‘Historical narratives and historical desires: re-evaluating American art criticism of the mid-nineteenth century’: Karen Georgi, Critical Shift: Rereading Jarves, Cook, Stillman, and the Narratives of Nineteenth-Century American Art, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013

Abstract

Striving to distinguish their authority as and demonstrate their professionalism, art critics James Jackson Jarves, Clarence Cook, and William James Stillman wrote exhibition reviews, essays, and increasingly self-conscious histories of American art and artists in the mid-nineteenth century. Whereas their writing has often been employed to establish a model of opposed pre- and post-war periodization in American art, Karen Georgi challenges this view, re-evaluating the rhetorical structures through which they set forth their opinions. Despite apparent differences and transformations in their categorical classifications, she finds commonalities in their definitions of art, as well as deeper commitments to the enduring belief in art’s truthfulness, and its moral and didactic purpose.

Keywords

• James Jackson Jarves
• Clarence Cook
• William James Stillman
• American Pre-Raphaelites
• John Ruskin
• the Crayon
• the New Path