Humbug! The Politics of Art Criticism in New York City’s Penny Press by Wendy Jean Katz (review)

In this important study the art historian, Wendy Jean Katz, offers a fresh perspective on New York’s antebellum art scene by focusing attention on the hundreds of cheap penny newspapers that flooded the city from the 1830s to the Civil War. As it turns out, these papers gave a great deal of attention to art, and their coverage transformed artists, artworks, and art institutions into objects of fiery contestation. Other scholars have culled from this extensive body of criticism, but Katz is the first to study it systematically. She identifies the political leanings of editors, writers, and artists, showing that the penny papers generally adopted an anti-monopoly, anti-elitist stance. But she is also finely attuned to differences among the papers on issues ranging from abolitionism to socialism, nativism, expansionism, women’s rights and, above all, party politics. Insofar as the penny papers sparred with the more expensive six-penny or subscription press, Katz extends her discussion to some of those publications. By effectively mapping New York City’s papers along multiple, changing axes, Katz makes a powerful case for the symbiotic relationship between political orientation and aesthetic values.

The Herald and its editor, James Gordon Bennett, figure prominently in Katz’s analysis. Officially unaffiliated with any political party, this widely circulated newspaper cast itself as the people’s vanguard, challenging privilege in many guises. Bennett, a ferociously racist southern sympathizer, seemed to take pleasure in unveiling the supposedly sordid underbelly of bourgeois life. Because art and art institutions had longstanding elite connotations, they became relatively easy targets. In the realm of art, the Herald, along with other penny papers, celebrated outsiders while attacking artists whose work garnered praise from the six-penny press and high prices from wealthy collectors. The Herald scorned New York’s National Academy of Design and generally rejected the sort of genteel, romantic pictures associated with the work of prominent academicians. In turn, it embraced artworks that seemed to embody a more naturalistic, sensual aesthetic. Along with other penny papers it ridiculed the trade in European old master paintings and criticized contemporary artists deemed overly tied to European academic traditions. Katz shows that the cheap papers were often at odds when it came to individual artists and artworks, but she suggests that their rhetorical style and aesthetic values helped to drive the broader discourse of antebellum art criticism.

By excavating long forgotten aesthetic disputes Katz gives due importance to marginalized, unknown figures. In the process, she opens a new window on the downfall of the American Art-Union—New York’s leading art institution of the 1840s. The Art-Union’s management included many of the city’s leading merchants. It purchased and exhibited artworks from American painters and distributed them, by lottery, to thousands of subscribers across the nation. Along with James Gordon Bennett, an artist named Thomas Whitley was among the organization’s most vociferous antagonists. Katz is the first recent scholar to take Whitley’s criticism seriously. She points out that he was affiliated with the utopian, socialist Fourierist movement, and she traces his writing though several penny papers. Generally dismissed as a vengeful, disappointed, failed artist, Whitley emerges from Katz’s research as a serious, if hyperbolic, critic who sought a more equitable system for the sale of art and support of artists.

With the rise of the Republican Party came a reorientation in the politics of art criticism. Katz charts the emergence of a new generation of critics who published not only in Republican papers (notably the Tribune and the Times) but also in new, specialized journals such as the Crayon and the Independent. Unlike earlier writers on art-related matters, they saw themselves as professionals. Along with the Young America writers of the 1840s, they identified with the cause of national artistic...