THE AMERICAN ART-UNION: Utopia and Skepticism in the Antebellum Era, beautiful art history-filled object for #Booksgiving

THE AMERICAN ART-UNION: Utopia and Skepticism in the Antebellum Era
KIMBERLY A. ORCUTT
Empire State Editions
$39.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The first comprehensive treatment in seventy years of the American Art-Union's remarkable rise and fall

For over a decade, the New York-based American Art-Union shaped art creation, display, and patronage nationwide. Boasting as many as 19,000 members from almost every state, its meteoric rise and its sudden and spectacular collapse still raise a crucial Why did such a successful and influential institution fail? The American Art-Union reveals a sprawling and fascinating account of the country's first nationwide artistic phenomenon, creating a shared experience of visual culture, art news and criticism, and a direct experience with original works.

For an annual fee of five dollars, members of the American Art-Union received an engraving after a painting by a notable U.S. artist and the annual publication Transactions (1839–49) and later the monthly Bulletin (1848–53). Most importantly, members' names were entered in a drawing for hundreds of original paintings and sculptures by most of the era's best-known artists. Those artworks were displayed in its immensely popular Free Gallery. Unfortunately, the experiment was short-lived. Opposition grew, and a cascade of events led to an 1852 court case that proved to be the Art-Union's downfall. Illuminating the workings of the American art market, this study fills a gaping lacuna in the history of nineteenth-century U.S. art. Dr. Kimberly A. Orcutt draws from the American Art-Union's records as well as in-depth contextual research to track the organization's decisive impact that set the direction of the country's paintings, sculpture, and engravings for well over a decade.

​​Forged in cultural crosscurrents of utopianism and skepticism, the American Art-Union's demise can be traced to its nature as an attempt to create and control the complex system that the early nineteenth-century art world represented. This study breaks the organization's activities into their major components to offer a structural rather than chronological narrative that follows mounting tensions to their inevitable end. The institution was undone not by dramatic outward events or the character of its leadership but by the character of its utopianist plan.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I've mentioned before my upbringing was very heavy on the art-world access, and a lot of art history came into my knowledge base as part of that. I was drawn to this book in part because it dealt with a topic I'd heard about, but had never gotten too much information regarding, so...well, curiosity got the better of me.

Thomas Hicks, Calculating, 1844. Oil on canvas, 13 5/8 x 17 in. (34.61 x 43.18 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Maxim Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 62.273. Photograph © 2024 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.


George Inness, View in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, Clearing off After a September Storm, 1849. Oil on canvas, 48 x 72 1/4 in. (121.92 x 183.52 cm). Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming; Whitney Western Art Museum; Gift in Memory of L.G. Phelps and Frances Phelps Belden, 21.00.

Asher B. Durand, Progress (The Advance of Civilization), 1853. Oil on canvas, 48 × 72 in. (121.92 × 182.88 cm). Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Gift of an anonymous donor, 2018.547. Photo: Travis Fullerton © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Nagel and Weingärtner, Humbug’s American Museum, 1851. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library.

Jacques Louis David, Coronation of Emperor Napoleon and Josephine at Notre-Dame in Paris, December 2, 1804, 1808–22. Oil on canvas, 240 1/8 x 382 1/4 in. (610 x 971 cm). Chateaux de Versailles et de Trianon. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

George Cooke, Raft of the Medusa, ca. 1830. Oil on linen, 51 3/8 × 77 1/4 in. (130.5 × 196.2 cm). New-York Historical Society, Bequest of Uriah Phillips Levy, 1862.4. Photography © New-York Historical Society.

Thomas Cole, North Mountain and Catskill Creek (Sunset on the Catskill), 1838. Oil on canvas, 26 7/16 × 36 7/16 in. (67.2 × 92.6 cm). Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Anne Osborn Prentice, 1981.56.

Washington Allston, Sketch of a Polish Jew, 1817. Oil on canvas, 30 1/4 × 25 1/4 in. (76.8 × 64.1 cm). National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, William A. Clark Fund).

Alfred Jones after William Sidney Mount, Farmers Nooning, 1843. Engraving. National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀
I've selected these images from the ones made available for reviewers to draw from in their reviews. (There are eighty-seven illustrative images in the entire text.) I think these choices offer the gifter of the book, to self or others, a pretty solid overview of the aesthetic on display in the book. If you like nineteenth-century art, more or less academic in its emphasis, this book is a great choice to ornament your coffee table.

The idea of the American Art-Union, its aim to bring visual culture to the entire borning nation, resonated with me like I was a bell and it was a clapper. Its aims, its choices, and the idea of a drawing to win original art...well, take my money, y'all.

Sadly the times were just not in sync with this lofty aim. The inevitable problems with Authority, among the membership, and all the usual nonsense that attends doing something large and ambitious that exceeds the practical and the cultural infrastructure, concatenated in a spectacular flame-out.

Unusually, the author chose to follow the internal threads of the story. I felt a bit at sea for a while, as I'd expected the bog-standard chronological structure. No indeed...and to be honest, it serves the story being told better than a chronolgy would have done. I can see that this technique will make enemies, though, so I don't want you to go in to a $40 book only to be blindsided with a synthetic approach where one expects an analytical one.

I'm eager for fellow appreciators of nineteenth-century utopianism, of the urgent need to create a visual culture in this world of philistines, and those who just flat love to look at art, to get one of these beauties for themselves, or a like-minded friend.

The Table of Contents, with its relative page counts, will show you better than I can what the author does with this story. The amount of text dedicated to the events chronicled is proportional to the importance of the events themselves, much more directly than I find is usual in art-history works:

Introduction: The Dream of Art for the People | 1

1 Engravings: To Lead Taste or to Follow? | 29

2 Selecting Artworks for Distribution: From Democracy to Oligarchy | 63

3 The Free Gallery: Art, Anxiety, and Revolution | 99

4 Distributions and Membership: “Messengers and Missionaries of Art”? | 122

5 The Bulletin: From Education to Provocation | 155

6 Slowly, Then All at Once: The Demise of the American Art-Union | 180

Acknowledgments | 209

Appendix A: American Art-Union Resources | 211

Appendix B: American Art-Union Officers and Committee of Management, 1839–51 | 213

Appendix C: American Art-Union Engravings Distributed to All Members | 216

Notes | 219

Sources Cited | 253

Index | 271

This is a fine work of scholarly thought, meeting beautiful art images, and coming together to produce a book that your budding historian, your culture vulture, and your very artsy giftee will eat up with a terribly refined runcible spoon.

I did.