The American Art-Union
The American Art-Union

Author: Kimberly A. Orcutt

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2024-08-06

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 153150700X

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The first comprehensive treatment in seventy years of the American Art-Union’s remarkable rise and fall For over a decade, the New York–based American Art-Union shaped art creation, display, and patronage nationwide. Boasting as many as 19,000 members from almost every state, its meteoric rise and its sudden and spectacular collapse still raise a crucial question: Why did such a successful and influential institution fail? The American Art-Union reveals a sprawling and fascinating account of the country’s first nationwide artistic phenomenon, creating a shared experience of visual culture, art news and criticism, and a direct experience with original works. For an annual fee of five dollars, members of the American Art-Union received an engraving after a painting by a notable US artist and the annual publication Transactions (1839–49) and later the monthly Bulletin (1848–53). Most importantly, members’ names were entered in a drawing for hundreds of original paintings and sculptures by most of the era’s best-known artists. Those artworks were displayed in its immensely popular Free Gallery. Unfortunately, the experiment was short-lived. Opposition grew, and a cascade of events led to an 1852 court case that proved to be the Art-Union’s downfall. Illuminating the workings of the American art market, this study fills a gaping lacuna in the history of nineteenth-century US art. Kimberly A. Orcutt draws from the American Art-Union’s records as well as in-depth contextual research to track the organization’s decisive impact that set the direction of the country’s paintings, sculpture, and engravings for well over a decade. Forged in cultural crosscurrents of utopianism and skepticism, the American Art-Union’s demise can be traced to its nature as an attempt to create and control the complex system that the early nineteenth-century art world represented. This study breaks the organization’s activities into their major components to offer a structural rather than chronological narrative that follows mounting tensions to their inevitable end. The institution was undone not by dramatic outward events or the character of its leadership but by the character of its utopianist plan.

A True American
A True American

Author: Wendy Jean Katz

Publisher: Fordham University Press

Published: 2022-02-01

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 0823298582

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This book argues that nativism, the hostility especially to Catholic immigrants that led to the organization of political parties like the Know-Nothings, affected the meaning of nineteenthcentury American art in ways that have gone unrecognized. In an era of industrialization, nativism’s erection of barriers to immigration appealed to artisans, a category that included most male artists at some stage in their careers. But as importantly, its patriotic message about the nature of the American republic also overlapped with widely shared convictions about the necessity of democratic reform. Movements directed toward improving the human condition, including anti-slavery and temperance, often consigned Catholicism, along with monarchies and slavery, to a repressive past, not the republican American future. To demonstrate the impact of this political effort by humanitarian reformers and nativists to define a Protestant character for the country, this book tracks the work and practice of artist William Walcutt. Though he is little known today, in his own time his efforts as a painter, illustrator and sculptor were acclaimed as masterly, and his art is worth reconsidering in its own right. But this book examines him as a case study of an artist whose economic and personal ties to artisanal print culture and cultural nationalists ensured that he was surrounded by and contributed to anti-Catholic publications and organizations. Walcutt was not anti immigrant himself, nor a member of a nativist party, but his kin, friends, and patrons publicly expressed warnings about Catholic and foreign political influence. And that has implications for better-known nineteenth-century historical and narrative art. Precisely because Walcutt’s profile and milieu were so typical for artists in this period, this book is able to demonstrate how central this supposedly fringe movement was to viewers and makers of American art.

Art and the Empire City
Art and the Empire City

Author: Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.)

Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 658

ISBN-13: 0870999575

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Presented in conjunction with the September 2000 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, this volume presents the complex story of the proliferation of the arts in New York and the evolution of an increasingly discerning audience for those arts during the antebellum period. Thirteen essays by noted specialists bring new research and insights to bear on a broad range of subjects that offer both historical and cultural contexts and explore the city's development as a nexus for the marketing and display of art, as well as private collecting; landscape painting viewed against the background of tourism; new departures in sculpture, architecture, and printmaking; the birth of photography; New York as a fashion center; shopping for home decorations; changing styles in furniture; and the evolution of the ceramics, glass, and silver industries. The 300-plus works in the exhibition and comparative material are extensively illustrated in color and bandw. Oversize: 9.25x12.25". Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Art Wars
Art Wars

Author: Rachel N. Klein

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2020-06-19

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0812296885

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A study of three controversies that illuminate the changing cultural role of art exhibition in 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.

Humbug!
Humbug!

Author: Wendy Jean Katz

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2020-02-03

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0823285391

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Approximately 300 daily and weekly newspapers flourished in New York before the Civil War. A majority of these newspapers, even those that proclaimed independence of party, were motivated by political conviction and often local conflicts. Their editors and writers jockeyed for government office and influence. Political infighting and their related maneuvers dominated the popular press, and these political and economic agendas led in turn to exploitation of art and art exhibitions. Humbug traces the relationships, class animosities, gender biases, and racial projections that drove the terms of art criticism, from the emergence of the penny press to the Civil War. The inexpensive “penny” papers that appeared in the 1830s relied on advertising to survive. Sensational stories, satire, and breaking news were the key to selling papers on the streets. Coverage of local politicians, markets, crime, and personalities, including artists and art exhibitions, became the penny papers’ lifeblood. These cheap papers, though unquestionably part of the period’s expanding capitalist economy, offered socialists, working-class men, bohemians, and utopianists a forum in which they could propose new models for American art and society and tear down existing ones. Arguing that the politics of the antebellum press affected the meaning of American art in ways that have gone unrecognized, Humbug covers the changing politics and rhetoric of this criticism. Author Wendy Katz demonstrates how the penny press’s drive for a more egalitarian society affected the taste and values that shaped art, and how the politics of their art criticism changed under pressure from nativists, abolitionists, and expansionists. Chapters explore James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald and its attack on aristocratic monopolies on art; the penny press’s attack on the American Art-Union, an influential corporation whose Board purchased artworks from living artists, exhibited them in a free gallery, and then distributed them in an annual five-dollar lottery; exposés of the fraudulent trade in Old Masters works; and the efforts of socialists, freethinkers, and bohemians to reject the authority of the past.

Young America
Young America

Author: Edward L. Widmer

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0195140621

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This fascinating study examines the meteoric career of a vigorous intellectual movement rising out of the Age of Jackson. As Americans argued over their destiny in the decades preceding the Civil War, an outspoken new generation of "ultra-democratic" writers entered the fray, staking out positions on politics, literature, art, and any other territory they could annex. They called themselves Young America--and they proclaimed a "Manifest Destiny" to push back frontiers in every category of achievement. Their swagger found a natural home in New York City, already bursting at the seams and ready to take on the world. Young America's mouthpiece was the Democratic Review, a highly influential magazine funded by the Democratic Party and edited by the brash and charismatic John O'Sullivan. The Review offered a fresh voice in political journalism, and sponsored young writers like Hawthorne and Whitman early in their careers. Melville, too, was influenced by Young America, and provided a running commentary on its many excesses. Despite brilliant promise, the movement fell apart in the 1850s, leaving its original leaders troubled over the darker destiny they had ushered in. Their ambitious generation had failed to rewrite history as promised. Instead, their perpetual agitation helped set the stage for the Civil War. Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City is without question the most complete examination of this captivating and original movement. It also provides the first published biography of its leader, John O'Sullivan, one of America's great rhetoricians. Edward L. Widmer enriches his unique volume by offering a new theory of Manifest Destiny as part of a broader movement of intellectual expansion in nineteenth-century America.

Circulation and Control
Circulation and Control

Author: Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire

Publisher: Open Book Publishers

Published: 2021-10-08

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 1800641494

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The nineteenth century witnessed a series of revolutions in the production and circulation of images. From lithographs and engraved reproductions of paintings to daguerreotypes, stereoscopic views, and mass-produced sculptures, works of visual art became available in a wider range of media than ever before. But the circulation and reproduction of artworks also raised new questions about the legal rights of painters, sculptors, engravers, photographers, architects, collectors, publishers, and subjects of representation (such as sitters in paintings or photographs). Copyright and patent laws tussled with informal cultural norms and business strategies as individuals and groups attempted to exert some degree of control over these visual creations. With contributions by art historians, legal scholars, historians of publishing, and specialists of painting, photography, sculpture, and graphic arts, this rich collection of essays explores the relationship between intellectual property laws and the cultural, economic, and technological factors that transformed the pictorial landscape during the nineteenth century. This book will be valuable reading for historians of art and visual culture; legal scholars who work on the history of copyright and patent law; and literary scholars and historians who work in the field of book history. It will also resonate with anyone interested in current debates about the circulation and control of images in our digital age.

The Murder of Helen Jewett
The Murder of Helen Jewett

Author: Patricia Cline Cohen

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 1999-06-29

Total Pages: 514

ISBN-13: 0679740759

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In 1836, the murder of a young prostitute made headlines in New York City and around the country, inaugurating a sex-and-death sensationalism in news reporting that haunts us today. Patricia Cline Cohen goes behind these first lurid accounts to reconstruct the story of the mysterious victim, Helen Jewett. From her beginnings as a servant girl in Maine, Helen Jewett refashioned herself, using four successive aliases, into a highly paid courtesan. She invented life stories for herself that helped her build a sympathetic clientele among New York City's elite, and she further captivated her customers through her seductive letters, which mixed elements of traditional feminine demureness with sexual boldness. But she was to meet her match--and her nemesis--in a youth called Richard Robinson. He was one of an unprecedented number of young men who flooded into America's burgeoning cities in the 1830s to satisfy the new business society's seemingly infinite need for clerks. The son of an established Connecticut family, he was intense, arrogant, and given to posturing. He became Helen Jewett's lover in a tempestuous affair and ten months later was arrested for her murder. He stood trial in a five-day courtroom drama that ended with his acquittal amid the cheers of hundreds of fellow clerks and other spectators. With no conviction for murder, nor closure of any sort, the case continued to tantalize the public, even though Richard Robinson disappeared from view. Through the Erie Canal, down the Ohio and the Mississippi, and by way of New Orleans, he reached the wilds of Texas and a new life under a new name. Through her meticulous and ingenious research, Patricia Cline Cohen traces his life there and the many twists and turns of the lingering mystery of the murder. Her stunning portrayals of Helen Jewett, Robinson, and their raffish, colorful nineteenth-century world make vivid a frenetic city life and sexual morality whose complexities, contradictions, and concerns resonate with those of our own time.