Desire & Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art, and: Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel & the Art-Romance Tradition (review)

These two rich studies by Jonah Siegel join other notable recent books on what Siegel helpfully denominates "the nineteenth-century culture of art." (Among these Jonathan Freedman's Professions of Taste [1990]; Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer [1990]; Kate Flint's The Victorians and the Visual Imagination [2000]; and Elizabeth Prettejohn's forthcoming Art for Art's Sake stand out.) Siegel's books share these works' interest in the special role of visuality in the formation of a long-nineteenth-century culture (one which has its parallel in vernacular visual culture, though that is not the focus of Siegel's work). As they demonstrate, visual arts, in part through the sheer accessibility of paintings and prints, contribute importantly to the visual inflections of this culture, also traceable in scientific practices, developments in psychology, and technical inventions. Other, more strictly historical studies have examined the growing role of the art critic and advisor; multiplying institutions of collection, exhibition, and sale; expanded possibilities for reproduction; and, not least, the unprecedented and not to be repeated economic and popular success of many contemporary artworks and artists. All these books call our attention to the pervasiveness of an expanding culture of art and note its impact on literary culture.

It is characteristic of both Siegel's books that he recognizes, far more than most literary historians, how much cherished concepts of authorship, audience, and even of the literary work in the nineteenth century were shared with and often decisively reshaped by their visual counterparts. "The artist" or "the work" often refers to literary authors and their texts no less than to painters and paintings. In this sense, Siegel's "culture of art" is a general term, embracing literary and visual arts together as mutually influencing, increasingly equal partners. Like the other studies noted above, Siegel assumes an important shift (differently located in different books, but for Siegel in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century) from earlier, more textual cultures (at least in Britain) to one marked by a "new significance of the aesthetic, with the attendant interest in art, artists, and prized art objects" (Haunted Museum 5).

"Aesthetic," in this context, is a term whose history registers the growing importance of the visual arts. Aesthetics was first so named by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten in 1750 to designate perception as a field for philosophical speculation; his own interests, however, were primarily literary. By the time "aesthetic" was fully anglicized (reluctantly, given the suspicion of German philosophizing until late in the century) it had come, by way of Kant and Hegel, to refer particularly to problems of perception and judgment in the visual arts. Only in the 1860s and 1870s, in a move that has remained contested (witness the responses to Walter Pater's advocacy of an "aesthetic criticism" embracing both art and literature), did the English term begin to register the imbrication of the literary with the visual arts that was, by then—as Siegel and others convincingly demonstrate—long accomplished.

Siegel's work, however, has a different focus from that of the studies mentioned above. He is interested in exposing underlying psychological structures that unite more firmly the affective and conceptual history of the literary with the visual arts in the nineteenth century. These turn out to be far from simple. The pattern he finds—desire for art produces anxiety at its own possible fulfillment, and hence simultaneous impulses to love and to destroy, to admire and to bury, artists and art works—fascinates Siegel as he sees it repeatedly played out in the often troubled history of relationships to (high) culture and artistic genius in nineteenth-century Britain. Desire & Excess, the...