3 focuses on Cook’s House Beautiful and the American section of his opus Art and Artists of Our Time, published in 1888. Both were widely read books reprinted from serialized journal articles. Comparing the style and rhetoric of these later works with that of his early output, the chapter argues that the aesthetic tenets in both Cook’s early and later texts were social critiques. Whereas the tone was openly controversial and antiacademic in his youthful Pre-Raphaelite phase,26 the later writing adopted the pose of the mature and more catholic authority figure. In both phases, however, he sought to counter what he considered the era’s prevailing conformism and, more specifically, its consumerist materialism.
Looking at this longer span of Cook’s career, the chapter finds that the art he championed enacted with its form a challenge to mainstream industrialized consumption and a call for individual reliance over and against conformity to the tastes of others. This was his goal throughout, whether as the invective of a young rebel on a tirade or in the more conciliatory guise of the established journalist. The later writing admits of a wider range of styles and formal modes; he even defended the painterly. But he maintained a consistent idea of art, which at bottom for him—and as we already saw in the comparison with Jarves—was a kind of truth, a collective social ideal that was objective and yet never without “individuality.”
With this reading of Cook, the final part of the chapter returns to the issue of modern historiography—in particular the treatment of stylistic change. It is the issue that comes to the fore in the readings thus far presented. To recap, the preceding chapters hypothesized that classifications for formal types have been read as competing and sequential notions of how art was understood and defined vis-à-vis its role in society (whether art was about collective truth or about individual representation, we might say, for short). I suggested that assumptions about time have been fundamental to reading the critical rhetoric in this manner. Then chapter 3 argues that Cook’s apparent rejection of his antebellum, moralizing, Pre-Raphaelite conception of art was, in fact, a refutation of the strictest construction of the pictorial strategy that he formerly believed to be the only one suited to “true” art, while true art nonetheless continued to be identified and valued in the same manner.
Thus, emerging from these arguments is the hypothesis of the second deep structure: there is an unconscious substitution of art’s definition in place of its formal appearance, a kind of privileging of the textual over the visual, or a desire to locate the historical in the discursive aspects of art. It is an issue of formal, stylistic debate being represented in modern historiography as something rather different; it is represented as competing discursive priorities for art with regard to its goals and its fundamental role in society. At stake is an unintentional repression of stylistic explanation, where in its place are inserted those elements of the critical discourse that are more fundamentally bound to historical discourses—particularly discourses of social and economic change or transformation.
The final section of the chapter is therefore devoted to considering the role that social change and the notion of transformation or “revolution” play in modern historiography of American art, and the consequent implications for style. Here the larger issue needs to be more fully contextualized. We can frame it by looking first at the level of overt considerations and methodological strategies in the field, working downward from there. At that overt level, the issue at hand was succinctly described by Wanda Corn a few decades ago: the “context is often dramatized at the expense of the work of art,” and American art histories therefore tend to use art primarily as illustration.27 This names the most general surface level only, which, in response to Corn’s warning, has received more nuanced attention since that enunciation. Yet across the spectrum of nineteenth-century American art history, however various the methodological approach may be, there is a common desire to situate the explanation of a given artwork in contextual factors of change and transforming events and how these relate to constructions of national identity and/or subjectivity (and, as before, their pluralities and representational politics).28 This is part of the widespread social commitment among historians of American art, noted at the outset.
Certainly “Americanness” was long ago rejected in its most programmatic and triumphalist senses—and in any form as a test for judging an artwork as worthy of attention. But the subject of art historical inquiry remains largely wedded to that which represents (various constructions of) American selfhood and its putative development within the singular conditions of American democracy and economic life.29 The subject more precisely is a representation of American history in which change is a key narrative motor: America as locus of identity formation, of changing subjectivity, of expansion. Expansion refers to territorial conquest, to expanding enfranchisement, and very frequently to economic growth—all of which are generally treated with healthy skepticism and critical insight. Thus, the issue is not that the field lacks perspectives or that it seeks to cover its ideological tracks. Formation, change, and expansion are instead the issue: we perceive history where we find such. Formation, change, and expansion are what make American art historical.
Does this also relate to a latent suspicion that style and form are not in themselves meaningful? Is there an elision of the verbal with the visual in American art discourse? In making this substitution that the chapter suggests to be the case, do we not also swap historical targets? That is, do we not unintentionally historicize social change instead of art or even stylistic change? Even if style represents the social, it (the style or the art) cannot automatically, ahead of time, be replaced by the social. Art is rendered historical, but its form is suppressed. These issues will come up again at the end of the book.
Chapter 4 turns to the writing of the book’s third protagonist, William James Stillman. Born in the same year as Cook, Stillman graduated from Union College in 1848, one year before Cook graduated from Harvard. Unlike Cook and Jarves, however, Stillman forged early, firsthand relationships with both art and Ruskin. He began his postgraduate life as a landscape painter, studying briefly with Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) and producing a few well-received studies of nature.30 Like his contemporaries, he felt that nature was deeply meaningful in all the ways familiar to students of American art. However, Stillman was a bit more inspired than most of his peers who extolled the virtues of nature, pursuing his contact with nature by living for long stretches in the woods. He organized and guided the outings of the informal club (dubbed the “Adirondack Club”) that consisted of such Cambridge lights as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louis Agassiz, and James Russell Lowell.31 One of Stillman’s few extant paintings, The Philospher’s Camp (1858), depicts the group in their camp in the woods.32 With regard to artists and writers overseas, Stillman had, by 1850, also met Ruskin himself. The famous critic took up the young artist, bringing him along to Switzerland with an eye toward molding his work.33
As a name in the American critical constellation, Stillman is less known than the other two critics. His early writing is nonetheless familiar and frequently discussed since he served as the editor and (often anonymous) main contributor to the Crayon. This was the country’s first serious journal dedicated to art, and it demonstrated a level of knowledge and dedication considered to be absent from previous American art writing. Founded in 1855 by Stillman and John Durand, son of the landscape painter Asher B. Durand, the Crayon ran until 1861.34 The first two years of publication set the tone and standard. They were also the years that Stillman was the editor. He rationed over as many issues as possible the contributions he secured from some of his distinguished Adirondack companions. He filled in the rest with his own unsigned matter and whatever else he could muster from among acquaintances and colleagues.35 In these years of Stillman’s editorship, the Crayon was clearly Ruskinian, revealing what Stillman later described as the stimulus that Ruskin’s first volume of Modern Painters (1843) had given to his own “nature worship, to which [he] was already too much inclined.”36
After his brief but intense engagement with the Crayon and his consequent nervous collapse, Stillman continued to find himself amid his era’s most prominent people,
