On Art

...The sheer moralism of the period was strenuous...

...It will be interesting though, to see how successfully it deals with the next, and far more interesting, period in American art which extends from the Civil War to the present...

...It shapes, as much as it is shaped by, its milieu...

...While changes in taste were not so rapid as they are now, they were not so leisurely as was supposed...

...It is the beginning of the mid-19th-century crusade for beautification, for rural cemeteries, for those better homes and gardens that were intended to provide "an unfailing barrier against vice, immorality and bad habits...

...some sharper conclusions or a position taken toward the mass of material...

...What a picture these Americans make????enlightened ministers, high-minded ladies, fledgling artists????swarming over Europe, its cathedrals, its palaces, its art museums, determined to see everything, scribbling interminable notes, keeping diaries, forming judgments for the benefit of relatives and neighbors at home...

...Tourists confronting the Boboli Gardens, Hyde Park, the Tuileries are transported into rapture...

...One could wish for something more critical or evaluative from the author...

...Men who had seen the Apollo Belvedere only in indifferent casts could not account for the thrill which the original provided...

...This was a far cry from the attitude of an, earlier generation which found all forms of art not only suspect but an affront to Puritan morals, an example of the corrupt and corrupting luxuries of older, decadent and tyrannical civilizations...

...cries Mary Jane Eames, ignoring the political implications, "almost every city in France and Italy would have been able to have boasted of much greater beauty...

...To read about the esthetic politics involved in deciding whether the Bunker Hill monument should be constructed in the form of an Egyptian obelisk or an antique column reminds one of how such decisions are now made by bureaucratic fiat and left for a few architectural critics to bemoan...

...Even Napoleon, who might not otherwise have appealed to democratic and Christian sentiments, becomes for American travelers a god of urban planning...

...Modern criticism tends to take up its position on the opposite side of that line, limiting itself to internal problems, to the morphological development of formal styles...

...I had never seen a ruin...

...At home, they had been visually deprived...

...Nineteenth century critics found the obelisk as an architectural form too reminiscent of Egyptian tyranny and therefore not suitable for a monument in a democratic society...

...What they had read about Europe or seen in engravings, had not prepared them for the experience????for the scale and ornament of the buildings, for the breadth and venerability of the paintings...

...Had he lived twenty years longer...

...The most interesting parts of The Artist in American Society are the revelations about the period...

...There it must discuss figures like Thomas Eakins or Winslow Homer, whose situation in American society may prove interesting, but whose real importance must be analyzed in terms of the art they created...

...This method seems to work well in a period of second and third-rate art, where the interest is national and historic rather than esthetic...

...Art of this order lives in equity with the context in which it was produced...

...I know," writes the Reverend Bush-nell after an hour in the Pitti Palace, "that it must be a benefit to me as regards writing and the conduct of life, to have dwelt in such an atmosphere...

...It was a matter of decades for attitudes to be argued against, accepted and then discarded...

...Puzzling out the discrepancy was their introduction to the thorny issues of esthetics...

...Some were grievously disappointed and continued to view the Continent with suspicion, while others were inclined to evaluate Versailles at so much per foot and find the cost extravagant...

...In a long and otherwise detailed text, replete with 86 pages of notes, only a handful of references to specific works of American art are offered????horatio Greenough's statue of Washington, Hiram Powers' famous The Greek Slave, a few paintings by Washington Allston and Thomas Cole...

...second, it illuminates, as few conventional histories of the period do, the shaping force of these attitudes upon the establishment of the profession in this country...

...He chronicles how and where artists like Thomas Sully, Samuel F. Morse, Asher B. Durand lived, what they said, and what they were paid...

...A strange claim to make for a study in the history of art, especially for one as worthwhile as The Artist in American Society...

...His argument won the day...

...Of the older civilizations, they argued, the Greeks alone possessed the proper democratic credentials...

...Art became the handmaiden of religion and a few American artists enjoyed a measure of support...

...Harris' sources extend from the journals, memoirs, travel and guide books of the period, from the fictional types of the artist in now forgotten novels, to such unlikely realms as Unitarian sermons, Fourth of July orations and the reports of the Standing Committee for the Bunker Hill monument...

...The tide is set running for a change of American attitudes about many things...

...No future history of American art will be able to ignore his account of the peculiar and sometimes unique pressures that were brought to bear upon the development of the profession...

...Under the influence of these European impressions Yankee thrift is taught to relax into conspicuous consumption, trade is sweetened by civic philanthrophy...

...One Independence Day orator urged government patronage of art as a device "to check the growing tendencies to insubordination, and to render all classes of citizens more humane, peaceful and happy...

...Harris is particularly illuminating about the republican strictures raised against certain styles of art and architecture...

...Not all American tourists, however, were granted such a dazzling vision of Europe...

...And the art public of the period, limited but influential, was far more committed and ardent and on grounds that had more urgency than mere faddishness (though there were, as always, connoisseurs whose interest was fashionable...

...One incidental benefit of his account of the amazing European interlude in American social behavior is that it fixes so absolutely the relevance and psychological complexity of Henry James' chief literary theme...

...They are on a grand inspection tour...

...In the subject of American innocence confronting Europe's civilizing decay, James hit upon one of the great historic dramas in American life...

...It is an art history without art...

...Still, what Harris has to say about the 70 year period in which art was nursed along from the position of a trade to a reasonably secure profession is extremely valuable...

...But the contradictory opinions;????the cases both for and against art in American society presented by literate Americans of the time????are dealt with even-handedly as Harris carefully abstains from taking sides in the controversy...

...Their letters are critical: Why have the powerful merchants at home made no provisions for such civilizing amenities...

...To be sure, it contains a good deal of factual information about the artists of the formative period (from 1790 to 1860...

...The value of Harris' book is that it reconstructs a period which has been easily glossed over as less than interesting in its artistic production, if not in the fate of its artists...

...Henry Ward Beecher weeps at the sight of Kenil-worth Castle: "I had never in my life seen an old building...

...But scant attention is given to what makes these artists interesting in the first place: the art which they produced...

...But whatever the contradictory effects of the European experience, it helped????for one or two decades????to raise the American artist to a position of eminence that was very near the pulpit...

...This new interest in the moral uplift of landscape helps to establish patronage for the birth of American landscape painting beginning with the Hudson River School...

...The tone of the innumerable letters and reports, as Harris notes, is one of religious conversion: Americans are having their moment in paradise...

...But this unlikely transformation of values provides the nexus of Harris' study: the encounter of well-placed, influential and affluent Americans with the centuries-old treasure house of Europe...

...Perhaps one should not carp at the fine distinction which Harris draws between art as a history of men and ideas and art as a history of esthetic and formal decisions...

...Protestant ladies found themselves becoming apologists for Popish rituals...

...Horatio Greenough, the country's first functionalist, reasonably pointed out that the obelisk was an integral form, whereas the column was intended to be a load bearing element of a larger structure...

...Harris states at the outset that his subject is not American art but the position of the American artist in American society, and the Spartan resolution with which he has carried out the job is admirable...

...The testimony on the moral and didactic burdens thrust upon art by ministers, politicians and artists alike is nearly overwhelming...

...For this labor of scholarship both historians and critics are indebted to him...

...For some, the encounter with Europe is traumatic...

...None of these references advances any critical evaluation of the works or discusses their relevance as formal achievements in the development of American painting or sculpture...

...Nowhere does the life of discrete works of art intrude upon the purest form of scholarship...

...Yet Harris' book is important, even invaluable, on two counts: First, it documents a wealth of information, much of it new, on American attitudes and opinions about art...