Review: Rachel N. Klein's Art Wars: The Politics of Taste in Nineteenth-Century New York

Reviewed by Alexis Monroe 

Around this time last year, I trudged to the Met in rumpled clothes and through sleeting rain for what I thought would be an intimate artist talk. When I pulled open the heavy front doors, I was greeted by a sea of tuxedoed waiters, fountains of champagne, and posh New Yorkers in evening dress. Feeling desperately out of place, I recognized that my conception as an art historian of the museum as a place to see art had run headlong into the museum’s other function as a place for the wealthy to be seen.

Art Wars: The Politics of Taste in Nineteenth Century New York
by Rachel N. Klein
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020
312 pages

Which is all to say: the class divisions inherent in the New York art world which Rachel Klein deftly identifies in her book are all too persistent today. Art Wars: The Politics of Taste in Nineteenth Century New York promises a history of taste fundamentally informed by class tensions and sectional strife. Klein crafts this history around three case studies, which she sees as defining events in the 19th-century art world: the collapse of the American Art-Union in 1852, the controversy in the mid-1880s around the Cesnola collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the push in the mid-1880s to open the Met on Sundays.

The American Art-Union, founded in 1838 on the model of European art unions, aimed to provide widespread public access to high-quality American visual production. For an annual five-dollar fee, subscribers would receive the lavish Art-Union catalogue, free access to the Art-Union gallery (which featured works by prominent American artists), and an engraving of an original work by an American artist. The wealthy merchants who founded the Art-Union believed that exposing a broad audience to visual art would provide not only moral uplift, but also national cohesion: above and beyond sectional strife, the American people would be bound together by a mutual appreciation for art. Even among New York City’s elites, not everyone shared the founders’ sentiment. Many argued that shifting art’s audience from the wealthy few to the working masses would degrade its quality and dilute its function. For instance, James Gordon Bennett, the editor of the New York Herald, went so far as to accuse the Art-Union of running an illegal lottery, leading to a protracted legal battle that eventually caused the institution’s downfall.

This relatively straightforward story must be extracted from Klein’s first two chapters, whose muddled background and numerous digressions mask the absence of something rather crucial: attention to the history of art itself. This manifests as a lack of concern that, at worst, lapses into outright disregard: for instance, Klein misidentifies Samuel Morse’s teacher, the famous American painter Washington Allston, as William Allston. In another case, she uses William Sidney Mount’s work as a sign painter and Asher Durand’s as an engraver as evidence to support the conflation of art and craft in the early 19th century, despite the fact that these two professions were quite distinct by the time these artists rose to prominence at mid-century. Strangely, Klein corrects her own error several pages later when she notes that the National Academy of Design “excluded from full membership [artists] who remained closely identified with the social world of the crafts.” Her most stunning oversight comes in a discussion of Frederic Edwin Church’s blockbuster painting The Heart of the Andes and Emmanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware. Although she mentions both works in her text, she only identifies the latter in a print of an art exhibition on the facing page that clearly shows both paintings.

These minor errors, though, are merely a casualty of Klein’s more general treatment of art as a neutral category onto which ideology — cultural forces, class conflict, political strife — can be projected. By ignoring the potential for art to be an active generator and interlocutor of the ideology she seeks to uncover, Klein casts aside a wealth of primary visual sources: the very objects of the heated debate she chronicles. In her chapter on the origins of the Metropolitan Museum, for instance, she includes an 1880 print of the museum’s interior in the context of discussing anxiety about working-class people visiting the museum. In the print, the figures populating the museum’s galleries are all visibly well-to-do: they regard the displays from a respectful distance, inclining their heads in polite conversation. However, at the print’s very center is a man dressed in denim and flannel, cleaning a display case with a cloth and pail. The print argues, in other words, that the only place for a working-class person in the museum is as a laborer, and that the museum ought to reify, rather than challenge, the class stratification that exists outside its walls. That neither the figure nor his ideological implications receive mention from Klein indicates a lack of interest verging on a lack of faith; art objects contain powerful rhetoric that might have bolstered Klein’s argument, and yet, she lets them stand silent. 

From the fall of the Art-Union in the 1850s, Klein moves briskly on to the 1880s without mention of either the Civil War or Reconstruction, two of the most important events of the 19th century. Because her decision to avoid this crucial period remains unexplained, her repeated mentions of sectional conflict and political strife ring hollow. For instance, she puts significant stock in the fact that many members of the Art-Union were wealthy New-York merchants committed to smoothing sectional conflict; however, she neglects to mention how New York’s position as the most ardently Democratic state in the North — kept so by binding economic ties between Manhattan merchants and Southern cotton producers — would have informed the interest of these men in national unity through art. This same background would also have been useful to Klein’s later explanation of delays surrounding the Met’s founding, in which she attributes deferred consensus to political conflict in the city.[1] It is not only these political details, though, that detract from the force of Klein’s point: the Civil War and its aftermath were absolutely fundamental to the way Americans viewed themselves and their art. The war tracked the rise and fall of landscape painting as a major genre[2] as Americans began to question the sanctity of landscape as a source of national identity; Reconstruction saw the growth of both conservative, nostalgic genre painting as well as the first inklings of experimental, abstract work that eschewed politics. The artistic richness and rapidity of aesthetic shift during these decades can hardly be overstated, and no history of the art world would be complete without their mention. 

Art Wars does find its footing in the later chapters on the Metropolitan Museum, where the narrative is tightly limited, both temporally and by a smaller cast of characters. Klein’s presentation of Luigi Palma di Cesnola’s acquisition, sale, and display of his collection of Cypriot antiquities is engaging and entertaining. We learn that Cesnola, as U.S. consul in Cyprus, excavated — that is, looted — a vast array of valuable ancient objects. In an attempt to position his finds in league with the then-famous “Treasure of Priam,” a massive cache of precious antiquities discovered in Troy, Cesnola claimed to have located everything in a single tomb (despite the objects’ wide variance in date and physical origin). This sly marketing strategy worked: following a bidding war with the British Museum and the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum acquired the lot. A few years later, in 1879, Cesnola was named the museum’s first director.

The new collection, however, didn’t sit well with everyone. Critics saw in the objects signs of tampering, additions, and modifications, and publicly took Cesnola to task. Cesnola fired back, suing a critic who accused him of gluing the bearded head of a male body onto a female-bodied statue (which he did!) for defamation and libel. Klein argues that it was not only these sensational accusations that fueled controversy around the Cesnola collection, but also racial anxieties about the origin of (white) Western civilization. Because the objects were positioned by Cesnola as the embodiment of the Eastern influences integrated by the Greeks, and the Greeks were the originators of Western civilization, then, by extension, “lesser” Eastern influence was inherent in Western culture. The Met took pains to organize the Cypriot objects in an ethnographic manner which emphasized their inferior position to the fine, decorative, Western objects on display, but eventually sold five thousand “duplicate” pieces to a private collector, and, later, put half of the remaining objects into permanent storage. 

If racial anxieties were implicit in the museum’s objects, Klein writes, they were also present in debates over the makeup of the museum’s visitors. She dedicates her final chapter to a chronicle of the movement by the city’s ethnic groups and organized labor to keep the museum open on Sundays, the only day most New Yorkers did not have to go to work (although the Met was technically closed on Sundays, wealthy friends of board members and trustees were frequently let in the side door for private visits). Shrouding themselves in fidelity to the sanctity of the Sabbath, wealthy members of the Met’s board cited concern over the behavior and decorum of immigrant visitors in their fight against Sunday openings, which lasted for nearly a decade until popular opinion overwhelmed their untenable position. Klein ends on an optimistic note, pointing to the inclusivity of the Met’s programming at the turn of the century. 

If this conclusion feels far from the book’s beginning, perhaps it is because the number of major instances of “public” engagement with the art world were so few in the 19th century. Klein’s insistence on the primacy of the public elides the overriding importance that private patrons played in the evolution of art and taste: some of the century’s most important works — Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire series, or Asher Durand’s Progress — were privately commissioned; others — Church’s aforementioned Heart of the Andes, for instance — were shown publicly only as prelude to a patron’s purchase. Although the public might have occasional access to these works through gallery exhibitions or circulated reproductions, the content of the work reflected the concerns of a wealthy class far removed from their world. The politics of taste, even in Klein’s inclusive telling, is still essentially limited to the decisions of an elite few about how the masses ought best to experience art — and this, Klein would do well to mention, remains little changed over a century later. In our present moment, in which the ever-widening wealth gap and its consequences are on brutal display — in which a T-Rex skeleton was auctioned off at Christie’s for $31.8 million on the same day the world’s COVID case count hit 32 million — we owe it to ourselves to take especial care in treating the art world and its products as a reflection of culture, broadly speaking. 

Alexis Monroe is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, specializing in the history of representations of the American landscape. Her dissertation, “The Crisis of the 1850s: Western American Land and Landscape, 1848-1861,” investigates the role of government survey images in the political conflict over slavery’s expansion before the Civil War.

[1] See, for instance, Sven Beckert’s The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 from Cambridge University Press, 2001.

[2] Maggie Cao’s The End of Landscape in Nineteenth- Century America (University of California Press, 2018) is one of the best treatments of this topic.