|
Aesthetic Painting in Britain and America Collectors, Art Worlds, Networks
Melody Barnett Deusner
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Series New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020 Hardcover. viii + 280 pp., 108 ill. ISBN 978-1913107147. $50/£40
Reviewed by Laurent Bury
Aestheticism is most often considered a typically
British movement, even though one of its main exponents was the American-born
Whistler, whose career was spent on the Old Continent, first in France, later
in England. This volume recently published by Yale University Press reminds us
that on the other side of the Atlantic, there also existed a strongly developed
answer to what was not an exclusively British phenomenon. But once again, the
most important element in the title of Melody Barnett Deusner’s book might well
be the last word of its subtitle. Indeed, she introduces the concept of network
as the key to her understanding of Aestheticism: first, because aesthetic
paintings were not infrequently designed as series or modules, to be exhibited
in one room where the different items answered one another, but also because
each commission could relate to other works by the same artist, or even to the
productions of his colleagues. Aesthetic paintings can also be perceived as
“tools of interconnection” [7], proving that their patrons and collectors
belonged in the same cultural group, a close-knit network of politicians and
industrialists whose professional qualities could be used in the selection and
arrangement of works of art in a domestic setting: those decorative spaces allowed
to consolidate social networks, at a time when new technologies were also
creating stronger links between people all over the world. In the late
nineteenth century, which saw itself as a networked period, Aestheticism was far
from offering escapist dreams disconnected with everyday reality: on the
contrary, it provided the context for a vibrating social life, with
transatlantic applications. In other words, Aesthetic Painting in Britain and
America is clearly not a history of the Aesthetic movement: Melody Barnett
Deusner duly gives credit where credit is due, paying homage to the research of
scholars like Linda Merrill, Charlotte Gere or Elizabeth Prettejohn who
documented this tightly interlocked art world. Her ambition is to underline the
coordinated nature of this artistic phenomenon, “sketching out the larger
constellations of cultural preferences and day-to-day experiences within which
a love of ‘art for art’s sake’ was situated, relying more upon a close,
granular analysis of individuals and communities” [18]. Once the conceptual
frame is posited in the Introduction, the book offers five case studies, neatly
divided between Britain and America, Chapter 3 being devoted to the transition
between the Old and the New World. Chapter 1 focuses on Arthur James Balfour, who
commissioned Burne-Jones’ Perseus series in 1875 for his music room at 4
Carlton Gardens. Using “previously neglected documentary material about
Balfour’s home and collections” [37], the author shows how the Souls, a social
group organized round “King Arthur” Balfour, shared an ideal of interconnection
which expressed itself even through their love for the “organic systems” of
William Morris wallpapers. Surrounded by a network of Aesthetic works of art,
the Souls asserted their tastes and elective affinities, Balfour’s love for
Burne-Jones’ art becoming part of his public persona, as shown when he took
some of the Perseus paintings to 10 Downing Street, where he lived as
Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905. No study of Aestheticism would be complete without a
chapter about the Grosvenor Gallery. Melody Barnett Deusner offers a different
take on this epicentre of the movement by studying its artistic role in
relation with another aspect usually ignored by art historians: the Grosvenor
Gallery also hosted London’s first central power station, not simply in order
to provide electric light for the works on display in its exhibition rooms, but
also as the centre of a network which soon came to cover much of the West End
and beyond. In 1885, this new technological system superimposed itself to an
institution that was already seen “as a privately operated artificial generator
of artistic values” [94]. In spite of its positive aspects – electric lamps,
whose effect was judged similar to daylight, allowed the Grosvenor to open
until 10 pm – the new network also had its inconveniences (noise and vibration,
in particular), which could only be remedied by the 1888 Electric Lighting Act. As said above, Chapter 3 examines how the Aesthetic
movement was exported from Britain to the United States, Oscar Wilde’s famous
American conference tour of 1882 being only the most superficial, even though
the most famous, of its manifestations. Communication seems to have been
particularly difficult between the two countries: English art was seldom
exhibited in America, and often appeared as incomprehensible. Melody Barnett
Deusner identifies a “paranoia about asymmetrical cultural and economic flows”
[132], which led some Americans to denounce British Aestheticism as “a particularly
contagious, uncontainable, unnatural, and troubling phenomenon” [118]. The
movement was better known through caricatures such as Du Maurier’s cartoons,
Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience or F.C. Burnand’s play The Colonel,
in which an American cavalry officer banishes Aestheticism from an English home
where domestic bliss can thus be restored. Chapter 4, “Aesthetic New York : Selection,
Comparison, and Arrangement”, explains how collectors were then supposed to
exert an influence on national taste, deploying the skills of a businessman in
the way they chose works of art for their homes – “the systemic imperatives of
Aestheticism and turn-of-the-century collecting practices were mutually
reinforcing” [191] – but also when they donated their private collections to
the nation, forming “a kind of unofficial board of directors for the promotion
of American art” [207], and often going as far as to control how the paintings
would be displayed in purposely built museums. As Whistler’s stupendous “Peacock Room” was bought and
shipped to America by Charles Lang Freer, it seems quite natural that this book
should include a detailed study of this collector and his friends and
colleagues in Detroit. In his private home, Freer created several of those
“harmonious systems” composed of Aesthetic paintings: for his main hall, he
commissioned a group of seven landscapes by Dwight W. Tryon, based on
repetition and variation. The role of works of art as connective agents is also
analyzed through the relationship between Freer and Colonel Frank J. Hecker,
who both purchased paintings by Thomas Wilmer Dewing, promoting harmony not
only between paintings and homes, patrons and artists, but also between
collectors and colleagues, while having business discussions in their Aesthetic
interiors. In their correspondence, Freer called Dewing’s studio his “factory”,
and Dewing himself discussed his “productivity”, showing that “Aesthetic form
might be seen as conceptually aligned, rather than opposed to, that world of
commerce” [199].
All rights are reserved and no reproduction from this site for whatever purpose is permitted without the permission of the copyright owner. Please contact us before using any material on this website.
|
|
|
