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Book Reviews
The Handmaidens of Modernism
| MANCINI, JOANNE MARIE. Pre-Modernism: Art-World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory Show. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 256 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-691-11813-2.
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No matter how arresting, exalted, or complete an image may appear to the eye, it is ultimately beholden to the printed word. Artists today may think this dilemma uniquely postmodern. J.M. Mancini, however, finds its source in the dozens of art magazines that began to proliferate during the Gilded Age. In this provocative study she describes an art world where critics, editors, and publishers wielded formidable—perhaps even the ultimate—creative power. The art press, Mancini contends, "creat[e] the parameters that define what kind of work of art will or will not be made...determine who will or will not make art, and...delimit how and by whom art will or will not be seen" (11). Art critics at the turn of the twentieth century trumped the influence of patrons, dealers, collectors, even artists. Such an assertion breaks with existing scholarship that dates authority of this magnitude to Clement Greenberg in the mid-twentieth century. Mancini foregoes writing the obvious microhistory of art criticism however. With select case studies, she pursues instead two related questions in cultural history. When and how did modernist aesthetics take root in the United States? And, when and how did the concept of art split into distinct, hierarchical categories of high and low, sacred and commercial, fine and decorative? According to Mancini, art critics proved instrumental to both transformations during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. |
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Though lacking a conventional narrative, Mancini's book divides into neat halves. Its first concentrates on art magazine production and the evolving sophistication of art writing. Magazines, she explains, served as a "portable branch of the art world"—a realm (on paper) that even readers far-flung from urban art centers could hold in their hands, read, and collect (36). From dozens of titles Mancini singles out one, Modern Art, a "transitional" publication of the 1890s whose content was a "fusion of the vanguardist and the mainstream" (32). Its luxurious look and exclusive focus on art set it apart from more ordinary fare like Scribner's and Harper's Weekly. Modern Art was the commercial venture of Joseph Moore Bowles, who enlisted Louis Prang as his publisher (18). No aesthetic purist, Prang marketed the journal with chromolithographs popular among readers, while Bowles solicited essays from modernists like Arthur Wesley Dow and Max Weber that he interspersed with illustrated poems and reportage from provincial art scenes. This eclecticism, Mancini argues, shows fluidity in a period that most scholars believe to be characterized by a set cultural hierarchy. With evidence so rich and original, Mancini makes a compelling case. But were the boundaries truly fluid, or were they firm but flouted by Bowles to sell magazines? And were readers of Modern Art and the magazines it inspired aware of or oblivious to these distinctions? |
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Not until critics asserted themselves as a professional class of cultural cognoscenti, Mancini maintains, did a hierarchy emerge. Before their arrival, art writing of the 1870s and 1880s was "institution-building." Articles promoted "art progress" by praising every initiative, big or small, to organize a club, school, museum, or exhibition. Once the field professionalized, Mancini argues, critics became gatekeepers, their readers "nonprofessional clients" and "consumers" (101). So, for example, critic Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer felt it her role to "guide and foster the public's ...habits of perception and consumption" (102). This new generation of tastemaker selected its subjects carefully, classified artists and artwork, and judged for quality. Their outlook, more importantly, coalesced into a "pre-modern" creed. They endorsed the tariff-free importation of foreign art, elevated original artworks over reproductions, denigrated illustrations as superficial records, praised imagination over imitation, aesthetics over sales, and contemporary artists over the dead. Mancini outlines this key intellectual shift (using the criticism of van Rensselaer and Clarence Cook, her two case studies) with a concision that lends itself perfectly to non-specialists seeking a grasp of turn-of-the-century visual culture. |
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