Aesthetic Individualism and Practical Intellect: American Allegory in Emerson, Thoreau, Adams, and James
262
Aesthetic Individualism and Practical Intellect: American Allegory in Emerson, Thoreau, Adams, and James
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Overview
Originally published in 1990.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691606828 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1049 |
| Pages: | 262 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.90(w) x 9.80(h) x 0.40(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Aesthetic Individualism and Practical Intellect
American Allegory in Emerson, Thoreau, Adams, and James
By Olaf Hansen
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1990 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06823-7
CHAPTER 1
Allegory and the Work of Tradition
* * *
Thomas Eakins was a man of great character. He was a man of iron will and his will was to paint and to carry out his life as he thought it should go. This he did. It cost him heavily but in his works we have the precious result of his independence, his generous heart and his big mind. Eakins was a deep student of life and with a great love he studied humanity frankly. He was not afraid of what his study revealed to him.
— ROBERT HENRI
His art was lacking in the higher notes — poetry, the natural unthinking joy in sensuous beauty. It is a Puritanical art, austere, sombre, bitter.
— LLOYD GOODRICH
In 1876 America celebrated the centenary of its own becoming. The fact that Eakins's great painting The Gross Clinic was not included among the works exhibited in the Art Pavilion at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition has been frequently commented upon. But even if the series of great exhibitions and world fairs which rapidly followed one another are interpreted as symbolic events in their own right, one should not expect too much from these high points of cultural and social self-projection; at least not in the realm of intellectual history.
That the "Centennial March," which was played at the opening of the exhibition, had been composed by Richard Wagner demonstrates more than adequately that self-celebration and adequate self-reference usually diverge. The decision to exhibit Eakins's painting in the model of a hospital ward, using it as a kind of illustration, has an ironic twist to it, which critics who see all of this as a major insult to an important work of art tend to overlook.
The decision to use The Gross Clinic as a piece of information is based, even if unintentionally, on an elementary grasp of the painting's allegorical nature. Displaying it as part of a documentary effort meant to make use of all the didactic and time-bound properties of true allegory. In this sense at least the painting was not dislocated but had been put in the right place.
A working tradition favors allegory. Aware of the need for abstraction, it also knows about the dangers of sterility: a tradition at work, therefore, is the self-reflective process looking for an adequate expression of its full content. Its great concern is to deal successfully with opposites and this naturally leads to a great sensitivity about time's double features of duration and arrest, of eternity and the immediate moment. Allegory, by explicitly approaching the question of the shape arid the meaning of time dramatizes in art what science and philosophy fail to express. Where allegory is dominant, epistemology looks pale. Knowledge becomes clearly defined as the necessary first step: The second step involves the quest for synthesis. This second step is the final one — never fully accomplished.
The painting that Thomas Eakins presented to a puzzled audience in 1875 cam^ totally without preparation. Never before, as many commentators have pointed out, had such a painting been seen in America. If it is part of tradition's work to resist the exhaustion of its sources, Eakins's contribution to the strength of American culture can hardly be overestimated. The power of his work to withstand the efforts of classification makes for an interesting episode within art criticism. Eakins has in turn been described as a realist, as a positivist, and as a naturalist. On rare occasions a critic would simply come to terms with the difficulty of his task by giving credit to the presence of a whole range of qualities in Eakins's work, if only in order to expand the meaning of the term realism as it might be applied to Eakins.
The question always is: Where and in what does he discover reality? ... For Eakins always knows far more than can be seen; he knows why what is seen takes on the appearance that it does. From the outset he bases his painting on a great deal of research into problems of anatomy and perspective and light. It is a sort of knowledge which may not be needed by other temperaments but which Eakins tracks down with an intenseness that amounts to a passion. He accepts the world in more than its visual aspect; he credits every person and every thing in it with independent existence. What he endeavors to attain is an understanding of all that exists below the surface — the solidity of things, the countering stress of bodies in action, the quiescent tensions of bodies in repose. The ways in which Eakins acquires this knowledge are all experimental and scientific, in harmony with his intellectualized conscious life. All this has by now been so often said in other words that perhaps this bare statement may be acceptable; but it is restated here to indicate the means by which his pictures go beyond a merely visual naturalism to a mental realism. And this is more than the passive understanding just mentioned; it is the active state of comprehending things and creatures and personalities from within which remakes them not only as pictures to be seen but also as pictorial organisms to be comprehended again.
The act of comprehending something again is exactly the task that tradition demands and articulates in works of art that emphasize their authenticity by way of concurrent distantiation and actuality. In fact, none of Eakins's later works would achieve what The Gross Clinic did, in terms of dramatizing its own place and meaning in time. There is, however, a tendency in his portraits to emphasize the solitary position of the sitter that is sometimes contrasted with elements of the "outside world" that are seen in a relationship to both the viewer and the person viewed. Frequently these elements are quite obvious, like the tools of his profession in the portrait of Benjamin Howard Rand, or like the scientific formulas surrounding the portrait of Professor Henry A. Rowland on the carved frame of the painting. These are, however, only minor infractions on the genre. They are the kind of intrusions that confirm the existence of the authentic visual space that they comment upon. Such added iconographical commentaries are not yet part of the unified order of allegorical construction.
In other cases it is the obvious self-absorption of the person portrayed that we first feel as a form of withdrawal and then interpret as a resistance against pictorial fixation in time. Thus, anticipating a point to which we shall return later, the object of the painter's attention is exactly where it is — as painted — and it is somewhere else as well, at a place we only know about, because the act of painting has taken place. Eakins's best portraits always convey the feeling to the viewer that he is intruding into an unfinished interaction between the painter and his subject. It is as if, even in the finished portrait, the act of painting still continues: the portraits seem to defy being firmly placed, sometimes by sheer force of melancholy and sometimes by strange and unnerving elements of theatricality. Even if we want to ignore the rather dramatic composition of head and body in the portrait Lady with a Setter Dog, we cannot overlook the gesture of the empty right hand. The isolated gesture demands attention. This is, of course, merely another way of saying that the attention of the artist is bilocal — it concentrates on his subject and at the same time on a space in history that the subject does not occupy. The bilocality of the painter's attention is, in effect, the very mixture of narration and representation that we mentioned earlier. It is a kind of realism, one should add, that shares more with French painters like Manet and his friends among the antisalon realists than we are likely to expect from Eakins if we simply examine his educational background.
By the time of Eakins's arrival in Paris, the bataille réaliste was at its height. The major programmatic statements by such spokesmen for realism as Flaubert, Zola, Courbet, and Baudelaire had been made and were in circulation among intellectuals and artists. The Salon des Refusés of 1863 had made its enormous impact, and if we allow for the possibility that Eakins was most probably exposing himself to the qualified, tempered traditionalism of Gérôme as well as to the modernism of the contemporary realist, we will understand the real nature of his education in France. We will, in addition, understand how Eakins's French education fits into his American background and enabled him to paint The Gross Clinic, a painting that we take to be the painterly signature of the allegorical tradition in the American nineteenth century.
However, on the surface of Eakins's development as a painter there is little advance promise of the authority of The Gross Clinic. There are a few details that can be isolated, but they do not really explain the explosion of stylistic will that we find in The Gross Clinic. Barbara Novak sums up the status of Eakins adequately when pointing out: "With Eakins, this desire for knowledge — an almost obsessive one in this case — extended to the use of the machine as tool (photography) and into mathematics. His art thus belongs, in many of its aspects, to the mensurational, machine-connected aesthetic that characterizes much American art before and after him. In his grave attempts to reconcile knowledge with art, he was perhaps the most philosophical and conscientious of American artists."
Philosophy, in this sense, can only refer to his work, because we do not have any elaborated statements by Eakins on American art. There is no cogent statement on the nature of art from which we can quote; nothing, at least, in the sense of The Art Spirit by Robert Henri, who was a great admirer of Thomas Eakins, and who never missed an occasion to point out the significance of his work.
If we look at contemporary books on art, like those by James Jackson Jarves, The Art-Idea, and Art Thoughts, we will find that by their very orientation towards European art they make the sudden appearance of a painting like The Gross Clinic rather more puzzling than not. On the other hand, the tone of high idealism that one finds in such opening remarks as those of Jarves's The Art-Idea lends itself easily to an interpretation of American art in the nineteenth century that can draw heavily upon an equally idealistic view of transcendentalism: "Life may be likened to a sphere which includes an inexhaustible series of circles of knowledge. In the beginning we are but a simple point. But mind having the power of self-increase, each successive experience enlarges its circumference. Ultimately it may include within its grasp all love and wisdom short of Divinity."
The act of looking at a painting is seen as just another indication of an open future, as an act that draws our attention away from the painting, a way of organizing actual time into a historical shape that would also identify the role of the beholder. The existence of the painting is seen as a reminder of a kind of generalized potential and growth.
The mental processes by which we thus enlarge our circles are worthy of attentive observation, partly from the satisfaction of analyzing and appreciating the mind's growth, but chiefly indicative of the illimitable future of knowledge which they gradually open to our view, in the degree that we humbly, earnestly, and continually demand to know the secrets of Immortality.
If it were not for this ever-expanding Future to tempt us on, we should speedily despair of the Present, and pronounce it only vanity and vexation.
The career of Thomas Eakins has often been interpreted as a puzzling phenomenon in the making of an artist, simply because his tutelage under Jean-Leon Gerome seemed to be exactly the expected idealistic uplift that the American artist needed, according to critics like Jarves. As we shall see there are two misconceptions at work in this assumption that will have to be corrected. One concerns the actual learning process a painter like Eakins went through when working in Paris, and the second one is related to our perception of a painter like Gérôme as opposed to what Eakins saw in his teacher's paintings.
Eakins, after having worked at the Pennsylvania Academy in Philadelphia, left for Paris in 1866 at the age of twenty-two to receive his formal education as an artist. If we look for the influences that shaped Eakins's artistic development before his experiences in Paris, we will have to confine ourselves to his use of Rembrandt Peale's Graphics, a series of drawing manuals, and the exercises that Eakins did under the instructions given in those manuals. Indeed, his Drawing of Gears and Drawing of a Lathe, both of which are in the Hirschhorn Collection, refer us to the early photographs of mechanical objects, taken by Charles Sheeler during the rise of the American avant-garde. What we see here is that the scientific bias of the American artist and his reverence of objecthood are part of an unchanging tradition. Even the influential Jackson Jarves, whose idealistic concept of art is represented in its most elaborate form in his popular volume The Art-Idea, finishes his book by emphasizing the role of science in the development of the arts.
If we analyze carefully the argument that Jarves presents roughly ten years before Eakins finishes his first large painting, The Gross Clinic, we realize that Eakins's own scientific attitude reflects his conservative ties to the craftmanship tradition of "picture-making," which in this respect locates him within the continuation of the American Enlightenment. Eakins's teaching method, as described by several of his students, seems like an answer turned into practice when compared with the questions raised by Jackson Jarves.
In science we find no routine of individual reproduction, as in art, but a systematic unfolding of progressive truths; so that the startling or discredited discovery of one age becomes the familiar knowledge of the next. Thus a mighty whole is gradually built up. Nature gives freely, as she is pertinaciously asked.
Every discovery in the laws of matter that affects the elementary substances in art-use, simply or combined, should be carefully scrutinized, to detect its practicability to enlarge or improve the means of art. Perspective, of which so little was formerly known, is now reduced by science to so simple a study that a school-girl in this respect surpasses the efforts of ancient masters.
The nature of the scientific bias in American art has been interpreted in many ways, and one of the most succinct formulations has been offered by Barbara Novak, who claims that "in America there was a vested interest in the preservation of the fact, behind which we can perhaps identify deeper religious and philosophical attitudes to the substance of God's world, attitudes prescribing the analytical irreverence of Impressionism."
But the question remains, what, more precisely, the "vested interest in the preservation of the fact" could have meant, if we take into account that whatever we or the contemporary beholder are supposed to see behind the represented fact is determined by the meaning that the representational surface is allowed to require. Emerson's view that the innermost and fundamental secrets of nature, when revealed to a man, would probably turn out to be disappointingly simple is reflected in Eakins's remark on the necessity of dissection as part of the artist's education.
If beauty resides in fitness to any extent, what can be more beautiful than this skeleton, or the perfection with which means and ends are reciprocally adapted to each other? But no one dissects to quicken his eye for, or his delight in beauty. He dissects simply to increase his knowledge of how beautiful objects are put together to the end that he may be able to imitate them. Even to refine upon natural beauty — to idealize — one must understand what it is that he is idealizing; otherwise his idealization — I don't like the word by the way — becomes distortion, and distortion is ugliness. This whole matter of dissection is not art at all, anymore than grammar is poetry. It is work, and hard work, disagreeable work.
The term and the whole idea of beauty stands in an ambiguous relation to the idea of the object. It is, however, the kind of ambiguity that later would produce statements like Fairfield Porter's, who in his book on Eakins in 1959 made the following emphatic use of machine-metaphor: "The French academicians painted 'machines,' that is, deliberate, elaborate paintings of great size whose purpose was the display of the artist's power. Eakins thought of painting as a deliberate construction. His paintings of scullers were executed from studies of perspective, of reflections and of anatomy put together in the studio. An Eakins 'machine' was more modest and thorough than a French academician's; it was a fixation of an idea on canvas, like the Concert Singer."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Aesthetic Individualism and Practical Intellect by Olaf Hansen. Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- PREFACE, pg. ix
- INTRODUCTION, pg. 1
- CHAPTER 1. Allegory and the Work of Tradition, pg. 19
- CHAPTER 2. Merlin’s Laughter, pg. 45
- CHAPTER 3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, pg. 81
- CHAPTER 4. Henry David Thoreau, pg. 123
- CHAPTER 5. Henry Adams, pg. 141
- CHAPTER 6. William James, pg. 175
- CHAPTER 7. American Allegory, pg. 195
- SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 237
- INDEX, pg. 247