"It Is Surprising That There Are Any Happy Wives": The Art Interchange, 1878-1886

"It Is Surprising That There Are Any Happy Wives": The Art Interchange, 1878-1886 Mary W. Blanchard For historians of nineteenth century women's history, the relationship of women to artistic production is generally contained within the construct of a moral "separate sphere." Here, note these historians, women found aesthetic creativity and fulfillment in such nonprofit domestic projects as knitting, crocheting, and the making of quilts. The marketplace (and, with it, the discourse of art in the public realm) was aligned with male entrepreneurship and male visibility. Yet in the 1870s and 1880s, the emergence of a distinctly new art "craze," the Aesthetic Movement, complicated this dichotomy. For, at this time, the emergence of an independent (and visible) female aesthetic voice (drawing on earlier legacies of artistic production in home crafts) championed professionalism of the domestic arts in the public sphere, as it demanded a reformulation of domesticity itself. For the aesthetic practitioner of the 1870s and 1880s, art became, not domestic accommodation and separation, but gender politics and public discourse.1 Of course throughout the nineteenth century, gender politics entered the evolving reconstitution of domesticity. The demand for the women's vote was a renegotiation of male political spaces, and, by inference, a reformulation of women's proper sphere. The move for women's higher education opened the discourse on female intellectual limits and, as such, questioned traditional domestic categories. Even the women's club movement , which stressed self-culture, female community, and reform, can be seen as challenges to the pure domestic ideal. All these movements in some way attacked or reformulated middle-class domesticity. These groups were visible and articulate in their own time and are visible to historians today. But another set of challengers arose in the 1870s and 1880s as the Aesthetic Movement galvanized thousands of women to see artistic production as a move beyond self-culture. These aesthetic women attempted to use the domestic arts of painting, sewing, and handicrafts to move into the public sphere of commerce, subversively instigating a philosophy which aggrandized the individual female artist and celebrated her sensual (and amoral) nature. Aestheticism was a reform movement for both art and society which originated in England in the 1850s and 1860s as a © 1996 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8 No. 3 (Fall) 1996 Mary W. Blanchard 37 reaction to Victorian urbanization and industrialization. Influenced by the philosophies of the Pre-Raphaelites, John Ruskin, and William Morris (and implemented by exhibits of English handicrafts at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial), the Aesthetic Movement was associated with the resurgence of the decorative arts in the middle-class home. More broadly, however, writers on aesthetic taste insisted that art and beauty were the goals of life and that people should live for art. Such a philosophy was a natural catalyst for women who questioned their domestic (and "separate") role in Victorian society.2 As a popular movement, Aestheticism was not an elite event, but rather it permeated popular culture through the elevation and execution of the secondary arts in the home. Art education for women, female workshops and studios, artistic salons run by women, and commercial ventures spearheaded by women aesthetes exemplified the importance of art for the middle-class American woman, both in the private and the public realm. This art "craze" resulted in the formation of many art clubs and schools all over the country. Professional status paralleled the amateur pursuit. The Rhode Island School of Design and the Art Students' League were only two of the burgeoning academic institutions committed to the legitimacy of art as both expression and profession. Concurrent was the formation of art journals. Such magazines as Art Age, American Art Review, and Art Amateur were typical enterprises. These publications, begun in the 1870s and 1880s, circulated throughout the country and reached many areas and classes beyond the circle of elite urban tastemakers. One such publication, the Art Interchange, was established in 1878 by Candace Wheeler (1827-1923), a successful textile designer and founder of the New York Society of Decorative Art. Wheeler was part of the urban upper middle-class, circulating with the artists of the Tenth Street Studio and launching her own professional interior decorating...