Nothing is more irreconcilable than the universalist formalism advocated by Alfred Stieglitz and the socially-informed realism supported by the painter Robert Henri. To the final judgment of the mentor of the Ashcan School, who considered the development of avant-garde forms tantamount to aristocratic elitism, the photographer and gallery owner vigorously replied by denouncing the inanity of the sort of academic indulgence that would substitute “quantity for quality” in the name of an ideal unrelated to the essence of art.
        If the early twentieth-century head-on conflict between these two key figures seems so exemplary, that is so not only because it will have prefigured, mutatis mutandis, the declared hostility of what would become the New York School against the consensual realism defended in the cultural politics of the New Deal. The latter had integrated for the first time into the national community that “nobody,” the artist, and thanks to this new communion among the artist, the worker, and the public, the American citizenry was even to find in art a way of regaining its strength. Beyond mere personal misunderstandings, such confrontations have so regularly punctuated the history of the arts scene in the United States that they testify to the fact that they are structural in character; before attaining social recognition in the aftermath of the 1929 crisis, the American artist had for a long time as his sole alternative either making his way alone or trying to arouse the kind of popular approval that was then still lacking. In other words, he had to decide between invention and convention. Two generations earlier, while the rising middle class was attempting to follow along with and to assist in orienting the course of artistic creativity, two diametrically opposed works from the 1840s revealed even more clearly the fundamental import of this antagonism, specific to America, between formal experimentation and popularly-oriented realism. Behind their apparent simplicity, The Painter's Triumph (1838) by William Sydney Mount (1807-1868) and The Artists’ Conversazione by Thomas Pritchard Rossiter (1818-1871) offer two opposing visions of art that coincide with two different conceptions of the social role of the artist. While the emphasis placed on these respective time sequences is not aimed at establishing some sort of equivalence between these nineteenth-century painters and their more substantial and renowned successors, this parallel nevertheless tends to suggest the extent to which an understanding of twentieth-century American art begins . . . in the nineteenth century.
        According to Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur (1735-1813), the author, under the name J. Hector St. John, of the 1782 Letters from an American Farmer, America embodies the place of absolute new beginnings. Europe having allowed only despotic societies, Americans’ happiness proceeded directly, in his view, from their ability to forget history. A break with the dishonored aristocratic past was inevitably going to go hand in hand with a rejection of aesthetic enjoyment, which was considered a “papist” symptom of decadence. “For my part,” wrote Crèvecoeur, “I had rather admire the ample barn of one of our opulent farmers, who himself felled the first tree in his plantation, and was the first founder of his settlement, than study the dimensions of the temple of Ceres.” It was only by a slow and gradual reversal that the Fine Arts finally achieved a formerly contested legitimacy. In 1830s America, some no longer hesitated to think that it was a worthy and reasonable endeavor to represent a barn, which would become one of the emblems of pictorial and photographic Americana.
        An apostle of the idyllic values of antebellum landed America, the painter William Sydney Mount was to become the stalwart artisan of this unanimously consensual type of art. Even before he began devoting himself to chronicling the rural world of Stony Brook, his hometown on Long Island, Mount had already consecrated this unprecedented communion of artist and farmer in the abovementioned 1838 canvas. One owes to the painting’s original buyer its emphatically programmatic title, The Painter's Triumph. With the commonplace, not to say preposterous, presence of the Common Man within the pictorial space, Mount became an innovator as he invited America into the privacy of the studio. In his simple and direct language, which helped to secure an immediate positive reception, he was stating his faith in the flowering of a popular and national form of painting. In his diary, one could thus read, on July 21, 1838: “I am painting a picture representing a painter showing his picture to a country man-farmer.” The artist and his audience were henceforth able to share this common space that was so wanting for European artists, themselves more concerned with affirming their uniqueness by taking a stand against society’s reviled as well as desired Pharisaism. All distance abolished, the common man could find himself at ease within this pictorial Home Sweet Home, thanks to a vernacular art that is distrustful of all romantic celebration of the theater of creation. With limpid clarity, his laconic representation of the artist’s studio eschews any aura of mystery. This otherwise glorified and sacralized “temple” where art is conceived was here candidly reduced to its simplest function: the manufactured completion of the painting. Seen from the rear of the frame, the picture within the picture is therefore presented straight away to one’s view more as an object than as an idea in paint. This primary insistence upon the physical reality of the picture radically identifies painting with the simple force of the artisan’s act, all the better to castigate any sacrilegious recourse to imagination alone.
        The bareness of this rudimentary studio proves too ostentatious for its sobriety not to take on declarative value: this emptiness presents the tabula rasa of democracy. Save for the presence of a copy of the Apollo Belvedere, which harks back to an ancient past prior to the times of monarchical decadence, the absence of cultural models is the clue that the artist no longer has to do anything but turn toward his fellow men in order to answer the finally legitimate question: What is one to paint? This anonymous and nondescript site therefore raises its obstinate insignificance into a democratic symbol: here is literally anywhere. The studio could only be in that ample barn of an opulent farmer, no matter which one, since no bit of the romantic imaginary will leave its distinctive mark thereupon. America claims to be the country of a perpetual lack of differentiation, a place where everything is the same. Mount’s statements would come to directly echo this view: “The studio of a painter ought to be everywhere,” he wrote. “Wherever one finds a scene for a picture, inside or out.” The American painter challenges, de facto, the fundamental dichotomy found in European Romanticism, which had created an insurmountable rift between the visionary power of the artist and bourgeois utilitarianism. Mount cared little about the Romantic primacy of the inner world; to the prophetic figure of the artist who decrypts the world like a hieroglyph, he opposed the egalitarian self-evidence of the nondescript and the banal: here, things will never be anything other than what they are. As archetypical heir of American Protestantism, Mount denied that the action of the artist could possess any power of dissimulation. To borrow an expression from Mona Ozouf, “This is the country where everything is visible,” where nothing, and especially not art, could screen out truth. American art thus will be only democratic and moral, therefore realistic and devoted to transparency.
        No revelation is to be expected from this sort of art, which becomes a simple matter of recognition. The public, as embodied by this farmer, would never tolerate the slightest gap between reality and its representation. The partition between the painter and his audience rests here only on the acknowledgment of this mimetic tour de force, which is perceived as an artisan’s exploit and not an aesthetic one. Hands prosaically set against his thighs in a posture that would not fail to be judged indecent in a museum, the farmer assesses the exact resemblance between the sketch, set right on the ground, and the painting raised to the level of the easel: the enthusiasm of the viewer, one sees, pertains less to a judgment of taste, properly speaking, than to a scrupulous evaluation of the adequacy of the work in relation to its object and of the work’s self-identity. In 1938, a photograph of the Texan regionalist painter Merritt Mauzey (1898-1973) meticulously transferring a drawing onto lithographic stone further accentuated this obsession with resemblance. The authentic American artist would therefore be a meticulous plagiarist whose social calling would consist in guaranteeing that monotony would take precedence over variations, masses over the individual, the visible over the invisible, and, in fine, the unequivocal over the enigmatic.
        “Glazing is the soul of art.” In what could be described as a line of aesthetic verse, Mount repudiated with a flourish the attraction of colors and forms in the name of the virtues of modesty and honesty, so dear to a public enamored of domestic and patriotic values. The concerted alliance of religious and manufacturing styles helped give moral value to the smoothness of the work--which is varnished, polished, tidied up, Baudelaire would have cruelly added. This is the virtuous, homey completion of a job which asserts its perfect craftsmanship to the extent that it recedes from view. The assertion of such an “impersonal” and neutral style undoubtedly rests on an unconscious analogy between the thinness of the pictorial surface and the purity of the young American civilization. Mount seems to be responding in advance to the criticism the cosmopolitan writer Henry James will bring to bear a generation later: “Everything there is to see is shown; civilization has the thinness of film.” For Mount’s generation, what this thinness of film, this transparency of the surface, legitimized, on the contrary, was the moral rectitude of American Realism, “this transparent mirror of truth,” to borrow Mona Ozouf’s lovely expression.
         The dialogue between society and the artist could proceed therefore only from immediate recognition of artisan know-how and from the most intimate sort of complicity with the represented scene. All these characteristics are to be found again in the regionalist painting of the interwar period, a period of cultural isolationism that would, as a matter of fact, mark the return to favor of these “minor masters” from the nineteenth century.
        By participating in the advent of a pictorial form of platitude, what Mount was accepting was an art founded on compromise, the one offered every American artist anxious to end his social isolation, viz.: the democratization of art. This dilemma required that the artist decide between a solitary aspiration for formal innovation and the democratic distrust of forms--in other words, between acceptance of society’s indifference and the search for an audience. Far from the original Calvinist discredit of art, this compromise nonetheless allowed a perpetuation of moral simplicity in the work of art; moreover, it was in no way experienced as an inevitable renunciation, since social recognition for the artist depended on the invention of this yet-to-be-won-over public. At the antipodes of historical painting founded on hero worship--a notion fundamentally alien to the presuppositions of American democracy--the establishment of middlebrow art was intentionally going to allow the nondescript and the ordinary to become erected into a new aesthetic norm. Instead of and in place of this Europeanized hero, such art would make anybody the chosen figure for the representation of democracy. The predominance of the realistic genre scene thus connects the triumph of the painter with an agreed-upon limitation on originality in painting. This democratic pact, which served as a guarantor of the nation’s cultural homogeneity, was going to seal the painter’s alliance with the then-rising middle class. “It is therefore not true to assert,” Tocqueville wrote, “that men who live in democratic times are naturally indifferent to sciences, literature, and the arts; only it must be acknowledged that they cultivate them after their own fashion and bring to the task their own peculiar qualities and deficiencies” (Book II, Chapter IX of Democracy in America).
        The success of the artistic approach of an artist like Mount nevertheless remains indissociable from a much vaster cultural phenomenon: the rise at that time of Art Unions. Created in New York in 1839, the American Art-Union, a private institution of patronage for artistic life, ended up playing a central role in American artistic life. This democratic art embodied by Mount or by George Caleb Bingham fostered as much as it benefitted from the loyalty of a public audience attached to the promotion of edifying and reassuring virtues. As Joy Sperling has shown, the middle class, in a state of disarray, set up these national, domestic, and artisan virtues as a way of attempting to master the irruption of novelty in urban industrial areas. The (rather modest) subscriptions paid by its thousands of members issuing from the emergent middle class were converted into contemporary works of art, which were then allocated through a large annual lottery reserved for the members of the association. These members also received contemporary American engravings and the first printing of what would soon become the first genuine art review in the United States. For the first time, the cultural activism of the wealthy entrepreneurs who headed up the Art Union conferred upon the middle class a key role, thereby ensuring the active promotion of “correct taste” on a national scale and for the common people. Thanks to this system of circulation, the regional career of a painter like Bingham--the painter of pioneers and of the new Western territories--could suddenly attain national recognition, something that was previously unthinkable for an artist from Missouri.
        While The Painter's Triumph was attempting to impose a common language with the aid of the familiar resources of the realistic genre scene, the painter Rossiter’s The Artists’ Conversazione (1841), for its part, ostracized Mount’s farmer from the field of creation. Rossiter confronted head on the audience strategy that would prefigure the rise of mass culture, denounced a century later by New York painters concerned about the anonymity of mass production in art. Rossiter’s gathering of exiled American painters substituted the closed and self-sufficient universe of the Europeanized Romantic artist for the idealized transparency of the American world. By its mixture of languages, the work’s very title resonates straight away as a distinctive emblem of expatriation. This conversazione heralds a cosmopolitan renunciation of a common language. Indeed, nothing connects this refined studio any longer to the virtuous, sober, and masculine world Mount had exalted. The public is condemned to remain a mere spectator of a scene whose elitist message is designed to exclude it in a provocative way: here it is claimed that judgments of taste are to be the exclusive privilege of artists alone; conversation, an aristocratic art if there ever was one, confirms how far this assembly of aesthetes has removed itself from the old dream of Jeffersonian rural America so as to adopt a deliberate attitude of elitist withdrawal from the social world. Rossiter thus prefigures the doctrine of “art for art’s sake.” The reflection in the mirror of Jean-Antoine Houdon’s Ecorché, a work employed at the time for training young artists, perfectly symbolizes this demand for a self-referential art liberated from social constraints.
        While he rejected the degradation of taste by what would later be termed the masses, Rossiter nevertheless sought to counteract the solitude of the artist by glorifying the notion of an artistic community. He liked to think of himself as an artist before being an American. In him, the affirmation of an artistic aristocracy rests on acceptance of a form of heterogeneity: the diversity of the pictorial language of American painters represented here enters into resolute conflict with the concern for cultural homogeneity being expressed by the middle class. Dissimilarity is what brings these individuals together, uniting them against the unifying values spread by genre scenes. Against the reign of convention, Rossiter tried to make himself into the herald of the emancipatory values of formal freedom; hung on the wall, the copy of a Titian from the Louvre is there to stipulate that, for want of a tradition of excellence in the United States, encouragement of the arts could not help but benefit from such a confrontation. The painters assembled here by the imagination of an artist form an ideal community only because they do not resemble one another. Undoubtedly, this was, in Rossiter’s view, the only way to struggle against the demand that all works be treated as equivalent and to take a stand against the subordination of aesthetics to morality so as to restore admiration, that criterion of taste about which Tocqueville had asked himself whether it had a future in democracy.

1. Translator: The author not supplying references here or for other quotations of English-language authors, I have not been able to find this quotation in English.

Bibliography