Picturing Power ─ Portraiture and Its Uses in the New York Chamber of Commerce

The New York Chamber of Commerce's renowned collection of portraits, totaling nearly three hundred in all, captures with aesthetic precision and symbolic power the giants of American business. Reflecting the carefully crafted images of two centuries of civic leaders and entrepreneurs, the portraits tell the story of industry's making and reach all the way to the late twentieth century. In a groundbreaking study of these images as historical documents& mdash;both reflections of and agents in the life of a major institution& mdash; "Picturing Power" recounts the founding, growth, and eventual decline of the nation's original and most powerful business organization. Lavishly illustrated with examples from the Chamber's collection, as well as archival photographs relating its history, "Picturing Power" charts the social and aesthetic course of institutional portraiture in America.

From its inception in 1768, the Chamber served to regulate and codify commercial practice, provide business interests with a unified means of forming and advancing their agenda, and consolidate and elevate the status of its members and the profession as a whole. By linking commercial development to social and cultural progress, portraiture did much to support these ends. Whether enhancing, sanitizing, and stabilizing businessmen's reputation, downplaying their wealth or whitewashing their questionable practices, portraiture fashioned a public identity for its subjects that matched the corporate and civic needs of their time. By studying the changing use of these images, "Picturing Power" reveals the strategies and preoccupations of an American business culture striving for egalitarian virtue while remaining firmly committed to the principles of competitive capitalism. Americans' shifting and ambivalent relationship to commerce situates these portraits, representations of the human face of business, at the critical intersection of enduring contests in American life& mdash;between self-interest and the greater good, between equality and the social hierarchies that wealth engenders.

Karl Kusserow is curator of American art at the Princeton University Art Museum.