Pre-Modernism: Art-World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory Show

by J. M. Mancini

Overview

Speaking of the emergence of modernism, author Virginia Woolf famously said: "On or about December 1910, human character changed." But was the shift to modernism really so revolutionary? J. M. Mancini argues that it was not. She proposes that the origins of the movement can in fact be traced well into the nineteenth century.


Several cultural developments after the Civil War gradually set the stage for modernism, Mancini contends. New mass art media appeared on the scene, as did a national network of museums and groundbreaking initiatives in art education.These new institutions provided support for future modernists and models for the creators of the avant-garde. Simultaneously, art critics began to embrace abstraction after the Civil War, both for aesthetic reasons and to shore up their own nascent profession. Modernism was thus linked, Mancini argues, to the emergence of cultural hierarchy.


A work of impeccable scholarship and unusual breadth, the book challenges some of the basic ideas about both the origins of twentieth-century modernism and the character of Gilded-Age culture. It will appeal not only to art historians but also to scholars in American history and American studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691118130
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/14/2005
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	8.00(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

J. M. Mancini is Lecturer in Modern History at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. She has published extensively on nineteenth and twentieth-century American history and culture.

Read an Excerpt

Pre-Modernism

Art-World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory Show

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By J. M. Mancini

Princeton University Press

Copyright © 2005 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-11813-0

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Introduction

INTERROGATING MODERNISM

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism. -Octavio Paz, 1967

At the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, better known as the Armory Show, thousands of Americans lined up to see what was billed as the first major exhibition of modern art in the United States. Even before the show opened, the art world was alive with anticipation. In a letter to her friend Gertrude Stein, the wealthy Greenwich Village salonist and patron of modern art Mabel Dodge set down a breathless account of what the show would mean to American culture. "There is an exhibition coming," she wrote, "which is the most important public event that has ever come off since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, & it is of the same nature The academy are frantic. Most of them are left out of it ... I am all for it ... there will be a riot & a revolution & things will never be quite the same afterwards." In these brief comments, Dodge provided a template that defined American modernism in its own time and dominated its historical interpretation for nearly a century: modernism as a riot, modernism as a revolutionagainst existing institutions, modernism as a break in history.

This is a book about one of the most unyielding questions in the history of culture: the issue of how and why the course of art can appear to suddenly and dramatically change, in seemingly revolutionary fashion, from one dominant style to another. Under study here is one particular change, the emergence of modern art in the United States, and one very important aspect of that change: the roles that art criticism, art critics, and art publishing played in fostering not only a new aesthetic but also an altered mode of cultural production between the end of the Civil War and the second decade of the twentieth century.

From the outset, participants and scholars have devoted extensive effort to explaining the modernist revolution. As Dodge's comments indicate, modernists themselves were self-conscious about their own role as iconoclastic creators of a revolutionary upheaval in American art and culture. Many of modernism's early defenders not only described their activities as a challenge to outmoded artistic fashions, but also linked themselves to the loosening of moral strictures, the budding of radical politics, and the wholesale rejection of a stifling Victorian society in the years before the First World War. Over time, these self-creating gestures have become part of the historical fabric, so that it is sometimes impossible to separate performance from practice. This is not in itself surprising-historical figures always have a hand in their own self-fashioning. The difference is that modernists, unlike their peers the Progressives or their predecessors in the Gilded Age, still speak largely for themselves. Despite what seems like constitutional skepticism toward virtually everything anyone said at the turn of the century, once historians move out of the settlement house and the White City (see fig. 40) and into the bohemian quarters of the Village, they seem inclined to believe, along with Virginia Woolf, that "on or about December 1910, human character changed," and are content to direct their skepticism toward fiddling with the dates.

While the revolution against outmoded standards of art and behavior unquestionably played a part in the transformation of American art, I believe that the roots of the modernist revolution were deeper and more tangled than acknowledged by participants or scholars. Modern art was neither an isolated collection of works and makers nor the mere byproduct of social and political radicalism, but a mutually constitutive set of institutional practices and aesthetic beliefs, deeply rooted in the immediate context of the American art world. More than that, it was a historical movement, with historical antecedents. As in the case of political revolutions, which historians convincingly have shown to be the product of multigenerational developments in political culture and language rather than immediate catalytic ruptures in the political order, the artistic revolution called "modernism" did not happen overnight but was made during the course of a generation or more by people who were not even necessarily modernists themselves.

My primary objective here is to challenge the mythical history of American visual modernism as a sudden, revolutionary rupture with the past. My aim is to demonstrate that late-nineteenth-century art criticism and publishing contributed significantly to the emergence of modern art by fostering the aesthetic principles, like abstraction, that would underpin modernist artworks, and by establishing the institutional and professional framework that would allow American art and the avant-garde to flourish after the turn of the century. Specifically, this book makes three arguments. The first and most general one is that turn-of-the-century transformations in American art must be understood within the context of a broader and earlier boom in art publishing that included new mass visual media like magazines, chromolithography, and art education materials for the public schools. The second is that the drive by Gilded Age criticism to promote an integrated, national infrastructure of museums, schools, and associations-and to construct art publishing as a portable branch of the art world-provided not only the organizational topography of the "mainstream" twentieth-century American art world, but also the framework for avant-garde organizers like Alfred Stieglitz. And finally, I argue that a push toward professionalization in criticism that began as early as the end of the Civil War led writers to embrace the principle of abstraction even before artists did, a move that provided an aesthetic platform for modernism even as it strengthened the authority of professional criticism.

This book also seeks to reframe another key transformation in turn-of-the-century American culture: the emergence, in Lawrence Levine's famous phrase, of "cultural hierarchy." Particularly among historians and sociologists, there has been little effort to challenge the hugely influential thesis, set forth by Levine and Paul DiMaggio, that the post-Civil War art world was predicated upon the establishment of "sacralized," nonprofit, metropolitan museums meant to house only original and unique art objects. According to Levine and DiMaggio, this development (and parallel developments in music and theater) triggered the emergence of sharp divisions between "high art" and "popular culture" for the first time in the nation's history. In examining this issue, I will argue that the many interconnections between the "fine arts" and its institutions, including museums, and "popular" media such as the graphic, decorative, and industrial arts, militate against this view. I will not suggest that museum builders and their allies in publishing did not contribute to the stratification of art, particularly as the nineteenth century neared its end. Contrary to prevailing interpretations, however, I will contend that the key villains in this tale were not primarily entrepreneurs in either the nonprofit sector or the commercial world of image publishing, but the critics who sought to wrest professional control over the interpretation of art from both of them-and from their audiences.

This study rests upon a few basic premises. The first and most basic of these is that all art derives from and is defined by a multilayered process of cultural production, deeply rooted in the art world. The most important implication of this is that in the art world, a complex nexus of interlocking constituencies including critics and publishers, museums, the public, patrons, art schools, the market, and artists, all play productive as well as supporting roles in the definition, creation, distribution, and consumption of art. Many people who were not artists at all-or who are considered to be "minor" artists-shaped the future of American art. In insisting on the importance of the art world, however, I do not wish to diminish the ingenuity or the work of artists. The choices available to artists were conditioned by the contexts in which they lived and worked, and their creativity was both fostered and limited by those contexts. Nonetheless, artists did not lack agency. Like publishers and museum builders, many turn-of-the-century artists were canny entrepreneurs whose strategic resourcefulness facilitated and enhanced their ability to pursue creative goals. If I emphasize this entrepreneurial aspect of artists' careers, it is not because of a lack of interest in their works or in artistic creativity. Rather, it is because many others are able to read and analyze it with far more eloquence than I. And, if I emphasize the significance of non-artists, it is not in order to denigrate the contributions of artists. Rather, it is because the very real roles these people played in making art-and in making art possible-are all too rarely acknowledged. This book is meant, then, as a companion to the many fine studies of the individual artists and artworks of the period, rather than as a polemic against them.

The second premise is that art worlds, and art-world practice, are historically specific. Like the styles that emerge from within art worlds, the latter change over time and develop in response to specific cultural conditions that vary with time and place. As a result, entire ways of making, understanding, and seeing art can be forgotten, lost, and rendered invisible with the passage of time, even when the works produced and consumed by those art worlds remain. Although art worlds and art-world practice are always the products of social conditions and social experience, neither they nor their constituencies are sociological universals. Like art, art worlds have histories that require historical interpretation.

The third supposition is that criticism, as both a discourse and an interlocking series of institutions and practices, is richer, more varied, and more important than is generally recognized. Perhaps more than any other art-world agent, criticism sets the art world's boundaries, not only shaping the modes of viewing and making that will be available at a given time and place, but also defining an art world's purpose, its personnel, and its aesthetics. What I mean by this is that even before a work is conceived, made, viewed, or interpreted, it has been fostered, directed, and limited by the critical context into which it is born. Aesthetics do not just proceed from artworks; they also precede them.

It is thus my intention to focus on something that has not generally received much attention: the importance of criticism and publishing in creating the parameters that define what kind of art will or will not be made, that determine who will or will not make art, and that delimit how and by whom art will or will not be seen. Sociologists of art have pioneered the study of how "organization and process" influence "how artists work and how their creations ... are disseminated or marketed in relation to the broader socio-political-economic context." And yet, even they often unnecessarily limit the history of criticism to purely the history of taste, and too narrowly describe the function of criticism as solely the legitimization of artworks that are already made. From the groundbreaking work of Howard Becker to the more recent efforts of Vera Zolberg and David Halle, the sociology of art often assumes that "artists produce works, some of which critics ratify." But criticism also directly shapes what modes of "organization and process" are available to artists even before their works are made-and even before they have become artists. It is certainly true, as Malcolm Gee argues, that critics "have been central to the process by which twentieth-century artworks have been promoted, viewed, and understood." It is crucial, however, to understand that critics both produce judgments and build systems. To fail to ask what drives critics to promote entire art worlds as well as individual artists or artworks is to fail to understand one of the driving forces behind artistic change.

A related point that must be made here is that the history of American art and criticism in this period is inseparable from either the history of print culture or the history of art-world institutions-local, as well as international. European painting, training, and criticism undoubtedly had an immeasurable impact on American modernism; Americans were insecure about their culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and they did look outward not just for what was old, but also for what was new. It is true, as Johanna Drucker writes, that "Clive Bell and Roger Fry were read by Alfred Barr and Clement Greenberg who were read by Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss, by Tim Clark and Victor Burgin." And it is true that expatriate painters like James Abbott McNeill Whistler absorbed both European and Asian influences in their art and relayed them to fellow Americans abroad through their artworks, their critical commentary, and their personal relationships. At the same time, however, many of the architects of American modernism, from the time of Manet to the time of Greenberg and at all points in between, were American: they went to American schools and museums; they read American books, magazines, and newspapers; and they worked in the American art world. The result was that foreign and expatriate influences, important as they were, were mediated through the institutions of the art world, including the media itself.

Take, for example, the case of Whistler, who (alongside Frank Lloyd Wright in architecture and Alfred Stieglitz in photography) is perhaps the only American painter before the middle of the twentieth century to be considered significant in the international development of modernism. In part, this is on account of Whistler's novel incorporation of Japanese design, which helped him to achieve the flat, decorative effects that became his trademark-and which would also be important to the work of other early American modernists like Mary Cassatt. To put in context Whistler's role as an importer of Japanese influences, however, it should also be noted that one of the most popular art sections of the massively attended 1876 Philadelphia Centennial was the Japanese display. This event gave many thousands of American men, women, and children their own firsthand glimpses of the prints, ceramics, and other works that had influenced Whistler. Following the success of this display, in 1879 the new magazine The Art Amateur presented a series of full-color japoniste "Menu Cards Presented to Subscribers ... with Compliments of [its editor] Montague Marks," designed by Tiffany and Co. (fig. 1); Boston chromolithographer Louis Prang began selling sets of "Japanesque Floral Designs," priced at twelve cards for sixty cents; and The American Art Review published an illustrated article called "Notes on Hokusai, The Founder of the Modern Japanese School of Drawing" (fig. 2). Its author was the collector of Japanese art, Edward Sylvester Morse of Salem, Massachusetts. Morse was also mentor to the first curator of Asian art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Ernest Fenollosa, who, in turn, was a major influence both on the artist and teacher Arthur Wesley Dow and on Ezra Pound, Fenollosa's literary executor. Whistler's art (and personal contact with artists) was certainly important in bringing Japanese art to Americans, but it was not unique.

It is also notable that Whistler was himself shaped by his early experiences in the American art world, as well as by his expatriation. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Whistler began his artistic training in the Drawing Department of the United States Naval Academy under Robert Weir, father of artists Julian Alden Weir and John Ferguson Weir; the latter Weir also became the first Director of the Yale Art School. Once again, this is not to make an argument for American exceptionalism, or to discount either foreign influences or the two-way experience of expatriation on Americans. Rather, it is to suggest that art-world institutions also played a formative but little-understood role in shaping American art, and provided an important context for the reception and translation of international influences.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Introduction: Interrogating Modernism 7

Chapter 1: Modern Art and Modern Art: From the Christmas Card to the Avant-Garde 17

Chapter 2: Building an American Art World 45

Chapter 3: Professionalism and a New Aesthetic Order 99

Chapter 4: The Armory Show in Critical Perspective 133

Chapter 5: Camera ork : Organizing the Avant-Garde 159

Chapter 6: Continuity and Rupture 181

Postscript: Pre-Modernism and Postmodernism: Reflections on the Tilted Arc Crisis 215

Acknowledgments 222

Abbreviations 223

Notes 223

Selected Bibliography 244

Index 251

Photography Credits 256

What People are Saying About This

Katherine Manthorne

This book will have an audience far beyond the boundaries of art history. It is a refreshing and much-needed change from narrowly focused monographic works and it holds new insights for both specialists and general readers.
— Katherine Manthorne, City University of New York

From the Publisher

"This book will have an audience far beyond the boundaries of art history. It is a refreshing and much-needed change from narrowly focused monographic works and it holds new insights for both specialists and general readers."—Katherine Manthorne, City University of New York

Editorial Reviews

Winner of the 2008 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art

"Pre-Modernism by J. M. Mancini is . . . a beautiful, thoughtfully designed book. . . . It is written by a historian venturing into one of the most hotly contested areas of art history—the origins of modernism. She does so with considerable verve and the result is a fascinating exploration of the American art world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."—-Ludmilla Jordanova, The Historical Journal

From the Publisher

Pre-Modernism by J. M. Mancini is . . . a beautiful, thoughtfully designed book. . . . It is written by a historian venturing into one of the most hotly contested areas of art history—the origins of modernism. She does so with considerable verve and the result is a fascinating exploration of the American art world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Historical Journal - Ludmilla Jordanova

Pre-Modernism by J. M. Mancini is . . . a beautiful, thoughtfully designed book. . . . It is written by a historian venturing into one of the most hotly contested areas of art history—the origins of modernism. She does so with considerable verve and the result is a fascinating exploration of the American art world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
— Ludmilla Jordanova

The Historical Journal