Taxing Visions: Financial Episodes in Late Nineteenth-Century American Art
The Huntington Art Gallery, San Marino, California, Through May 30, 2011
Sometimes when two scholars discover that they have been researching similar topics, they circle each other like predators. However, for Taxing Visions, curators Leo G. Mazow and Kevin M. Murphy have pooled their respective findings on art and economics to remind us that the recent financial crisis was no anomaly in American history.
Organized by the Huntington and the Palmer Museum of Art at Pennsylvania State University, the 31 paintings, prints, journals, and ephemera range from 1860 to 1900, a period in which the nation faced several financial panics—1857, 1869, 1873, and 1893—not to mention the upheavals of the Civil War and Reconstruction. There were also social changes such as the emergence of consumer culture and urbanization, along with political issues like the gold standard debate and deepening race-class distinctions.
The artists in Taxing Visions range from the well-known to the obscure, and the quality of their works varies widely with an emphasis on the sentimental narrative. The curators have opted, in their words, “to tax our sensibilities” by including works that may be short on aesthetic merits, but reinforce the exhibition’s premise. For example, John George Brown’s A Tough Story (1886) and Buy a Posy (c. 1881) show street urchins whose ragged clothing is offset by angelic faces. Ragamuffin art was popular with the Vanderbilts and the Astors; Brown was a favorite of department store magnate Isidor Straus. Mazow notes that Brown was no fool when it came to tailoring his art to public expectation. When asked why he portrayed his tattered urchins with clean faces, Brown responded “If you paint them with dirty faces you can’t sell the picture.” Mazow concludes, rather ponderously, that sentimentalizing urban poverty tended to “[distance] the abject and [foreground] the cleansed and the marketable.”
A far more effective work in this line is Julian Alden Weir’s The Flower Seller (c. 1879) in which dignity, resignation, and exemplary brushwork make the point of economic hardship with subtlety and depth. The less said the better about Henry Mosler’s The Fair Exchange (1881), in which a simpering lass in gypsy clothing has her boots shined by a grinning Parisian garçon with muddy pants.
Fortunately, the picturesque is leavened with a welcome dash of satire as in David Gilmour Blythe’s Art Versus Law (1859–1860). In this Daumier-esque work, an artist in tattered coat, patched trousers, and rumpled hat is confronted with a padlocked studio door that is plastered with “to let” notices. For many artists, the studio was not only a place to work, but also a showroom and living quarters. It is instructive to compare Blythe’s work with James Henry Beard’s Studio to Let (1864) depicting almost the same scene. Both might be self-portraits, but Blythe emphasizes the predicament with a more contrasting palette and exaggerated body language. The evicted artist’s chin juts in consternation as he realizes that he’s been thrown out of what is clearly little more than an attic garret. Beard’s artist seems marginally better off, carrying the tools he would need for plein air work. Here, though, the figure is flattened in the picture plan amid all-over neutral tonalities. Blythe’s starving artist holds our attention in a way that Beard’s does not.
Genre pictures are also common in Taxing Visions. Eastman Johnson’s The Pension Claim Agent (1867) is a fine study of humble domesticity and humility as a crippled man, possibly a Civil War veteran, makes his case for a pension. In Crossing the Ferry (1878), Thomas Waterman Wood depicts adults of different ages and classes accosted by a young violin player who is passing the hat. Standing nearby, a black woman in a madras cotton shawl holds her young son who peeps around her head directly at the viewer. It is a charming work executed in an accomplished manner and, with its themes of race, class, economic hardship, and urban variety, it sums up everything that Taxing Visions wants to say.
However, for sheer painterliness, Tattered and Torn (1886) by Alfred Kappes is the stand-out work in the show. Caught in a shaft of light, an aged black woman in a threadbare dress strikes a match to light her pipe. By suspending the action, Kappes holds our attention and forces the eye to linger on every finely-observed detail. The spotlight is on the individual here, rather than, as Mazow sees it, “the seamy underside of financial indigence…and the spectacle of poverty held at a distance.”
The exhibition catalogue has been ill-served by its editors. Although the reproductions are good, there are several typographical errors. In addition, it would have been helpful to have more context for some of the artists. German immigrant Charles Kroll, for example, is represented by Panic of 1869 (1869), a strange view of domestic devastation that was painted in response to contemporaneous events. Knoll’s proto-expressionistic style raises many questions, but we can learn very little from the catalogue.
Taxing Visions offers a unique opportunity to examine relatively unknown works brought together in sharp focus. To see these works in a museum at the estate of railroad titan Henry Huntington adds an extra dimension that surely could not have escaped the curators.
From the top
David Gilmour Blythe (1815–1865), Art versus Law, 1859–60, oil on canvas, Brooklyn Museum
Alfred Kappes (1850–1894), Tattered and Torn, 1886, oil on canvas, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts
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