Critical Shift. Karen L. Georgi

      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

      The opening section of chapter 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