Art for Americans

The Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 12,No. 3,Winter 1981 Art forAmericans Don Graham.The Fiction of Frank Norris: The Aesthetic Context. Columbia, Mo.: university of Missouri Press, 1978. 172pp. HWayne Morgan. New Muses: Art in American Cultwe,1865-1920. Norman, Ok,: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978.232 + xiv pp. Arthur Frank Wertheim. The New York Little Renaissance: Iconoclasm, Modernism, and Nationalism in American Culture,1908-1917. New York: New York University Press, 1976.276 + xiiipp. Jay Bochner Theissue I find the most interesting in Wayne Morgan's book is one which receivesits most satisfactory treatment in Don Graham's study of Norris. NeivMuses early on poses the basic question of the value of art for American societybetween the Civil and First World wars. It is a most exciting question , and it is a most difficult one to answer. In terms of method, how shallwe go about evaluating the growing function of art in this presumably Philistine society? For how many and which sorts of Americans could art, ofone kind or another, play a serious cultural role, whether to soothe the soulat home or demonstrate to European snickering that America indeed wasa culture at all'? This large question, with its many ramifications, is not tobeanswered by a survey of the critics who held swayin the pages of Hmper ~, Week(v,Centwy, Scribner's, Atlantic and other publications of that ilk, and yetit is the paraphrased opinions of those critics which make up the main body of Morgan's study. Certainly these critics represent something, one aspect of a cultured elite, but their arguments and their tastes leave us quite alienated from the actual fabric of American culture. At best we learn that manycritics were conservative, and that a few hoped that the promotion of art would bring some culture to an energetic but materialistic America. As towhat inroads art actually did make, no attempt is made to tell us, though the earlier chapters often whet our appetite. 346 lay Bochner There is no doubt that New Muses is voluminously documented, and the book represents a real mine of references for anyone interested in taking up where this work leaves off; but there is also no doubt that the study leaves off far too early, whether it be on this issue of my choosing or any other.We cannot even tell the views of one journal from another, or if there are trends within a given journal. The author declares in his preface that he has no thesis to hammer home, but he has gone to another extreme. The book is closer to an annotated bibliography than an argument or history of some sort, with little effort to discover what specifically was going on among art students, art collectors and art dealers. There are innumerable generalizations, but made at every turn, and of the blandest sort, proclaiming a desire for innovations for some twenty year period and a desire for order and stability in some other period just as large and, at times, overlapping with the first. Large groups, masses even, are credited with wishing such and such or its opposite, and this is not documented with reference to the audiences, but with reference to an art critic and arguments among art critics. In no case do we ever getto the public, nor does the technique of the study ever give us hope that wemight. The further we go into the book the more we come back to what various artists were doing, as the critics saw it, and I do not think that really represents American culture. Meanwhile the audience always seems ready to do whatis called for, to be prudish or hankering for sensuality, to want art for an elite or art for the democratic masses, whenever it is convenient for the author's organization of his material. To argue, at various points, that a given audience now required greater sensuousness and individualism in the painting it bought just is not substantiated, nor can it be by the evidence marshalled. A call for painting to supply and illustrate an ordered culture is a little better substantiated among the critics, but as to whether a buying or viewing...