Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America. - Review - book review

Without at all contesting the rewards of this enterprise, we may register its limits when Burns turns her attention to the interpretation of pictures. Simply put, Burns reads pictures as allegories of class interest and identity. Consider her treatment of Winslow Homer. Burns argues that Homer was not just a rugged individualist who idealized nature but a prominent landowner and businessman who evinced a "cynical awareness" of market conditions for his art. His pictures, accordingly, reproduce and sustain his fictional image of himself, masking Homer's commitment to commerce. In Eastern Point (1900), Burns writes, Homer "edited" the scene "to give no hint that the landscape of elite vacation culture stood nearby." Homer and his brothers, Burns adds, were themselves responsible for the transformation of Prout's Neck into a resort, "buying up" the shoreline and "selling lots for cottages to well-to-do summer residents" (p. 190). Granted, this kind of reading is now a fixture of materialist approaches to landsc ape painting and to realist discourse in general. And yet one might object that Burns accepts the landscape painter s first claim for himself: she treats the landscape motif as prior to, and hence adjudicator of, its representation. Just that understanding leaves the art historian with little to do but compare the representation to the seeming original, detailing Homer's omissions and absences. Just this sense of a prior scene also establishes painting's status as ideology: wittingly or unwittingly, the naturalist painter distorts a more foundational reality, allowing Homer to promote his interests even as he disguises them.

Turning to the language of Homer's reception, Burns offers still more ambitious readings along similar lines. She explains that as Homer was producing "his dramatic paintings of the sea," the business world was in "almost constant flux." Critics of business no less than critics of art, Burns adds, spoke in terms of "natural" laws and the "rhythms of economic forces." By analogy, then, Homer's pictures could be said to speak the "language of business." Similarly, Homer's Adirondack logging scenes "reproduced capitalist ideologies" by naturalizing such attributes as "aggression, ferocity, and rapaciousness." Indeed, Homer's landscapes displaced the economic "experience of precariousness and uncertainty" onto "the natural world." Those landscapes "helped sustain fictions vital to preserving belief in individual autonomy" at the very moment when "threats" against such autonomy "seemed most ominous" (p. 217).

Can individual pictures so thoroughly model cultural forces and class interests, to the point of reflection? Burns's answer seems to be yes, at least to judge from still further examples: Whistler's Nocturnes, she suggests, together with Dewing's Recitation, "distance themselves from the world of things by sheer emptiness." The emptiness of their canvases "proclaimed their remoteness from consumer culture and the world of things" (p. 73). Conversely, the ravishing surfaces and luxurious interiors of William Merritt Chase epitomize "the paradigm of the aesthetic commodity" (p. 68). Their displays of "abundance" and "amplitude" offered pictorial satisfaction of consumers' earthly desires. The difficulty here is not Burns's claim that artistic identity was shaped by rampant commercialism--although let it be said that she treats commerce as antithetical to sincerity, as if the "commodified self" to the extent it exists, constitutes an inauthentic mode of subjectivity. The difficulty is deciding what such identit ies mean for how the pictures look. Burns could have decided that they do not mean much: she could have staked Out the position that the pictures themselves are too densely mediated to yield ready correspondences to consumer culture. Instead, she treats pictures as veritable homologies. From Whistler to Homer, single works mirror the localized interests of their makers and supporters. From empty interiors to ravishing surfaces and violent storms, pictures themselves model marketplace culture. Burns establishes this connection between picture surface and social context through a rich but elusive network of metaphor and analogy, relying all the while on the mysterious machinery of ideology--effectively a materialist zeitgeist--to bridge the gap.