Critical Shift. Karen L. Georgi

aspects of the language Stillman used at this moment. His style was densely figurative with a riot of metaphors, and the chapter proposes that this language was intimately related to the definition for art that he championed at the time. Stillman’s early art theory demanded a certain type of critical writing that relied heavily on forms of figurative language. His tropes helped establish the substance of the philosophy, not just the tone of evangelizing zeal.

      The chapter then contemplates the less discussed but significant rejection of Ruskin that actually characterized Stillman’s art criticism for the majority of his long life. In the late 1860s, Stillman openly rejected his earlier Ruskinian understanding of art. From this time onward, he returned on various occasions to the subject of Ruskin and to his quarrel with the art theory of his former mentor. These instances are analyzed together, with the premise that the articles on Ruskin form a sequence in Stillman’s thinking that helps us plot the primary points of contention in play. These key points of Stillman’s refutation of Ruskin show us that it was not Ruskin’s morality per se that he rejected, but its insertion into art discourse. He refuted the assignment of ostensibly timeless non-art meaning to art; he refuted a metaphorical definition of art.

      Chapter 5 then takes up Stillman’s later writing and, in particular, the linguistic changes that accompanied his rejection of Ruskin. His language became much less metaphorical, and new forms replaced the earlier tropes. The chapter argues that the substantive criteria for Stillman’s post-Crayon definition for, and assessment of, art required a new critical language. As his Ruskinian definition had relied on those tropes discussed in the previous chapter, the later art theory was embodied in a less overtly figurative style. The new language helped theorize art on the basis of apparently factual and not metaphysical comparison. New metonymic figures appeared, creating a discourse of art filled with self-referentiality, an art criticism more about art—and specifically by way of its own materials and supposed history. This later, ostensibly more art-centered art theory needed a form of critical language that built into itself a referential mode of explanation.

      Apparently fitting our periodization, Stillman’s later texts set up a definition for art in which it is no longer about morality, but rather about communicating by way of art’s particular properties, about expressing an artistic insight into the subject, which is made meaningful precisely by art. The elevated value of the subject is that which is added by art. Beauty, art’s materials, and art’s traditions became Stillman’s new critical cornerstones. The history of art in particular became an important and often repeated factor in his critical discourse. Many references were made to past art, to older styles, to the characteristics associated with various schools of art, to sociohistorical factors associated with the production of art. The chapter argues that these more overtly material and art-related sources for art’s meaning were an intentional contrast to those earlier bases for critical evaluation—the metaphorical imposition of God and religious morality—which had come to seem external to art. Indeed, the invocation of history appears to have been one of Stillman’s primary means for giving art discourse a new, materialist grounding. It was a theme widely shared by his peers in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.

      Looking closely at the role of past art and history in Stillman’s art discourse, however, the chapter finds that his various uses of history are not really historical. They might better be called a discourse of history inasmuch as history, the past, and ideas of historical change appear as rhetoric in the writing. They became integral to Stillman’s critical judgments as terms of value. Indeed, history offered him a comparative standard against which to judge the art of his own time. The term “history” reveals its rhetorical character even further by its frequent contraposition to the label “science.” So whereas history helped define the ideal in art, those contemporary paintings that did not live up to Stillman’s notion of art were, by contrast, often categorized as science. Science named what art was not. The chapter thus analyzes these new key terms, finding that science stood for the present, for what Stillman perceived as its misguided modes of apprehension, its insistence on change, its deference to “fact” at the expense of beauty. These were features of Stillman’s era that he lamented bitterly.

      This was the modern world according to Stillman, the society on the other side of the many revolutions, social upheavals, and movements for self-determination for which he himself had fought. It had ushered in, above all, time and flux, growth and change—all of which seem to have destroyed for Stillman the coherence and beauty, the traditions and training, that had formerly (“historically”) belonged to art and life. What was good in contemporary art was that which did not represent the tendencies of the day, but which in some way demonstrated formal strengths rooted in art’s past. History was a way to refer to what was lost in the modern world; it was a metaphor.

      Thus, while Stillman most closely resembles the critical picture drawn by our modern periodization, he nonetheless located his ideal of art in the not-present, in a timeless world of art’s traditions and best past masters and styles. “Good art”—which, it is important to note, possessed many of the same features that we too consider to be the salient and “good” characteristics of the art from the moment—was for Stillman precisely that which eschewed overt engagement with its time. Is it not remarkable, then, that we interpret those same features, even some of the same paintings, as representing modernity’s success, as coming from the change, “revolution,” and expansion of that era? For Stillman, change, expansion, and linear time were among art’s chief obstacles. They produced contemporary art that needed the label “science” or “archeology.” In our modern periodization, these same features of change and expansion constitute not only history but also art’s historical meaning. Is it not then possible that we too have failed to differentiate between history and metaphor—that formation, expansion, and change are themselves metaphors for American art’s particularly American meaning?

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       REREADING JAMES JACKSON JARVES’S ART-IDEA

      It could be argued that James Jackson Jarves entered modern art history in the 1930s, or perhaps it was at that moment when he assumed the dignified and conspicuous place he now occupies in the historiography of American art and art criticism. In 1933, Theodore Sizer, then director of the Yale University Art Gallery, reintroduced this “forgotten New Englander” with a paper read at various venues, including the annual meeting of the College Art Association. It was published in the New England Quarterly, and an entry for Jarves appeared in the Dictionary of American Biography.¹ A few articles by other scholars followed in the 1940s, with the most extensive critical biographies appearing in 1951 and 1952.² Those studies, noted in the introduction, were Francis Steegmuller’s The Two Lives of James Jackson Jarves and John Peter Simoni’s Ph.D. dissertation “Art Critics and Criticism in Nineteenth-Century America.” Beginning with Sizer, Jarves was resuscitated as a heroic idealist, struggling against the provincial American preference for naturalism in art and tirelessly expending his resources to teach that American public about art’s development and about the morals it expressed. Such a narrative is not surprising for the 1930s and 1940s, as many scholars sought to find lineages and/or explanations for contemporary painting that rejected naturalism in favor of expressiveness or abstraction.

      Regardless, Jarves had not, in fact, been totally neglected previously, as his collection of early Italian paintings at Yale had drawn consistent, though not voluminous, critical attention from the late nineteenth century onward. That attention, however, cast Jarves in a different light, as it focused on questions of faulty attribution, often downgrading the value of individual works or questioning their aptness as examples of the historical lesson the collection claimed to demonstrate.³ There would seem, therefore, to be more than one image of Jarves. His reputation, like that of many historical figures, has been subject to change over time. This, too, is not surprising, and in Jarves’s case there is evidence to back up both images. Indeed, even in the studies that tend toward the heroic Jarves, there are references to the ill-informed or even manipulative Jarves.⁴