Critical Shift. Karen L. Georgi

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, places, and events.³⁷ The chapter will expand on those most pertinent to his critical writing, but a brief outline here will point to the range of his commitments and interests. He held two consular posts in the 1860s: in the first half of the decade, he served in Rome during the tumultuous final years of the unification of Italy, just before the pope lost temporal authority and the city became the capital of the new republic; then, from 1865 to 1869, he was stationed in Crete at the moment of uprising against Turkish rule. More activist than was seen to be fitting, Stillman found himself in trouble on a few occasions for his open sympathy with the struggle for liberty. Throughout much of his life—which he summarized as that of a journalist—he wrote not about art but about the revolutions of his day, in which he was a firsthand observer if not a direct participant. These writings include numerous letters from the various fronts and subsequent books such as The Cretan Insurrection of 1866–7–8 (1874), Herzegovina and the Late Uprising (1877), and The Union of Italy, 1815–1895 (1909).

      Most of his life from 1860 onward was spent overseas, largely in England and Italy. After his work at the Crayon, his next regular journalistic appearance was in the pages of the Nation, though he was apparently an occasional correspondent, sending many articles from Crete from 1866 to 1869. He regularly submitted editorials and other signed reviews for decades afterward. He was an official reporter for the London Times beginning in 1886, though he had already been publishing with the paper and receiving payment for his contributions for many years. His writings on art and archeology (the latter had become a kind of specialty from his years in Crete) were also published in the Century magazine, among other periodicals.³⁸

      Stillman’s writing perhaps comes closer to the shift in critical definitions of art than does that of the other two figures. Ironically, however, he remains largely understood as an antebellum follower of Ruskin. The last two chapters are consequently dedicated to Stillman’s writing with the goal of bringing his work into sharper focus. Chapter 4 concentrates on his earliest and