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The previous chapter concluded that the current historiographic role of writer and collector James Jackson Jarves might be reassessed on the basis of his texts. Looking closely at the patterns of his rhetorical structures and putative methodological principles in his work as a whole, we saw that his apparently modern rejection of verisimilitude in art—the literal, external, and material, in Jarves’s words—formed part of a system that sought to rationalize and historicize his aesthetic priorities. Rather than a critique of art’s antebellum role as the embodiment of truth, Jarves’s castigation of “repellent realism” set up the negative side of a rigid and obsessively repeated dualist schema, whose opposite was thereby represented as true art—the ideal or the spiritual. The ideal was much less easy to define formally, however . It was that which did not demonstrate formal similarity to the naturalism , eye-catching composition, color, bold use of space, and sharp details then popular in the United States. In addition, the chapter demonstrated that inconsistency dogged Jarves’s use of the theory he explicitly claimed as his purpose. In conclusion I hypothesized that the disjunction between his writing and his reputation points to our own assumptions about time and about art’s relationship to society. These hypotheses will become clearer with the present chapter’s examination of the early criticism of Clarence Cook. Cook’s definition of art seems to have rested at the other end of the continuum from Jarves’s, on the side of the real, with the objectivity of natural facts. The writing of Cook that we are about to encounter is less obsessive 2 clarence cook and jarves Fact, Feeling, and the Discourse of Truthfulness in Art 44 critical shift in its use of the dyadic structure, but it is present and integral nonetheless. Though he called for a “new” art, vociferously challenging that which currently dominated the scene, he was entirely wedded to the antebellum American conflation of art with nature. Cook wanted to see “pains-taking fidelity to nature.” For him, this was the only way to remain faithful to art’s goal, from which he claimed “our artists are strayed so far.” They had strayed, he lamented, “from the pursuit of truth as an end of Art; they have so universally accepted the dogma that something called Beauty is the end, and not Truth; they are unanimously agreed that nature is to be idealised, generalised, bettered.”1 This is Cook’s well-known insistence on extreme adherence to nature, associated with his early criticism from the mid-1860s, when he was a founding member of the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art—the so-called American Pre-Raphaelites-and the editor of its journal, the New Path. His doctrine rested on a belief that art has a moral responsibility to eschew convention, taste, “arrangement,” and all such impermanent and aesthetic ends. Strict adherence to verisimilitude was his solution for avoiding these pitfalls, and it guaranteed, to his mind, “earnestness” and seriousness on the part of artists. This was the only way to discover the preexisting and universal, the so-called truths of nature. He disliked beauty as a goal because it posited the artist’s desires (to follow the accepted convention, to paint what was popular, to experiment with pleasing compositions or colors ) in place of the universal. Since Cook repeatedly insisted on nature and on painting “literally,” with details finely and minutely described and with all extraneous sentiment left out, he championed that which Jarves rejected. The two critics appear to stand at the opposite poles of the paradigm in which realism and idealism are opposed, each using the terms to define his version of true and false art. Consequently, these writers have given us cause to perceive the trends often identified in the periodization. This is not in dispute. Furthermore, as with Jarves, Cook is a figure whose career spans the historical moment of the Civil War and postwar decades—years of great significance to constructions of the American past and its development. Chronological proximity to the war suggests almost automatically that rupture would likewise characterize art discourse. Given disruptions and dislocations of such magnitude, we are tempted to assume that art, too, must have undergone a transformation in this period. Thus, the continuity that may have existed in the art world and in its debates and priorities is more difficult to perceive. [3.133.144.217...

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