The "Writing" of Modern Life: The Etching Revival in France, Britain, and the U.S., 1850-1940 (review)

The title of this work, the catalogue of an exhibition held at the University of Chicago's Smart Museum of Art, reveals one of the most interesting and novel aspects of what might have been well-known territory: the etching revival which took place in nineteenth-century France is here extended well into the twentieth century and to British and American artists as well. This makes for some fascinating connections and comparisons between works, practices, and traditions which relate to each other in complex and interesting ways. Beyond this broadening—and deepening—of the phenomenon of the etching revival, the exhibition took as its main themes the relation between etching and writing, and the concept of etching as an art of modern life, themes which are explored in six essays covering different eras and national traditions: the connections and exchanges between writers and artists, the analogies between writing and etching, the role of the critical press, the representation of the etcher in texts and images, the use of etching for literary illustration, etching as an art particularly suited to the representation and expression of modern life. Some of this material will be familiar to specialists but much, particularly the post-1880 material, will not be, and even the essays on the better-known material offer new insights into the subject and the works discussed.

An excellent introductory essay by Elizabeth Helsinger, "The 'Writing' of Modern Life," sets out the main issues. As a direct, unmediated art which translates especially well the personality of the artist, etching has always been likened to handwriting, to a "signature," an analogy exploited in the post-Romantic context of the nineteenth-century revival. Many of the essays take up this idea and relate it to a modern emphasis on suggestion, interpretation, and expressiveness rather than imitation. More important, perhaps, is Helsinger's emphasis on the strangeness, unfamiliarity, alienation, and disquiet which etching can convey: as she observes, this is its true modern character, its ability to represent an "urban loneliness" and to render "the strangeness of the new." Martha Tedeschi studies the rhetoric and vocabulary in which writers and artists in England distanced etching from its association with leisured amateurs, notably women, and redefined it as a professional, "high" art. In an essay on French writers and the graphic arts, Anna Arnar shows how etching becomes figured as a form of work, one which embodies freedom in both an artistic sense and more broadly in social terms. Through a close analysis of works by Bracquemond and Buhot, Alison Morehead explores the increasing interest in successive impressions of etchings, and the increasing aesthetic and economic value associated with these as points of entry into the creative process. An essay by Peyton Skipwith provides a fascinating survey of the period 1880-1930 in England, bringing out the connections between earlier masters such as Samuel Palmer and Charles Meryon, and younger generations associated especially with the Slade and Goldsmiths. A "Postlude" by Erin Nerstad provides a thought-provoking series of confrontations between older and younger artists, French, British, and American, representing cities, nature, laborers, and war. While the theme of "writing" may have become obscured along the way, this is of little importance, for readers will find much of interest in the broader chronological and national focus which the catalogue gives to the subject and in the fresh light which these intelligent essays shed on it.