relations.” Thus, while he repeatedly classified art under the categories of the real and ideal, he sought to bind his categories to ostensible historical conditions. He thereby constructed a rationale that validated his aesthetic preferences—as if they carried the status of factual knowledge, like a science of sorts. The real and ideal—or Jarves’s preferred equivalents, the material and spiritual—become terms of evaluation that are represented as objective classifications. With this system, the relative worth of realist versus idealist art was identifiable or even quantifiable not only because it was bound to ostensibly factual cultural characteristics (as opposed to aesthetic opinion), but because it could also be affirmed by historical example.
Comparing key aspects of this text with his earlier Art-Hints, published in 1855, the chapter argues that Jarves’s most essential project was not, in fact, that of demonstrating “the historical relations” of art, as he claimed. His founding interest was instead to secure the classificatory schema that would prove the superiority of the art he championed and simultaneously demonstrate that certain facts of American society actively worked against this correct understanding of art. While Art-Hints receives less attention in the historiography (understandably since it gives very scant attention to American art), it appears here because the juxtaposition with his apparently more sophisticated Art-Idea highlights the author’s obsessive attachment to his pet ideas, regardless of the theme he claimed to be addressing. The significant difference between the two texts is their level of fluency. The earlier and clumsier manuscript exposes more overtly the actual priority behind the rhetoric that persists throughout all his writing. We are thereby enabled to read in both texts an underlying desire to build a system that would authorize his judgment and instill the aesthetic preferences he hoped to foster among Americans.
The chapter concludes with speculations about the gap that opens between the Jarves who emerges from his texts and the reputed Jarves of our historiography. The latter represents authority; the former will show relative inexperience and compulsion coming through vociferous and self-promotional rhetorical strategies. How does the reputed Jarves come to stand? I hypothesize that he helps fulfill unrecognized desires in the subdiscipline—desires to perceive signs of ostensible critical development in art that apparently fits the paradigm of emerging modernism and that corresponds in time to significant ruptures and transformations in American society. Jarves not only provides us with copious references to the superiority of the expression of feeling in art but also represents art’s history as a phenomenon of sociohistorical context. He helps plot the overall narrative of development in the American art world all the more because he appears to have done so precisely at the moment of the American Civil War. That is to say, he comes to represent the aesthetic/critical shift of the normative periodization not only because his words superficially lend themselves to such meanings but also because they coincide in time with the upheavals of history.
The hypothesis concerning our modern insertion of time into the real/ideal binary remains, at this point, largely in the background. It requires the analyses in chapter 2 to bring it more clearly into view. Chapter 2 concentrates on the criticism of Clarence Chatham Cook from the mid mid-1860s. Like Jarves, he is important to the periodization of American art, but from the other side of the spectrum. Cook represents the American equation of nature with art, brought to its most emphatic critical heights. One of the country’s first examples of the professional art critic, the young Cook, a Harvard graduate in architecture, served as art critic for the New-York Daily Tribune beginning in 1864. His debut might be considered to be his editorship from 1863 to 1865 of the New Path, voice of the so-called American Pre-Raphaelites,21 or perhaps even his years with the Independent from 1854 to 1856, but it was the Tribune reviews that brought him the widest audience in his early career. This work is characterized by a tone as strident as that of Jarves. But Cook insists that true art is mimetically faithful to the minutest of nature’s details, and he is overtly deferential to the dictates of Ruskin. As such, Cook stands as an antebellum contrast to Jarves.22 Then, in the latter part of the century, he seems to change his mind. His later work will be the subject of chapter 3. For now, suffice it to note that his postwar journalistic output appears to reject his earlier Pre-Raphaelite definition of art, overtly critiquing some of his own clamorous Ruskinianism. Thus, he figures conspicuously in the prevailing periodization both for his supposed change of heart and for the antebellum positions for which he is known.
Nonetheless, a close look at his early criticism, in particular the manner in which he too deployed the real/ideal dyad, will show that his definition of art had little to do with straightforward mimesis. By juxtaposing his use of the schema with that of Jarves, the chapter will argue that these rhetorical poles did not, in fact, represent opposing definitions of art. Rather, they formed a structure inside of which one central, shared definition was contained. The real and ideal, that is to say, formed the outer boundary, the brackets within which a single definition for art was reinforced. The poles represented contrasting formal strategies, the pictorial options for reaching the same end—the expression of what they believed to be moral truths. For those who thought like Cook, sensibility and reverence toward the seen was the only right way. On the other hand, for those who believed as Jarves did, the goal was served by deviating from the visible world in order to demonstrate a spiritual vision.
Thus, while new formal concerns and aesthetic preferences can definitely be identified, much of what art was understood to be—its role in culture and the rhetorical structures of its definition—did not undergo the transformation that we have tended to read in the real/ideal contrast. There are, paradoxically, significant elements of continuity in the critical terms that are generally thought to demonstrate transformation. Here, then, the temporal question becomes more apparent: Cook and Jarves were not spokesmen for the real versus the ideal in a chronological sequence. The concepts were not used in a manner that unfolded in time. The real and ideal constituted a synchronic rhetorical structure of competing forms, which actually reinforced the same goal for art and the same inflexible dogma of truth. Yet our periodization assumes that competing definitions were bound to time, resulting in an automatic apprehension of these terms in the critical discourse as temporal and sequential.
Chapter 3 is devoted to a moreexpanded view of Cook’s post–New Path career, since chapter 2 limits the examples of his writing to his fi rst years at the New-York Daily Tribune and to his term as editor for the New Path. This larger sample of Cook’s writing is necessary in order to represent his ideas more fully. This will show the consistency that remained as well as the new elements that appeared in his critical writing in the postwar decades. The New Path had come to an end by 1865, but Cook continued to write for the Tribune, which sent him overseas as its Paris correspondent in 1869. He remained only until the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, at which time he repaired to Italy, spent time in Florence, where he met Jarves, and stayed in Rome until 1871.23 Back in New York, after a stint as art editor for the Atlantic Monthly from 1872 to 1875, Cook produced his most popular work, a series in Scribner’s Monthly called “Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks.” These articles were collected and reprinted in 1878 as The House Beautiful.24 In short, after the demise of the New Path, Cook worked as a writer or editor for some of the country’s most important periodicals, which additionally included Putnam’s Monthly and the Art Amateur. Toward the end of his career in 1883, he acquired the Studio magazine, but, as the Pre-Raphaelite chronicler David Dickason notes, “his taste for fine illustrations left that journal insolvent” and it ceased to appear in 1892.25
