From the antebellum era through the Gilded Age, New York City's leading art institutions were lightning rods for conflict. In the decades before the Civil War, art promoters believed that aesthetic taste could foster national unity and assuage urban conflicts; by the 1880s such hopes had faded, and the taste for art assumed more personal connotations associated with consumption and domestic decoration. Art Wars chronicles three protracted public battles that marked this transformation. The first battle began in 1849 and resulted in the downfall of the American Art-Union, the most popular and influential art institution in North America at mid-century. The second erupted in 1880 over the Metropolitan Museum's massive collection of Cypriot antiquities, which had been plundered and sold to its trustees by the man who became the museum's first paid director. The third escalated in the mid-1880s and forced the Metropolitan Museum to open its doors on Sunday—the only day when working people were able to attend.
In chronicling these disputes, Rachel N. Klein considers cultural fissures that ran much deeper than the specific complaints that landed protagonists in court. New York's major nineteenth-century art institutions came under intense scrutiny not only because Americans invested them with moral and civic consequences but also because they were part and parcel of explosive processes associated with the rise of industrial capitalism. Elite New Yorkers spearheaded the creation of the Art-Union and the Metropolitan, but those institutions became enmeshed in popular struggles related to slavery, immigration, race, industrial production, and the rights of working people. Art Wars examines popular engagement with New York's art institutions and illuminates the changing cultural role of art exhibition over the course of the nineteenth century.
From the antebellum era through the Gilded Age, New York City's leading art institutions were lightning rods for conflict. In the decades before the Civil War, art promoters believed that aesthetic taste could foster national unity and assuage urban conflicts; by the 1880s such hopes had faded, and the taste for art assumed more personal connotations associated with consumption and domestic decoration. Art Wars chronicles three protracted public battles that marked this transformation. The first battle began in 1849 and resulted in the downfall of the American Art-Union, the most popular and influential art institution in North America at mid-century. The second erupted in 1880 over the Metropolitan Museum's massive collection of Cypriot antiquities, which had been plundered and sold to its trustees by the man who became the museum's first paid director. The third escalated in the mid-1880s and forced the Metropolitan Museum to open its doors on Sunday—the only day when working people were able to attend.
In chronicling these disputes, Rachel N. Klein considers cultural fissures that ran much deeper than the specific complaints that landed protagonists in court. New York's major nineteenth-century art institutions came under intense scrutiny not only because Americans invested them with moral and civic consequences but also because they were part and parcel of explosive processes associated with the rise of industrial capitalism. Elite New Yorkers spearheaded the creation of the Art-Union and the Metropolitan, but those institutions became enmeshed in popular struggles related to slavery, immigration, race, industrial production, and the rights of working people. Art Wars examines popular engagement with New York's art institutions and illuminates the changing cultural role of art exhibition over the course of the nineteenth century.
Art Wars: The Politics of Taste in Nineteenth-Century New York
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Art Wars: The Politics of Taste in Nineteenth-Century New York
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Overview
From the antebellum era through the Gilded Age, New York City's leading art institutions were lightning rods for conflict. In the decades before the Civil War, art promoters believed that aesthetic taste could foster national unity and assuage urban conflicts; by the 1880s such hopes had faded, and the taste for art assumed more personal connotations associated with consumption and domestic decoration. Art Wars chronicles three protracted public battles that marked this transformation. The first battle began in 1849 and resulted in the downfall of the American Art-Union, the most popular and influential art institution in North America at mid-century. The second erupted in 1880 over the Metropolitan Museum's massive collection of Cypriot antiquities, which had been plundered and sold to its trustees by the man who became the museum's first paid director. The third escalated in the mid-1880s and forced the Metropolitan Museum to open its doors on Sunday—the only day when working people were able to attend.
In chronicling these disputes, Rachel N. Klein considers cultural fissures that ran much deeper than the specific complaints that landed protagonists in court. New York's major nineteenth-century art institutions came under intense scrutiny not only because Americans invested them with moral and civic consequences but also because they were part and parcel of explosive processes associated with the rise of industrial capitalism. Elite New Yorkers spearheaded the creation of the Art-Union and the Metropolitan, but those institutions became enmeshed in popular struggles related to slavery, immigration, race, industrial production, and the rights of working people. Art Wars examines popular engagement with New York's art institutions and illuminates the changing cultural role of art exhibition over the course of the nineteenth century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780812251944 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 07/17/2020 |
| Series: | America in the Nineteenth Century |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
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Read an Excerpt
Introduction
The Importance of Taste: Intellectual RootsYou will notice several pale-faced, white kidded fashionables, with pretty accompaniments leaning languidly on their arms; young clerks; school boys and girls; the mechanic and his family; the cartman in his clean linen frock; the portly merchant; the honest bronzed face of the farmer; the poor seamstresses and sewing girls . . . there they are all earnestly contemplating the works of art with which the walls are covered. All social distinction is lost in admiration of Art—all are happy.
—Oswego Commercial Times, December 1, 1848Fully two-thirds of the visitors are of foreign birth—German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Russian their physiognomy and their tongues proclaim them. I saw several well-dressed attractive Japanese—men and women—in American garb. Among the Americans chiefly women are those who have no holiday but Sunday, and to whom a sight of the art treasures will shed a halo of beauty over the humdrum days of the week.
—Washington Post, July 26, 1891This book is about three protracted public battles that marked significant transformations in the nineteenth-century American art world and in the culture more broadly. The first battle began in 1849 and resulted in the downfall of the American Art-Union, the most popular and influential art institution in North America at midcentury. The second erupted in 1880 over the Metropolitan Museum's massive collection of Cypriot antiquities, which had been plundered from the island of Cyprus and sold to the trustees by the man who became the museum's first paid director, Luigi Palma di Cesnola. The third struggle escalated in the mid-1880s and forced the Metropolitan Museum to open its doors on Sunday—the only day when working people were able to attend. Each of these disputes allows us to glimpse cultural fissures that ran far deeper than the specific complaints that landed the directors of each institution in court.
Attacks on the Art-Union signaled tensions over the commercialization of culture and the scope of the tasteful public. Would the art world continue to be presided over by well-to-do, civic-spirited amateurs or would it become a part of the burgeoning world of commercially organized urban amusements? Was the taste for art an exclusive quality or was it freely available as a source of class and political cohesion? The battle over the Art-Union did not so much resolve these questions as bring them into the open. The enlistment of art for purposes of moral uplift outlived the Art-Union, but the utopian vision of aesthetic taste as a means to national unification could not survive the political upheavals of the mid-nineteenth century. Even within the realm of imagination, social and political tensions could no longer be contained within the walls of the art gallery.
The issue that galvanized critics of the Metropolitan Museum in the early 1880s was the allegation that workmen, under Cesnola's direction, had fraudulently altered sculptures not only by joining broken, unrelated pieces but also by camouflaging lines of attachment and creating wholly new parts. The episode sparked efforts to professionalize the museum and gained momentum amid the class resentments that divided the city and nation during the 1880s. Controversy surrounding the Cypriot antiquities also highlighted alternative visions of display and acquisition. Cesnola justified his collection by invoking historical and ethnographic narratives. He insisted that it revealed the prehistory of classical Greek art and civilization. Objects widely perceived as the ugly products of lesser people had a place in the museum because of their historical, ethnographic, and archaeological value. Cesnola's leading critics, concerned with the uplift of American character through the improvement of domestic taste and design, insisted that only objects of beauty—preferably the best exemplars—could serve the purpose of aesthetic education. They too were invested in the incorporation of foreign artworks, but they focused on form, color, workmanship, and decoration rather than raising inconvenient questions about the cultures from which the art came.
Following closely on the Cesnola controversy, the movement to open the Metropolitan on Sundays demonstrated the depth and breadth of popular engagement with the museum. It drew strength not only from New York reformers, liberal religious groups, and the popular press but also from working-class immigrants and labor activists. The first Sunday openings, which finally arrived in the spring of 1891, attracted tens of thousands of visitors and belied the trustees' effort to define the museum as a "private" institution.
The scope, persistence, and intensity of these conflicts—their extended, bitter engagement with a wide public—justifies use of the term "art wars" and points to their broader social and political meanings. The rise and fall of the Art-Union cannot be understood apart from deepening class tensions of the 1840s and escalating political struggles over slavery and abolitionism. In fact, the organization was, in part, a product and casualty of those conflicts. The Cesnola controversy also had a class dimension, but its particular intensity derived as well from late nineteenth-century racial anxieties associated with the global transfer of people and products. Cypriot antiquities raised a host of unnerving questions, not least by challenging notions of Greek—and hence European—racial distinction and cultural lineage. At a time when non-Protestant, working-class immigrants were transforming the culture and politics of the city, Cyprus—a polyglot entrepôt of the ancient world—assumed special significance.
The art wars of the 1850s and 1880s also illuminate the changing role of art exhibition in nineteenth-century American thought and society. The Art-Union embodied the particular vision of the merchants who predominated among New York City's antebellum elite. It came into being at a time when the public display of pictures still appeared as a potential counterweight to political disunity and class antagonism. The act of looking at pictures had widely acknowledged public implications. Yet by the time the Metropolitan opened at its permanent Central Park location fantasies of art-induced political unification no longer seemed plausible, particularly to the industrialists (and their retainers) who predominated on the museum's board of trustees. Other concerns and possibilities, related to domestic design and the incorporation of non-Western objects, roiled the museum in the 1880s. The aestheticizing turn, which made deep inroads into early twentieth-century art museums, marginalized unsettling questions about producers of artworks and linked the museum, albeit indirectly, to the new world of consumer culture. Far from challenging the educational mission of the art museum, leading proponents of decontextualized, aestheticized exhibitions framed the museum's educational purpose as the improvement of consumer taste and home decoration.
The epigraphs at the start of this introduction bespeak central themes of the book. Both of the quotations are taken from newspaper reports. The first celebrates the Free Gallery of New York's American Art-Union in 1848 near the height of its popularity. The second offers a description of the Metropolitan Museum on a Sunday in 1891, soon after the trustees finally capitulated to the open-Sunday movement. The commentaries affirm the persistence of popular interest in art exhibitions during the middle and later nineteenth century, and they testify to the reformist project that encouraged the establishment of art museums throughout Europe and the United States. By celebrating the diversity of people who flocked to the galleries, both writers proclaimed the educational value of art to working-class spectators. In the process, they evoked the connection between the galleries' objects and subjects. Spectators, in the act of looking, became parts of the display—evidence of art's uplifting potential. Throughout the nineteenth century, art promoters insisted that art held the power of moral improvement while offering a healthy diversion from dangerous pleasures. The full galleries seemed to confirm the claims and aspirations that linked New York's American Art-Union to its far more enduring successor.
And yet these passages also hint at significant changes. By 1891 the vision of a multiclass (if entirely white) audience had dissipated. Accounts of the Metropolitan Museum's earliest Sunday openings stressed the foreignness of working-class visitors—their social, racial, and cultural distance from more experienced museumgoers. The type of artwork deemed worthy of display had changed as well. Rather than focusing on American graphic art, the Metropolitan included casts of celebrated Greek and Roman sculptures as well as monumental stone antiquities excavated from the island of Cyprus. Ancient pottery, glass, and jewelry, antique European laces, and Chinese and Japanese ceramics were also on display. Painting played a significant role in the exhibitions, but most of the museum's graphic holdings were of European origin. The Art-Union reflected the founders' interest in using art to promote the political unification of citizens; by the time the Metropolitan opened on Sundays, many promoters as well as critics envisioned it primarily as a means to the self-cultivation of viewers and as an educator of domestic taste.
New York City is a particularly fitting place in which to explore these changes. As early as the 1820s it had eclipsed Philadelphia as the hub of the American art market and was becoming a magnet for aspiring artists. Art exhibitions of various sorts were already gaining popularity. New York was also the site of furious public controversies over art, audience, and exhibition, and those battles captured considerable national attention. Most important, the city gave rise to historically connected institutions that allow us to examine art-related cultural transformations in a focused way. The American Art-Union purchased paintings by living American artists, put them on exhibition in the centrally located "Free Gallery" and at the end of each year, distributed them by lottery to the subscribers. At its high point in 1849, subscribers, concentrated in the Northeast and Midwest, numbered close to 19,000. That year, when the population of New York City totaled about a half a million, managers claimed that 750,000 people visited the Free Gallery. Yet the Art-Union, which inspired imitators throughout the nation, provoked a group of angry critics who challenged its vision of public culture. The organization disbanded in 1852 after having been prosecuted as an illegal lottery. Twenty years later, following several years of planning, the Metropolitan Museum opened at a temporary location, and in 1880 moved to its permanent building at Central Park. Like the earlier institution, New York's art museum was a project conceived by the city's elite, and its founders included several surviving members of the Art-Union's leadership. These continuities make those institutions particularly useful contexts for exploring changes in the cultural outlook of the men who conceived and managed them.
But this book is not simply about the wealthy art enthusiasts who managed the Art-Union and sat on the Metropolitan's early board of trustees; it is equally concerned with audiences, broadly conceived. "Audience" here includes not only the people who visited the galleries of New York's various art institutions and who remain, to a great extent, shrouded behind veils of highly charged representations; it also encompasses people who wrote about sites of exhibition for a widespread readership. Both the Art-Union and the Metropolitan became the subjects of contentious, multifaceted, public conversations that have much to say about changing nineteenth-century notions of art and aesthetic taste.
Indeed, the history of New York's nineteenth-century art institutions was intertwined with the development of the press. The 1840s witnessed a proliferation of newspapers and periodicals that attended to the subject of culture in the process of serving and constructing their own readerships. The growth of the Art-Union was wholly dependent on the press, which also contributed mightily to the organization's demise. In 1851, according to the editor of New York's Tribune, the city's five cheap daily papers could claim a circulation of about 100,000. These papers joined an array of more specialized city newspapers as well as a growing number of urban periodicals whose sales were national. The late nineteenth century saw a further explosion in the numbers and circulation of New York papers, led by the New York World, which in 1891 boasted an average daily circulation of 314,718. In addition, the 1870s and 1880s saw the marked expansion of periodicals that focused exclusively on art-related topics. These publications, like their antebellum precursors, stoked controversy while making art, artists, and art-related institutions matters of popular concern.
To acknowledge the role of the press in nineteenth-century museum building is to revise one of the most compelling scholarly frameworks for thinking about art museums—namely, as ritualized spaces that help to legitimate power. Museums, from this perspective, invite visitors to enact hidden scripts embodied not only in the architecture of the buildings but also in the displays themselves. At the Metropolitan, according to one important line of argument, the script, embedded in donor memorials, period rooms, and lavish displays of decorative art, reifies the wealthy men and women who at one time lived among the objects on display. And yet, to extend the metaphor, major exhibition spaces generally embody several, at times contradictory, scripts written by multiple authors. This study explores divergent narratives written into sites of exhibition not only by the men who controlled them but also by critics in the press. Occasionally, as in the case of the Metropolitan's earliest Sunday openings, it is also possible to glimpse visitors themselves reimagining the museum in unforeseen ways. One way of conceptualizing the art wars that exploded in the early 1850s and again thirty years later is that scripts written into highly charged exhibition spaces were impossible to control.
Studies of nineteenth-century American cultural transformation—particularly with respect to art institutions—generally focus either on the pre- or post-Civil War periods, with one particularly notable exception: The most influential account is still Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, first published in 1988. Levine built on work by the sociologist Paul DiMaggio and the historian Neil Harris, both of whom located the Art-Union among the popular, urban, and generally commercial institutions that proliferated in American cities before the Civil War. Levine argued that antebellum audiences made little distinction between education and entertainment, and he suggested that notable cultural institutions of that era did their best to draw in large numbers of people from a wide swath of the population. Only in the later nineteenth century did rigid distinctions between "high" and "low" culture appear in the realms of theater, music, and art. New institutions, organized on a noncommercial basis, restricted access, celebrated artistic uniqueness and originality, and imposed increasingly strict standards of aesthetic classification. By the century's end, cultural tastes, practices, and institutions increasingly mapped the growing class divide. According to Levine and DiMaggio, the educational mission that initially helped to animate late nineteenth-century art museums dissipated relatively quickly, replaced by a tendency to present artworks as ineffable, sacred exemplars of transcendent beauty—objects whose quality could be appreciated only by a select few.
In effect, these scholars identified the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as decades in which leading American art museums came to embody the elitist tendencies that the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu analyzed in his studies of twentieth-century French museums and culture. Bourdieu described aesthetic taste as a form of "cultural capital" that may appear to be individual and personal but in fact represents the array of lessons learned from family, school, and other arenas shaped by privilege or lack thereof. The "sacralization" of art described by DiMaggio and Levine (or "religion of art" in Bourdieu's terms) effectively denied the hidden cultural capital that made aesthetic taste possible. Insofar as art museums presented objects as having transcendent spiritual meaning, they downplayed their role as educators of a broad public and positioned themselves as exclusive sites for the enactment of class distinction.
Yet neither the Art-Union nor the Metropolitan fits this grand narrative. Founders of the earlier organization did their best to increase the number of subscribers and to draw people into the Art-Union's Gallery, but their motivation was class uplift and political unification rather than profit. They believed that graphic art had the ability to convey powerful moralizing national messages. As I show in the following chapters, promoters and officers of the organization insisted on its noncommercial structure and emphasized its distance from the various commercial entertainments of the day. Meanwhile historians have chipped away at the image of early twentieth-century museums as mausoleums of high art, willfully removed from popular and commercializing cultural tendencies. Late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century museum builders were far from unified in their vision of the wider public. And while they drew clear distinctions between their own institutions and earlier commercial entertainment centers epitomized by P. T. Barnum's American Museum, the relationship between art museums and other engines of consumer culture (fairs and department stores) was varied and complex. Key figures on the Metropolitan's turn-of-the-century board of trustees and curatorial staff identified the museum's civic purpose as the uplift of national character through the improvement of American taste, architecture, and design. Rather than turning away from reformist projects, the Progressive Era Metropolitan became actively involved in an effort to educate consumers through the display of decorative art. In the 1910s the Metropolitan's workrooms were turning out replicas of furniture on display while members of the museum's curatorial staff also worked as store designers. By the following decade, the Metropolitan and other museums were borrowing display techniques from department stores. The very period that Levine and DiMaggio identified as the culmination of high cultural distinction appears in more recent historiography as the period in which important American art museums adopted a new role as a standard bearer within consumer culture.
In fact, New York's major nineteenth-century art institutions were deeply engaged with a wide public and attracted far more popular controversy than scholars have generally recognized. They became lightning rods for conflict not only because Americans invested aesthetic taste with moral and civic consequences, but also because they were part and parcel of explosive processes associated with the rise of industrial capitalism. Elite New Yorkers spearheaded the creation of the Art-Union and the Metropolitan, but those institutions became enmeshed in popular struggles related to slavery, immigration, race, industrial production, and the rights of laboring people.
Intellectual Resources: The Language of Taste
New York's art-related culture wars had intellectual roots in eighteenth-century British commentaries that gave aesthetic taste both moral and public significance. Art was a fraught topic in Anglo-American discourse because republican and revolutionary thinkers linked it to the dangers of "luxury." Patronized by kings, aristocrats, and the Vatican, art (including architecture) carried connotations of corruption, degeneration, and the general loss of republican virtue. But counterarguments gave the taste for art quite different implications. Sir Joshua Reynolds, as president of London's Royal Academy, presented a civic republican justification of art and artists that became common parlance for art promoters across the Atlantic. In his Discourses presented to students at the Royal Academy from 1769 to 1790, Reynolds used the language of civic humanism to argue for the link between fine art and public virtue. Above all, painting, as distinct from craft production, was for him an intellectual pursuit. Just as the artist abstracted from particularity to convey general truth, so the citizen rose above private interests and appetites to consider the public good:The art which we profess has beauty for its object; this it is our business to discover and to express; but the beauty of which we are in quest is general and intellectual; it is an idea that subsists only in the mind; the sight never beheld it, nor has the hand expressed it: it is an idea residing in the breast of the artist, which he is always laboring to impart, and which he dies at last without imparting; but which he is yet so far able to communicate, as to raise the thoughts, and extend the views of the spectator; and which, by a succession of art, may be so far diffused, that its effects may extend themselves imperceptibly into public benefits, and be among the means of bestowing on whole nations refinement of taste . . . and conducting the thoughts through successive stages of excellence, till that contemplation of universal rectitude and harmony which began by Taste, may, as it is exalted and refined, conclude in Virtue.For Reynolds, grand narrative painting that depicted historical and religious scenes constituted the highest form of art precisely because it was best able to convey abstract ideas conducive to public virtue. As John Barrell points out, Reynolds drew a direct analogy between the community of taste and the political community. His imagined "republic of taste" was an elite, exclusively male world, but one that extended beyond the ranks of aristocracy to include artists as well as wealthy men of trade. It did not include artisans or, for that matter, most of the "mixed multitude of people" who composed the audience for art. Refined ladies might attend exhibitions; they might also be versed in the elegant art of drawing, but the highest forms of production and appreciation were, in Reynolds's view, confined to prosperous, educated men. Art could inspire the "contemplation of universal rectitude and harmony," but only among the select few who already held the qualifications of citizenship. The position of history painting atop the hierarchy of arts was consistent with Reynolds's vision of taste as a marker of public virtue in the traditional republican sense. It is not hard to see why this republican celebration of painting gained a following among American artists who were concerned about the status of art and artists in the United States.
Yet Reynolds himself assumed a place within a much wider discussion of aesthetic taste understood most broadly as a realm of refined pleasure associated with uplifted moral quality. Ian Pears observed that treatises on taste "poured from the presses" in England during the first half of the eighteenth century, motivated in part by concerns about the excesses of courtly culture but also by efforts to redefine political virtue beyond the perquisites of aristocratic birth. Taste offered access to social inclusion but it also provided new criteria for exclusion. It offered a critique of dissipated extravagance without demanding Spartan denial. Precisely what taste was and how standards might be determined remained the subject of extended debate, but it is important to recognize that eighteenth-century thinkers regarded aesthetic and moral standards as fixed. From their perspective, it was the human capacity for perception that varied among individuals and groups and over time. The seeds were present throughout humanity but only those with wide-ranging associations (available only to the most cosmopolitan and educated subjects) had the means of developing taste to its highest levels.
Debates about taste extended throughout Europe, most notably into France and Germany, but it was the British and particularly the Scottish thinkers who had the most widespread impact within the post-Revolutionary United States. A lively transatlantic trade in books brought multiple British printings to America, and select works underwent republication in the United States. Elements of Criticism by Henry Home, Lord Kames, originally published in Edinburgh in 1762, underwent forty-six American printings in many editions between 1796 and 1860. Archibald Alison's Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, first published in Edinburgh in 1790, also gained great renown. As required reading not only at colleges but also at young women's academies, it underwent eleven American printings in several editions from 1812 to 1860. These works, as well as the writings of David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, Alexander Gerard, and the Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke, set the terms of American engagement with art and artists into the 1840s.
For purposes here it is significant that the Scottish thinkers reset the boundaries of the tasteful community beyond those created by Reynolds. They did so by linking aesthetic appreciation rather generally to morality, benevolence, commerce, and what they saw as the progress of civilization. Whatever their differences, the Scottish writers identified aesthetic appreciation as an emotional response—a form of pleasure—that signified moral sensitivity and facilitated uplifted social interaction. Lord Kames made the point quite clearly when he observed that "the venting [of] opulence upon the Fine Arts . . . instead of encouraging vice, will excite both public and private virtue." In other words, he allowed that fine art might inspire virtuous actions in the public realm, but he also identified taste with qualities that he considered private. The cultivation of taste, he believed, had the power to "invigorate the social affections" while moderating "those that are selfish." And to "the man who has acquired a taste so acute and accomplished, every action wrong or improper must be highly disgustful."
The belief that aesthetic taste constituted a disinterested and therefore elevated form of pleasure derived in part from the conviction that it was distanced from mere bodily feeling. As Alison elaborated, the emotions of taste "afford an innocent and elegant amusement to private life, at the same time that they increase the Splendour of National Character; and in the progress of Nations, as well as of Individuals . . . they serve to exalt the human Mind, from corporeal to intellectual pursuits." Alexander Gerard suggested that "a man of an improved taste puts very little value on sensual delights." Writers linked taste to the senses of sight and sound (considered more elevated than those of taste [for food], smell, and touch) but they also went out of their way to insist that taste involved processes of thought. From their perspective, the senses could evoke taste only with the addition of imagination—the chain of thoughts or associations that gave meaning to sight and sound. It was this mental process that produced the intrinsically pleasurable "emotions of taste"—namely, the feelings of beauty and sublimity.
Writers described those feelings in various ways, but they generally linked the former to delicacy, calm, and cheerfulness, while they identified the latter with awe, grandeur, largeness of scale, solemnity, and even terror. Lord Kames observed that "all the various emotions of beauty have one common character, that of sweetness and gaiety. The emotion of grandeur has a different character: a large object that is agreeable, occupies the whole attention, and swells the heart into a vivid emotion, which though extremely pleasant, is rather serious than gay." To this combination of sensation and imagination, the additional feature of intellectual judgment (or what Hume referred to as "practice") was necessary for those who hoped to arrive at a true or discriminating taste. Edmund Burke made the point by observing that "what is called Taste, in its most general acceptation, is not a simple idea, but is partly made up of a perception of the primary pleasures of sense, of the secondary pleasures of the imagination, and of the conclusions of the reasoning faculty."
Eighteenth-century theorists were in general agreement concerning the objects of taste—namely, natural scenery and the fine arts. They identified the latter with painting, poetry, and music, and they generally included some combination of architecture, gardening, sculpture, and oratory. To appreciate the lesser, necessary, or mechanic, arts (also referred to as the "useful arts") might be an indication of polite or refined character, but they linked moral elevation to higher forms of pleasure. Even David Hume, who made the case that "innocent" luxuries were actually beneficial to the public interest, placed the emotions of taste, associated with the fine arts, on a higher plane than other forms of "refinement on the pleasures and conveniences of life." As he observed, "nothing is so improving to the temper as the study of the beauties either of poetry, eloquence, music, or painting." And when he wrote that such study "produce[s] an agreeable melancholy, which, of all dispositions of the mind, is the best suited to love and friendship," he was referring to an elevated form of sociability that transcended sensuality.
The distinction between beauty and sublimity offered a way to preserve the traditionally public or political connotations of taste even as the term assumed more private meanings. At least Alexander Gerard made this move by investing beauty and sublimity with gendered meanings. He associated beauty with "tenderness and softness"—qualities that were distinct "from the more elevated emotions of the soul." Sublimity, in his view, was "a still higher and nobler pleasure." He linked it, among other things, to heroism, patriotism, "greatness of power," and he invested it with military imagery.
Notions of taste remained entwined with nationality. Insofar as imagination was based on associations, one's national circumstances came into play. As Archibald Alison wrote, "national associations have a similar effect in increasing the emotions of sublimity and beauty, as they very obviously increase the number of images presented to the mind." It followed that fine art would have a particularly strong impact on audiences who shared the national associations of the artist. Alison continued: "the fine lines which Virgil has dedicated in his Georgics to the praises of his native country, however beautiful to us, were yet undoubtedly read with a far superior emotion, by an ancient Roman." And Hume, who believed that the most delicate taste could transcend the limitations of time and place, nonetheless observed that "we are more pleased, in the course of our reading, with pictures and characters that resemble objects which are found in our own age and country, than with those which describe a different set of customs." That artists could evoke national feeling was also apparent to Adam Ferguson, who observed that "fine artists . . . are but few, compared to the numbers of a people; but there are none, whose apprehensions or thoughts communicate more effectually with the minds of their countrymen."
If taste served as a way to conceptualize bonds of friendship, community, and national
sentiment, it also provided a means of constructing differences of value among individuals and groups. Kames could hardly have been more straightforward when he wrote, "Those who depend for food on bodily labour, are totally void of taste; of such a taste at least as can be of use in the fine arts. This consideration bars the greater part of mankind." And while the majority was excluded from the tasteful community by manual labor, others were denied entry based on extravagance. Kames was not alone in making the point that beauty and sublimity involved simplicity. That belief allowed him to "bring under trial the opulent who delight in expense," men whose "appetite for superiority and respect, inflamed by riches, is vented upon costly furniture, numerous attendants, a princely dwelling, sumptuous feasts, everything superb and gorgeous." Such extravagance, indicative of "self-love," was quite distinct from taste, which involved "simplicity, elegance, propriety, and things natural, sweet, or amiable." In short, "the exclusion of classes so many and numerous, reduces within a narrow compass those who are qualified to be judges in the fine arts."
If Kames was invested in the establishment of clear boundaries between the possessors of taste and their moral inferiors, other writers saw taste as a matter of degree. Alison acknowledged that "even the peasant" might have imagination derived from associations to local scenes. However, he also suggested that the greater "the number of associations we connect with it [the object of taste], the stronger is the emotion of sublimity or beauty we receive from it." In other words, he gave considerable advantage to cosmopolitan subjects. Similarly, Hume distinguished between men possessed of the most discriminating or "polite" taste and others who took pleasure in the various fine arts. (Hume used the term "liberal arts.") Only the former had the reason, knowledge, and discrimination to overcome the prejudices of time and place and to discern transcendent quality. He believed that such men, though "rare . . . are easily to be distinguished in society by the soundness of their understanding, and the superiority of their faculties above the rest of mankind."
Women occupied a pivotal but ambiguous place in this imagined community of taste. They were nowhere to be found at the most rarefied levels of discrimination where reason and (in Reynolds's view) the ability to generalize, were defining attributes. It is telling that even Alison neglected to mention female subjects in his essay on taste. Yet we know that women played a prominent role in the polite society of eighteenth-century London and Edinburgh; they read poetry, attended exhibitions of painting, and studied drawing as well as music. Reynolds resolved the problem by distinguishing the tasteful minority from the audience at large, and to the extent that other theorists allowed for gradations of taste, they seemed to make room for women's engagement in what Joseph Addison famously called "the pleasures of the imagination."
The fact that women were both the objects and subjects of taste complicated the question. Hume could declare that "it is with books as with women, where a certain plainness of manner and of dress is more engaging, than the glare of paint and airs and apparel, which may dazzle the eye, but reaches not the affections." He and others suggested that a woman who embodied the attributes of beauty—including simplicity and virtue—could have an uplifting impact on men. Insofar as Scottish Enlightenment thinkers considered the progress of civilization, they made the treatment and elevation of women a critical benchmark. By this logic, refined women and fine art were almost precisely analogous. As objects of beauty, both had the capacity to elevate and inspire morally sensitive (tasteful) viewers; at the same time, respect for worthy women, like the appreciation of fine art, signaled virtue in men. For all its limitations and mixed messages, the discourse of taste would become a potent resource for educated women in nineteenth-century North America.
The community of taste eluded definition, particularly at the margins, but this very malleability helps to explain the power of the concept across the Atlantic. Political and cultural leaders of the Revolutionary generation hoped that taste might contain republican liberties and offset the danger of factionalism. Well into the antebellum decades, a rich patriotic visual culture testified to the broad popular investment in a national community, distinct from corrupting influences associated with Europe. At the same time, the theory of taste offered urban elites a way to claim both moral superiority and public authority. It gave aspiring middle classes a framework for group identity—a mark of moral distance from the laboring poor and luxury-loving rich. Insofar as the idea of taste conceptualized the progress of society from savagery to refinement, it helped to underwrite colonial projects across the continent. For women, notably women of the middle class, it offered a way to claim moral standing, and, as the notion of taste evolved in the antebellum era, it helped to justify domestic consumption against the constraints of Calvinist orthodoxy. Yet there remained an unresolved—and unresolvable—contradiction: As a mark of distinction, taste was intrinsically exclusionary; as an engine of public uplift, it was necessarily expansive. This tension remained in check until the 1840s when escalating social and political conflicts placed new pressures on both the theory and practice of taste.
Even as discussions of taste evolved over the course of the nineteenth century, a fundamental tenet of Scottish thought remained in place among art promoters and museum builders—namely, that taste was a moral quality with public and private implications. The Art-Union sought to galvanize taste in the interest of civic uplift and national unity. The Metropolitan increasingly addressed its visitors as consumers of household objects. New York's art wars chart that evolution.
Table of Contents
Introduction. The Importance of Taste: Intellectual Roots 1Chapter 1. Paintings in Public Life: The Rise of the American Art-Union
Chapter 2. The Limits of Cultural Stewardship: The Fall of the American Art-Union
Chapter 3. Art and Industry: Debates of the 1850s
Chapter 4. The Art of Decoration and the Transformation of Stewardship: The Making of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Chapter 5. Metropolitan Museum on Trial: Antiquities, Expertise and the Problem of Race
Chapter 6. The Battle for Sundays at the Museum
Epilogue. Edith Wharton's Museum
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments