Michael:

This is the second of my two-part posting on the 'culture-quake' that occurred in America after the Civil War, rendering the Hudson River school of art almost instantly obsolete and enshrining a series of very different art movements in its place. (You can read the first part here.)

As I mentioned, a number of disruptive antebellum trends went from ‘subversive’ to ‘dominant’ as a result of the shock of the Civil War itself. Of course, the war itself had a significant impact on American life. And what an impact it was. Out of an American population of 31 million in 1860, the military death toll from the Civil War was in the range of 620,000-700,000 (i.e., 2 – 2.25% of the population.) Obviously, in contemporary terms this would be the equivalent of 6-7 million combat deaths. I’ve heard it said, believably, that everyone in America in 1865 knew someone who had lost a family member to the war.

In trying to estimate the effect of this trauma on cultural attitudes, one can look to other epochal wars. The Civil War death rates of Americans were quite comparable to those of Britain, France and Germany in World War I. Since the Great War is commonly cited as having a transformative effect on European culture, I think one can safely assume a similar effect had occurred 50 years previously in America.

Brady Studio, Dead At Dunker Church, Antietam, 1862

Clearly, the sheer bloodiness of the war dealt antebellum-style optimism a painful blow. One cannot help but suspect that the assassination of Lincoln and the inability of Reconstruction to fully emancipate the now 'freed' former slaves in the face of continuing armed resistance in the South—after all those combat deaths—also had a sobering effect on America’s confidence that all problems were solvable for men of good will.

Moreover, the Civil War intensified the growth of urbanization, industrialization and the financial infrastructure that made them possible. It was plain that these factors had been critical to winning the war for the North. The increased stratification of American society that followed was, if not liked, then at least considered an inescapable part of ‘the order of things’ by post-Civil War society.

Finally, the war seems to have encouraged the adoption of an evolutionary mind-set, if only for its ‘wised-up’ aura of grim realism. (Again, I must remind you, when the term ‘evolution’ is used, this often refers more to Lamarckian and Spencerian ideas about evolution rather than those of the Darwin himself.) As Mr. Menand puts it:

In a society that had just been through a civil war the appeal of [evolution] is plain—as [Henry] Adams, in his mordant way, recognized…[survival of the fittest-style] evolution, he wrote in the Education, was the perfect theory for a ‘young man who had just helped to waste five or ten thousand million dollars and a million lives, more or less, to enforce unity and uniformity on people who objected to it.’

Rather than try to provide a summary of the various schools and artists of the Gilded Age, I thought it would be more interesting to forget traditional classifications and look at how the various intellectual and social trends of the era manifested themselves in post-War art:

Tendency #1—Art as an Expression of Post-Traumatic Shock: The pain and suffering of the war emerged at least in bits and pieces over the subsequent era. The extent of the lasting ‘bruise’ inflicted by the war can perhaps best hinted at by an anecdote of the aged Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. During his service in the Army of the Potomac, Holmes had been seriously wounded three times and lost many of his comrades and friends. The experience left an apparently permanent mark. As Mr. Menand relates it:

Holmes had grown up in a highly cultivated, homogeneous world, a world of which he was, in many ways, the consummate product: idealistic, artistic, and socially committed. And then he had watched that world bleed to death at Fredericksburg and Antietam, in a war that learning and brilliance had been powerless to prevent. When he returned, Boston had changed, and so had American life. Holmes had changed too, but he never forgot what he had lost. “He told me,” [a friend] reported, “that after the Civil War the world never seemed quite right again.”

Holmes' remark is even more affecting (to me, anyway) when you realize that it dates from the 1930s. This sense was well expressed, some 66 years earlier, by Winslow Homer, who served as a graphic war correspondent during the conflict. Possibly as a result of his work as an illustrator, Homer got directly to the point:

W. Homer, The Veteran In A New Field, 1865

Painted only a few months after the end of the war, it shows a Union soldier returning to civilian life, scything a field of wheat. But the “new field” clearly references his “old field”—i.e., the Civil War battleground—where he cut down men, not crops. Can this ‘Grim Reaper’ go back happily to the pastoral existence he knew before the war? Homer seems to be, er, reserving judgment.

Tendency #2—Art as an Expression of ‘Bottom-Up’ Paradigms: A series of trompe-l’oeil still life paintings by John Frederick Peto and his fellow Philadelphian, William Michael Harnett demonstrate the introduction into American art of the ‘bottom-up’ intellectual processes (i.e., those typified in the scientific world by statistical mechanics and evolution.) The use of the trompe-l’oeil still life form to explore the themes of memory, loss and nostalgia seems to have been sort of a delayed reaction to the violent changes brought on by the war. In a world without divinely-ordered continuity, a ‘sense of things’ can only be slowly and laboriously assembled from the jumble of experience.

J. F. Peto, Lincoln and the Star of David, 1904

Peto’s work, focuses obsessively—as much as 40 years after the fact—on the assassination of Lincoln and America’s apparently inconsolable loss. In his painting, Peto introduces a collection of incidental items—a damaged board, some rusty nails, a burned match, a daguerreotype of Lincoln—apparently randomly selected, virtually mute in themselves, assembling the 'meaning' by a process of juxtaposition--and slowly build to a crescendo of emotion.

Tendency #3—Art as An Expression of Loss of Faith in American Exceptionalism and Search for New Models in Art History: Oddly, despite the victory of its government in the Civil War and the country’s emergence as a world power (the USA had by far the largest and most modern army in the world in 1865), America chose that very moment to stage a vigorous retreat on the ‘artistic nationalism’ front. The very name of the dominant post-war movement, the American Renaissance, suggests how far the country was from indulging any antebellum dreams of a purely native art developed from purely native inspiration. This ‘retreat’ or ‘reorientation’ was the result of three factors. First, a great loss of faith in American exceptionalism had occurred. The notion of a benevolent God conferring a unique destiny on Americans seems to have taken a perfectly understandable beating during the war. (What was the unique destiny of Americans—to slaughter each other in huge numbers? Whoopee.) The second was that a sort of historical convergence had occurred between Europe and America between 1800 and 1871. Great Britain and France had both become quasi-American-style democracies, and even Germany had adopted a parliament, on the one hand—and America had fought a bloody European-style mass war, on the other. America was simply no longer quite so unique a society as it had been in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, American art in the post Civil-War era needed a different and wider set of metaphors and models than those available in the antebellum culture to express itself. The Civil War monuments of Augustus Saint Gaudens might draw on Roman and Renaissance prototypes, but where else was he going to find models that addressed the realities of the nation’s recent military experience?

A. Saint-Gaudens, Robert Gould Shaw and the Fifty-Fourth Regiment Memorial, 1900; Classical Frieze

A. Saint-Gaudens, Sherman Monument, 1903; Verrocchio, Equestrian Monument to Colleoni, 1480s

Tendency #4—The Spencerian Theory of Evolution and Art as An Expression of Elite Status: As the industrializing economy of the North had triumphed in the war, so did the business elite triumph after the war. The Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Fricks, the Vanderbilts, the Goulds, the Astors, the Fisks, the Morgans, et al, felt entitled (or destined) to take their place on the world stage as a successful ruling class in the tradition of previous aristocratic republics: the Athenians, the Florentines, the Venetians, the British, etc., etc. These Americans were certainly far richer than any of their predecessors. Hadn’t they thus proved themselves the fittest? In Spencerian terms, didn’t they deserve the best? Likewise, weren’t they entitled to advertise their superiority?

J. S. Sargent, Henry Lee Higginson, 1904 (Detail); A. Saint-Gaudens, Marcus Alonzo Hanna, 1907; J. S. Sargent, John D. Rockefeller, 1917

Tendency #5—Art as an Expression of Post-War Attitudes towards Work and Nature: The great ‘migration’ of American workers from the farm to the factory, from rural isolation to the crowded big city (already underway in the late antebellum era) swelled to overwhelming dimensions in the post Civil War era. American artists such as Thomas Anschutz and Winslow Homer approached this phenomenon from two different points of view.

T. Anshutz, The Ironworkers' Noontime, 1880

Anschutz provides a visual representation of the way in which industrialization changed how Americans thought of themselves; although each figure in the painting stands its own ground, so to speak, they also clearly operate, and think of themselves, as a team.

The greater importance of teamwork and various forms of social cooperation were clearly a significant element in American life of this era; it was no coincidence that at just this time the American philosopher Charles Peirce was asserting that Truth wasn’t the metaphysical abstraction of Idealist philosophy, but rather that “Truth is social.”

The flip side of urban socialization and incorporation into the industrial ‘machine’ was illustrated by Winslow Homer’s post-Civil War paintings of rural America. Here, when he paints the human figure at all, he focuses exclusively on the men and women that ‘modern’ America is leaving behind—at the seashore, in the countryside, in the wilderness.

W. Homer, The Adirondack Guide, 1894

Unless clearly identified as ‘tourists’ (Homer was not above putting attractive and fashionable young ladies into his pictures from time to time) his subjects are the ‘losers’ of Social Darwinism, those who aren’t trooping off to the city. Intriguingly, Homer doesn’t present his rural subjects as living in loving harmony with a beneficent Nature; rather, he shows them inhabiting (or struggling with) a thoroughly desacralized nature, a nature which is often beautiful but simultaneously cruel.

W. Homer, The Gulf Stream, 1899

It is as though with the rise of the Machine, and the withdrawal from rural life, Americans of the post Civil War era read in the book of nature not the benevolent word of God but an ominous and occasionally threatening message.

Tendency #6—Lamarckian Evolutionary Theory and the High Aesthetic Experience: The emphasis on private, highly refined aesthetic experience in much of the art of the Gilded Age (including the Tonalists, the artist-dandies like Whistler and William Merritt Chase, the American Impressionists, many of the artists of the American Renaissance, etc., etc.) seems to have reflected the influence of Lamarckian evolutionary theory. Lamarck, of course, taught that children inherited both the genetic and acquired characteristics of their parents. As a result, one of the duties of the American elite was to spend their time having exquisite experiences that would ennoble their offspring.

J. H. Twachtman, Arques-la-Bataille, 1885

Their children would, hopefully, have a refined taste and high-minded attitude as part of their partimony. The extremely widespread use of languorous upper-class women as subject matter for this type of painting seems to clearly indicate the connection between such art and what might be termed the project of breeding an elite.

J. S. Sargent, Alice Vanderbilt Shepard; T. W. Dewing, Summer, 1890 (Detail)

J. Whistler, Symphony in White No. 3, 1865; A. H. Thayer, Angel, c. 1889

Tendency #7—Art as an Expression of Coming to Terms with Science: The disquieting power of modern science—a discipline what had effectively displaced religion at the pinnacle of intellectual prestige in the post Civil War era—is the subject of Thomas Eakins’ masterpiece, “The Gross Clinic.”

T. Eakins, The Gross Clinic, 1875

Although clearly modeled on Rembrandt’s famously painting “The Anatomy Lesson,” Eakins deliberately contrasts the investigation of a mere corpse in the Dutch painting with the almost Godlike power of the American doctor who lectures while invading the sanctity of the living human body.

Today it might seem a small thing to abandon 19th century Idealist philosophy and come to terms with the new ways of thinking demanded by the scientific advances (such as statistics and evolution) of the post Civil War era, but such a shift involved re-conceptualizing virtually the entire intellectual toolkit of Western Civilization as it existed in 1865. It was not an accident that in such an intellectual environment, the main thrust of American philosophical thought—illustrated, say, by William James’ Pragmatism or by the legal theories of Oliver Wendell Holmes—was aimed at stripping intellectual problems of metaphysical irrelevancies. As a consequence, the paintings of Thomas Eakins frequently took as their ‘inner’ theme the sheer amount of intellectual effort that confronted the thoughtful American in this period—who suddenly found themselves living in a strange world in which no benevolent Creator guaranteed that the human mind could ‘make sense of things.’

T. Eakins, Miss Van Buren, 1888; T. Eakins, The Thinker: Portrait of Louis N. Kenton, 1900

So what lessons can we learn from this example of ‘aesthetic revolution.’ Clearly, it’s not possible to be definitive here, but some hypotheses might be ventured:

(1) Sudden, violent shifts in taste are likely in the stepchildren of dramatic social events. War is, quite possibly, the greatest single impetus to such aesthetic shifts. (As I’ve suggested elsewhere, there is almost an umbilical connection between war and art.)

(2) The new, post-revolutionary consensus would appear to be ‘built up’ out of awkward or subversive intellectual tendencies of the previous epoch that are set free by the social convulsion.

(3) While art is ‘derivative’ or a follower of other aspects of society—religion, philosophy, science—it often reacts to shifts in those areas with astonishing speed and almost psychic intuition.

Hope you enjoyed this little whirlwind tour through the art of the Gilded Age. Have you got any more hypotheses to suggest regarding the structure of aesthetic revolutions?

Cheers,

Friedrich