Michael Leja

Fortified Images for the Masses

Two artists working in New York in the 1840s formed a partnership that remade print portraiture for a mass audience. One, Edward Anthony, was a daguerreotyp-ist and photographic entrepreneur; the other, Thomas Doney, was an engraver specializing in mezzotints. A good example of their collaboration portrays former president Andrew Jackson as he looked just two months before he died in 1845.

Eakins and Icons

Thomas Eakins undertook rigorous, systematic study of anatomy, linear perspective, motion, and reflection in the belief that the knowledge gained would enable him to paint intensely truthful likenesses. His paintings, however, are animated by irrepressible conflicts that stemmed from his attempts to bring seeing and knowing into harmonious union. Eakinss efforts often led him away from mimesis and toward adventurous experimentation with diagrammatic and noniconic signs. This aspect of his work points to parallels with the philosophical writings of his contemporary Charles Sanders Peirce. The comparison clarifies features of both oeuvres and the cultural history they share.

Art and Class in the Era of Barnum

One thing learned from a century and a half of mass culture is that its effects are complex and contradictory. Cultural homogenization has been real, but it has not brought reduction of cultural hierarchy, division and difference. Mass culture has in fact distinguished itself as consummately capable of merging these opposing tendencies into the very fabric of society and culture. This article examines case studies that feature crossover viewing situations: mass audience encounters with progressive art at the Armory Show in New York in 1913 and, conversely, elite audience experiences of lower-class attractions in dime museums and the Bowery in the later nineteenth century. The comparison strives to elucidate mass cultures dialectic of homogenization and differentiation.

Modernism's Subjects in the United States

Visual images and their viewers engage in processes of reciprocal definition. Viewers “constitute” images, assigning them salient features and meanings, while images “interpellate” viewing subjects, offering them viewing positions and identifications. The flow of power is circular, or more precisely spiraling, since the constituted image and its subjects are constantly shifting over time and in correlation.

Cubism in Bondage

Morgan Russell’s synchromist paintings of 1913 to 1915 merge cubism with color abstraction by appearing to sculpt with color planes. Often treated as a variant of Robert Delaunay’s orphism, they actually are quite different in form and in the themes they engage. An important sculptural source for these works was Michelangelo’s Louvre Captive (The Dying Slave), and Russell’s obsessive interest in this sculpture points to personal psychological factors that also figured prominently in his paintings. He recounted formative childhood experiences of physical constraint and bondage that help to explain his attraction to the Captive and to illuminate remarkable features of his abstract paintings. Form in these paintings originates in buckling, folding, and twisting; strings of color swatches entangle and impinge on one another as they crumple. Cubism is placed in bondage, with pressures and constraints on the picture plane seeming to emanate from all sides. In the small group of his early synchromies, Russell merged artistic achievement and psychic gratification in productive union. His synchromism was neither derivative nor a failure, as is sometimes claimed; rather, it warrants our close attention as an original and noteworthy contribution to modernist painting in Paris and New York in the early twentieth century.