Re-envisioning the Everyday: American Genre Scenes, 1905-1945 9780271093994, 9780271095820

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Genre Painting in a New Century: Jerome Myers, Edmund C. Tarbell, and Elizabeth Shippen Green
2 John Sloan’s Intimate Tenements
3 Brand Ordinary: Norman Rockwell and the Commercial Illustration of Everyday Life
4 The 1930s Genre Painting Revival
5 Ben Shahn and Jacob Lawrence: Beyond Genre Painting
Conclusion: A Genre America
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Re-​envisioning the Everyday

Re-​envisioning the Everyday American Genre Scenes, 1905–1945

John Fagg

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Fagg, John, 1977– author. Title: Re-​envisioning the everyday : American genre scenes, 1905–1945 / John Fagg. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Traces the history of American genre painting from 1905 to 1945. Examines how artists such as John Sloan, Norman Rockwell, and Jacob Lawrence adapted to an era of rapid urbanization, mass media, and modernist art”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023017593 | ISBN 9780271093994 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Genre painting, American—20th century. | Manners and customs in art. | United States— In art. Classification: LCC ND1451.6 .F34 2023 | DDC 759.13—dc23/eng/20230524 LC record available at https://​lccn​.loc​.gov​/2023017593 Copyright © 2023 John Fagg All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-​free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

Contents List of Illustrations  vii Acknowledgments xi

Introduction  1 1 Genre Painting in a New Century: Jerome Myers, Edmund C. Tarbell, and Elizabeth Shippen Green  17 2 John Sloan’s Intimate Tenements  55 3 Brand Ordinary: Norman Rockwell and the Commercial Illustration of Everyday Life  89 4 The 1930s Genre Painting Revival  121 5 Ben Shahn and Jacob Lawrence: Beyond Genre Painting  159 Conclusion: A Genre America  199

Notes 205 Bibliography 213 Index 225

Illustrations Color Plates (after page 120) 1. Norman Rockwell, Salesman in a Swimming Hole, cover, Saturday Evening Post, August 11, 1945

9. Rockwell, And Every Lad May Be Aladdin, Edison Mazda advertisement, 1920

2. Jerome Myers, Street Carousel, 1906

10. Rockwell, Freedom from Fear, 1943

3. Edmund C. Tarbell, Girls Reading, 1907

11. Malvin Gray Johnson, Thinning Corn, 1934

4. Elizabeth Shippen Green, The Library, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, August 1905 5. John Sloan, Scrubwomen, Astor Library, 1910–11 6. Sloan, A Woman’s Work, 1912 7. Sloan, In Her Place, Harper’s Weekly, October 4, 1913 8. Rockwell, cover, Literary Digest, January 29, 1921

12. Anton Refregier, The Park Bench, 1930 13. Ben Shahn, Puddlers’ Sunday, ca. 1938 14. Shahn, Vacant Lot, 1939 15. Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series, 1940–41, panel no. 25 16. Lawrence, A Family, 1943

Figures 1. George Bellows, Forty-​Two Kids, 1907  5 2. J. C. Leyendecker, Skinny Dipping Boys, cover, Saturday Evening Post, August 19, 1911  6 3. Charles A. MacLellan, No Swimming Here, cover, Saturday Evening Post, July 15, 1916  7 4. William Morris Hunt, The Bathers, 1877  10 5. Eastman Johnson, The Old Stagecoach, 1871  20

6. Illustrations from Frank Jewett Mather, “To Revive the Art of Every-​Day Life,” Literary Digest, February 16, 1907  21 7. Jerome Myers, The Tambourine, 1905 26 8. J. R. Shaver, When the Slot Machine Stuck, reproduced in Little Shavers: Sketches from Real Life (New York: Century, 1913)  30 9. Edmund C. Tarbell, New England Interior, 1906   32 10. Survey 30, no. 11 (June 14, 1913), cover  41

11. Frank Craig, “Barre Was Making Himself the Attraction of the Hour,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, June 1908  45 12. Elizabeth Shippen Green, The Sewing Room, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, August 1905  47

28. E. V. Brewer, From Sunrise to Twilight, 1924  116 29. Rockwell, The Banjo Player, 1926  117 30. Molly Luce, Suburbia, 1924  125 31. Thomas Hart Benton, The Lord Is My Shepherd, 1926  126

13. Green, Ivory Soap advertisement, 1919  51

32. George Caleb Bingham, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, 1845  133

14. Camille Pissarro, Two Young Peasant Women, 1891–92  59

33. Edward Hopper, Room in New York, 1932  140

15. Anton Otto Fischer, The Cheapest Commodity on the Market, Masses, December 1911  66

34. Raphael Soyer, In the City Park, 1934  142

16. John Sloan, Red Kimono on the Roof, 1912  68 17. Sloan, “Aw, Susie, be them dishes washed?,” Collier’s 49 (May 18, 1912)  69 18. Sloan, She’s Got the Point, Masses, October 1913  70 19. Sloan, Dolly Sewing, ca. 1912  75 20. Gerrit Dou, Self-​Portrait, ca. 1665  77 21. Sloan, “Miss Hallroom. . . ,” Harper’s Weekly, August 23, 1913  79 22. Sloan, Spring Planting, Greenwich Village, 1913  87 23. Page of John George Brown reproductions from Quarterly Illustrator 2 (1894)  96 24. Saturday Evening Post covers by Leyendecker, MacLellan, Thrasher, and Rockwell, 1913–16  98 25. Norman Rockwell, Piso’s for Coughs & Colds advertisement, 1920  104 26. Rockwell, cover, Saturday Evening Post, January 29, 1921  109 27. Rockwell, Fruit of the Vine, 1926  111

( viii )  Illustrations

35. William Sidney Mount, The Power of Music, 1847  146 36. Richard Caton Woodville, War News from Mexico, 1848  147 37. Paul Cadmus, Shore Leave, 1933  150 38. Dorothy Varian, War News, 1941  157 39. Ben Shahn, Sunday Painting, ca. 1938 161 40. Shahn, untitled photograph, ca. 1937 167 41. Shahn, untitled photograph, ca. 1937 168 42. Winslow Homer, The Veteran in a New Field, 1865  171 43. Carol M. Highsmith, Ben Shahn mural, Washington, DC, 2011  173 44. Louis Kahn, sketch for Jersey Homesteads, 1935  176 45. Arthur Rothstein, Scene at the New Jersey Homesteads Cooperative, Near Hightstown, New Jersey, December 1936  177 46. Jacob Lawrence, Rain No. 1, 1937  179 47. Lawrence, Ice Peddlers, 1936  182

48. Lawrence, The Migration Series, 1940–41, panel no. 57  185 49. Lawrence, The Migration Series, 1940–41, panel 20  186 50. Installation view of the exhibition Paintings by Jacob Lawrence, October 10–November 5, 1944  188 51. Lawrence, Harlem Series, “They live in old and dirty tenement houses,” 1943  194 52. Honoré D. Sharrer, Tribute to the American Working People, 1951  200

Illustrations  ( ix )

Acknowledgments I acknowledge the journals and editors who have granted permission to use previously published material: elements of chapters 1 and 2 appeared in an article for Modernist Cultures; a version of chapter 4 appeared in The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1915–1945. I explored ideas related to the project in contributions to American Art and the Archives of American Art Journal. A Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Nottingham supported the initial stages of research on this project, and a Terra Foundation for International Art Travel Grant was transformative in enabling access to archives and objects central to the study. A Short-​Term Visitor fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), the Dr. and Mrs. James C. Caillouette Fellowship at the Huntington Library, and an Eccles Centre for American Studies British Library Fellowship facilitated periods of focused research. The University of Birmingham provided study leave periods to work on the book and wonderful colleagues and students to work alongside. My thanks go to the Terra Foundation, more generally, for helping me towards becoming a historian of American art, from the Summer Residency in Giverny in 2005 through numerous opportunities to see, discuss, and learn about American art, to support for events and exhibitions that I have attended, convened, and curated. Similarly, colleagues at the Archives of American Art, the American Art journal, the Courtauld Centre for American Art, and SAAM have supported my development as a writer and researcher. I am also grateful for opportunities to develop ideas related to this project in the form of conference panels, public talks, and exhibition catalogue essays provided by Elizabeth Athens, David Peters Corbett, Heather Campbell Coyle, Alexandra Fraser, Barbara Jones, Nicola Kalinsky, Elizabeth Moss, Brandon Ruud, David Ward, Andrew Witt, and Melissa Wolfe. In obtaining images and permissions to this book I am grateful to the institutions, organizations, and private collections named in credit lines. Thanks go to those who reduced or waived fees in recognition of the scholarly, not-​for-​profit nature of the enterprise. Tabby Garbutt at University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign was one of several individuals who went “above and beyond” to be helpful, while Erica Hirshler provided great advice when I got stuck. Many librarians and archivists have provided assistance and expertise, especially Venus Van Ness at the Norman Rockwell Museum Archives and Susan Anderson at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Keisha Fraser-​Bruce and Elysia Winwood were diligent and enthusiastic as Undergraduate Research Scholars

sifting through magazine archives for images of everyday life. At Penn State University Press, my thanks go to Ellie Goodman and Maddie Caso for their advice, kindness, and patience throughout a not-always-easy journey from manuscript to print, and to John Morris for careful copyediting. Many friends and colleagues have read, discussed, mentored, and encouraged my work on this project, including Lacey Baradel, Ross Barrett, Celeste-​Marie Bernier, Francesca Berry, James Buckels, Will Carroll, David Peters Corbett (again), Heather Campbell Coyle (again), Rona Cran, Alexandra Harris, Andrew Hemingway, John Holmes, Tony Hutchison, Laura Katzman, the late Richard King, Michael Leja, Leo Mazow, Peter Messent, the late Cynthia Mills, Rebecca Mitchell, Dave Murray, Alexander Nemerov, John Ott, Matthew Pethers, Mark Rawlinson, Emily Shapiro, Douglas Tallack, Robin Vandome, Robin Veder, and Sara Wood. From casual remarks to detailed feedback, all those named here made this book better. Offering remarks, feedback, challenge, and encouragement, Jennifer Greenhill has been a true critical friend for as long as I have been trying to be an art historian. Finally, a different kind of thanks to my parents, Alan and Lynda, my sister Kate, and the Arthur, Robertson, and Shellard families, for putting up with me while I wrote this book; to Abe and Jesse for helping me to understand the complexities and joys of everyday life; and to Erica, with love.

( xii )  Acknowledgments

Introduction

C

ome recall the pleasures of a familiar scene and simple story. For the August 11, 1945, Saturday Evening Post cover Norman Rockwell pictures a middle-​aged man with thinning hair and faraway smile up to his chin in river water. He details the way that before taking the plunge this man carefully arranged his spectacles, matchbook, two-​tone shoes, and cigar on the grass and neatly hung his tie, shirt, jacket, pants, and suspenders from the low bridge on which his company car is parked. Salesman in a Swimming Hole (plate 1) is, like much of Rockwell’s postwar work, awash with nostalgia. But for what? It looks back to the salesman’s youth when he and his buddies tore out of school and into the river for sure, and to some earlier America when such simple pleasures were the stuff of everyday life. But perhaps it is also nostalgic for an art that invites the viewer to follow the story from the hot car down the steep slope to the cool river, and that licenses them to think of the weary commercial traveler crossing the bridge and driving down the road a ways before turning back to park and abandon work and woes and car and clothes to the seductive water and its sweet memories. Perhaps Salesman in a Swimming Hole is nostalgic for genre painting. Or perhaps it looks that way from a twenty-​first-​century perspective. Rockwell seems a lonely figure in his mid-​twentieth-​century moment, as, so the story goes, few other American artists were making works like Salesman in a Swimming Hole then. His contemporaries might have pointed to other Post cover artists like Mead Schaeffer or John Falter as acolytes or apprentices, or to the regionalist and American Scene painters of the 1930s as kindred spirits. But the line that American genre painting’s antebellum heyday was followed by late nineteenth-​century decline and then twentieth-​century obsolescence has become so fixed that Rockwell appears to have few peers or proximate precedents. Recent commentators tend to liken him to Johannes Vermeer and other seventeenth-​century Dutch painters or occasionally antebellum Americans such

as William Sidney Mount. It has even become possible to imagine him “a painter of the bourgeois social world in an American tradition that has almost no social painters and very few paintings that even portray groups of people.”1 Nostalgia was a central theme in Rockwell’s art. Indeed, the “The Old Swimmin’-Hole” had been a freighted site of lost innocence at least since the last stanza of James Whitcomb Riley’s 1883 poem of that name: “Oh! the old swimmin’-hole! When I last saw the place, / The scenes was all changed, like the change in my face.”2 But the form Rockwell’s art took might also be nostalgic, as, lacking a generic home, it is always casting back to some other time or place. Re-​envisioning the Everyday begins around 1905 with Jerome Myers, Edmund C. Tarbell, and Elizabeth Shippen Green. Genre painting then, as now, meant the painting of everyday life. It was and still is by convention associated with small paintings in a naturalistic idiom that show humble scenes of hearth and home, farm folk socializing, children at play, and servants about their chores, or, in its more rarefied form, bourgeois interiors and leisure pursuits. Such paintings tend toward gently humorous and sentimental types and motifs as well as moralizing messages and harmful stereotypes. Art critics in the first years of the twentieth century generally dismissed genre painting as an antiquated form and just occasionally tried to imagine a future for it. Were the street and interior scenes made by Myers, Tarbell, and Green pulled back into the genre painting tradition they invoke, or could they drag it into the new century? Could genre painting address city life, express the ideals of Progressivism, or find a new home on the pages of mass-​market magazines? At its best, genre painting bears a close—if condescending, rose-​tinted, or in other ways distorted—relationship to the everyday life it depicts, interprets, and constructs. Unlike Myers, whom he was friends with, and Tarbell, whom he disliked, the socially and politically engaged painter John Sloan made art avowedly of its moment that sought to capture the lived experience of Lower Manhattan in the years around 1910. Did his use of genre painting compositions and techniques in this period lead to insight into, or limit his interpretation of, the everyday lives of neighboring housewives? Did his shift from the quick glance of impressionism to the slow looking encouraged by genre painting steep him in the detail of domesticity or prevent him from seeing the interconnectedness and complexity of tenement housekeeping? The opening chapters of this book explore genre painting as a backward-​looking art form in a progressive era. Rockwell is central to Re-​envisioning the Everyday, in that he takes up much of its middle chapter, but the aim is to decenter his art or at least relocate it within a living tradition of American genre painting that ran right through 1905–45. In the company of Green and Sloan, who both worked as illustrators and made scenes of everyday life for mass-​market magazines, he already looks a little less lonely. Setting his early work within the discursive frame of these magazines, and in dialogue with other illustrators ( 2 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

as well as the editors and advertisers who commissioned them, reveals the way commercial art reproduced the school-​like conditions of earlier genre traditions. Rockwell’s mature paintings, like Salesman in a Swimming Hole, draw on motifs and types shared and elaborated with other artists and inhabit an everyday world built over decades of advertising commissions and magazine covers. Those advertisements and covers established a stock repertoire of cheeky schoolboys, careworn mothers, and perplexed “old codgers” from which they constructed a stable, white, middle-​class everyday America. They thus came closer to the nineteenth-​century American genre tradition in tone and theme than anything else made by early twentieth-​century easel painters. But when the Whitney Museum of American Art and other institutions set out to establish a national genre painting canon in the 1930s, Myers and Sloan were part of the conversation and Rockwell and his colleagues were not; even at exhibitions that embraced Currier and Ives chromolithographs and John Rogers’s painted plaster sculptures, contemporary commercial illustration remained beyond the pale. The various artists that 1930s critics and curators did propose as contemporary contributors to that canon, including Molly Luce, Thomas Hart Benton, Edward Hopper, Raphael Soyer, Anton Refregier, Dorothy Varian, and Stuart Davis, proved problematic in other ways, calling into question genre painting’s relationship to affect, narrative, politics, and form. The Whitney’s 1935 American Genre: The Social Scene in Paintings and Prints, 1800–1935 exhibition was the central event in what the fourth chapter identifies as a 1930s genre painting revival, which raised but rarely answered a range of searching questions. If some artists who took everyday life as their theme were not deemed to be genre painters, what were the grounds for their exclusion? Could abstract paintings or propaganda paintings be genre paintings? Or was genre painting bound to received realism, simple stories, and nostalgic moods? This book ends with the work Ben Shahn and Jacob Lawrence made after this 1930s revival, in which both artists sought to move beyond genre painting. Shahn and Lawrence expanded their vision of everyday life through murals, series, reference to photographic archives, prose-​poetic captions, and elements of abstraction, while remaining at least in touching distance of the tradition. Surveying its waxing and waning fortunes, Re-​envisioning the Everyday is a history of and reflection on American genre painting in the first half of the twentieth century. It thus tells a story about a way of painting or seeing when it no longer meets the world, but also about the resilience of that way of painting and seeing. Genre painting took shape in the seventeenth-​century Dutch Republic and became popular in America in the antebellum era; Vermeer conventionalized ways of depicting servants in Delft households, and Mount, farmers in their Long Island yards. But genre painting did not cease to exist as urbanization and industrialization swept aside its characteristic scenes and settings. Nor did it end because a post–Civil War generation of practitioners lacked Mount’s subtle humor and lost the close connection to local audiences that he and his introduction  ( 3 )

peers enjoyed. Nor when it fell out of favor with critics in the 1890s or came up against photography or impressionism or abstraction. Forms live on in popular taste and vestigial trace. They are rediscovered, revived, and referenced—in appropriation, allusion, and pastiche—by subsequent generations. They are adapted to new modes of production and dissemination, as in Rockwell’s mass-​market magazine covers, and they are reworked in new idioms, as in Shahn’s and Lawrence’s paintings of the early 1940s. This book addresses works like Salesman in a Swimming Hole that reproduce the look of, and so directly call back to, earlier genre traditions. But it also considers paintings of everyday life that are, in look or form or function, unlike earlier genre paintings but that bear some relation to the tradition, that illuminate or are illuminated by it, that extend and expand and re-​envision it. Or critique it. Walter Benjamin observed that in their embrace of genre painting, the late nineteenth-​century German bourgeoisie “captured and fixed the present moment, in order to be rid of the image of the future. Genre painting was an art which refused to know anything of history.”3 For twentieth-​century American artists, taking up genre painting’s form and content could mean taking on its connotations and perspective or seeking to do damage to them. The nostalgic vision of Rockwell’s midcentury Post covers insists on a singular everyday life: an aging white man immersed in a golden-​hued past. When, in Richard Wright’s 1938 short story “Big Boy Leaves Home,” one of a group of African American boys suggests they head to the swimming hole, his friends’ first response is “N git lynched? Hell naw!”4 Everyday life held radically different possibilities—different risks and different pleasures—for different groups of Americans. As an increasingly diverse range of artists began to picture everyday life, and as they did so in a broader range of styles and idioms and from a broader range of political and identity positions, so a more complex and multifaceted everyday revealed itself. As these artists came to a fresh reckoning with the everyday life of their changing world, some came to see it not only as a site of sentiment and nostalgia but also as a site of political oppression and resistance.

The Genre of Genre This book is about genre painting. It considers what makes an object a genre painting not by looking at works by Vermeer or Mount at the center of the category, but by interrogating those at or beyond its margins. Other recent studies have taken a similar tack, interrogating landscape painting and sentimental art at or after the point at which they are said to end or become redundant or passé.5 In 1907 George Bellows painted a group of boys chatting, swaggering, stripping, pissing, diving, and swimming on, off, and around a dilapidated East River pier. When Forty-​Two Kids (fig. 1) was shown ( 4 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Fig. 1  George Bellows, Forty-​Two Kids, 1907. Oil on canvas, 42 × 60 ¼ in. (106.7 × 153 cm); framed: 48 ⅞ × 66 15⁄16 × 2 ⅞ in. (124.1 × 170 × 7.3 cm). Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, William A. Clark Fund), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 2014.79.2. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

at the Carnegie Institute, a Detroit journalist observed that “all the characters of the ‘Old Swimming Hole’ were there, including Slim, Sliver, Slats, Spike, and Skinny. Only Fatty was missing.”6 The reference to Riley’s poem appears to misread Bellows’s painting, either in ignorance of its context or with humorous intent. For Forty-​Two Kids has been understood, both by the artist’s New York peers and subsequent art historians, as a painting absolutely of its modern urban moment, of the newsworthy phenomenon of poor immigrant children running amok on New York streets and docks.7 To call it a genre painting feels like an affront—to Bellows and to the genre tradition. But why? The absence of rustic nostalgia is one of many reasons Bellows, Sloan, and the other New York realists known as the Ashcan School make uncomfortable bedfellows for Rockwell in a twentieth-​century genre painting tradition. Their art inhabits a different structure of feeling to that which he shares with poets like Riley and painters like Mount and Eastman Johnson, whose The Old Stage Coach (1871; see fig. 5) exemplifies nineteenth-​century genre painting’s vision of innocent, bucolic childhood. Ashcan realism is urban where genre tends to be rural; in pursuit of novelty where it cleaves to the familiar; rough where it is smooth. When Sloan looked back to his early Ashcan School years, he recalled, “It was really [Robert] Henri’s direction that made us paint at all, introduction  ( 5 )

Fig. 2 J. C. Leyendecker, Skinny Dipping Boys, cover illustration from the Saturday Evening Post, August 19, 1911. Files licensed by Curtis Licensing Indianapolis, IN.

and paint the life around us. [Winslow] Homer and Eastman Johnson and Mount had painted the life around them, but we thought their work was too tight and finished.”8 The thick smears of paint, the sketch-​like gestures that establish the boys’ bodies, and the murky backdrop of the nocturnal East River into which the figures recede all give Forty-​Two Kids a sense of on-​the-​spot record and back-​alley danger that distances it from the genre tradition. Bellows and Sloan surely painted the everyday, though: street kids at play and construction workers at rest; shoppers on busy city streets; tenement housewives hanging out their wash. As one critic put it in 1908, their art embraced the “ugly, sordid, or commonplace.”9 So what really sets it apart from genre painting? It is not the emphasis on the gritty city alone, as in the same period Tarbell and other Boston School artists made beautiful paintings of bourgeois life in modified impressionist idioms that similarly stick in the craw of the American genre tradition. Again, Boston School paintings do not feel like Mount’s, Johnson’s, and Rockwell’s; they are too aestheticized, perhaps, and too cold. To try to put the preceding claims about what a genre painting feels like on surer ground, it might be argued that proximity to the “received realism” or “realism of recognition and reassurance” practiced by Vermeer and Mount and Rockwell is an essential element of genre’s generic repertoire.10 But why should a painting of everyday life look this way? After all, an impressionist landscape is still a landscape and a cubist still life is still a still life, though in form both make a more emphatic break from convention than a gritty-​realist city scene does from the look of genre painting. ( 6 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Fig. 3  Charles A. MacLellan, No Swimming Here, cover illustration from the Saturday Evening Post, July 15, 1916. Files licensed by Curtis Licensing Indianapolis, IN.

And isn’t the fuzzy modifier “gritty” doing a lot of work here? Sloan’s realism may have been ugly and sordid in 1908 but seemed staid when set against the social realism of the 1930s, and indeed in the moment of that decade’s genre painting revival critics could claim that his paintings “continue with no disconcerting break . . . a genre tradition.”11 Moreover, somewhere between 1907 and 1912 Sloan’s art slipped through the porous boundary between gritty and received realism so that it wound up looking less like Bellows’s Forty-​Two Kids and more like more like the paintings he dismissed as too tight and finished. But does looking like a genre painting make a painting a genre painting? Sloan never called himself a genre painter, and his work was not exhibited or sold as genre painting in the 1910s. If the status of an object is in part determined by the conditions in which it is produced, circulated, and received, then neither a Bellows nor a Sloan, nor indeed a Rockwell made to be photomechanically reproduced on a magazine cover, is much like a Vermeer or a Mount at all. Maybe, though, conditions do not have to be identical for production and reception to work in similar ways. When Rockwell started making Post covers in the mid-1910s, he was not the sui generis figure remembered today but the best of a bunch of commercial illustrators who developed a repertoire of stock types and familiar scenarios, borrowing and adapting one another’s work to create multiple variations on their themes. In August 1911 J. C. Leyendecker pictured boys preparing to dive from a rock (fig. 2); in July 1916 Charles MacLellan showed a wet, half-​naked boy cowering behind a tree bearing the sign “No Swimming Here” (fig. 3); in June 1921 Rockwell had “Spike,” introduction  ( 7 )

“Skinny,” “Fatty,” and their dog running, in varying degrees of undress, past a “No Swimming” sign. These illustrations replicate the play on familiar types, layers of humorous storytelling, and sense of a common culture shared by artist and audience that characterized antebellum genre paintings. Like earlier genre paintings, both European and American, they are proximate to language, with advertising copy and editorials standing in for emblem books and proverbs or almanacs and political jokes. Also like earlier genre paintings, which in the Dutch Republic were made to be displayed in private homes and in nineteenth-​century America circulated as woodcut and chromolithograph reproductions, magazine covers became a familiar part of everyday life, scattered on coffee tables or pinned to walls. If successful, their imagery folded into memories and commonsense constructions of the everyday. When Rockwell, a self-​described “sissy” who grew up in a New York apartment, looked back to a swimming-​hole boyhood, it was to rare summers in the country where he imagined himself a “barefoot boy” and to the world he and his peers had envisioned for those earlier Post covers. This discussion risks becoming mired in the challenge to good prose style that is the meeting of genre theory and genre painting: the problem of genre as genre. As the art historian Thomas Crow points out, “The notion of genre painting contains an obvious ambiguity: how can one genre among several—history, portraits, animal and still-​life subjects—assume the name of the category given to them all? What is it about scenes of contemporary human types in ordinary, everyday settings that defies their having a positive and exclusive descriptive term of their own?”12 This uncertainty was apparent in the early twentieth century and even found its way into the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, a volume committed to stable categories and fixed terms. The long “Painting” entry at first admits that “the term ‘genre’ is elliptical” but goes on to assert that it identifies “a picture of a scene of ordinary life without any religious or historical significance.” Uncertainty returns in the acknowledgment that genre painting is “something a little more special” than this initial definition implies and in the use of increasingly intangible and subjective terms: genre paintings must not be “large and showy” but instead “small in scale” and “finished with the most fastidious care”; they rarely carry “satiric or didactic purpose” but have “a sympathetic charm, that gives the masters of the style a firm hold on our affections.”13 Encyclopedic clarity quickly gives way to the fuzzy and subjective terms of vernacular usage. This discussion also risks becoming fixated on the terms of art history but blind to art; a book devoted to such categorizing and policing would be a small-​minded thing. But, without getting too hung up, these terms and definitions do matter, or at least become significant under certain circumstances. One way to think about genres is as, in the language of fluidity and porousness developed by literary theorists, “open sets endlessly dissolved by their own openness.”14 During the 1930s genre revival, the Whitney Museum curator Lloyd Goodrich, who knew of ( 8 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

and had written about Rockwell, did not include his Post covers in the landmark exhibition American Genre. Twenty-​five years later the art historian S. Lane Faison Jr. was happy to assert that “Rockwell belongs to a line of humorous genre painters which originated at least as long ago as in seventeenth-​century Holland.”15 Attitudes toward commercial illustration changed, Rockwell’s stock rose, and the category of genre painting dissolved and remade itself around him. An alternative way to approach genre is embodied by the critic Royal Cortissoz, who must by art-​historical convention be introduced as an arch-​conservative. When dismissing the modernist and social realist paintings Goodrich did include in American Genre, Cortissoz declared, “For most of us, at any rate, ‘genre’ suggests through ancient usage, homey, intimate life, life steeped in sentiment.”16 This approach is at once fixed in its certainty and fuzzy in its language. By not including Rockwell and other contemporary commercial illustrators in his genre survey, Goodrich omitted a seam of imagery that insisted on the continuities of middle-​class life during the Depression. Cortissoz’s (conservative) objection was that, in rejecting genre painting’s hominess and intimacy, contemporary painters overemphasized breadlines and homeless shelters as defining the everyday life of the era. This mix of certainty and fuzziness ran through critics’ and publics’ responses to genre painting. In 1939, four years after the Whitney Museum exhibition, Richard W. Stimpson, a “shut in” from Worcester, Massachusetts, wrote the organizers of the Fogg Museum’s New England Genre exhibition to ask if, as he could not visit the exhibition, they might direct him to inexpensive prints of “the old swimmin’ hole, Saturday night baths of youngsters ‘in the old wooden tub,’ or of certain warm episodes that generally took place in the woodshed.” Harvard Museum Class student Henry R. Hope apologized that “none of the pictures in our exhibition represents the amusing scenes that you asked about. If we had been able to find any, we certainly would have tried to borrow them.” He elsewhere noted that while one work in the exhibition, William Morris Hunt’s The Bathers (1878; fig. 4), did depict river swimming, this contemplative figure study, with its attention to the play of dappled light on water and distinct absence of high jinks, was probably not what Stimpson had in mind.17 In fact, swimming holes were rarely depicted in nineteenth-​century genre painting and only became a popular motif in the early twentieth-​century magazine illustration that looked back to it, but Stimpson and Hope share a clear sense of the kind of amusing swimming scene that should have been part of the American genre tradition. Like Hunt’s Bathers, Winslow Homer’s Four Boys Bathing (1880) and Thomas Eakins’s The Swimming Hole (1885) do not sit comfortably in that tradition. Indeed, these artists troubled 1930s efforts to establish an American genre painting canon, appearing at once as master painters of the everyday and at the same time to exceed genre in their seriousness and originality. Cortissoz’s know-​it-​when-​you-​see-​it logic and appeal to vernacular aesthetic categories play a significant role in definitions of genre painting, and indeed most other genres. introduction  ( 9 )

Fig. 4  William Morris Hunt, The Bathers, 1877. Oil on canvas, 38 × 25 in. (96.5 × 63.5 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Morris K. Jesup Fund, 1936, 36.99.

Everyday Life Thinking about genre painting is thus a way of thinking about genres, and it is also a way of thinking about everyday life. Here ambiguity once more abounds. When commentators, whether the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica or twenty-​first-​century art historians, seek to bring definitional clarity to the term “genre painting,” their glosses, such as “contemporary human types in ordinary, everyday settings,” are themselves unstable, even hollow. What does “ordinary” look like? Where does the “everyday” take place? Norman Bryson begins Looking at the Overlooked, a book that like Re-​envisioning the Everyday takes a genre category as its organizing principle, with concern over the basic “assumption that still life exists.” Are “still life” or indeed “genre painting” not categories and relationships imposed on disparate images by “modern critical discourse”? Bryson’s quickfire response is to argue that art and its discursive frames are inseparable, that still life or genre painting is a construction within which artworks are made and viewed. He goes on to explain that individual paintings are contributions to “series (plural)” of like works and, against materialist objections that the history of a genre implies a transhistorical or universal conception of art, to emphasize the “materiality of series.”18 This book proceeds on a similar basis to offer a material history grounded ( 10 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

in early twentieth-​century art discourse on genre painting and period conceptions of everyday life. A materialist history of still life can confidently point to the matter depicted in such works: fruit and tableware and flowers are, surely, things in the world. The same might (optimistically) be said of everyday life. One recent theorist of the everyday observes that while it is often invoked in this way, as “the ultimate, non-​negotiable reality, the unavoidable basis for all other forms of human endeavour,” there is a false confidence to such claims as “everyday life is the most self-​evident, yet the most puzzling of ideas.”19 Assertions of this kind draw from a European intellectual tradition in which Georg Simmel, Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and others made the everyday the subject of critical inquiry. This diverse body of work often moves from close observation of mundane and routine activities such as shopping, cooking, or walking city streets to reflection on the aesthetic and experiential qualities of these activities, or analysis of their position within larger social and political structures. It tends to be attentive to the details and quirks of taken-​for-​granted phases of life and the particularities of spaces and routines so familiar that they slip into habituated background. It often emphasizes the way that hegemonic power is manifest in such moments and sites but also the small and informal tactics by which individuals and groups resist and subvert that power. Above all else it works to defamiliarize the everyday, making it strange, elusive, ever-​present, and indefinable. It is fair to say that this everyday is rarely brought into dialogue with that invoked in glosses of genre painting as the painting of everyday life. There are good, materialist reasons for not thinking about genre painting in relation to these theories of everyday life. Simmel’s and Benjamin’s Western Marxism and Lefebvre’s and Certeau’s interrogation of postwar Paris operate in frames of reference and experience unlike those accessible to genre painters in the seventeenth-​century Dutch Republic or antebellum or early twentieth-​century America. To conflate these distinct encounters with everyday life risks appeal to some transhistorical or universal condition and raises the problem of discussing works of art in language inconceivable to their creators. But, equally, these theories of everyday life illuminate and are illuminated by many of the paintings discussed in this study. Moreover, several of the painters explored here, including Sloan in his intense encounter with rapidly modernizing Manhattan and Shahn through his wide-​ranging experience of the New Deal, came close to the circumstances and politics out of which critical inquiry into the everyday arose. Specifically, like Lefebvre and Certeau, who were attuned to the meaning of everyday life by a period of flux as old Parisian routines and habits were eroded and erased, Sloan and Shahn saw a way of life passing before their eyes. The paintings discussed in this book were all made within a period of transition in everyday life in America that can be broadly defined by the processes of modernization—including expanding cities, rapidly developing technologies, and increasing state introduction  ( 11 )

bureaucracy—and the politics of Progressivism. Dedicating the Mark Twain Memorial Bridge in September 1936, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told residents of Hannibal, Missouri, that, “in place of the school house from which Huck Finn lured Tom Sawyer to truancy and the old swimming hole, you have eighteen modern grade schools, a high school, parochial schools and a fine library.” Clearly enjoying the contrast between Twain’s mythmaking and modern-​day reality, Roosevelt set Tom Sawyer’s oil lamps against 1930s Hannibal’s “municipal electric light and power plants.”20 The speech celebrates the technological progress that brought electric light to Sloan’s Greenwich Village studio in 1912 and then to the midwestern small towns Shahn photographed in the mid-1930s as well as the wider program of progressive social reform that ran from Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency to FDR’s New Deal. The arc of progressive thought and politics is roughly coterminous with the period 1905–1945 covered by this study, and each chapter addresses the way painters of everyday life engaged with forms of Progressivism. While it often functioned as a nostalgic mode with which to oppose progress of various kinds, genre painting in this period also registered changes as small as the adoption of American fashions in an immigrant neighborhood and as large as the Tennessee Valley Authority regional plan. This history of everyday life in early twentieth-​century America was told within and against the conventions of genre painting. Nineteenth-​century genre paintings rarely pictured factory or city scenes, and so one challenge for twentieth-​century artists was to bring the tradition into their urban, industrial world. Another was to negotiate a tradition shot through with both casual and virulent racism and other forms of conventionalized and stereotyped thought. Nineteenth-​century genre painting was typically made by and for white men, taking the male-​dominated public sphere as its setting and whiteness as a normative state. It explicitly acknowledged race and racism as facets of everyday life only on the occasions when it depicted nonwhite figures at its margins and marked them as other. Early attempts to establish a genre painting canon perpetuated these exclusions and otherings, for example by ignoring the important genre paintings made by Lilly Martin Spencer in the 1850s and Henry Ossawa Tanner in the 1890s. These practices extended into the twentieth century, where Ashcan School artists made white masculinity the normative urban identity in their work and Rockwell built his insistently white small-​town world.21 All this worked to place African American experience outside the sphere of everyday life and to make genre painting a troubled undertaking for Malvin Gray Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, and other artists who, in engaging with its themes and practices, risked reinforcing, or making images that were pliable to, racist discourse. Genre painting as a practice at once accesses and occludes the everyday, encouraging artists to look slowly at and think carefully about common folk, everyday routines, and ordinary things but freighting those people, activities, and objects with the baggage and blind spots of a long and complicated history. ( 12 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Histories of American Genre Painting Thus far, the historiography of American genre painting has been presented in frustratingly vague terms, with references to how paintings seemed and felt and quotes from encyclopedia entries and newspaper critics, but only brief mention of more substantive histories of art. As in the use of Raymond Williams’s phrase “structure of feeling,” which identifies “meanings and values as they are lived and felt” as distinct from “formally held and systematic beliefs,” the point has been to suggest the popular understanding of genre painting in the early twentieth century.22 That understanding is, at least with regard to period perceptions of the nineteenth-​century genre tradition, reflected in the more formal and institutional histories of American art that emerged in the later decades covered by this book. The story of genre’s late nineteenth-​century decline was reiterated and embellished in a series of accounts from art critic and historian Frank Jewett Mather’s 1907 article “Status of Genre Painting” through to curator Lloyd Goodrich’s catalogue for the 1935 American Genre exhibition. “The tradition of the old American genre school was still carried on by its surviving members—painters of rural life like Thomas Waterman Wood, Eastman Johnson, and E. L. Henry, or anecdotalists like J. G. Brown,” Goodrich explains. “Genuine as were the qualities of most of these men, they represented a survival rather than a new departure.” More than half a century later, Elizabeth Johns concluded her groundbreaking 1991 American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life by observing, “In 1861, when the Civil War broke out, genre painting as a national enterprise had dropped to a low ebb.” Surveying the relatively short-​lived popularity of Mount, Spencer, and the other painters her study focuses on, Johns continues, “Genre painting had simply failed to meet the needs of new viewers in new times.” These claims have been challenged and revised by recent scholarship, which finds more humor, nuance, and originality in later nineteenth-​century genre paintings than Goodrich and Johns.23 But there is little dispute that the antebellum decades were the heyday of artistic achievement and popularity for the form. It is more difficult to make positive claims about histories of early twentieth-​century genre painting, because they barely exist. This is not an exaggerated statement of this book’s originality, but rather an acknowledgment that twentieth-​century American genre painting as a named enterprise only occasionally registers in art-​historical scholarship or museum practice. Goodrich’s American Genre exhibition and the wider 1930s genre revival, encompassing newspaper and magazine articles and reviews, historical surveys like Alan Burroughs’s Limners and Likenesses (1936), and other exhibitions such as the Fogg Museum’s New England Genre and the Downtown Gallery’s Contemporary American Genre, sought to make the genre tradition central to exhibitions and histories of American art and extend it into the twentieth century. This agenda was in some ways carried forward in Oliver Larkin’s Art and Life in America (1949) and introduction  ( 13 )

Milton Brown’s American Painting: From the Armory Show to the Depression (1955), books written during and out of that context that were published after the Second World War.24 But the idea of an ongoing genre tradition was short-​lived, gaining little traction in the postwar period. Its claims went against the grain of an emerging story of American art that emphasized landscape over genre painting as nineteenth-​century precedent for twentieth-​century painting. Postwar scholars and curators concerned with overturning the sense of cultural inferiority that cast American painting as parochial, derivative of European models, or lacking national roots and character had little use for a transatlantic tradition where nostalgia and conservatism were integral to its generic repertoire. Against that dominant narrative it was efficacious, for example, for champions of Ashcan School painting to locate Bellows and Sloan in established currents of modernist painting, even in the terms of Clement Greenberg’s damningly faint praise as “a continuation, essentially, of [Édouard] Manet’s phase of impressionism” rather than as heirs to William Sidney Mount and John George Brown.25 Recent scholarship on Ashcan School realism, commercial illustration, regionalism, social realism, and related practices refers, with surprising frequency, to particular works as genre paintings or likens practitioners to earlier genre painters and schools. But the term is used in a relatively neutral manner to suggest everyday subject matter and a degree of “received realism” without implying critical disdain or taking up the baggage of the genre painting tradition. Thus, a painting by Sloan is “a practically timeless genre scene,” Rockwell is “the Vermeer of this nation’s domestic history,” social realism is “a variety of genre painting,” and Lawrence’s early works are “Harlem genre scenes.”26 These are meaningful claims but do not come with a sustained consideration of what it is to place these artists in the same tradition as Vermeer, Mount, or Brown or the degree to which they really take up the generic repertoire, and thus the possibilities and limitations, of genre painting. Similarly, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2009 blockbuster American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915 included Mount, Johnson, Brown, and other genre painters but presented a survey of narrative art of everyday life that was careful not to tie itself to the particularities of genre painting. This was most apparent in the final section of the survey, demarcated by the 1876 Centennial and the First World War. In the galleries, wall color and hang signaled a more modern exhibition space, while in the catalogue cosmopolitanism, urbanism, and impressionism become the key terms as genre slips from the exhibition’s vocabulary.27 Re-​envisioning the Everyday argues that American genre painting was a living tradition and practice in the first half of the twentieth century. It demonstrates that the influence of earlier genre paintings and an awareness of the genre tradition were an active presence in early twentieth-​century art-​making; that the conditions of production and reception of mass-​market magazine editorial and advertising illustration reproduced, at least by analogy, those in which genre painting had previously thrived; and that in ( 14 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

certain moments—including specialized art-​critical debates in the 1900s and the widespread genre painting revival of the 1930s—genre painting was important to the way art was made, displayed, and received. Seeing Myers, Tarbell, Green, Sloan, Rockwell, Hopper, Varian, Refregier, Shahn, and Lawrence as genre painters might mean as little as allowing more story into their work, and more stock types, or finding their paintings funnier, perhaps, but also more closely keyed to convention. Or it might mean as much as recognizing in them a counterweight to American art canons and narratives that lean toward landscape and abstraction and individualistic expression, and so turning the gaze from the distant horizon to look more closely at the kitchen sink, attending in that domestic vicinity to the small things that get swept aside by grand narratives.

introduction  ( 15 )

1 Genre Painting in a New Century Jerome Myers, Edmund C. Tarbell, and Elizabeth Shippen Green

E

dward Lamson Henry tends not to figure in the history of American modernism. But in February 1913 the septuagenarian purveyor of rural genre scenes stepped from the bustle of Lexington Avenue into the Armory Show. Jerome Myers recalled that amid the cubism and fauvism of this era-​defining exhibition, I was introduced by friends to E. L. Henry, who was then in his eighties [sic]. I had known his work, for which I had a great respect. Together we went around the huge show. Henry had an impairment in one eye, to such an extent that he had to hold the eyelid up with his finger to see. Yet he carefully looked at all the pictures, and when he had finished, he said, “Mr. Myers, they told me there was a lot of crazy wild art here, but I really found it wonderfully interesting and I am very glad to have seen it.” This was the unbiased tribute of an unpretentious American painter of a past generation.1

Enfeebled, gently condescended to, and positioned firmly in the past, Henry here embodies American genre painting at the start of the twentieth century: resolutely, despite his inquisitiveness, not part of the story of modernity and modernism in which the streets of New York and the Armory Show play key roles. Myers casts Henry as an anachronistic figure in this moment but also extends the hand of friendship and acts as his guide, thus suggesting the way he and other painters of his generation mediated between past and present, between genre painting and modern painting.

Genre painting’s demise was a critical commonplace by the start of the twentieth century. Against that backdrop, this chapter focuses on three artists whose work, in subject, form, or medium, engaged with aspects of modernism and modernity while retaining a strong connection to the genre tradition. Myers repeatedly painted New York neighborhoods shaped by recent migration from southern and eastern Europe, leading contemporary commentators to shoehorn him into the politics of urban reform and later art historians to compare him unfavorably to the urban realism of his Ashcan School friends. But Myers was as much a sentimental painter of cute kids as Henry’s contemporary John George Brown. The presence of this familiar type complicates the appeal that his art held for both political progressives and critics and collectors of modern art in the 1900s and 1910s. In those years, Edmund C. Tarbell repeatedly pictured bourgeois women in beautiful interiors, which, together with insistent allusions to seventeenth-​century Dutch genre painting, meant his work could be seen as a retreat from the modern world. But the impressionist-​inflected technique and compositional clarity and rigor of Tarbell’s paintings enabled critics to also see them as a mediation of traditional and modern concerns, as an aesthetic expression of Progressive Era ideals, even. Like Tarbell, Elizabeth Shippen Green often depicted bourgeois interior settings. Where his paintings were taken up by proponents of modern aesthetic and political ideas, her illustrations for magazines like Harper’s Monthly and the Saturday Evening Post were enmeshed within modern mass media. Made and viewed in proximity to short stories, advertisements, and advice columns, and as sequences and series of illustrations consumed by a fixed readership on a regular basis, Green’s work reenergized motifs that had become moribund in conventional paintings of domestic life. Just as Henry was an anachronistic presence at the Armory Show, Myers’s cute kids stand out from the city paintings of his peers, Tarbell’s paintings contain forwardand backward-​looking elements, and Green’s domestic scenes work with and against the magazines in which they appeared. An art historian friend of Tarbell’s suggested that his art showed “the effect of the Impressionistic movement when grafted, so to say, on good old Dutch stock.”2 A sense of grafting, or of borrowing, mediating, or repurposing, runs through the art discussed in this chapter. Grafts do not always take, and repurposed objects often fit awkwardly into new surroundings. What motivated Myers’s sentimental vision of New York slums, and what was at stake in painting cute kids in these neighborhoods? Brown’s urban urchins and rustic barefoot boys expressed romantic nineteenth-​century ideas of childhood, but Myers’s kids seem out of step with the sociological discourse of the Progressive Era. Where seventeenth-​century Dutch genre painters pictured their bourgeois patrons to themselves, Tarbell’s allusion and pastiche tie his twentieth-​century New Englanders back to that earlier moment. Do the conventional settings and subjects of his paintings not, similarly, check their abstract and formalist tendencies? Green’s illustrations imbue ( 18 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

bourgeois women with the agency and self-​possession but are reliant on the discursive frame of mass-​market magazines to construct that independent identity. The history of genre painting in the twentieth century is a history of mismatched form and content, revivals proposed and abandoned, and artists’ navigation of conventions and constraints. To recover a moment when Myers and Tarbell could be seriously considered as modern genre painters, this chapter draws on Frank Jewett Mather, Charles Caffin, James Huneker, and other critics who wrote, with a strong sense of art history and an awareness of the emerging terms of modernist art theory, for mainstream audiences. Recognizing that genre painting had to change and arguing that it might be melded with modern art, these writers were, like the painters they championed, involved in acts of mediation and compromise. Their arguments offer insights into Myers’s and Tarbell’s art and the stakes of early twentieth-​century genre painting that the subsequent course of (art) history obscures. But they also contain confused and contorted claims and the blind spots and biases of their era. At best uninterested in women artists and dismissive of commercial illustration, these critics missed the way that Green’s art offered much that they sought from modern genre painting. The chapter adheres to the period discourse so far as is productive but makes space to acknowledge Green and her peers and to elucidate the stranger mediations, not always apparent to their contemporaries, that early twentieth-​century artists made with genre painting.

Abeyance or Revival? Eastman Johnson’s 1871 The Old Stage Coach (fig. 5) and Myers’s 1906 Street Carousel (plate 2) appeared across a two-​page spread in the February 16, 1907, Literary Digest (fig. 6). In both paintings children mass in and around canopied wooden structures built or repurposed as sites of play; both painters locate the everyday in that seemingly timeless sphere and invest in the detail and variety of its gestures and interactions. The wider world does of course encroach, in the buildings spied through Johnson’s trees and more insistently in the shops and shoppers of Myers’s busy Lower East Side street. In 1880 Johnson’s painting prompted the critic S. G. W. Benjamin to claim that no one who sees its “rollicking group of boys and girls playing on the rusty wreck of an abandoned mail-​carriage, can ever doubt again the possibilities of genre art in this country.”3 Framed by the heading “To Revive the Art of Every-​Day Life,” The Old Stage Coach stands for American genre painting’s past and Street Carousel its present. Setting is only the most obvious contrast between these rural and urban scenes: between, for example, Johnson’s tight, Düsseldorf-​trained brushwork and Myers’s more varied surface. The differences—and similarities—between the two works illuminate the contentious debate about genre painting’s place in early twentieth-​century American art. genre painting in a new century  ( 19 )

Fig. 5  Eastman Johnson, The Old Stagecoach, 1871. Oil on canvas, 36 ¼ × 6 ⅛ in. (92.08 × 152.72 cm). Layton Art Collection Inc., Gift of Frederick Layton, at the Milwaukee Art Museum L1888.22. Photo: John R. Glembin.

“An inspection of the current art exhibitions would show genre painting almost completely in abeyance,” began Mather’s essay when it first appeared in the New York Evening Post as “Status of Genre Painting,” before being reprinted in the Nation and then condensed and illustrated in the Literary Digest.4 Following a well-​established line of argument, Mather explains that a once vibrant and vital form had failed to keep pace with the intellectual and cultural currents of the preceding decades and lost its capacity to describe the modern world. Regretting this turn of events, Mather urged a revival, identifying in Myers and other American artists hope for a modern genre painting. This story of decline and rebirth fitted the era’s feisty and insightful newspaper art criticism, pitched, as Mather elsewhere observed, at the “proverbial wayfaring man.”5 “The writer in the Evening Post does not much interest us,” came Will Hutchins’s quick-​fire response in the Springfield Republican, “and largely because he does not seem to consider or care for what has actually been done already.” Hutchins, a painter and occasional critic, claimed a commonsense view of the American genre tradition. Surely, Eastman Johnson’s “great popular successes were in genre,” Winslow Homer might now paint seascapes but he “never forgets his sense of the power of the human element,” and “then there is Brown, is he not a genre painter of great popularity?”6 These objections carry weight, as Mather’s history of American genre painting is cursory at best, but miss the wider point, which was not about the prevalence or popularity of genre painting but

( 20 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Fig. 6  Illustrations from Frank Jewett Mather, “To Revive the Art of Every-​Day Life,” Literary Digest, February 16, 1907, 260–61. The University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-​Champaign.

the way “the painting of scenes of everyday life is not merely neglected, but discredited” by art critics and younger artists. The ongoing presence of Brown, Henry, and other genre painters of their generation was a source of amusement and consternation for many critics. On seeing Brown’s American Farmer (1908) at the 1909 National Academy Spring Exhibition, one drolly observed that “the esteemed veteran has gone over to the enemy.” Spotting signs of impressionist technique, including “purple shadows,” they warned that “Father Brown is on the warpath of modernity.” During the following year’s Spring Exhibition, James Huneker explained that to recover from the modernist painting at Alfred Stieglitz’s Little Gallery, “We confess we went up to the Academy in a chastened mood and sought the compositions of Gilbert Gaul, Henry (not ‘Oh!’ Henry, but E. L.) and dear old J. G. Brown.”7 These humorous notes cast genre painting as an arcane form and as a comfort blanket amid the maelstrom of modern art. That sense of familiarity, engendered, for example, by Brown’s frequent repetition of the newsboy and bootblack types (see fig. 23), was part of genre’s problem. Mather explains that the once great European tradition had, over the course of the nineteenth century, been “stifled” in its “dotage” by the “groundswell of Romanticism.” The Romantic turn toward the imaginative, the exotic, and “the outré” had “dealt familiar painting its death-​blow.” Impressionism and the painting that followed from it genre painting in a new century  ( 21 )

emphasized idiosyncratic style and novelty. By contrast, late nineteenth-​century appreciations of genre painting showed little concern for these qualities. Indeed, Benjamin had attributed Johnson’s success to familiar motifs, including “homely scenes of rustic negro life,” and saw “nothing startling or especially novel in the style of Mr. Johnson. It is quiet and unsensational.” Encountering The Old Stage Coach at the newly installed Layton Art Gallery of Milwaukee, one critic called it “an old friend of many years ago.”8 Genre painting is sometimes glossed as “familiar painting,” and its popular appeal rests in part on its comforting repetitions, as opposed to the shocks provoked by Stieglitz and the Armory Show in the 1910s. Mather was not alone in feeling that something had been lost with the rejection of this unsensational art. In Modern Painting (1893), an influential book on both sides of the Atlantic, novelist and critic George Moore had railed against painters in whom he saw the influence of Romanticism and impressionism breeding “weak febrile idiosyncrasy.” As a corrective, he argued, “If the work is good, very little personality is required. Are the individual temperaments of Terburg [Gerard ter Borch], [Gabriël] Metzu, and Peter de Hoogh [Pieter de Hooch] very strikingly exhibited in their pictures?”9 This appeal aligns with period accounts of seventeenth-​century Dutch genre painting, such as Eugène Fromentin’s claim that freedom from the demands of church and aristocracy produced an art of the soil and the people, a “painting for the crowd, consisting of the citizen, the working-​man, the upstart, and the first comer, entirely made for them and made of them.” In a poetic evocation of genre’s quiet power, Fromentin wrote that to picture the Dutch Republic to itself, painting had “to become humble for humble things, little for little things, subtle for subtleties; to welcome all without omission or disdain; to enter into their intimacy familiarly, and affectionately into their habits.”10 This Dutch ideal of a humble art of the people was frequently used as a measure for later painters of everyday life but also suggests why genre painting was out of step with an art world that, Moore aside, prized individualism and originality. If familiarity was one cause of genre’s decline, attachment to sentiment and story was another. “The children play at stagecoaching, and one is driving a team of six of both sexes and colors,” writes the critic who hailed The Old Stage Coach as an old friend. “There are the steady ones, the kicker and the saucy black mare ready for any freak, and the passengers climb in for their imaginary journey.”11 An earlier commentator for the Cleveland Herald wrought similar sentiments from the picture: On the bright meadow grass an old coach stranded and wrecked beyond hope of resurrection, but in and about it the merriest crowd of happy, barefooted elves that ever devised mischief. The wheels are gone, and there is no tongue, but from the old boot a merry face peeps out, and through the curtainless windows you see charming little country damsels as soberly seated and as ( 22 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

carefully holding their dolls as if they were really on a journey. There is no baggage visible, but the passengers crave top seats. One boy in a rapture of excitement and delight stands aloft swinging his broken bat. A loud hurrah leaves his open lips. Two little girls are perched just behind the driver’s box; one has a broken parasol held with coquettish grace; but the spirit of the thing is in the driver’s attitude. See how he holds his reins!12 This way of viewing or, perhaps more accurately, reading genre painting to identify and verbalize the gestures, markers of identity, settings, and other telling details from which story may be made was as old as the tradition itself. It is also surprisingly persistent: art historian Patricia Hills indulges the thought that Johnson’s children “have thrown aside their school books and lunch pails” before pulling back to observe that the painting is “unabashedly anecdotal.”13 By the end of the nineteenth century anecdote and sentiment were precisely that which divided art critics from popular public taste. The public that voted Thomas Hovenden’s story-​laden genre scene Breaking Home Ties (1890) the best painting at the 1893 World’s Fair was increasingly emboldened in its own opinions on art and unconcerned that they ran counter to voices of expertise and authority. Doubling down, the critics developed an elitist art discourse in which narrative painters were seen as “pandering to conservative tastes and opposing change.” In 1895 the journalist Andrew Carpenter Wheeler, who styled himself Nym Crynkle, felt the need to defend John George Brown against such charges: “Of course I know that most of Mr. Brown’s compositions are story pictures . . . and that being story pictures they appeal less to the technical critic than to the sensibilities of the human being.” Crynkle sets his lay admiration for Brown’s storytelling against the disdain of a specialized but suspiciously inhuman expert. One such expert, Charles Caffin, complained of Brown’s street boys that the “softening of the type pleased a sentimental public.”14 Here and elsewhere in his 1907 Story of American Painting, a broad historical survey aimed at a general readership, Caffin used critical commentary on popular figures like Brown to stake out the terms of formalist art criticism. Where Caffin objected to the softening or familiarity of genre painting’s types, it is the act of and reliance on typing itself that in retrospect appears the most troubling aspect of the tradition. Nineteenth-​century genre paintings instigated, circulated, and normalized racist and sexist stereotypes, as in the description of The Old Stage Coach, which casually applies animalistic and sexualized imagery to the African American girl, identified as a “saucy black mare ready for any freak.” Johnson had been known for African American subjects since his Old Kentucky Home (Negro Life at the South) (1859), a painting that suggests some sympathy for the people it depicts but also reproduces crude stereotypes. While the girl at far left in The Old Stage Coach does not seem more caricatured than her white companions, the painting was made in an idiom and by an genre painting in a new century  ( 23 )

artist who gave viewers license to see her difference. Brown utilized racist stereotypes, as in A Jolly Lot (1885), where an African American boy plays the fool to entertain a white audience, while his repetition of white newsboy types alone and in groups contributed to the normalization of whiteness and construction of racial difference. Johnson and Brown, like other nineteenth-​century genre painters, consistently constructed scenes that distance white middle-​class painters and viewers from African American and white working-​class subjects. While art historians have identified instances in which they and their peers produced sympathetic and dignified depictions, genre painting as a form was implicated in and structured around stereotyped and condescending ways of seeing. It was other aspects of the tradition that led Mather to declare “that genre painting should be revived hardly needs argument. If only to open the eyes of our generation to the beauty that lies at its door, if only to leave some worthy memory of our walk and conversation to posterity, we need the interpreter of everyday life.” Could twentieth-​century genre painting escape familiarity, sentiment, and anecdote, or indeed stereotyping and othering, to perform this role? For his contemporaries and most subsequent histories of American art, the decline of genre painting was a matter of fact. But Mather, by broadening his sense of what such painting might look like, saw that happily, there are suggestions of a revival of this homely art, and paradoxically enough, it is the impressionists who bear the gifts. It is the followers of Manet and Monet, who profess an entirely impersonal devotion to problems of light, that are actually producing as if incidentally the best genre painting. At home one may recall Childe Hassam’s occasional excursions in this field, Tarbell’s transcripts of country house and studio life, the fresh and vivid impressions of New York streets by Glackens, John Sloan, and George Luks. Good genre is rarely brusque; it wants a quiet relish of the human comedy. Truly in the great tradition of genre seems to us Jerome Myers’s visions of our slums. Here is the brooding quality that constitutes the dignity of a homely art: here is the balance between personal interests and play of chromatic light and shade, that one notes in the sober products of the Dutch school.15 Mather here condenses many of the themes circulating in period discussion of genre painting: the apparent tension with impressionism and modernist formalism, the fuzzy traits such as homeliness that define the category, and the appeal to seventeenth-​century Dutch painting as the locus of true genre. Mather’s new genre painters were an eclectic mix. Frederick Childe Hassam and Tarbell were members of the Ten, an exhibition group of commercially successful artists, and Tarbell was also identified as the leader of the Boston School. Both groups worked in modified impressionist techniques, typically depicting scenes of bourgeois leisure ( 24 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

and domesticity. William Glackens, George Luks, and John Sloan were, by contrast, identified as realists and with New York street life at the time, and as the Ashcan School retrospectively. All, as Mather suggests, took cues from impressionists. But where Childe Hassam and Tarbell took up the late impressionisms they encountered as students in Paris and painted vivid sunlit parks and well-​appointed interiors, Sloan and his peers pursued, at least in the early phase of their careers, Manet’s dark palette, seamy subject matter, and dedication to painting modern urban life. Critics called Tarbell’s paintings “lessons in the holiness of beauty” and associated Sloan and his peers with the ugly and sordid; Sloan complained of the “poor Boston brand of painting.”16 That Mather could bring these distinct, even opposing, groups together is indicative of the way genre painting disrupts established categories and narratives of American art history.

Jerome Myers’s Cute Slums Myers stood for modern painting on the pages of the Literary Digest in contrast to the antiquated Johnson. His Street Carousel carried distinctly contemporary connotations: the women’s shawls and aprons and men’s hats and beards identify them with the Jewish and Italian migration that reached its peak the year after the painting was made; the densely populated commercial and residential buildings and taller tenements rising behind them were the site of a new polyglot and cosmopolitan urban culture. This attention to such neighborhoods led the campaigning Independent newspaper to cast Myers as a Jacob Riis–like urban reformer, seeing in his 1908 solo exhibition “the growing consciousness of the existence in our cities of the many who make the great crowds for whom there can be no hope under present conditions.”17 This exhibition was immediately followed at Macbeth Gallery by The Eight, which featured city paintings by Glackens, Luks, and Sloan. That coincidence, together with their shared friendship, Philadelphia roots, and fascination with New York street life, led later art histories to cast Myers as a fringe member of the Ashcan school who pursued the group’s gritty realism but “clothed it in romance.” However, Myers vehemently opposed urban reform, preferring the slums left as they were, and, going by his descriptions of his own work in his 1940 memoir, Artist in Manhattan, probably agreed with Robert Henri, who felt he did not fit in The Eight because of “the sentimentality of his work.”18 Indeed, Myers seems closer to Johnson and Brown than Sloan and Luks, and his painting is better understood as an adaptation of their sentimental genre painting to modern urban life than as a realist rejection of that tradition. This affinity with earlier genre painters and remove from the Ashcan School was apparent to critics at the time. “A lot of fun used to be poked at the late J. G. Brown because of the cleanliness of his newsboys and bootblacks,” explained C. Owen Lubin. genre painting in a new century  ( 25 )

Fig. 7  Jerome Myers, The Tambourine, 1905. Oil on canvas, 22 × 32 in. (55.88 × 81.28 cm); framed: 28 ⅛ × 38 ¼ × 2 ⅜ in. (71.44 × 97.15 × 6.03 cm). Acquired 1942, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

“They were always pink and sweet and ready for Sunday school, with the exception of an academic tear or so in their garments. He liked his East side well washed, scraped and deodorized. So does Jerome Myers.” Luks’s Mary Ellis (n.d.), Lublin noted, “would go through one of Mr. Myers’s dainty crowds like a cyclone.” These humorous remarks chime with Mather, who observed that “much of the irresistibleness of Jerome Myers comes from a kind of tenderness of spirit,” and the critic and collector Duncan Phillips, who praised him as “not a journalist, nor a socialist, nor a sensationalist of any sort, but a kindly observer with a passion for humanity.”19 Phillips also noted that Myers “loves to see again and again the East Side children”; where the former sketch reporters Glackens and Sloan scoured the city for novel subject matter, he followed the genre practice of developing a small repertory of types and motifs. Street Carousel and The Tambourine (1905; fig. 7) are typical in subject, scale, and composition of city scenes made over several decades. In contrast to Luks’s slashing strokes and smears or the abbreviations and gestures of Sloan’s crowd paintings, Street Carousel is worked in small dabs precise enough to pick out individual bricks and the ornate design on the side of the carousel. While couched in disparaging terms, the art historian Milton Brown’s claim that Myers’s “primitive technique and lack of sophistication give his people a doll-​like

( 26 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

quality” catches the way that each figure has a kind of formal autonomy; surrounded by a hint of line, set in their own unbroken light, arranged in crowds free of jostling or indeed gentler impacts.20 Calling Myers’s crowds of children irresistible, dainty, and doll-​like draws out the precise, even finicky, way in which they are rendered, but also their cuteness. While “cute” was not a word that Myers’s admirers used to describe his paintings, it fits their look and the appeal they held. A decade after praising him as “a kindly observer” of children, Phillips wrote, “Myers loves to see and to draw their little legs and backs expressing exuberant reactions to whatever is going on.” Another two decades on, when acquiring The Tambourine for his collection of modern art after seeing it at Myers’s 1941 memorial exhibition, he declared, “This does seem to be his masterpiece and I cannot resist it.”21 Myers was commercially successful in a way that Ashcan School painters like Sloan were not, irresistible to Phillips and other collectors to the extent that his friend Guy Pène du Bois observed that “as a rule his canvases are sold before they can reach a dealer’s hands.”22 Cute, as literary theorist Sianne Ngai explains, is a profoundly consumer aesthetic bound to strong feelings for things—an intense, intimate possession of commodities that finds expression in a desire to manipulate and squeeze.23 In Street Carousel a group of children wait their turns to go on the ride. One little fellow has squished his pudgy body into a small wooden cart. The way his rounded, malleable form just fits the rigid square, and so is marked as something to be held and contained, meets Ngai’s observation that the cute “aesthetic depends on a softness that invites physical touching—or, to use a more provocative verb, fondling.” In front of this boy a little girl with a froufrou pink dress and coordinating parasol puts the back of her hand to her chin and tilts her head just so as she talks to a friend whose own hand is snuggled deep in the pocket of a neat brown pinafore. While Myers’s canvases are generally marked by precision and detail, faces tend to be somewhat stylized—with lines and dots for eyes and mouths—and indistinct. With her outsize black dot eyes and the hint of red lips set in wide, rounded cheeks, the girl in pink follows Ngai’s suggestion that “the smaller and less formally articulated or more bloblike the object, the cuter it becomes.”24 Myers’s streets with human-​scaled buildings featuring stoops, balconies, shutters, garrets, awnings, and decorated shop fronts are, like his children, cute, in a manner acknowledged in twenty-​first-​century real estate parlance. The insistent cuteness of Myers’s scenes encourages the kind of sentimental investment that nineteenth-​century commentators made in Johnson’s The Old Stage Coach. Will the carousel close before the children get their turn? What if they cannot find their coin when they get to the step? Myers and his Ashcan School peers were at the epicenter of the first commercial exploitation of cute. Glackens’s wife, Edith Dimock, painted scenes of city childhood that

genre painting in a new century  ( 27 )

were even more exuberantly “scraped and deodorized” than Myers’s (and were among the few American works John Quinn purchased at the Armory Show); J. R. Shaver and other New York commercial illustrators contributed covers and cartoons to Life magazine based around the exploits of ragged urchins; Rose O’Neill’s Kewpie comics and dolls and Grace Drayton’s Campbell’s Soup kids emerged from the same studios and art schools as Ashcan realism. Ngai argues that O’Neill’s and Drayton’s “wide-​eyed, round-​faced, and chubby-​cheeked” creations had a “physical vigor” that meant that they were not yet a full realization of the cute “aesthetic of accentuated helplessness and vulnerability” that emerged in American mass culture after the First World War.25 But the street kids Myers and Shaver depicted and the slums they inhabited were themselves vulnerable and imperiled, at least according to the way these artists saw the city. This particular sense of the slums was articulated when Myers, Shaver, Luks, and Sloan were interviewed by Louis Baury for a 1911 Bookman article, “The Message of Proletaire.” Introduced as an artist of “depth and aesthetic sensitiveness,” Myers describes city slums as the lone site of resistance to a society dedicated to “a levelling of all things to one plane.” Where clothes are chosen and worn elsewhere in New York according to the dictates of fashion, in the slums “the waist line remains where nature placed it, the hat or piece of lace which adorns the head is in character with the wearer, and the garments, even though they be frayed and worn, fall into loose, easy lines.” This sense of the characterful slum is apparent in the dress and demeanor of the adult figures in Street Carousel or Sunday Morning (1907), which Myers described as “the Italian quarter of the city; the early groups out on their Sunday parade. . . . Here are life-​loving men strolling along with their wives and children, all unhampered by traffic rules; there are no traffic signs, no safety zones, no automobile peril.” He told Baury that such neighborhoods were threatened as “schools, missions, settlement-​houses, and slum workers bring to bear upon them the levelling, systematising tendencies of the country and the time.”26 Like many later twentieth-​century observers, Myers’s eye was drawn to the detail of everyday life at the moment when change made the familiar and overlooked suddenly visible. Myers’s sentimental vision of the slums and opposition to the homogenizing effects of progressive reform was a common stance. In 1909 Sloan noted, “I am rather more interested in the human beings themselves than in the schemes for betterment. In fact, I rather wonder if they will be so interesting when they are all comfortable and happy.” A few years later, in his sketch “The Fabulous East Side,” James Huneker fondly recalled the neighborhood of the 1890s, “still virginal to settlement-​workers, sociological cranks, impertinent reformers, self-​advertising politicians, billionaire socialists, and the ubiquitous newspaper man.” By the early 1910s, Huneker sighed, “the sentimentalist feels a heart pang to see the order, the cleanliness, the wide streets, the playgrounds, the big boulevards, the absence of indigence that have spoiled the most interesting part of New York City.” If this dismay at efforts to improve living conditions that spoil the interest ( 28 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

and charm of slum areas appears callous, Randolph Bourne’s 1916 Atlantic Monthly essay “Trans-​National America” offers a more compassionate and carefully articulated take. “What we emphatically do not want,” Bourne argues regarding the “foreign savor” of immigrant communities, “is that these distinctive qualities should be washed out into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity.” In Bourne’s vision, “national colonies” such as the Lower East Side’s Italian and Jewish neighborhoods provide a bulwark against “the American culture of the cheap newspaper, the ‘movies,’ the popular song, the ubiquitous automobile.”27 The desire to protect and preserve their unique qualities was closely related to the characterization and depiction of slums as cute; as, that is, things precious, threatened, and in an odd but insistent sense diminutive. The name “Little Italy” expresses this sense of the ethnic enclave as a compact space set apart from the homogenous city that surrounds and encroaches upon it. Huneker suggested that, in scenes like Street Carousel, Myers “brings to us the treasures of the humble: their little joys—so joyous in their constant misery—so appalling—their daily ways, goings and comings.” In his memoir, Myers describes Corner Mart (1905) as “a quiet little corner, where the neat little houses had their neat little tenants, who spent afternoons fishing in the East River nearby.”28 There are strong echoes here of Fromentin’s claim that painting in the Dutch Republic had “to become humble for humble things, little for little things,” and thus a correlation with the sense of seventeenth-​century Holland as a small republic threatened by vast empires. In Baury’s “The Message of Proletaire” Myers limits the language of diminution to calling the Lower East Side a “quaint quarter,” but the illustrator J. R. Shaver gives full expression to this vision of slum children. His words are accompanied by his Life illustration When the Slot Machine Stuck (1913; fig. 8), in which another group of kids clusters on the street, all baggy dungarees and ragged pants, straw hats and squat bodies, clamoring to be involved in an effort to forcibly extract “pepsin gum” that seems a little less innocent than Myers’s street carousel. To one side of Shaver’s group a smaller child has fallen and lies sprawling on the ground, left hand splayed, chin in the dirt, feet thrust out helpless, vulnerable, and so cute. Baury describes the “shy, reticent little folk” in Shaver’s illustrations as “ ‘his kids,’ ” echoing the way John George Brown and other earlier genre painters took ownership of particular types. “You can’t help but love them,” Shaver explains, “because they’re so appealing and so absolutely natural!” Such claims, in which the slum becomes the threatened site of unaffected nature, reverse the rural-​urban divide articulated in much late nineteenth-​century American culture, including genre paintings of country children such as Johnson’s The Old Stage Coach. Shaver makes that inversion explicit: “From what I’ve seen of slum children . . . I should say that they are the healthiest specimens of young America running around anywhere. Yes healthier even than country children, and certainly much keener, much more quick genre painting in a new century  ( 29 )

Fig. 8 J. R. Shaver, When the Slot Machine Stuck, reproduced in Little Shavers: Sketches from Real Life (New York: Century, 1913). Author’s collection.

witted.” Myers shared this attitude, later writing that “the happiness of children, their number and their well being amply made up for the parent’s privation.”29 Children flourish not in the countryside but in the city and are threatened not by slum environments but by the leveling forces of social reform and mass culture. This was a significant reworking of earlier ways of picturing childhood in genre scenes. Brown’s urban bootblacks and newsboys, like those who populated Horatio Alger’s closely related rags-​to-​riches tales, were defined by work, not play. From the late 1870s Brown divided his time between painting this city boy type in the winter and less worldly country boy and girl types while he summered in the Catskills.30 The “insular child’s arcadia” of “The Barefoot Boy” of John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1855 poem and Johnson’s 1860 painting of the same name as well as The Old Stage Coach and Winslow Homer’s Snap the Whip (1872) became, in art historian Sarah Burns’s words, “a potent emblem of what had been lost, both from the individual life and the life of the nation.”31 A deep nostalgia found expression in such images as America became increasingly urbanized and sivilized. Myers, Shaver, and others appropriate and repurpose the cuteness and sentiment of these rural types and motifs to express equivalent feelings for a phase of urban life that, in turn, they saw passing before their eyes.

Edmund Tarbell’s Dutch Interiors Myers bore a strong physical resemblance to Rembrandt van Rijn and had the habit of painting himself “after” Rembrandt’s self-​portraits, floppy hat and all. A 1915 “Who’s Who ( 30 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

in American Art” entry explains, “Back somewhere in his genealogy, the family of Myers was born in or adopted Holland. Jerome’s memory of Holland is vague. He was born in Virginia.” Making Myers a Dutch Virginian was not simply a joke but fits the “Holland mania” that led early twentieth-​century Americans to look to the Dutch Republic as an alternative point of national origin, at once more entrepreneurial, progressive, and ascetic than seventeenth-​century Britain.32 “Were Rembrandt living and working among us here and now,” Myers explained in an expression of late-​life disappointment at the way art world tastes had turned against him, “he would be told that his pictures are too low in tone.” In this spirit, Phillips observed that “as [Pieter] Breughel and [David] Teniers and [ Jan] Steen loved to paint the recreations and amusements of the poor, so Jerome Myers enjoys his self-​imposed mission of representing the East Side people of New York.” Identifying with seventeenth-​century Dutch painting could mean claiming the low subject matter of Steen or suggest aspirations to the “high life” beauty of Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer. No Americans were more closely associated with the latter than the Boston School painters Edmund Tarbell, Frank W. Benson, and Philip Hale.33 These artists moved from immersion in impressionism as students in Paris to teaching positions at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) School in Boston, where they developed a commercially successful repertoire of styles and subjects. In the first decade of the twentieth century Tarbell made a series of works, including Girl Crocheting (1904), New England Interior (1906; fig. 9), and Girl Reading (1909), that insist on a relationship to Vermeer. In December 1906 the Boston Sunday Herald hailed Tarbell’s Girl Crocheting as “The Best Picture in America”: “there are some sober-​minded persons who can see in the little painting qualities surpassing some of those in the work of the old Dutch masters, who delighted in the portraiture of interiors and the quiet home life of the Hollanders.” The full-​page spread reproduced Tarbell’s painting and Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (1657), which was captioned “Van Der Meer Interior Suggesting Style of Mr. Tarbell’s Picture.”34 Acknowledgment of Tarbell’s connection to Vermeer extended beyond Boston. On viewing New England Interior, which was shown “unfinished” two months later at the Ten’s 1907 Montross Gallery exhibition in New York, Huneker enthused about the quality of the work before wearily acknowledging the familiarity of the Dutch comparison: “Tarbell is represented by only one picture, but it suffices; a New England [interior], unfinished, yet finished beyond the power of other painters. You say Vermeer or Terburg.”35 The point was perhaps so familiar because almost everyone who commented on Tarbell’s art in this period, whether conservative critics like Royal Cortissoz or Kenyon Cox or more forward-​looking figures like Huneker and Caffin, acknowledged its relationship to Dutch genre painting in general and Vermeer in particular. In pursuit of a Dutch ideal of order and beauty, Tarbell repeatedly arranged the furniture, the objets d’art, the drapes, and the light of his New Castle, New Hampshire, genre painting in a new century  ( 31 )

Fig. 9  Edmund C. Tarbell, New England Interior, 1906. Oil on canvas, 30 ⅜ × 25 ¼ in. (77.15 × 64.13 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Mrs. Eugene C. Eppinger 1985.66.

home around his daughters, who modeled bourgeois clothes, repose, and pastimes. That such scenes were understood as genre correlates with contemporaneous reappraisals of the generic category. Will Hutchins had complained that by including the Belgian society painter Alfred Stevens in his account of genre painting Mather went against “the accepted meaning of the present day,” which, he explained, “means the common life of common people.” But anglophone critics, especially following the “rediscovery” of Vermeer by Theophile Thoré-​Bürger, had shifted from a mid-​nineteenth-c​ entury focus on low subjects to recognize Dutch genre painting as a broad category that ran from the coarse and common to high-​life scenes and aesthetic refinement. “The analogy of this art to that of Vermeer is apparent at a glance,” explained Cox in a 1909 essay on Tarbell. “There is the same simplicity of subject, the same reliance on sheer perfection of representation—the same delicate truth of values, the same exquisite sensitiveness to gradations of light.”36 The association was carefully cultivated: Tarbell’s light falls, like Vermeer’s, from high windows into sparsely furnished rooms decorated with fine paintings and objects where women sit or stand absorbed in some combination of delicate tasks, hushed talk, reading, and silent contemplation; on at least one occasion the allusion is overt, as the corner of a reproduction of Vermeer’s The Music Lesson (ca. 1662–65) appears in Tarbell’s Preparing for the Matinee (1907).37 Such allusions were grounded in the Boston School’s depth of scholarship on Vermeer, which culminated in Hale’s 1913 monograph on the artist. While Tarbell had seen and admired Dutch paintings as a student in Europe in the mid-1880s, Isabella Stewart Gardner’s 1892 acquisition of The Concert (ca. 1658–60) brought Vermeer to Boston. The series that begins with Girl Crocheting roughly coincides with the public display of The Concert following the 1903 opening of Fenway Court. What was it for Tarbell to paint like Vermeer? In The American Scene (1907) Henry James made much of the sight of European objects in American settings, with the Aphrodite sculpture at the Boston Art Museum prompting the wry declaration “He has not seen a fine Greek thing till he has seen it in America.” Encountering Gardner’s Fenway Court against the backdrop of a moribund Boston haunted by its former glories, James found solace in his wealthy friend’s creation: “It is in presence of the results magnificently attained, the energy triumphant over everything, that one feels the fine old disinterested tradition of Boston least broken.” Literary historian Beverly Haviland explains that in The American Scene Gardner’s collection “performs a valuable cultural function not merely because it is an example of taste as a creative rather than a merely consuming act but because, even while it remains private property, it is publicly available for others to study, to appreciate, and, perhaps, even to be inspired by.”38 Were Vermeer-​like paintings such as Girl Crocheting and New England Interior what Gardner and James had in mind? Some contemporaries doubted so: the gallerist Robert C. Vose dismissed Tarbell’s pupil William MacGregor Paxton with the witticism genre painting in a new century  ( 33 )

“A near Vermeer is a mere veneer”; Lincoln Kirstein recalled that while his teachers at the MFA School were enthralled by “Mrs. Jack Gardner’s beautiful Vermeer . . . she didn’t have much interest in any of them.”39 Others, though, were convinced there was more at stake. “If the inspiration of Vermeer is evident there is no trace of imitation,” Cox declared. “Mr. Tarbell is trying to do what Vermeer did, not to do it as Vermeer did it—still less to give the superficial aspect of the Dutchman’s pictures.”40 This claim frames questions that would recur across early twentieth-​century efforts to revive or reimagine genre painting: was it possible or desirable to picture contemporary everyday life within the idioms and assumptions of earlier eras? What form could or should a modern painting in the genre tradition take? When Girl Reading was shown at the Ten’s 1909 annual exhibition, Huneker saw “silver daylight, the cool light of New England. A girl bathed in its magic is reading. The spacing is alluring, from the chair to the wall, from the window to the chair. It is the Vermeer gambit, that no one will deny, but who can handle such difficult and lovely problems as Tarbell does?”41 Huneker’s patient phrasing measures out the dimensions of the room, rendering in language the poetics of interior space that Vermeer perfected and that, on this account, Tarbell consciously and carefully inhabits. That phrasing suggests an awareness of other influences too. Among the art objects in Tarbell’s rooms, alongside the paintings on the wall that make knowing reference to Dutch painting, are color woodblock prints, porcelain vases, and other evidence of the Japonism that he shared with both the French impressionists and many fellow Bostonians. Through the research, publications, and teaching of Ernest Fenollosa and Arthur Wesley Dow, Tarbell and his peers were versed in Japanese art. Dow’s influential book Composition took a structural approach to art making, conceiving the page or canvas as a space in which elements were located and manipulated. The terms of what Dow understood as Japanese aesthetics form a constant refrain: “A work of fine art constructed upon the principle of Subordination has all its parts related by delicate adjustments and balance of proportions, tone and color.”42 While neither Dow nor Huneker used the term, they invoke the Japanese aesthetic concept ma; the gap, negative space, or interval between things—chair and wall, window and chair—as an experiential site for the beholder. Ways of painting and seeing that entered Western art through and after impressionism thus mediate Tarbell’s perception and reproduction of Vermeer’s sense of space. For Cox, Huneker, and others, Tarbell’s engagement with seventeenth-​century Dutch painting was more than a nostalgic or imitative return. Art historian Michael Baxandall argues that the received notion of influence “seems to reverse the active/ passive relation which the historical actor experiences and the inferential beholder will wish to take into account. If one says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than Y did something to X. But in the consideration of good pictures and painters the second is always the more lively reality.” Baxandall ( 34 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

offers a long list of livelier alternatives to “influence,” which includes “draw on, resort to, avail oneself of, appropriate from . . . revive, continue, remodel, ape, emulate, travesty, parody . . . subvert, perpetuate, reduce” and ends “everyone will be able to think of others.”43 While it is hard to see such quiet canvases as New England Interior as active to the extent of parody or subversion, they do insist on some such relationship. Film theorist Richard Dyer develops a nuanced, multilayered definition of the term “pastiche,” which provides a useful addition to Baxandall’s list of what Y might do to X. Dyer frees pastiche from its close association with postmodernism by pointing up a longer history to the practice and diversifying its range of implications. Dyer’s gloss, “a kind of imitation that you are meant to know is an imitation,” and indeed the intended slight “a near Vermeer,” catch what Tarbell’s paintings do.44 Girl Crocheting, New England Interior, and like works are passive and imitative in a meaningful way. Just as Myers’s relocation of sentimental rustic genre motifs to the Lower East Side expressed complex feelings of nostalgia for a particular form of urban poverty, so Tarbell’s paintings, which recall Vermeer but in twentieth-​century settings and techniques, establish dialogue with the past within the genre tradition. They create spaces—“from the chair to the wall, from the window to the chair”— that encourage reflection on past and present, on seventeenth-​century Holland and twentieth-​century Boston, on Delft interiors and New England interiors. They ask not for comparison but contemplation, for acknowledgment of mutual or equivalent aesthetics and ideals. Intended to hang in Boston Brahmin homes, as New England Interior did when Catherine Codman acquired the painting, they acknowledge that they shared the city with The Concert (and indeed the many Dutch paintings amassed by the long line of art-​collecting Codmans).45 Tarbell’s paintings express a local culture that was cosmopolitan, that reached across the Atlantic and the Pacific, and that was in active dialogue with the European past. Gardner’s acquisition of The Concert and other masterpieces changed the way Boston saw itself, but, as Henry James recognized, and New England Interior offers a space to contemplate, Boston also made new ways to see Vermeer.

Modern Genre Painting While period art criticism often set genre painting against modern painting, it also sought to mediate between these terms. Thus, several critics argued that the best nineteenth-​century painters developed formalist qualities within the conventions of genre. Caffin explained that while Eastman Johnson had learned his craft “at a time when the prime consideration both with painters and the public was that a picture should represent an incident, a poem, or a story,” he came to treat these subjects “as an genre painting in a new century  ( 35 )

opportunity of inventing a scheme of harmonious colouring.”46 Mather’s account of the paradoxical revival of American genre by “followers of Manet and Monet, who profess an entirely impersonal devotion to problems of light,” makes a similar claim for Myers, Tarbell, and other contemporaries.47 Such arguments persisted into high modernist art criticism, with Clement Greenberg later tracing “space and light” and other elements of midcentury abstraction back to seventeenth-​century Dutch genre, “in the cases of Vermeer and de Hooch, with the recession of flat planes according to the modulation of light.”48 Influential early twentieth-​century critics returned repeatedly to the question of how painters might mediate between modernist formalism and genre painting’s attention to everyday life. Balancing formal and everyday concerns, Huneker explained that “many problems of atmosphere, clear and obscure and translucent, Myers has set himself to solve,” but also that “with Myers it is common humanity that is the shibboleth.” Myers’s own description of his (unlocated) painting The Girls (n.d.) begins, “A little fugue in grays, tender grays out of which softly emerge my dream children,” and ends with the hope that the painting might “keep the candid simplicity of these children as they face their world.”49 Here are genre painting’s sentiment and nostalgia (as well as its will to type and to possess) but also a language for the composition’s formal qualities. While “fugue” might invoke a hazy dream state, it also implies, after James McNeill Whistler, a kind of tonal and harmonious painting. On these terms Myers’s art could be positioned within the genre tradition and the trajectory of modernism, as when his paintings featured in Duncan Phillips’s modern art collection and gallery. A more concerted effort to elucidate modern genre painting centered on Tarbell. In a 1909 essay in the Studio on “The Problem of Modern Interior Painting,” the English critic T. Martin Wood discussed the work of a group of European painters—including Pierre Braquemond, Vilhelm Hammershøi, and William Orpen—who made paintings of well-​appointed rooms that were typically empty or occupied by a single figure. These were, Wood insisted, modern paintings in the way that they are “full of a human interest, created by inference alone where older art would have felt the introduction of a figure to be necessary.”50 Like the Danish painter Hammershøi, whom Wood has in mind here, Tarbell allowed apertures to create uncertainty so that human presence and its signs introduce a frisson of tension into still interior spaces. Dutch genre painters had used door and window openings from large foreground spaces into secondary scenes to generate spatial interest in small canvases. Tarbell knew this strategy as it is exemplified by de Hooch’s Interior of a Dutch House, a painting he encouraged the MFA to acquire in 1903.51 But while he and his peers often used such spatial divisions, this was done, as in the door quite precisely half-​open in New England Interior, in ways that play between seventeenth-​century Dutch constructions of the private, legible home and something more ambiguous. ( 36 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

These revisions to the genre interior involved not only the introduction of ambiguity but also a new formal and aesthetic approach. “In the old Dutch interior paintings,” Wood explains, “we feel the pleasure which the painters took in each little incident they painted.” But modern interior painting involved something more: To take pleasure in a kind of surface beauty, which is only to be found indoors, as the old masters took pleasure in it, and yet to be compelled to lose sight of it, to dissolve it all into tones and out of these to reconstruct it all over again with a miraculous incorporation of the light of which it is partly made—this is the problem of modern painting. By embracing truths which were beyond ancient vision, which are impossible to realize by ancient methods, this is how the not yet complete history of interior genre desires to complete itself.52 Wood returned to these formalist terms in a 1912 Art and Progress article, “Genre Painting,” which included Tarbell’s 1907 Girls Reading (plate 3) among its illustrations.53 Here the emphasis is again on color, tone, and a holistic sense of composition and design. In both pieces Wood identifies groups of contemporary artists who explore the bourgeois interiors, beautiful objects, muted human presence, and rarefied atmosphere of Vermeer’s and De Hooch’s high-​life genre but with the insights and innovations of impressionism. Caffin, who had close ties to London critics and journals and shared Wood’s aesthetic concerns, described Girls Reading as “a lesson in the holiness of beauty” in a profile of Tarbell for Harper’s Monthly. “We no longer regard them as genre in the old sense that their significance is to be calculated by their intimate representation of familiar things,” he explained. “It is true that such matters form the ostensible subject of his pictures; but they are merely the necessary substratum of fact upon which his real intention must be built—the fabric of subtle suggestion to one’s sense of abstract beauty.”54 It is not hard to see Girls Reading in this way. Through two large rectangular windows bright sunshine floods in on gauzy curtains, creating a swath of white that runs out along the folds in the fabric and gives to a mellower glow at its edges. The light from the curtained windows spreads through the room, pooling in patches of translucent material, in one girl’s hair ribbons and the loose sleeve of another’s blouse. This soft light on soft material contrasts with the strong parallel lines of the window frames that structure the composition, their corners meeting the rounded form of an ornamental vase. The girls’ dresses, the material draped over the arm of the couch, the polished floor and highly polished table, and the hand mirror all collect and refract that light, which is treated in brushstrokes like enough to offer an almost overwhelming homogeneity of surface but varied in subtle ways to convey the distinct effects of sunlight on glass, buffed hardwood, and crimped fabric. Everything gently shimmers and rustles. Other genre painting in a new century  ( 37 )

critics followed Caffin’s line, as in Leila Mechlin’s awkward assertion that “Mr. Tarbell’s pictures are not dependent for interest upon subjective significance.”55 Aesthetic design and abstract effect subsume subject matter; scenes of everyday life become vehicles for modernist formalism. These assertions fit with the rejection of genre painting’s anecdotes and “familiar things” in Caffin’s Story of American Painting, as well as broader efforts to assimilate advances in theory made by French painters and critics into Anglophone criticism. In practice this meant a heightened insistence on Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s separation of the arts in his Laocoön (1766) that lacked clarity and sophistication, at least until Roger Fry’s 1910 and 1912 postimpressionist exhibitions in London.56 Compromises such as the attempt to graft formalist aesthetics onto genre painting would be dismissed out of hand by doctrinaire modernists in the wake of those exhibitions and the 1913 Armory Show. Thus, the painter and critic Willard Huntington Wright attacked Mather as essentially a “scholastic pedant” who hung on Fry’s coattails, Caffin as “a kind of head-​master in the kindergarten of painting” whom Stieglitz had converted to modernism “largely through hypnotism,” and Huneker as “entertaining” but no more aesthetically advanced than Cox or Cortissoz.57 Still life, and to a lesser degree landscape, proved more suitable vehicles for modernist formal experimentation; fruit bowls and tableware, less resistant to being rendered subordinate than scenes of everyday life. It is hard, given subsequent developments, to see Myers or Tarbell as modernists, but easy to appreciate why their contemporaries were invested in seeing them in that way. The claims that they were modern genre painters make sense amid the compromises and confusions from which more stable definitions of modernism emerged.

Progressive Genre Painting These discussions of genre painting and modern art took place within the broader currents of Progressive Era thought. While there was no single doctrine, early twentieth-​century progressive ideas and movements were united in their emphasis on and faith in a trajectory of improvement and modernization.58 The implementation of modern practices, and in particular forms of efficiency and technical specialization, would lead to social “betterment” and cultural “uplift.” Experts and managers would improve everything from immigrant assimilation to agricultural production to homemaking. Several strands of modernism, with their quasi-​technical language and rejection of earlier modes of expression, bore close relation to these ways of thinking. However, American progressives shared a deep commitment to art’s utilitarian capacity to reach broad audiences and communicate and educate. To these ends, they sought out and called for visual art that engaged with everyday life rather than pursuing avant-​gardism ( 38 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

or introspection. Genre painting’s mix of familiarity and sentiment offered progressives an obvious, though troublingly backward-​looking, means to build community, communicate ideas, and enlist support for reform. Several of the critics who sought to mediate between modernism and the genre tradition also worked to bring specialized art discourse to broader publics. Caffin, Mather, and Mechlin regularly contributed to general interest publications like Scribner’s, Harper’s, and the Independent, were prominent on public lecture circuits, and wrote for art magazines “for laymen” such as Art and Progress. “Art is not something aside from everyday life, it is a common heritage, and as William Morris has said, we would not have art for a few,” declared the prospectus for Art and Progress, which Mechlin edited. The dissemination of high culture to popular audiences through magazines was part of a wider Progressive Era program of uplift; an expression of Progressivism’s “utopian faith in print.” Caffin’s profile of Tarbell was part of a Harper’s Monthly series on American and European painters that also took in other seemingly conservative painters, including Frank Benson and Lucien Simon. But Caffin showed “faith in print” by using these profiles to introduce French-​influenced ideas about modern art to Harper’s large and largely conservative readership.59 The apparent paradox of modern genre painting makes sense in this context and shares much with other progressive mediations. Indeed, modern genre paintings’ mediation of old and new aesthetics was paralleled in its mediation of nineteenth-​century and Progressive Era worldviews. Myers’s The Tambourine served both purposes. Myers’s studio was the first that Duncan Phillips visited; his Band Concert Night (1910, reworked 1916) was among Phillips’s first private acquisitions; several purchases made around 1920 established his work as a strong, coherent, and frequently exhibited “unit” at the nascent Phillips Memorial Gallery. Art historian David Scott cautions that Phillips only began to think of his collection as “a museum of modern art and its sources” in the late 1920s and explains that the Myers, Sloan, and Luks acquisitions at the start of that decade “reflect a broadening of sensibility and form a bridge to his eventual appreciation of the most advanced art of his epoch.”60 While these artists thus performed a mediating role in Phillips’s evolving taste, the 1942 acquisition of The Tambourine indicates that they continued to play a part in the story of modern art he wanted his collection to tell. By contrast, The Tambourine’s first owner, James Speyer, a Wall Street banker and philanthropist, was likely less interested in the paintings’ formal qualities than in its depiction of a Lower East Side scene related to his role as a founder and major financial backer of the University Settlement of New York.61 Myers’s sentimental scenes of slum life bore a vexed relationship to urban reform. There is little documentation of Speyer’s art collecting, which centered on eighteenth-​century French and Italian painting, and so claims about his personal interest genre painting in a new century  ( 39 )

in Myers can only be speculative. Was he moved to buy The Tambourine by the same feelings that shaped his philanthropy? Might it have been shown at the University Settlement House or used in its work? When, two years after Speyer bought the painting, the Independent lauded Myers’s 1908 solo exhibition for its expression of “the growing consciousness” of the need for urban reform, it explained that “because of the truth of his vision he can already move us very deeply.”62 The Independent was a Congregationalist abolitionist weekly that had embraced a broad platform of progressive reform. In the same period progressive settlement houses, such as Jane Addams’s Hull House in Chicago and New York’s University Settlement, led by James H. Hamilton, moved from models of Christian charity that equated poverty with moral failings to a secular, sociological concern with resources and institutions. Like Myers’s genre painting, progressive politics moved between nineteenth-​century practices and the emerging conditions of modernity; between, for example, the rhetoric of moral suasion, which might harness a sentimental painting’s capacity to “move us very deeply,” and an evidence-​based approach to Settlement work. Acknowledging that there were significant differences between Christian and secular approaches to urban poverty, Hamilton confidently stated that “the social betterment idea is held in common by all.” But, as he made clear to Louis Baury when claiming that “schools, missions, settlement-​houses, and slum workers” threaten characterful neighborhoods with “the levelling, systematising tendencies of the country and the time,” Myers felt differently.63 Speyer plowed vast sums of money into reforming the Lower East Side but owned for almost four decades the work of an artist who savored and wished to preserve the old life of the slum. That irony was replicated when the June 14, 1913, issue of the Survey— the Russell Sage Foundation’s “Journal of Constructive Philanthropy”—carried John George Brown’s painting of the bootblack “Paddy” on its cover (fig. 10). Inside, a short article, illustrated with Brown’s painting Heels over Head (1894), quotes the artist, who had died in February 1913 aged eighty-​two, complaining to the New York Times, “My boys are all gone.” Echoing Myers and J. R. Shaver, Brown praised old-​time newsboys as “alert, strong, healthy little chaps, with elastic bodies and frank courageous faces,” and expressed dismay that, with the advent of compulsory schooling, “the essence of vagabondia was gone.” The Survey contrasts Brown with another “old New Yorker,” the reform campaigner Jacob Riis, who had recently written in Harper’s Monthly celebrating the improved conditions and opportunities for the city’s impoverished children. The article goes on, “We know more about the influences of the street today and that the artist who idealized newsboys’ faces on canvas idealized as well their character and lives.” A decade later, the Survey’s October 1923 “Graphic” issue—“An illustrated magazine of social exploration, reaching out to wherever the tides of a generous progress are astir”—devoted seven pages to reproductions of Myers’s paintings and drawings, once more accompanied by Mather’s claim that these “visions of our slums are in the great ( 40 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Fig. 10  Survey 30, no. 11 ( June 14, 1913), cover. Photo: HathiTrust.

tradition of genre.”64 The Survey gave prominent cover and interior space to Brown’s art, which it deemed to represent a false, idealizing perspective; the Survey’s “Graphic” issue reproduced sentimental, nostalgic paintings by Myers, who was expressly opposed to its aims. Progressivism emphasized the utility of art: its capacity to record and inform, for uplift and suasion, and to engage with the world. In January 1908, the month before Myers was singled out for praise, the Independent’s editorial “The Futility of American Art” imagined the National Academy of Design’s Winter Exhibition “preserved intact for two thousand years” and then listed the unpainted elements of national life that future historians would remain unaware of. These included “the surgeon . . . the sand-​hog of the caisson . . . the Sunday school, the kindergarten, the sweat-​shop . . . the miner in the mountains working his prospect alone, the baby tied on the fire-​escape . . . the delivery room of the public library, and the grandstand at a foot-​ball contest.” Without using the term “genre painting,” the Independent echoed Mather’s appeal for an “interpreter of everyday life”: “We have our daily commonplace interests and duties, but men of genius who could idealize them for us and show us their deeper meaning are lacking.”65 This reads at once as an attack on the staid exhibitors at the Academy and genre painting in a new century  ( 41 )

on the increasingly formal concerns of modern art. Six months later Caffin framed his Harper’s Monthly profile of Tarbell in response to such complaints, extensively paraphrasing “The Futility of American Art.” He refuted its claim that American painters were “without ideas or ideals,” and the implication that Tarbell, a painter so absorbed by beauty, must have “retired into a quiet backwater, far from the real stream of thought and conduct.”66 Caffin goes on to mediate between the abstract beauty of Tarbell’s paintings and the utilitarian view of art that he assumed Harper’s readers shared with the Independent’s editors. Caffin’s aesthetics meshed with progressive political philosophy’s language of balance and harmony. For example, his praise for Tarbell’s capacity to “unify . . . myriad nuances into a chord of complete harmony” coincides with Herbert Croly’s call, in his influential Promise of American Life (1909), for “that harmony between public and private interest which must be the object of a national economic system.” His Harper’s Monthly profiles argue that the Boston School’s ideals “come nearer to those of seventeenth-​century Holland than to those of Italy” and that the Dutch Republic upheld a “democratic ideal, compact as a crystal.”67 He developed these ideas further in 1913’s Art for Life’s Sake, which must be one of the few books to devote equivalent attention to Johannes Vermeer and Frederick Winslow Taylor. Like many progressives, Caffin embraced the time and motion studies and models of industrial efficiency in Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) as a blueprint for reform, but came to the unusual conclusion “I know no better example of complexity, thus ordered into simpleness by Scientific-​Artistic Organization, than the Holland genre picture.”68 While the reference is generalized, Caffin has Vermeer in mind and thus Tarbell in the vicinity. Put another way, Tarbell saw, or allowed Caffin and perhaps other contemporaries to see, New England interiors not as timeless or outside history but as exemplars of the time of bourgeois domestic order. The nascent modernist aesthetic and wide-​ranging Progressivism of the first decade of the twentieth century created a particular prism through which Myers and Tarbell might be perceived as modern genre painters. Myers’s adaptation of the motifs and sentiments of bucolic idealized American childhood to immigrant neighborhoods of the Lower East Side aligned with the concerns of the urban reform movement. Tarbell’s picturing of his New Hampshire home as Vermeer had painted domestic space in Delft more than two hundred years earlier was not to retreat into a “quiet backwater,” but to give aesthetic expression to the continuity and progress of that bourgeois order from its first expression in seventeenth-​century Holland to its fullest expression in early twentieth-​century America. Both artists struck a balance between normative naturalism and the formal innovations of painting after impressionism that contemporaries saw as at once traditional and modern. Neither artist featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1935 American Genre survey, though, and few historians have ( 42 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

subsequently enlisted them to convey their era’s “walk and conversation to posterity.”69 Indeed, Tarbell in particular has been seen to avoid such everyday realities, as when art historian Elizabeth O’Leary observes that Boston School paintings rarely contain “evidence of the acute tensions between Boston’s upper class and the ever-​growing masses of immigrant workers.”70 In retrospect, Myers’s and Tarbell’s paintings are so freighted with historical allusion and with cute and beautiful affective and aesthetic qualities as to seem far removed from the everyday life of early twentieth-​century New York and New England.

Genre Painter or Illustrator? “There are two fallacies [that] the paintings of Edmund C. Tarbell controvert,” declared Mechlin in Art and Progress: “that the art which produced the Dutch Interiors of the time of Vermeer was peculiar to the place and era; and that all American genre painters have become illustrators.”71 The first point reiterates the established critical line on Tarbell; the second suggests that by 1910 the enterprises of genre painting and commercial illustration had become in various ways entwined. Straightforwardly, a great many painters in this period supported themselves with illustration commissions, blurring professional identities and the boundaries between art and commerce.72 More complicatedly, illustration became a term of invidious distinction, as in another Art and Progress critic’s observation that “we may find a group portrait or a genre painting occasionally dismissed as technically clever, but in quality ‘mere illustration.’ ” Thus, Mechlin elsewhere stated, “Placing no dependence upon what may be designated as a literary interest, and without forced sentiment, Mr. Tarbell has produced paintings both significant and appealing.”73 Such claims were assertions of both highbrow distinction and medium-​specificity: to say that Tarbell was a genre painter but not an illustrator was to observe that he did not need to take on commercial commissions and that his paintings were not reliant on literary sources and associations. By contrast, Huneker observed that, while New England Interior undoubtedly recalls Vermeer and Gerard ter Borch, “Tarbell has imprisoned also within this frame a separate national, rather sectional sentiment. It is American, and it is New England. The room with its window, above all, its background, fairly floats in atmosphere. The women are actual transcripts. A masterpiece in this genre.” Mather similarly describes such paintings as “transcripts of country house and studio life.” Given the critical investment in Tarbell’s formalism, this textual metaphor is striking; it acknowledges that the paintings record time and place in their subjects’ clothes and poses, the ornaments and paintings in the rooms, and the (paradoxically) colonial revival chairs and tables.74 In New England Interior, the two women seem animated by and engaged with one genre painting in a new century  ( 43 )

another, at least in contrast to the languid poses of Girls Reading and earlier works. The way that one woman’s hand intrudes into the lap and the personal space of her companion, who in turn seems to shy from her, introduces a crackle of tension into the becalmed, pristine interior, and perhaps this called to Huneker’s mind New England’s tradition of quiet-​spoken but powerfully persuasive women. This sense of a return to the world, to things and emotions and movements, is still more apparent in another painting, Josephine and Mercie (1908). Here, identified not just as “girls” but by their own names, Tarbell’s daughters are harder to dismiss as the “ostensible subject” or “substratum of facts” on which formalist concerns are pursued. Again, one girl reads, though with a face that suggests concentration and engagement, but the other writes, and apparently with some urgency, leaning forward into her pen and mess of papers. Perhaps the insistent materiality and lived experience of the everyday could only be suppressed and rendered subservient to formalism for so long. That possibility was, oddly, reinforced by the publication of Caffin’s “The Art of Edmund C. Tarbell” in the June 1908 issue of Harper’s Monthly. Late nineteenth-​century advances in print technology made it increasingly difficult to differentiate between the various kinds of images that appeared in illustrated newspapers and magazines. Photomechanical reproductions of oil paintings, drawings, and photographs—some made as unique works to be shown in galleries and sold to collectors, others commissioned by the publication and its advertisers as illustration—were all printed in like form to the same size and format and with similar captioning and design elements. This flattened distinctions between mediums, between original and copy, and between fine and commercial art.75 In that June 1908 Harper’s Monthly the photomechanical reproductions of seven Tarbell oil paintings that accompany Caffin’s essay look distinctly of a piece with the halftone plates made from Frank Craig’s illustrations for Grace Ellery Channing’s short story “The Beloved” (fig. 11) and W. D. Stevens’s illustrations for Alice Brown’s “The Discovery” that appear just a few pages earlier. Such moments point to the ways Tarbell’s paintings were, contrary to Mechlin’s claims, literally and figuratively proximate to narrative and other discursive frames. Both Craig’s and Stevens’s illustrations depict bourgeois women in flowing dresses in high-​ceilinged interiors decorated with fine objects and furniture. It would not have been hard for a casual browser of the magazine to imagine the two women pictured in New England Interior moving to the formal rooms of their home to receive guests as Craig shows Channing’s Mrs. Parminter doing, or more fancifully, for one of the Girls Reading to get caught up in complex romantic entanglements like Brown’s protagonist Lucy and end the day burning a love letter as in Stevens’s illustration. Even without the neat proximity created by the reproduction of Tarbell’s paintings in Harper’s Monthly, the protagonists, themes, and settings of Boston School oil painting existed in close, mutually supporting relation to this kind of periodical literature and illustration. Tarbell ( 44 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Fig. 11  Frank Craig, “Barre Was Making Himself the Attraction of the Hour,” 1908, engraving by J. H. Grimley, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, June 1908. The University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-​Champaign.

offered nuanced, beautiful oil paintings of its fictive world; short stories and novels brought thick description and narrative movement to the lives and scenes Tarbell pictured, enabling him to leave such matters unsaid. If reproductions of Tarbell’s genre paintings could look at a glance like illustration, could illustrations not look like, or simply be, genre paintings? Craig and Stevens cleave closely to scenes and details of Channing’s and Brown’s stories, but Harper’s Monthly also featured artists such as Elizabeth Shippen Green, who sometimes contributed story illustration of this kind but also produced stand-​alone works that did not directly illustrate any particular text. Were such images, which also often showed women at everyday work and leisure, not merely context for or supplement to paintings like Tarbell’s, but genre scenes in their own right? Mather thought not, explaining that standing in the way of a twentieth-​century revival of genre painting were “the cheapness and prevalency of photography, which gives merely the data, falsifying the impression of the times, and even more the surfeit of illustrations, superficial and mannered, which seem to be the record we wish, but are actually nothing of the kind. For seventeenth-​century Holland we may consult Hals, Terburg, Jan Steen, the Ostades, Metsu, and a score of others. For nineteenth-​century America our grandchildren will consult the files of the magazines. The difference speaks for itself.”76 This highhanded tone was typical of efforts to genre painting in a new century  ( 45 )

preserve the high, even sacred, status of the original, preferably oil-​on-​canvas, work of art during the first phases of mechanical reproduction. Mather’s argument is also typical of Progressivism’s contradictory urges: to bring art to the many but insist on the primacy of a form accessible only to the few; to value magazines as a means of disseminating information and ideas about art, but not art itself. The genre tradition Mather sought to revive began with art made not for the gallery but for the home, small and affordable enough to become everyday decoration, as might a cover or full-​page illustration removed from a magazine and pinned to the wall. Mather was chauvinistic not only about what might constitute genre painting but also about who might produce it. His list of Americans working from impressionism back to genre painting omits Mary Cassatt, whose work appeared in the Paris Impressionist Exhibitions from 1879 to 1881 and whose subsequent focus on scenes of maternal domesticity brought her closer to a painting of everyday life than most of the men he named. In his 1907 Story of American Painting, Caffin complained, in a further twist on the way genre painting and illustration had become entwined, that “a majority of the figure-​painters . . . have become directly infected with the prevailing pseudo-​ethics of the publishers.” Mass-​market magazines, with their predominantly female readership, had, he continued, produced art determined by “irreproachable table-​manners rather than by salient self-​expression.” The gendered implications of this claim were underscored in “A Note on American Illustration,” where Caffin bemoaned “the greater virility, variety and originality of foreign illustrations.”77 Green and her peers were thus doubly written out of early twentieth-​century debates about American genre painting, as women making woman-​centered art and as illustrators for mass-​market magazines.

Elizabeth Shippen Green’s Interior Illustrations Across seven full-​page color illustrations in the August 1905 Harper’s Monthly, Green’s The Mistress of the House shows a woman (not perhaps the same individual but variations on a type) tending to houseplants, sitting in a rocking chair at needlework in The Sewing Room (fig. 12), pruning roses, looking through bound illustrated volumes in The Library (plate 4), playing in a field with two girls, reading an illustrated book to one girl, taking afternoon tea with a friend in a spacious garden, and descending a picture-​lined staircase for dinner. These are familiar subjects for genre paintings, in which typically, from Vermeer to Tarbell, men picture women at leisure or work in the domestic sphere. But they take on different connotations when made by women, as in the seventeenth-​century Dutch artist Judith Leyster’s A Young Lady Holding a Lute with a Music Score on Her Lap in a Candlelit Interior (1631) or the antebellum American artist Lilly Martin Spencer’s Kiss Me and You’ll Kiss the ’Lasses (1856). Given the ( 46 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Fig. 12  Elizabeth Shippen Green, The Sewing Room, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, August 1905. The University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-​Champaign.

failure of art institutions and histories to acknowledge the work of women artists, it is unlikely that Green knew either Leyster or Spencer; certainly, neither featured in early twentieth-​century discussions of the genre tradition. But as in their work, the change of perspective on a familiar subject in her illustrations carried the potential to revive and renew the genre tradition. While in no way overtly political, Green’s art spoke to the pressing questions of women’s property, visibility, and intellectual and domestic labor. Like Tarbell’s paintings, Green’s stand-​alone illustrations fitted the discursive frame of Harper’s Monthly. Just a few pages before The Mistress of the House an Alice Brown short story begins: Abigail Bennet stood by the kitchen table, her mixing-​bowl before her. She hummed a little under her breath, as she paused, considering what to make. genre painting in a new century  ( 47 )

There were eggs on the table, in a round comfortable basket that had held successions of eggs for twenty years. There were flour and sugar in their respective boxes, and some butter in a plate. It was an April day, and Abigail’s eyes wandered to the kitchen window at the sound of a birdcall from the elm. A smile lighted her worn face. The winter had been a hard one, and now it was over and gone. This, also, was a moment’s peace in the midst of the day.78 Abigail is a farmer’s wife, less wealthy and less sophisticated than Green’s women appear to be. From this opening a slight morality tale unfolds about the seductive pleasure but then the moral danger of telling small lies as she manages her household around a lovestruck daughter and miserly husband. Brown’s setting and story do not correlate in any intended or specific way with Green’s illustrations, but their contributions to Harper’s Monthly are not unconnected. The appeal of Brown’s story lies in its attention to the emotional and sensory bonds to objects and places that build up through long habitation and habituated routine: to what it is to possess and use the same egg basket every day for twenty years; to the clink of a mixing bowl pushed against a measuring cup. In The Mistress of the House and elsewhere, Green finds a visual language for these experiences. Green, Violet Oakley, and Jessie Willcox Smith, known as the “Red Rose Girls,” shared both an unconventional domestic arrangement—living and working together in homes and studios outside Philadelphia between 1901 and 1911—and an aesthetic. A 1900 article on “Representative American Women Illustrators” grouped Green and Smith as “Decorative Workers”; art historian Anne Higonnet’s description of the way Smith “used line vigorously, creating an enchanting illusion of coherency and containment by binding all the elements of her composition into a decorative whole,” applies to Green also.79 In her interior scenes, patterns, parallels, tessellations, details, and voids combine to establish an order beyond the merely tidy, so that “Mistress” comes to connote a deep connection between interior and occupant. The ornate bentwood of The Sewing Room rocking chair entwines with the equally ornate swirls of the patterned rug while its latticed back aligns with the multiplied squares of the paneled door, both coincidences contingent on the posture of the seated woman. In The Library the extravagant drop of the woman’s sleeve grazes the edge of the volume she holds. It is just one of many instances where the curved lines of soft and rounded things— the teapot, the vases, the wicker chair—gracefully meet the rectilinear grid of books on and against which they are set. Where Caffin characterized magazine illustration as art made by men required to bend to the tastes of women, the woman in the library could quite plausibly be looking at Elizabeth Shippen Green illustrations in bound volumes of Harper’s Monthly, bringing artist, subject, and audience into a single shared experience. While the title The Mistress of the House may imply that the “Master” is absent ( 48 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

because out at work, Green and her companions at the Red Rose Inn had carved out space of their own in which to live and work, and careers independent of men. Nothing in the portfolio directly references this lived experience, but the seven illustrations evince a powerful sense of self-​possession. The Sewing Room and The Library depict the motif of well-​to-​do women sewing or reading in flowing gowns so frequently rendered by Boston School painters like Tarbell and Benson or, in a still more stylized manner, by their peers Thomas Wilmer Dewing and John White Alexander. Indeed, just a few pages after The Mistress of the House, a woodcut of Alexander’s painting The Favorite Corner (ca. 1905, now known as A Quiet Corner) shows a highly aestheticized female figure reclining by a window with a book. In an accompanying appreciation, W. Stanton Howard refers to the artist’s “happy combination of the actual with the ideal, of elegance with simplicity, of sentiment with style,” aesthetic terms that might equally be applied to Green’s illustrations. But Howard then traces the movement from Alexander’s artistic interest in “the appearance of objects under a singular beautiful light” to his “delicate tonal values” to his omission of “all details which would lessen the effect of the whole.”80 This is the subordination of matter to form that Caffin emphasized in his essay on Tarbell, but that Green’s work at least partially resists. Green’s illustration style, determined in part by the practical imperatives of color reproduction, combines planes of bright primary color with black outlines that are at times, as in the delineation of the woman’s back in The Library, thick and declarative. There is an equivalent purposefulness to the activities depicted. Where the book in the lap of the woman in Alexander’s The Favorite Corner seems a prop or prompt for transporting reverie, reading in The Library is a worldly, focused pursuit. It involves not one book but many; dozens of volumes are neatly but not uniformly arranged on the shelves, while others are spread-​eagled to preserve a page or strewn across the floor. The woman appears alert and engaged, holding one volume open on her lap with another at her feet and a separate sheet held at arm’s length as if cross-​referencing some image or idea. All this is shown in painstaking detail. Similarly, while the voluminous translucent sleeve at the center of The Sewing Room is illuminated by the elegant French window in the kind of fleeting effect of light on fabric that Tarbell sought, this serves to highlight the woman’s active arm, which reaches out for a reel of thread. Leaning forward in her chair, she sits erect, focused on the work at hand, her fingers taut in the at once firm and delicate grip required by needlework. Facture, composition, and content all insist on the lived, material qualities of everyday life. The domestic interior was a gendered setting that licensed female self-​expression but limited what might be expressed. Art historian Patricia Smith Scanlan explores the way that double bind was heightened by mass-​market magazine commissions in her account of the rise of Smith, Green, and other women illustrators. While these women “translated genre painting in a new century  ( 49 )

their perceived affinity for feminine subjects (childhood and motherhood) and styles (the decorative) into lucrative projects for magazines, print publishers, and advertisements,” the high-​profile publications they worker for “further solidified the gendering of the artists’ productions as the inevitable result of their femininity.”81 At the same time, though, the word and image networks and interlocking serials that characterize magazines like Harper’s Monthly offered ways to tell more complicated visual stories about women’s lives. The frontispiece to The Mistress of the House bears the subtitle “Being a series of pictures by Elizabeth Shippen Green,” placing capitalized emphasis on the seriality of the images; on their plenitude and their connected, sequential relationship to one another. Where Boston School paintings present such women in isolation and in stasis, the seven Mistress of the House illustrations makes clear that these moments, The Sewing Room and The Library, are just phases of a busy, varied day. Working exclusively for Harper’s Monthly, Green produced discrete series of this kind and illustrated short stories and the serialized novels of Richard Le Gallienne and Mrs. Humphry Ward. Her art was thus enmeshed in an emerging serial culture. Harper’s Monthly subscribers’ encounters with The Mistress of the House would have been mediated by their memory of Ward’s serialized novels illustrated by Green, at once filling in details hinted at by the illustrations and creating the expectation of a narrative movement from scene to scene, and by the portfolio’s place within the series of illustrations that Green contributed to the magazine month after month. Moreover, its picturing of domestic life correlated with illustrated articles and advice columns about homemaking published occasionally in Harper’s Monthly and prominently in Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, and with the advertisements for soap, polish, and other domestic products that underwrote these magazines. In these and other ways magazines encouraged and schooled readers to see images made for and reproduced in their pages in relation to one another, as part of unfolding series. Where early twentieth-​century constructions of fine art emphasized the painter’s originality and even idiosyncrasy as well as the autonomy of the art object, commercial illustration—like earlier genre painting traditions in which artists had repeated their own, and borrowed, adapted, and riffed on one another’s, motifs—embraced seriality. Green continued to contribute to Harper’s Monthly through the 1910s and 1920s, as well as producing characteristic domestic scenes for advertisers such as Procter and Gamble. The series of Ivory Soap advertisements that she, Smith, and Katharine Wireman illustrated shared similar copy, a consistent format, and the motif of communication across generations and classes, such as mothers teaching daughters homemaking techniques or employers instructing servants. Much in Green’s illustration (fig. 13) that appeared in magazines including the Saturday Evening Post in October 1919 is familiar. Highly polished floors and wood-​paneled walls, fine patterned rugs and elegant furniture, and large framed windows with shutters all signify the aestheticized bourgeois ( 50 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Fig. 13 Elizabeth Shippen Green, Ivory Soap advertisement, 1919. The University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-​Champaign.

space of the Mistress of the House series and similar paintings by Tarbell and his peers. But where those paintings exalt harmony and repose, a visceral tension runs between the two figures here.82 The aproned servant braces herself with her left hand to clean the smooth, white architrave with her right. The well-​dressed mistress looks over her shoulder at this work while holding an ornamental vase firmly in both hands and to the side of her body farthest from the servant in a manner that seems protective and a little overwrought. Green’s illustration quite directly returns to the familiar genre painting theme of class tension, embodied by encounters between mistresses and servants. The sense of possessiveness and that the vase has been whisked out of harm’s way are corroborated genre painting in a new century  ( 51 )

by the advertising copy: “Use Ivory Soap for renovating the prized possessions that a harsh soap would ruin.” The text then alludes to the long-​established order and accumulation of valuable objects that define bourgeoise domestic space: “For 40 years Ivory has been cleansing such things as Oriental rugs, oil paintings, fine mahogany, enamel, gilded frames, statuary, silken hangings and valuable bric-​a-​brac, without injury either to material or finish.” As in earlier Boston School paintings and her own related illustrations, this domestic order is expressed in the balance, precision, and declarative simplicity of Green’s composition. Neat horizontal and vertical lines meet at sharp right angles forming the frames and moldings of the window, door, and paneled wall. That these features of interior architecture are expressive of the social order is apparent as, positioned either side of the open door and its ornate architrave, six thin and two thick vertical lines separate servant and mistress. The exceptions to all this rectilinear orderliness are the round mirror behind the mistress’s head, which reflects and weirdly distorts the room, and the servant’s right hand, which crosses the lines that demarcate class distinction. In its allusion to the perceived failings of domestic servants, which occupied the Domestic Reform League in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the scene feels slightly dated or backward-​looking, perhaps able to address this issue more directly than turn-​of-​the-​century Boston School paintings because it was on the wane. But in the mirror’s hint of a bending social order and the suggestion that the mistress will take on the task of cleaning the vase with Ivory Soap herself, the advertisement also speaks precisely to its post–First World War moment, in which labor-​saving devices and ready-​made consumables were replacing live-​in domestics and day-​labor help in middle-​class homes.83 Serene scenes of bourgeois domesticity have the capacity to transport viewers to some becalmed site of delicate beauty far from the very circumstances of everyday life they purport to represent. This was in part why artists like Tarbell and Alexander and writers like Caffin valued them. But when located within the complex discursive field of weekly and monthly magazines and alongside advice columns and advertising copy, the noise and the nuance of day-​to-​day life return to images of this kind. They are fitted to the repetitive rhythms of periodical publication and the ways in which words and pictures act on one another in commercial space. Made for that context, Green’s genre interior illustrations always seem busier and closer to the material experience of domestic life than the oil paintings of her Boston School contemporaries. At once timely and nostalgic, and both gently and pointedly humorous, her Ivory Soap advertisement, like the contemporaneous mass-​market magazine genre illustrations discussed in chapter 3, reestablishes the capacity for social commentary nurtured by earlier genre painting traditions. John Sloan disliked Green and her peers about as much as he disliked Tarbell and his peers. He lamented Tarbell’s “poor Boston brand of painting” and complained ( 52 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

about the “villainous work of Misses Green and Smith” and the influential teacher Howard Pyle’s other “poor little imitation Haemhorroids [sic] of Pupils.” He was good friends with and more sympathetic to Myers, but in later life joked that his slum children always seemed to be ready for Sunday school in “pinafores and pantaloons.”84 This animus and critique can be explained by the similarities and differences between Sloan’s art and that of Myers, Tarbell, and Green. Like Myers and Tarbell, Sloan was included in Mather’s list of potential twentieth-​century American genre painters and like them could reasonably be said to move through impressionism toward genre. Less overtly than Tarbell, he too came to use elements of seventeenth-​century Dutch painting in his depiction of contemporary everyday life. But where Myers and Tarbell were commercially successful during the first decades of the twentieth century, Sloan struggled to sell a painting. Instead, like Green, he worked as a magazine illustrator, though again with less financial reward, and came to picture women with a careful attention to their everyday activities. The three artists discussed in this chapter all worked at some remove from everyday life: urban reformers had to ignore Myers’s sentimentality and nostalgia to see his paintings as a record of slum conditions; Caffin needed a strong, at times strained, reading to find in Tarbell an aesthetic expression of Progressive Era ideals; Green’s illustrations come closer to everyday experience but are embedded in and reliant on a version of women’s lives constructed and mediated by mass-​market magazines. In each instance there is a tension between form and content, as elements of earlier genre traditions make an awkward fit with metropolitan life, modern art, and mass media. The chapter that follows argues that Sloan found a more direct engagement with the people, routines, and things of the tenement world around him and came to a nascent understanding of everyday life as a site of politics.

genre painting in a new century  ( 53 )

2 John Sloan’s Intimate Tenements

B

uckets, brooms, rags, clothespins, clotheslines, houseplants, needles and thread, flatirons, groceries, crockery. While best known for his sidewalk scenes that capture the commerce and crowds of New York in the 1900s and 1910s, John Sloan also filled his paintings, drawings, and etchings with the smaller details of city tenements and the domestic routines of the women who kept house there. Where to keep milk and butter cool, how to dry laundry on a fire escape, what to do with a family’s possessions in cramped quarters, when to pause to read or daydream. Sloan’s looking at women, his peering into and picturing of intimate spaces and scenes, is often, rightly, understood as vexed and voyeuristic. Alongside those motivations other, at once more innocent and more worldly, reasons for painting women emerge, as Sloan eschewed impressionist influences in favor of slower, more conventional practices akin to earlier genre painting. Apertures, recesses, and niches structure interior space; delicate brush- and penwork, alive to the folds of fabric and sheen of tableware, grant household objects their particularity; the sharp delineation of detail indexes long, careful study. In his own home and his neighbors’ apartments Sloan witnessed the deft, tedious, exhausting work of homemaking and understood at least some of its significance within the cycle of working-​class labor and for a nascent feminist recognition of the personal as political. Could this be a painting of everyday life? That is, could genre painting in New York around 1910 reveal and interpret the new ways of life taking shape in the metropolis? Or was the form, as critics had claimed of the previous generation of genre painters, so tied to past tradition that its access to the present was bound to be blunted and bland? This chapter explores Sloan’s genre scenes as an at once revelatory and constrained interpretation of everyday life in the tenements. “If only to open the eyes of our generation to the beauty that lies at its door,” declared the influential art critic and historian Frank Jewett Mather in 1907, “if only

to leave some worthy memory of our walk and conversation to posterity, we need the interpreter of everyday life.”1 Listing him alongside Edmund Tarbell and Jerome Myers as American contemporaries taking on this task, Mather drew Sloan into the critical debate about modern genre painting. Sloan and the other artists later dubbed the Ashcan School were, for Mather, “followers of Manet and Monet” who in their “fresh and vivid impressions of New York streets” were “actually producing as if incidentally the best genre painting.”2 Charles Caffin, writing in the same year in his popular art history book The Story of American Painting (1907), straightforwardly declared Sloan’s work “excellent examples of modern impressionism,” but then tied himself in knots: “It is the humanity of the scene, as well as its pictorial suggestions, that interest him. Not, however, in the way of telling a definite story, but by inference and suggestion. It is the impression of the human interest that he has received, and he renders it impressionistically.” The paradox here was how to reconcile the elements of humor and narrative in Sloan’s art with the need to make him a medium-​specific modern who “avoids all competition with the verbal artist.”3 On reading Caffin’s critique Sloan observed, “He gives me quite a notice. Almost too much prominence in the ‘impressionist’ movement as he puts it.” Sloan saw more of himself in a 1909 profile for the Craftsman in which his friend Charles Wisner Barrell made connections to several literary figures, including Honoré de Balzac and Charles Dickens, and to the graphic satire of William Hogarth. Barrell stressed this was not to say “that Sloan imitates Hogarth’s manner, for the point of similarity between the famous Englishman and the young American artist lies in the fact that both seem temperamentally akin in their appreciation of the common, everyday life of parlor and pave.”4 To his peers Sloan was more like either Manet or Hogarth, his art either modern or in the humorous genre tradition, its emphasis either formalist or on narrative and satirical content. These were real alternatives for Sloan, and in 1907–9 his art could have taken either path. While, unlike Tarbell, Sloan had not studied impressionism in Europe, he gained that experience and influence indirectly through his friend and mentor Robert Henri, who encouraged him to paint after returning to Philadelphia from study in Paris in the early 1890s. Canvases such as Easter Eve (1907), which depicts a couple silhouetted against a florist’s illuminated window, evince impressionist influence in rapid brushwork, swaths of luminous color, and attention to what Caffin, who reproduced the painting in his book, called the “phantasmagoria” and “passing show” of the city. Here Sloan might plausibly be using everyday scenes, as Tarbell had, as vehicles for the exploration of light and form. But, by 1909, it was Barrell’s characterization of an “American Hogarth” concerned with “The Real Drama of the Slums” that struck a chord and pointed the way forward. Sloan confessed to his diary, “It is awe-​inspiring to read an article speaking so well of one’s own attainments. Makes me feel that I should ‘hustle’ to live up to it” ( January 18, 1909). Barrell held significant sway in this moment, introducing ( 56 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Sloan to socialist politics, to which he became zealously committed. He was one of several influences, which also included autodidactic reading in François Rabelais, Henry Fielding, and Walt Whitman as well as the art history and criticism of Hippolyte Taine and George Moore; encounters with Jan Steen paintings and Thomas Rowlandson and Charles Keene prints; and friendship with John Butler Yeats. At the same time Sloan’s work for the socialist magazine the Masses and mass-​market magazines like Harper’s Weekly brought his art into contact with an emerging political discourse of everyday life that included feminist critique of housework as unpaid labor and progressive efforts to manage and reform the domestic sphere. All this led to an art that was earthy, slowly contemplative, concerned with mundane daily life, and in dialogue if not competition with the written word. Sloan did not refer to his city scenes as genre painting, but in time others were happy to name them as such. Once the (somewhat manufactured) shock that the Ashcan School’s “ugly” urban realism at first provoked had died down, and especially once a few decades had added a hint of nostalgia to scenes of “old New York,” the critic Edward Alden Jewell could comfortably claim that “much of John Sloan’s early work may be thought to continue with no disconcerting break—if with differing emphasis and in the artist’s own individual style—a genre tradition,” and the painter Walter Pach could refer to Sloan’s “genre period.”5 Where other paintings discussed in this book, whether as commercial illustration or with elements of abstraction, challenge the terms of genre painting, Sloan’s pictures of housework are in idiom, medium, and subject congruent with earlier traditions. Rather than pushing at the boundaries of the category, they encourage consideration of what genre painting might be and do at the start of the twentieth century.

Three Scrubwomen “Started today on a subject I have had in mind for some days, the scrub women in the Astor Library,” Sloan wrote in his June 1, 1910, diary entry. “Got the idea when there with Yeats last week.” That painting, finished nearly a year later, centers on three strong, characterful women who have paused to talk while one kneels to scrub the floor and the others take their brooms and buckets up the stairs. That ornate spiral staircase frames the right of the composition, shelves of leather-​bound books the left, while the hint of a dimly lit mezzanine runs above the women’s heads. Ornately decorated and highly polished, this interior’s restrained display of wealth is quite unlike the cheap restaurants and amusements and drab sidewalks Sloan tended to paint at this time and, set against the women’s sturdy bodies and utilitarian clothes, creates the kind of juxtaposition of high and low that Hogarth reveled in. A further contrast is established as john sloan’s intimate tenements  ( 57 )

the round of the kneeling woman’s buttock rhymes with the bent back of one of three apparently male readers who slump over their books at a table in the background. Scrubwomen, Astor Library (1910–11; plate 5) was the first of a sequence of scenes of New York women at their regular chores and routines that Sloan would make over the next few years. These works move from the public space of the library to the intimate domesticities of tenement apartments, take Sloan deep into the genre painting tradition, and offer insight into women’s everyday work. Much that shaped this sequence was present for Sloan at its inception. To research magazine illustrations and to read about art, he regularly visited the public library bequeathed by John Jacob Astor, often in the company of Yeats. On the trip that planted the seed of his painting, Sloan “looked at a few numbers of the Burlington Magazine” (May 25, 1910), later commenting in his diary on Maurice Denis’s article on Paul Cézanne. This ran concurrently with Kenyon Cox’s three-​part review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s fall 1909 exhibition of Dutch paintings, presented under the London-​based magazine’s “Art in America” heading. Denis begins with a bold statement of the terms of medium-​specificity—“The Cézanne question divides inseparably into two camps those who love painting and those who prefer to painting itself the literary and other interests accessory to it”—and goes on to eulogize Cézanne as a classical, formalist “pure painter.” Cox’s review, and contemporaneous responses to Dutch genre painting, set the earthy humor of Jan Steen, “a moralist, a genial chastizer of the frailties and foibles of his fellow-​citizens, and a fore-​runner of our own Hogarth,” against the formal “perfection” of Johannes Vermeer.6 Astor Library, built by a landlord who was at the time America’s richest man and like the Metropolitan Museum a public resource whose hours excluded working people, was an embodiment of the inequities that fired Sloan’s socialist politics. In the week between conceiving the painting and starting at his easel, he confessed to his diary that “while I, at ease in bed, took a good morning nap Dolly got at the huge stack of dishes, the aftermath of our dinner last night” (May 31, 1910). The oppositions between “pure” and “literary” painting and between idealism and materialism in which critics had previously framed his art, the politics of labor and capital, to which he was committed, and his own complicity in the gendered division of domestic labor were right in front of Sloan as he set out to paint. While Sloan famously never left the United States, he was, through voracious reading, gallery-​going, and studio talk, an informed and engaged participant in debates about modern European art. It thus requires only a slight stretch to think of him in relation to Camille Pissarro, whom Denis discusses at some length in his article on Cézanne and who was concerned with similar questions of form and politics. Sloan’s Scrubwomen, Astor Library and Pissarro’s Two Young Peasant Women (1892; fig. 14) both offer deeply sympathetic depictions of working women at rest. Art historian T. J. Clark gives a compelling account of Two Young Peasant Women as an attempt to work through ( 58 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Fig. 14  Camille Pissarro, Two Young Peasant Women, 1891–92. Oil on canvas, 35 ¼ × 45 ⅞ in. (89.5 × 116.5 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, 1973, 1973.311.5.

impressionist painting to a very material concern with the lives and circumstances of field women: “Are they day laborers, or servants living in a household, or members of the family? How hard is the work they are taking a break from?” Pissarro made the painting that prompts these quotidian questions at what Clark describes as a turning point in French modernism, the “matrix of 1891,” wherein “idealisms of various kinds were on the offensive, and materialism in retreat.”7 Sloan probes similar concerns. How long will it take the women to work their way around the whole cavernous hall? For how many years have they been scrubbing these floors? It would be wrong to relate Sloan too closely to the “matrix of 1891” or to Pissarro’s various paintings of peasant women, which Sloan is unlikely to have seen, but wrong too to suggest he was wholly apart from these concerns. After all, he took up painting in earnest when Robert Henri returned from Paris to Philadelphia full of ideas and inspiration in the early 1890s, and he first envisioned his Scrubwomen while reading Denis’s essay on Cézanne. Moreover, he set his realist painting against both Tarbell and the Boston School’s bourgeois idylls and those contemporaries who idealized working-​class subjects. Clark sees a straightforward opposition between Pissarro’s painting of pretty peasants and the “far deadlier fictions of labour and the female body” found in “the downtrodden field-​women of [ Jean François] Millet, or the Joan-​of-​Arcs-​in-​the-​making of Jules Breton.” “These,” he asserts, “are the pictures Two Young Peasant Women is painted against.” Pissarro differentiates his women from these dangerous precedents through modernist formal experimentation with color and surface and the scale and placement of the women that work to make the picture “not quite monumental figure painting and not quite scene from everyday life.”8 Sloan may not have been familiar john sloan’s intimate tenements  ( 59 )

with Pissarro’s solution, but he certainly knew the problem of Millet, as The Gleaners (1857) and other works had attained phenomenal popularity in America and encouraged a steady stream of American imitators.9 In his 1909 Craftsman profile, Barrell had worked hard to differentiate Sloan from Millet and from those Americans who took their cues from the Barbizon School: Even in the closest approach to the raw reality of things, it is difficult for an artist to avoid idealizing and so dignifying his subject. The strong, heavy, patient figures of Millet’s peasants have at times the immensity of Titans, so close are they to the great primal things of earth and of life; the terrible, heart-​wringing poverty, which is the chosen theme of Eugene Higgins, has also a sense of universality, as if the artist saw only abstract human wretchedness in great shadowy masses and painted what he saw. But John Sloan, both in his paintings and in his brilliant relentless little etchings which give us such vivid glimpses of New York life, shows no tendency to grasp human wretchedness in the mass, but rather to show here and there a detached bit of life which has the power of suggesting the whole turbid current.10 Sloan was pleased with all that Barrell wrote, “with the exception of classing me with Eugene Higgins whose work is absolute ‘fake’ ” ( January 18, 1909). This comparison to an American purveyor of Millet-​esque scenes was apparently so annoying to Sloan that he missed the way it works not to liken him to but differentiate him from Higgins. The danger of idealizing and universalizing must have been on Sloan’s mind as he made Scrubwomen, a painting that comes within touching distance of Millet’s “deadly fictions” and “universality.” For there is something potentially heroic in the scrubwomen, in the vigor and vitality that sets them against the forlorn readers at their distant table. Like Jerome Myers’s Lower East Side figures, they maintain vestiges in clothing and bearing of the Old World and are likely first-​generation immigrants not so far removed from European fields. Is it not tempting to see this as something like an urban peasant painting? While sharing many of Pissarro’s concerns, Sloan turned away from modern painting to frame his Scrubwomen in the genre tradition exemplified by the seventeenth-​century Dutch masters. The Metropolitan Museum exhibition that Kenyon Cox reviewed for the Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs had been hailed as “an artistic event in the life of every American visitor who cannot go abroad” by Natalie Curtis in the Craftsman.11 It provided another means for Sloan to broaden his art education without leaving home, and he enthused in his diary over “a great collection loaned for the most part by private collectors. A number of fine Frans Hals and Rembrandts. Saw again Rembrandt’s Finding of Moses, a small oval picture which I had seen in Mr. J. G. Johnson’s collection in Philadelphia. A beautiful ‘flute player’ by Hals and ‘boys singing’ by the same artist.” ( 60 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Rembrandt and Hals were the most heavily represented and most discussed painters in the exhibition, but where other commentators tended to also focus on Vermeer, Sloan picked out “several Jan Steens and many other great things captured by the money of these American bourgeois riche” (October 9, 1909). The stakes in that choice were apparent in those other commentators’ appraisals: Cox mentioned Steen only as a minor painter while praising Vermeer’s “consummate treatment of light” and “infinite refinement”; Royal Cortissoz enjoyed Steen as a “boisterously sympathetic limner of rustic manners” but concluded, “you cannot find delight, a lasting sensation of beauty, in the Dutch Hogarth as you can find it in Vermeer.” What Sloan, an “American Hogarth,” surely saw in Dutch genre painting was the school of “steady-​going realists” identified by Cortissoz, whose paintings of “the wholesome, earthy lives” of ordinary people sprang from “an age of sturdy materialism.”12 Sloan’s Scrubwomen follows the Dutch genre tradition in both subject and composition. The Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition was part of the city-​wide Hudson-​Fulton Celebration of Henry Hudson’s “discovery” of Manhattan and of the wider “Holland mania” that saw Progressive Era Americans look back to the Dutch Republic as a model of asceticism, republican government, and hygiene. Curtis was an ethnomusicologist by training, and like many lay observers of historical genre paintings he was drawn to then-​and-​now parallels in everyday life: “As we think of the dark narrow canyons leading from lower Broadway . . . it seems impossible to believe that those very streets once held the homes of the scrupulous Dutch, who in the old country washed even the outside of their houses three times a week!” Cortissoz noted that for Vermeer “it was enough to paint some placid lady of Delft, occupied in household duties,” and across high-​life genre’s pristine interiors and low genre’s dissolute households cleaning and cleanliness were prominent and morally freighted in Dutch painting.13 Much of the early critical response to Sloan and other Ashcan School painters suggested they were radical or aberrant in their choice of low and “ugly” subjects, so the decision to paint working people could itself seem an act of heroic defiance. Placing his painting of working women in dialogue with Dutch genre was a way for Sloan to make this subject commonplace and unremarkable. Scrubwomen describes a more complex space than Sloan’s familiar terrain of tenement apartments and a field deeper than impressionism’s characteristic attention to surface and façade. The alcove that Sloan’s foreground scrubwomen occupy is enclosed and shadowy, but light floods in from the library’s grand South Hall, just as Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch lit their scenes from specific sources embedded in the composition. Without the prompt of Sloan’s visit to the Metropolitan Museum and browsing of the Burlington Magazine, art historians Robert Snyder and Rebecca Zurier note this “architectural setting and harmonious golden tone, evocative of Dutch interior scenes with housewives,” and suggest that it makes the women’s “work seem pleasant, if not easy.” Sloan borrows more than this hint of hominess from Dutch genre painters, utilizing john sloan’s intimate tenements  ( 61 )

spatial divisions and recessions, as they had, to establish subtle distinctions between leisure and labor and public and private spheres.14 If this space seems homely, whose home is it? The scrubwomen who spend much of the day there and are so comfortably in possession of their surroundings? Regular patrons, like Sloan and Yeats? Or the Astor family, who still laid a proprietorial claim to the building that bore their name? Similar questions arise about work. Who among the scrubwomen paused to talk in the foreground and the readers at their table in the background is at work, and who is at rest? Yeats visited the library for general reading, but it was intended as a research facility, and Sloan’s visits were for his work as a magazine illustrator. Much of Dutch painters’ investment in housewives and servants related to the sanctity and purity of the private sphere and the virtue a clean home accrued to its owner, but the connotations of cleaning and cleanliness change in a public space. As a frequent visitor to the library, was Sloan conscious that the women scrubbed, in part, for him? By not merely evoking Dutch genre painting but engaging with its deep strategies, Sloan makes a humble and particular, rather than idealizing or universalizing, picture of labor that acknowledges his own presence and complicity in the scene. Yeats was, with Denis and Cox in the Burlington Magazine, another figure present at the Astor Library who shaped the way Sloan painted Scrubwomen. Over the previous year Yeats had become a mentor and even father figure to Sloan, to an extent displacing Robert Henri. Where Henri urged his students, “Do it all in one sitting if you can. In one minute if you can” and joked that “Sloan” was “the past participle of ‘slow,’ ” Yeats labored day after day, often overworking his canvases, and encouraged Sloan to attend to craft and finish.15 Work on Scrubwomen was particularly slow. It is easy to imagine Sloan, seated in Astor Library and distracted from the Burlington Magazine, looking slowly at the scrubwomen’s progress through the numerous alcoves and corridors that open out into the South Hall, watching them scrub and pause, catching muffled snippets of conversation, measuring their task against his own over the course of a day. Back at home he worked intensively on the painting during June 1910 and may have continued to do so over that summer before showing it to an approving Henri in October. It was then presumably propped in his apartment-​studio, in a still somehow unsatisfactory state and in the corner of his eye as he worked on other things, until he took it up again in March 1911. Slow, meticulous brushwork in which no element of the composition was too insignificant to be labored over and invested with time and care was central to the practice of Dutch genre painters. It attuned them, and then Sloan, to that which in the everyday world is not fleeting and ephemeral but rooted and cyclical. The scrubwomen, as Sloan must have seen on his repeat visits to the library and contemplated on his multiple returns to the canvas, scrubbed every day. Sloan resists making his three women Millet-​esque icons of labor or condescending to them as “jolly scrubwomen” in the manner of antebellum genre painting. ( 62 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Delineated in slow, relatively fine brushwork, the woman on her knees looks up to her two companions with mirth playing about her face, but the central figure’s pursed lips, raised eyebrow, and closing, downturned eyes suggest humor soured or complicated by some other thought, while the woman ascending the stairs looks back over her shoulder with a face at once full of intent and hard to read. This complex, individuated characterization creates the sense of something shared between these women inaccessible to the passing viewer and irreducible to any straightforward descriptor. Yeats acknowledged that ambiguity when he came to write about the painting in an essay on Sloan for Harper’s Weekly, describing the exchange as “furtive” and asking, ultimately, “Why does this picture interest anyone? What is the charm of this sad colored arrangement in brown? Is it the old women or the two readers? . . . Are we looking at a picture of silence made visible? I cannot say.” There is an echo here of Caffin’s claim that Sloan pictures human interest not by “telling a definite story, but by inference and suggestion.” There is also an uncertainty about interpreting everyday life in the context of modernist formalism. Yeats’s essay not only calls the scrubwomen’s conversation “furtive” but also picks out the details that make McSorley’s Back Room (1912) a “lonely” place and imagines the foreground girls in Hairdresser’s Window (1907) “laughing and whispering together and no doubt making guesses as to who the girl [having her hair dyed] may be.” This is a way of reading a genre painting, akin to late nineteenth-​century accounts of Eastman Johnson’s The Old Stage Coach, that emphasizes what Denis called “the literary and other interests accessory to” painting or what Caffin called the work of the “verbal artist.” In almost the same breath Yeats recalls his formalist aesthetics and declares, “A work of art that can be put into words is picture writing and by no means a work of art; even though to a people more conversant with words than with painting it would be preferable.”16 The next painting of a woman at work that Sloan made tipped the scales further toward “picture writing” by overtly stating its connection to language and to the genre tradition’s use of proverbs and parables in its title. A Woman’s Work (1912; plate 6) is painted in a slow, careful manner, in meticulous brushwork attentive to the various textures of brickwork and the shapes thrown by linen in the breeze, which reciprocate its thematic concern with work and duration. But those themes are also expressed verbally, in the manner of genre paintings like Steen’s Easy Come, Easy Go (1661), in the titular allusion to the proverb that the painting in some sense illustrates: “Man may work from sun to sun, / But woman’s work is never done.” Seen in light of this proverb, the rigged-​up clotheslines create a circuit of unending work, the shadow passing across the courtyard charts the passage of the working day, the wrought-​iron balcony rail encages the woman (though her toes poke through between its struts), and the ladders that stretch up and down—in the latter case to below the frame—take on a symbolism of exit and escape. Such an interpretation, licensed and encouraged by the title, places john sloan’s intimate tenements  ( 63 )

Sloan within the anecdotal or proverbial genre painting tradition and chafes against familiar ways of seeing the Ashcan School as, in one sense or another, modern painters.

Women’s Work The smallness, seriousness, and serenity of Sloan’s genre scenes of domestic labor struck Yeats in a second essay on his friend’s art, published in the little magazine Seven Arts: “In ‘A Woman’s Work’ we have the woman of the domestic imagination, peaceable, rooted in the small activities of busy life, a woman to infuse tenderness and cure passion. We have evidence that the artist liked her best of all; has he not stayed long enough with this picture to finish it almost ad unguem? The color arrangement is quiet and sensitive and tremulous with morning sunshine.”17 To finish ad unguem is achieve the smoothness felt by a fingernail running over marble. Oddly, this praise for a polished, peaceable painting contributed to a bitter dispute about art and politics. Sloan’s commitment to socialism was a source of tension in his friendship with Yeats, as he acknowledged in a February 2, 1911, diary entry, when, at a dinner with the cartoonist Art Young, “Perhaps we talked a bit too much on the thing nearest our heart, Socialism, to amuse Mr. Yeats. Still he endured it very well.” The older man was not always so passive, but, as Paul Franklin explains in his detailed study of the friendship, “Sloan normally tolerated his mentor’s harsh criticisms of his politics without incident. However, in early 1917, [Sloan] ‘went off in a torrent of rage, his face getting black,’ and verbally attacked [Yeats], after which the two men were estranged for several months.”18 Following their rift, Yeats wrote to Sloan in June 1917 to counsel against involvement in politics, as “to become a fighter is to desert art.” “I can remain intellectually at rest and go about my art business of writing or painting,” Yeats observed, “as if I was in a hermits [sic] cell.”19 The Seven Arts review, which praises the quiet artistry of A Woman’s Work and studiously avoids any mention of politics, appeared the same month. Sloan’s socialism has led many commentators to consider the relationship between his art and his politics. In this they have been helped and hindered by the artist’s own statements on the matter. Patricia Hills begins her groundbreaking essay on Sloan’s representation of working-​class women with a statement that his second wife, Helen Farr Sloan, recorded in 1946 or 1947: “I was never interested in putting propaganda into my paintings, so it annoys me when art historians try to interpret my city life pictures as ‘socially conscious.’ I saw the everyday life of the people, and on the whole I picked out bits of joy in human life for my subject matter.”20 While the “evidentiary value” of assertions made decades after the pictures themselves is, as Michael Lobel points out, questionable, Sloan did, in similar terms, tell Herman Bloch of the New York Call he “had no intention of working for any Socialist object in my art and paintings” (May 5, ( 64 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

1909).21 Hills, Lobel, and other scholars have developed compelling arguments that variously explore the influence of patronage on Sloan’s stance, the ways in which political references to army recruitment drives and Tammany Hall do make their way into his painting, and the compromised distinction that he made between apolitical paintings and the graphic art he contributed to the Call and the Masses.22 Art historians have tended to approach this question with a relatively fixed notion of the political, tied to the period’s socialism or specific campaigns against militarism or corruption, and so follow Yeats in viewing scenes of everyday life like Scrubwomen, Astor Library, and A Woman’s Work as standing firmly apart from Sloan’s politics. But Progressive Era efforts to manage and intervene in family life and mass-​market magazines’ advocacy of personal efficiency for housewives, as well as the suffrage movement and an emerging left and feminist critique of housework as unpaid labor, all brought women’s lives and work into the political sphere. Between Sloan’s completion of Scrubwomen in spring 1911 and his start on A Woman’s Work the following year, the socialist magazine the Masses published its December 1911 “Women’s Number.” The dominant editorial voices here are male and strike the paternalistic tone that would reverberate through male socialist and protofeminist writing of the 1910s, but over the course of the magazine women’s perspectives on women’s issues come to the fore in opinion pieces by May Wood Simons, Lena Morrow Lewis, Lida Parce, and Ida Crouch-​Hazlett, and sketches and stories by Josephine Conger Kaneko, Eleanor Wentworth, Ethel Knapp Behrman, and Inez Haynes Gillmore. Simons, a rising figure within the American Socialist Party, asked: The larger part of the agitation, even in the socialist movement, among women has been directed toward whom? Why, the girls in industry. Not the housekeepers. Much of the failure to produce work that equals man’s work in art, literature and mechanics is due to the fact that so large a proportion of the women of the race spend their lives in housework. To dust, scrub, wash dishes. Where is the inspiration? Less even than in digging ditches. But the patient woman keeps up her flagging courage by saying, “It is womanly. It is woman’s place.”23 Here and elsewhere female contributors identify the domestic sphere as the site of their everyday struggle and oppression. From this recognition they draw comparisons between the role of housewife and house servant and build arguments for household cooperatives and labor-​saving efficiencies. In the early 1910s, amid campaigns for the vote and for prohibition, and around the dominant, paternalistic voices of their male allies, some American women on the left came to a nascent articulation of second-​wave feminism’s identification of the personal as political. john sloan’s intimate tenements  ( 65 )

Fig. 15  Anton Otto Fischer, The Cheapest Commodity on the Market, Masses, December 1911. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University.

While it would be another year before he joined Max Eastman’s revamped Masses as art editor, Sloan had known the magazine’s founder, Piet Vlag, since 1909, and, given his interests in socialism and suffrage, it seems likely that he would have seen the December 1911 “Women’s Number.” Simons’s message about the deadening effect of the demand to “dust, scrub, wash dishes” would surely have entered his thinking as he slowly painted women at work. The title A Woman’s Work, with its implied “is never done,” which could be clichéd or trite, a pat phrase reached for with a raised eyebrow, was, when Sloan chose it in the spring of 1912, invested with a complex truth. The “Women’s Number” also contained a different kind of lesson for Sloan in The Cheapest Commodity on the Market, a black-​and-​white reproduction of a painting made firmly within the genre tradition by the socialist illustrator Anton Otto Fischer (fig. 15). Nine women congregate around an arched brick entrance. To its right a sign addresses them: “notice employees.” A high wooden fence stretches along the sidewalk with squat utilitarian buildings behind it and behind them tall chimneys billowing black smoke into a bleak sky. The clustered women sport, in various combinations, shirtwaists, long skirts, neckties, shawls, round-​toed or pointed boots, and pompadour hairstyles. Some carry lunch pails, others handbags. The scene finds some precedents in Winslow Homer’s 1871 painting Old Mill (The Morning Bell) and the factory scenes such as Bell Time (1868) that he made for Harper’s Weekly in the same period. Everything in it indicates mundane routine; this meeting on the sidewalk and passing through the entranceway occurs every day. Paid work and its other—housework, not leisure—are, ( 66 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

in the genre tradition’s accrued symbolic language of entrances and apertures, joined and separated at this gate, and the tall, drab fence reinforces that sense of a threshold between spheres. This painting illustrates a committed but unfocused editorial on women’s labor, which ends with praise for the artist: “Some people who can think well would like very much to be able to draw. Some artists who draw well would like very much to be able to think. Mr. Fischer does both. He has pictured the thing for us more vividly perhaps than we could with our own imaginations; it remains for us to act.”24 The pointedness and didacticism suggested here seem absent from the painting itself, which struggles to say more than routinized work is bad. Fischer’s problem, shared by many other Masses illustrators and politically committed genre painters, was how to make scenes of everyday life speak for complex political issues, and especially for the intersecting public and private challenges facing women in the 1910s, which could, decades later, still be described as “the problem that has no name.”25 Sloan’s embrace of the witty, punning genre tradition of Steen and Hogarth in paintings of domestic labor such as A Woman’s Work and Red Kimono on the Roof (1912; fig. 16) created the potential for more pointed critique. When the latter work was shown at Sloan’s 1916 solo exhibition at Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s studio-​gallery alongside recent landscapes made in Gloucester, Massachusetts, including Play on the Rocks (1916), an insightful, double-​edged review in the New York Sun was alive to this possibility. Once more identifying him as “the American Hogarth,” the Sun critic explains that “Mr. Sloan is most interesting when most satiric. It is curious to observe that when he sets out to record the fairer aspects of nature he is scarcely bearable.” Thus, where paintings of the Gloucester coast are found wanting, glimpses of the sky and other natural elements in his “caricaturistic” city paintings are deemed “excellent.” A similar paradox occurs in figure painting: “He needs the spur of the comic impulse, it seems, to make him surmount consciousness of the paint brush. The little girls seating [sic] upon the rock are hopelessly unhuman and uninteresting, but the woman hanging out the wash upon the housetop and who put the clothespins in her mouth, being a funny object, is so much better than one might imagine in the work of another artist.”26 The clothespin in Red Kimono, outsized and protruding from the woman’s face like a duck’s bill or a cartoon tongue, does seem to offer a visual quip of the kind the Sun describes. A misogynistic telling of the joke is that she is gagged, rendered a “funny object,” and so dehumanized. The woman in A Woman’s Work has a clothespin in her mouth, too, but it is not exaggerated and invites empathy rather than mockery. Sloan uses this motif to make his pictures speak, in different registers, for the hard work and ingenuity demanded by tenement housekeeping and the ways domestic drudgery silences women. As anyone who has been stretched by manual tasks knows, you sometimes have to stick things in your mouth when you run out of hands. It is hard, though, to speak out when one’s mouth is full of clothespins. john sloan’s intimate tenements  ( 67 )

Fig. 16  John Sloan, Red Kimono on the Roof, 1912. Oil on canvas, 24 × 20 in. (61 × 50.8 cm). Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, James E. Roberts Fund, 54.55 © 2021 Delaware Art Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Fig. 17  John Sloan, “Aw, Susie, be them dishes washed?” Illustration for Mary Alden Hopkins, “Woman’s March,” Collier’s 49 (May 18, 1912). The University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-​Champaign.

Two months after he began A Woman’s Work, and perhaps—depending on just how slowly he painted—while it was still on his easel, Sloan observed and sketched the May 4, 1912, Suffrage Parade through the streets of Manhattan, producing illustrations that accompanied Mary Alden Hopkins’s article “Women’s March,” which appeared in Collier’s a fortnight later.27 Hopkins, in a similar vein to Simons, writes, “Thousands of ‘just married women’—women whom the census classes as dependent females because they get no pay envelope of a Saturday night after seven days of broiling steak, nicking dishes, running sewing machines, and nursing mumpy children—thousands of these industrious housekeepers marched in a glory of yellow splendor.” As art historian Ellen Wiley Todd observes, Sloan’s illustrations convey a “pleasant and nonthreatening” middle ground that avoids the caricatures of militant suffragettes and matronly suffragists typical of Life and other publications in the period.28 Several of Sloan’s illustrations reflect on the conflict between women’s political activism and domestic labor: two bored, disdainful women look on from a balcony, but a third, wearing a maid’s white apron, leans forward between them, perhaps straining to be part of the parade; a crowd of men and boys laugh and jeer with the caption “Aw, Susie, be them dishes washed?” (fig. 17). Sloan may not have come up with this line, but his drawing prompts its message as it divides the men and boys from the women they expect to be at their beck and call. john sloan’s intimate tenements  ( 69 )

Fig. 18  John Sloan, She’s Got the Point, Masses, October 1913. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University.

Sloan’s wife, Dolly, did not march in May 1912 because the Socialist Party Women’s Committee on which she sat had voted three to two—“the idiots!” noted Sloan in his diary (March 26, 1912)—against accepting the suffragettes’ invitation. But she had participated two years earlier when the socialist women had all worn red sashes and Sloan had encountered some of the heckling he would later picture, getting in a “little hot-​worded row with a man who was ridiculing the women. No bloodshed” (May 21, 1910). Dolly’s political activities included Socialist Party and suffrage committees, coordinating the care of millworkers’ children brought to New York during the 1913 Paterson strike, and various roles, including treasurer, for the Masses. Combining activism with conventional “women’s work” took its toll on many women on the left. Lena Morrow Lewis’s rise through the ranks of the Socialist Party came at the expense of her personal life. By contrast, May Wood Simons defined herself as “a devoted wife and an intellectual companion” to her activist husband Algie Martin Simons but struggled to reconcile those roles.29 The Sloans addressed this issue with an arrangement described in an April 29, 1911, diary entry: “Dolly put in a long, hard day’s work with the cleaning ( 70 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

and the woman who helped got $1.00. Dolly gets her 5.00 a week (our scheme for the last several months).” This “wages for housework” solution was one of many creative means by which men and women in and around the Sloans’ circle sought to rethink the terms of domestic life.30 Sloan pictured Dolly in the October 1913 issue of the Masses addressing the crowd at a suffrage rally, who respond favorably, with men and women turning to one another to express appreciation for her words, as the caption, “She’s Got the Point,” indicates (fig. 18).31 But the same issue also contained Seymour Barnard’s poem “Woman’s Place—A Nursery Rhyme,” which begins, Suffragette, suffragette, why do you roam? Women are wisest in staying at home: A few foolish millions may slave for their bread; Perversely preferring to work and be fed.32 The opening question is repeated in the second and third stanzas with the responses “Babies are needing you back in the home” and “Mother is scrubbing at somebody’s home.” While this issue of the Masses included a letter of appreciation from Christabel Pankhurst, Barnard’s apparent attack on the movement as a distraction from labor and its politics emphasizes the schism between socialism and suffrage. During the period in which Sloan repeatedly pictured women engaged in forms of housekeeping, his attention was repeatedly drawn to tensions between the domestic and political.

The Critique of Everyday Life Sloan’s paintings and graphic art, including his contributions to the Masses, rarely address politics directly in the manner of his Collier’s Suffrage Parade illustrations. They were, instead, “pictures of ash cans and girls hitching up their skirts in Horatio Street,” as Art Young complained when Sloan and several other artists quit the Masses in 1916 over the demand that their art carry propaganda themes and captions.33 But in the 1910s closely observed depictions of everyday life and domestic labor did not have to be overtly political to be political. In 1947, the same year that Sloan restated his distinction between propaganda and social consciousness on the one hand and “the everyday life of the people” on the other, the French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre published Critique de la vie quotidienne. Here, Lefebvre argues that “everyday life, in a sense residual, defined by ‘what is left over’ after all distinct, superior, specialized, structured activities have been singled out by analysis, must be defined as totality.” This at first seems to cast john sloan’s intimate tenements  ( 71 )

everyday life as something set apart, as Sloan suggests, from the specialized and structured activities of the political sphere. But as Lefebvre goes on, “Everyday life is profoundly related to all activities, and encompasses them with all their differences and their conflicts; it is their meeting place, their bond, their common ground.”34 That twoness—at once residual and all encompassing, apart from but profoundly related to structured activities—is foundational to and typical of the sense of everyday life offered by Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and other French theorists. This way of seeing everyday life was grounded in the lived experience of post–Second World War Paris, where imposed standardization and bureaucratization and the influx of American popular culture disrupted and so rendered visible the habits, rhythms, and structures of daily life.35 To impose this vision of the everyday onto the everyday of Sloan’s early twentieth-​century New York City risks anachronism. But, as historian Frank Trentmann puts it, “Everyday life did not suddenly begin in 1947 with the first volume of Henri Lefebvre’s Critique.” Just as May Wood Simons’s Masses essay presages and indeed suggests a prehistory for later feminisms’ attention to the supposedly private sphere, so, and not unrelatedly, Sloan’s genre painting responded to historical conditions that preempt those experienced by Lefebvre. It can thus be located within a “longer history of the everyday.”36 New York City in the first decades of the twentieth century was, like postwar Paris, a site of rapid transformation as mass immigration and rural-​urban migration expanded the population and as rapid transit systems, electric light, and new forms of commercial entertainment altered the pace and rhythm of daily life. This was also the era of Progressivism: of settlement houses and other efforts at urban reform; of the expansion of the state into aspects of American life previously conceived as private; of scientific management and personal efficiency. All of these developments worked to make the everyday—the neighborhood, the home, the family—contested political terrain and a site of inquiry and experiment for the Progressive Era’s cadre of expert observers. “The great historian,” Theodore Roosevelt told a 1912 meeting of the American Historical Association, “will in as full measure as possible present to us the every-​day life of the men and women of the age which he describes.”37 The particular circumstances of Sloan’s lived experience and artistic formation—including the intimate views of neighboring tenements afforded by his Chelsea home-​studio and the insights gained from observing Dolly and other radical women as they attempted to balance domestic and political work, but also the genre practices of painting the closely observed details of daily life slowly—enabled him to contribute to such a record of his own time. That record contains a subtle politics that Sloan and his contemporaries could not, really, have seen or articulated as politics, but that the later insights of critical theorists of everyday life and of second-​wave feminism make visible.

( 72 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Intimate Tenements Sloan worked at home. When Edward Hopper identified him as a “home-​staying painter,” he was referring to the fact that Sloan never went to Europe, but the phrase also describes his relationship to the domestic sphere.38 Between settling in Manhattan in 1904 and the point in 1912 when he took on a studio in Greenwich Village, he drew and painted and made etchings and taught students in the small apartments he shared with Dolly. He took commissions for magazine illustrations, which paid enough to support them both, and painted and made prints, which he struggled to sell. Of the men in New York City in these years who were of sufficient means for their spouses not to work but not wealthy enough to pay full-​time servants, how many spent the substantial part of the day at home? Sloan was unusually involved in and witness to the cycles and strains of his own domesticity, and he and Dolly lived an intense domestic intimacy. That working arrangement is documented in etchings and drawings that, rather than looking out into the neighboring tenements, depict the Sloans’ own space. The etching Memory (1906) commemorates an evening with Robert Henri and his first wife, Linda, in which food, friendship, sitting, reading, drawing, and the cluttered stuff of home life coexist in compressed, peaceful equilibrium. Woman with Etching Tray (ca. 1912) shows one of Sloan’s students taking a lesson in etching in what was at once an informal classroom, a studio, and a home. That student, Mrs. Bernstein, herself embodied the productive mix of domestic and artistic labor that shaped Sloan’s art. “She’s a nice girl,” he noted in his diary, “mother of two children and two adopted ones. Studies art. ‘Makes her a better mother and a better artist,’ she says quite truly” (February 7, 1912). A similar balance is also apparent in the diaries, in which Sloan consistently maintained daily entries from January 1906 to June 1912. Alongside a great deal of information about Sloan’s creative process, social and artistic circles, and experience of early twentieth-​century New York, these entries provide a detailed account of day-​to-​day domestic life. Apparently initiated at the behest of Dr. Collier Bower—the Philadelphia physician who treated Dolly’s alcoholism and depression and encouraged Sloan to leave a morale-​boosting record of their life together where she might find and inevitably read it—the diaries need to be approached with caution.39 The first entry for 1911 begins, “Alone, which means my house in disorder, for I don’t keep things tidy when Dolly is away.” This turn of events was occasioned by Dolly staying on for dental treatment in Philadelphia, where they had both spent Christmas. Sloan moped in a “glum lonliness,” slept in a “lonely bed,” and lived “in a kind of home-​made Hell during her absence” ( January 1 and 2, 1911). It is hard not to see Bower’s therapeutic assignment behind such declarations. But the performance of keeping a diary is little different from, and—especially for an artist given to verbal expression and self-​documentation—could

john sloan’s intimate tenements  ( 73 )

easily give way to, actually keeping a diary. In such moments Sloan took time to reflect on his and Dolly’s codependency and on the balance of domestic and emotional labor in their marriage and home. Regardless of what mixture of motivations was at play in Sloan’s attentive record of Dolly’s housekeeping, he did take time to observe and record it. For example, as winter turned to spring in 1911, “Dolly tired herself out cleaning the place today, but it looks much more ‘homey’ and a place to live in. We had dinner at home [March 22]. . . . Dolly has Mary cleaning the place today, so out I sallied with a right good grace to take a walk in the warm (too warm for Spring) weather [April 29].” That summer a large commission to illustrate Scribner’s six-​volume edition of Émile Gaboriau’s detective stories kept Sloan busy, while Dolly mixed domestic tasks with political activism: Working on Gaboriau drawing all day. Dolly cleaning up front room. Spaghetti dinner [ June 11]. . . . Dolly worked at the cleaning up, etc. in the morning and I on the Scribner’s drawings (Gaboriau) [ June 14]. . . . Dolly went to a [Socialist Party] ways and means committee meeting in the afternoon after “house cleaning” her kitchen in the morning [ June 21]. . . . Mr. Yeats was calling when I returned. Dolly cleaning house. Mr. Yeats at lunch. I had bought a couple of crabs of which Dolly is fond [ July 29]. The entry in full for August 6, 1911, catches the mix of artwork and housework and political concern that fill the diary in this period: At home all day. I worked on a Gaboriau drawing. Dolly cleaned the house. We had a splendid roast chicken for dinner, “awfully” good and I had made ice cream—a great success too! There is a big and, I suppose, hopeless strike of street car men in Brooklyn. Working from home and keeping this diary let Sloan see the repetitive grind of housework in a way that few men of his generation would have had access or inclination to. Bringing crabs and other delicacies and triumphantly making ice cream, the kind of high-​status, nonroutinized culinary treats and tricks—like twenty-​first-c​ entury barbecuing—at which men “excel,” Sloan clearly pitched in. But he also “sallied” out and made little attempt to cross the line that demarcated women’s work. While by this point she was drawing a weekly wage for housekeeping, Dolly certainly did a lot of scrubbing. Dolly did a lot of cooking and sewing too. Again, Sloan’s diary diligently appreciates the familiar comforts of innumerable spaghetti dinners and marks the skill and inventiveness that went into eating well on a tight budget: “These ‘stews’ of hers are something better than what that name means. They are a special triumph of her culinary ( 74 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Fig. 19  John Sloan, Dolly Sewing, ca. 1912. Ink on paper, 14 × 12 7⁄16 in. (35.6 × 31.6 cm). Delaware Art Museum, Gift of Helen Farr Sloan, 2000 © Delaware Art Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

art” (May 13, 1912). Sewing too is likened to art and mixed with reading and conversation, as in the spring and summer of 1911, when Mr. Yeats on his portrait and I on Scribner’s drawings worked the whole day most industriously. With hope to spur us on. We really enjoy these days of work in the studio together. Dolly brought her sewing in today (she is making a coat of silk for Henri to wear in Summer weather, painting). Then our lunches of tea and bread and butter and jam [May 29]. . . . Terrific heat today. I worked with not great steadfastness on a drawing (Gaboriau). Dolly sewed [with] her usual indomitable energy on another silk shirt for me [ July 11]. . . . When I came home I found Mr. Yeats there with Dolly. She, sewing on another silk shirt for me [ July 24]. Yeats, Henri, and Sloan all made studies of Dolly at her needlework. A quick undated sketch by Henri shows Sloan reading and Dolly sewing. A sheet of Sloan’s sketches and doodles from around 1912 has Dolly at its center, lips pursed and eyes down in concentration on the delicate work in her lap (fig. 19). There is a quiet tenderness to this drawing, a delicate touch that reciprocates the work of Dolly’s hands. Sloan’s pen is attentive to the way her hair is swept up, to the hang of her necklace and the firm grip of her fingers. But, as is apparent from the sketches and caricatures that circle the john sloan’s intimate tenements  ( 75 )

page, including another take on Dolly sewing in her chair, this is an informal exercise, perhaps pursued during after-​dinner conversation. Formal images of the interior of Sloan’s apartment, such as Memory and Woman with Etching Tray, are rare in this period, and it was not until the following decades that Sloan made finished works such as the etching Herself (1923), in which Dolly darns a sock, and the charcoal drawing Dolly Sewing (1930). While paintings such as Scrubwomen, Astor Library and A Woman’s Work may stem from attention to the domestic labor of his own home, for Sloan art meant engagement with the lives of others. He and Henri were inspired by “Whitman’s love for all men,” and Sloan recalled that he particularly “liked what resulted from his descriptive catalogues of life. They helped to interest me in the details of life around me.”40 Rereading Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) in 1908 led Sloan to “thinking how necessary it is for an artist of any creative sort to go among ‘common’ people, not to waste his time among his fellows, for it must be from the other class not creators nor Bohemians nor dilettantes that he will get his knowledge of life. I should like to know two or three plain homes well” ( January 16, 1908). Frank Jewett Mather posited that a modern American genre painter should combine a form of realism with the French intimist painters Pierre Bonnard’s and Edouard Vuillard’s attention to everyday domestic life. Where Vuillard looked in on the apartment he shared with his mother, Sloan combined an introspective awareness of his and Dolly’s domesticity with slow looking at the plain homes of his neighbors.

New York Niches Dutch genre painting provided models for pictures that look carefully, in contrast to impressionism’s quick glance, at the homes and lives of others. In the spring of 1912, Sloan was twice struck by visions of women at windows. The works that followed from these encounters seem, at first, still further removed from politics than the paintings of women hanging out their washing. His March 21, 1912, diary entry describes “a delicatessen shop window, 3rd Ave. and about 10th St. fine at evening with bright lights and the Jewess proprietoress leaning on the inner edge with all the hams and sausage and her arms.” Offered without context, though presumably glimpsed on an evening stroll, this image conjures the staged composition and material abundance of much seventeenth-​century Dutch genre and still life painting, and specifically the niche paintings made by the Leiden fijnschilder Gerrit Dou in the 1650s and 1660s.41 As art historian Wayne Franits explains, “Paintings of this type feature stone enclosures or window surrounds inhabited by figures whom Dou began to depict with increasing monumentality. The niches served to enhance the overall trompe l’oeil effect of Dou’s paintings, to foist a delightful visual conceit upon the viewer by toying with ( 76 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Fig. 20  Gerrit Dou, Self-​Portrait, ca. 1665. Oil on wood, 19 ¼ × 15 ⅜ in. (48.9 × 39.1 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913, 14.40.607.

the parameters of art and reality.”42 While Dou’s paintings were not included in the Hudson-​Fulton exhibition and had by the 1910s lost some of the appeal they held for nineteenth-​century collectors, Sloan would have seen them in New York collections and in reproduction. The niche Self-​Portrait (ca. 1665; fig. 20) was part of Benjamin Altman’s large 1913 bequest to the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Burlington Magazine ran several important articles on Dou. Exactly one month after he was struck by the vision of the Jewish delicatessen, Sloan “saw a girl looking out of window in rooming house opposite and tried to paint her from memory. Don’t think I have it yet, but will probably go on with it tomorrow” (April 21, 1912). This painting, A Window on the Street (1912), and variants on its theme made the following year borrow Dou’s niche composition and many of its effects to frame early twentieth-​century women. john sloan’s intimate tenements  ( 77 )

Leaning on a decadent velvety cushion and with a mass of wavy, perhaps Wildean, bangs, the woman in A Window on The Street suggests bohemian theatricality. Several contributors to Louis Baury’s 1911 article “The Message of Bohemia” identified bohemians as dandies and frauds living “always in a world of pretensions.”43 While Sloan gave Baury a sincere account of the true bohemian as one who sacrifices material comfort in pursuit of freedom, he also saw the potential for fraudulent performance, passing comment on Robert Henri’s second wife, Marjorie’s, “conventional Bohemian” affectations (November 30, 1908). The woman-​in-​the-​window’s performative quality may have initially drawn Sloan’s attention and suggested the niche format; as art historian Martha Hollander observes, in many of Dou’s niche pictures “the principal subjects, shown half-​length in stone niches, resemble actors who have stepped forward to confront us.”44 Sloan revisited the theme of bohemian performance viewed through a rooming-​house window in a drawing made the following year. Here the protagonist reclines in a loose, flowing dress on an easy chair with a book and a cat and some perky geraniums. The caption, which accompanied the drawing in Harper’s Weekly, casts this as a knowing performance: “Miss Hallroom probably feels that she makes a pretty picture seated at her window, but over the way they think the two flat-​irons she has left on the window-​sill spoil the effect” (1913; fig. 21). While captions imposed by editors were a vexed issue for illustrators in this period, a preliminary sketch with Sloan’s first draft of the line, “Effect of two flat irons left on a window sill,” makes clear this was his own joke.45 As in much of Sloan’s graphic satire, a dose of realism, in the form of the mundane objects of domestic labor, undermines romantic pretensions. A third niche composition, the Harper’s Weekly cover In Her Place (1913; plate 7), turns from bohemianism to family life. In contrast to the bachelorettes of A Window on the Street and “Miss Hallroom. . . ,” the world-​weary woman slumped on the windowsill in In Her Place wears a wedding ring and occupies a space full of the stuff of domesticity. In Modern Painting, which was a formative book for Sloan, George Moore reserves his fullest praise for seventeenth-​century Dutch painters and the Punch illustrator Charles Keene, whom he casts as their kindred spirit. “Terburg [Gerard ter Borch] is simple as a page of seventeenth-​century prose,” Moore writes, “and in Keene there is the same deep, rich, classic simplicity.” Moore lauded the economy of Keene’s Punch scenes of middle-​class British life, exclaiming, “How slight the means, how extraordinary the result!” and explaining that through telling details “the very conditions of life of these people are revealed to us.”46 Sloan shared this admiration for Keene, acknowledging him as a model for his own drawing and collecting examples of his work. In his illustrations Sloan similarly marshals the slight means of the medium to convey the “conditions of life” he observed in his neighborhood. Rather than finding humor in a window-​framed performance, In Her Place instead peers into the domestic space behind the foreground figure. As Hollander observes, ( 78 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Fig. 21  John Sloan, “Miss Hallroom probably feels that she makes a pretty picture seated at her window, but over the way they think the two flat-​irons she has left on the window-​sill spoil the effect,” Harper’s Weekly, August 23, 1913. Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-​Champaign.

where some niche pictures frame figures like actors, in other compositions “the picture’s formal components . . . are arranged to suggest some association between front and rear spaces and hence to invite interpretation.”47 Slowly and carefully, in a way that affords each weight and significance, Sloan catalogues the things in the room. These are, from left to right: the net curtain, the bed, the hat on the bed, the material draped over the bedstead, the newspaper on the floor, the potted plant tethered on the windowsill, the pictures on the wall, the pots and pans and plates on the high shelf, the frilled material that decorates that shelf, the letters tucked behind the bracket that holds the shelf up, the skillet on the table beneath it, the kettle on the gas cooker, the pipe connecting the gas cooker to the gas supply, the coffeepot to be filled from the kettle, the urn and boxes stowed on a low shelf under the table and the shoes lined up under them, the curve-​fronted dresser with a pot of cold cream, a cigarette box and a half smoked cigar resting on it, the dresser’s cupboard and drawers, the net curtain, and the milk and butter kept cool on the windowsill. This kind of painstaking attention to detail was fundamental to the rich, simple genre art Moore advocated. As the nineteenth-​century French critic and theorist Charles Blanc observed, “it would be shocking to see a small genre picture like those of Terburg or Metsu [Gabriël Metsu] treated with negligence or want of delicacy. If the mind has little to do in the lower regions of painting, we must at least find there the mind of the pencil. What interest can an old housewife, scouring a kettle or preparing a meal, offer if the vulgarity of the subject is not redeemed by the spirituelle accentuation of each detail.”48 When set against art histories that cast Sloan’s repeated depiction of his female neighbors as compensations for his middle-​aged middle-​class status anxiety or as expressions of his sublimated desire for and fear of women, the claim that he was genuinely interested in housework seems rather naïve. But works such as In Her Place, together with Sloan’s writing and reading, bring tenement domesticity forth as a compelling artistic and intellectual concern.49 Looking into the “plain homes” of his neighbors and informed by his firsthand observation of Dolly and the testimony of protofeminists such as May Wood Simons, Sloan imbues the things in the apartment with the meaning they held for the domestic laborer. Utilizing the interpretive potential created by front and rear spaces in niche compositions, all this seems to rest in Sloan’s drawing on the woman’s back, to weigh upon her mind, to be that which furrows her brow and makes her head heavy in her hand. Remembering to place the skillet here and the kettle there, to pick up the newspapers, to clean beneath the frilled shelf cover, to pay the gas bill, to maneuver the heavy pan with this gesture, to put the milk back on the windowsill, to pick up that kind of bread on the way home, to take out the trash. This is the intimate ordinary experience of women in the city. This is the “everyday work of doing-​cooking,” which is, as Michel de Certeau’s collaborator on The Practice of Everyday Life, Luce Giard, describes it in her account of culinary activity, “one of the strong aspects of ordinary ( 80 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

culture.” Doing-​cooking is not of some “feminine essence,” Giard explains, but is deeply ingrained in women’s lives in many societies.50 Sloan shows domestic tasks and the thought and attention and specialization they demand with the careful, equivalent attention to each object and its placement afforded by his pen. This work was in part visible to Sloan in New York in 1913, as it was for Giard in mid-​twentieth-​century Paris, because it was in flux.

Re-​envisioning Domesticity If Sloan aspired to present “the very conditions of life” of ordinary New Yorkers in works such as In Her Place, he faced a daunting task, as those lives were characterized by increasing complexity and enmeshed in what sociologist Georg Simmel called the metropolitan “many membered organism.”51 Sloan was helped in this task by the way illustration made his art proximate with words. Moore’s claim that Keene depicted the condition of middle-​class Victorians within the slight means of drawing alone is somewhat disingenuous, as when these images appeared in Punch they were captioned with several lines of dialogue or complex scenarios akin to Sloan’s “Miss Hallroom. . . .” Beyond the specific caption, and even when viewed in a portfolio or gallery stripped of surrounding text, Keene’s cartoons drew on the vast discursive frame—the language, humor, and worldview—of Punch. So too, Sloan’s illustrations, and perhaps by extension his paintings on related themes, were embedded in the magazine discourse that framed them. A few months before Sloan’s In Her Place cover, former Collier’s editor Norman Hapgood had purchased Harper’s Weekly with the aim of establishing a progressive mass-​market magazine. Hapgood mixed Greenwich Village feminism and socialism with more mainstream Progressivism and brought the artists and the aesthetic of the Masses to a mass readership. Here Sloan’s images of women at windows took on, or were ascribed, particular meanings. On the cover of Harper’s Weekly, the caption In Her Place is followed by “(With an Editorial on Page 5),” explicitly tying Sloan’s illustration to the text of the magazine. A prospectus for Hapgood’s Harper’s explained that it would be a “spokesman of the new Feminist Movement in its broader and deeper aspects,”52 and it is to this end that Sloan’s drawing is put: One who looks out of the window of a railroad train entering a large city, or who looks out of the window of an elevated road, sees women sitting at dingy windows, gazing vacantly out of the small flats which their families inhabit. They have no sufficient occupation in taking care of two or three rooms, and the fact that they have not any adequate call on their energies and ability turns john sloan’s intimate tenements  ( 81 )

them into slatterns, so that they do not even do properly what little work there is to do. Mr. Sloan’s picture on the cover this week depicts such a woman.53 Hapgood moves from observations and inferences grounded in the details of Sloan’s drawing to broader explanations of the condition it depicts. In the modern metropolis, “multiform domestic tasks” such as weaving, dyeing, and making butter are no longer required of housewives; tenement apartments are “cramped and confined” but require less housekeeping; schools and other institutions have lessened the burden of childcare. All this leaves the housewife with little to do, which, to a progressive like Hapgood, is explanation enough for the drawing’s downcast mood. This account misreads aspects of Sloan’s drawing and, as later histories of domestic work argue, simplifies and overstates the labor-​saving effect of new technologies.54 But it also opens up a perspective on everyday life that exceeds the scope of the drawing alone. Sloan’s close observation of women’s work in his own apartment and the surrounding neighborhood, together with his absorption of genre traditions that conditioned an attention to the detail and structure of everyday life, helped him to see and to depict tenement domesticity with a rare understanding. Hapgood had no such privileged access and speaks from the familiar Progressive Era position of the expert outsider. As suggested by the skewed aspiration to be “spokesman” for the women’s movement, Harper’s Weekly was full of the paternalistic voice of male feminism also found in the Masses. Hapgood’s claim that women of the kind pictured in In Her Place are “slatterns” seems out of sympathy with Sloan’s illustration and misreads the signs of tenement life it contains. Where Sloan’s earlier etching The Women’s Page (1905) depicts an apartment left to chaos by a distracted housewife, here, aside from a newspaper on the floor and a book on the bed, all is orderly. That the small collection of pans and crockery is all on view may have suggested disorder to middle-​class homeowners used to ample closet and shelf space, but this was an inevitability of rented rooms, where such amenities were rarely provided. Misunderstandings of this kind often arose when middle-​class professionals observed tenement housekeeping, which tended to involve clever improvisations of the kind Sloan details, such as the wire-​tethered potted plant and the milk and cheese stored on the window ledge, and good domestic practice adapted to suboptimal conditions, such as clotheslines rigged to fire escapes.55 Sloan’s drawing contains hints of the changing way of life, and of the intrusion of modernity into the domestic sphere, that Hapgood enlarges upon. Genre painting in general and niche compositions in particular conventionalize attention to detail, and Sloan’s drawing encourages a close, interrogative look at the apartment interior, which includes a pipe that runs up the wall from the cooker, connecting it to the city-​wide gas distribution system. Intellectual historian Douglas Tallack points to the way that Sloan “evinces an awareness of the infrastructural aspect” of his exterior city scenes. ( 82 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Paintings such as Six O’Clock, Winter (1912) understand the city as a “peopled system” and acknowledge that the localized incidents they depict are located within the vast networks and structures of the metropolis.56 The gas pipe in In Her Place similarly shows that the seemingly insular domestic sphere is literally and figuratively penetrated by and connected to the New York grid. Manhattan’s street plan was only the most visible of the grids shaping urban modernity. Frank Trentmann explains that controversies and disputes around late nineteenth- and early twentieth-​century technologies such as mains for water, gas, and electricity that connected private homes to public services raised “questions about the nature of the everyday and its relation to non-​everyday processes and power.” Such conflicts “point to the limitations of approaching the everyday as a separate, intimate sphere, parochial, inward looking and instinctively conservative. The terrain of everyday life is more differentiated. New technologies like water pipes, hot baths, flush toilets, and constant running water changed practices of consumption, which, in turn, generated norms and expectations that could exert pressure on public life and politics.”57 Sloan was again unusually alive to these aspects of the everyday. His handiness—his willingness to take things apart out of curiosity or to fix things up for less practical friends—meant he had a general understanding of the domestic technologies that surrounded him. His tendency to work through the night in his apartment and, when he could eventually afford one, his studio made him attentive to the practicalities and economics of gas and then electric lighting. Sloan’s diary records frustration over a long-​running dispute with a gas company that had ignored legislation and overcharged him: “Today the Gas Company sends me a refund check for $20.01 in obedience to the order of court which decided that 80¢ was the legal rate since May 1906. No interest on the excess money which they have illegally forced consumers to pay (at $1.00 per thousand [cubic feet])” (May 11, 1909). Two years after this gas dispute the Sloans moved from their cramped, rundown Chelsea apartment to Gramercy Park, where they stayed briefly before settling in Greenwich Village. John excitedly noted that the Gramercy Park apartment would “have electric light, steam heat and hot water . . . and Dolly will have a real kitchen ‘with a sink’ ” (May 11, 1911). That such changes held personal and professional significance is apparent in a jubilant entry made shortly after the move. “I took a short walk after I had finished drawing, by electric light if you please! Not that it’s new to others, but to us it’s our first treat at home” ( June 9, 1911). In disputes over bills and tariffs, early twentieth-​century consumers like Sloan saw their own complex, interdependent position within the nexus of state regulation and private companies. Moving to a new apartment revealed the way these external factors shaped working practices and everyday life. Sloan’s diary provides an extraordinary array of such quotidian details. While the record is unique, the experiences themselves are not, as many artists lived in at least john sloan’s intimate tenements  ( 83 )

similar circumstances. But that act of record-​keeping, that habituated practice of noticing and describing, engendered a degree of attention and reflection and contributed to Sloan’s feeling for and insight into everyday life. Soon after moving into his new, improved apartment, Sloan made ice cream today in our new freezer. Very quick, less than 6 minutes not turning all the time. When I was a boy I had to twist the freezer handle 35 minutes down cellar at 1921 Camac St. Philadelphia with the jam shelf swinging overhead. I can bring the whole thing back: the old damp piece of red carpet, ingrain, that I used to cover over the finished job. The twist in the wooden stairs going down cellar. The heaving ruggedness of the earth floor, the joists overhead where, toward the front end opposite the round furnace, I had a trapeze. Out there the gas meter that I so longed to take apart. The hole of mystery under the marble steps [in] front [ June 25, 1911]. Here and in other instances there is an eloquent, lyrical register in Sloan’s record of ordinary experience, an acknowledgment of the way that mundane and repetitive actions shade into memory and emotion; of the way a coherent sense of self forms from the ongoing performance of ordinary tasks. Luce Giard writes, “Doing-​cooking is the medium for a basic, humble, and persistent practice that is repeated in time and space, rooted in the fabric of relationships to others and to one’s self, marked by the ‘family-​saga’ and the history of each, bound to childhood memory just like rhythms and seasons.”58 The encounter with new technology in the process of making ice cream takes Sloan back nearly thirty years to one of his boyhood homes. It calls to his mind the changes in material conditions he had witnessed and recalls a long-​held fascination with the relationship between the home and the wider networks of which it is a part. The gas pipes that connect Sloan’s Philadelphia boyhood home and the Manhattan apartment of In Her Place to wider city structures might also figure other kinds of interconnectedness that were reshaping understandings of the domestic sphere. In Chicago Jane Addams saw the lives of her Hull House neighbors become increasingly enmeshed in city-​wide structures and processes. In a 1908 lecture she explained: We have been accustomed for many generations to think of woman’s place as being entirely within the walls of her own household, and it is indeed impossible to imagine the time when her duty there shall be ended or to forecast any social change which shall ever release her from that paramount obligation. There is no doubt, however, that many women to-​day are failing properly to discharge their duties to their own families and households simply because they fail to see that as society grows more complicated it is necessary that ( 84 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

women shall extend her sense of responsibility to many things outside of her own home, if only in order to preserve the home in its entirety.59 Addams foreshadows (or directly inspired) Hapgood’s account of the transformation of domestic labor, explaining that even in tasks that remain within the home, such as maintaining hygiene and preparing healthy meals, a modern urban housewife “is utterly dependent upon the city administration for the conditions which render decent living possible.”60 Waste collection services, Health Department policing of food standards, and other areas of city governance create this condition of interdependence. Housekeeping for Addams becomes a duty that extends far beyond the physical space of the home. She describes, for example, the Hull House Woman’s Club’s collective effort to improve sanitation across a whole city ward. This sense of an expanded domestic responsibility was one of many ways Progressive Era thought broke down distinctions between the private and public sphere. Hapgood’s solution to the narrowed domestic sphere he observes in In Her Place was for women’s work to be relocated to suitably reformed factories and other sites “outside the home under conditions that will not be damaging.”61 Elsewhere in the same Harper’s Weekly, Anna Garlin Spencer, a Unitarian minister and leading suffragist, took a top-​down managerial approach to “Marriage Today and Tomorrow.” “The marriage of tomorrow will substitute for ancient tribal and family arrangements, and for the domination of church and synagogue, a State supervision and legal guardianship in marriage,” she explains. “As unfettered competition in business is becoming obsolete, so uncontrolled individualism in marriage contracts will become out of date, when once we have learned the true social meaning of the private home. An earnest of this coming social control of marriage is shown in the new ‘Domestic Relations Courts’ and their highly useful work of family rehabilitation.”62 While the “social control of marriage”—including economic support “for three or four children to each ‘eugenically eligible’ pair”—was an extreme fantasy of state intervention, the courts that for Spencer presage it were a Progressive Era reality. Established in Chicago, New York, and other cities in the early 1910s, courts of domestic relations pursued fathers who were drunk, absent, or in other ways “failed breadwinners,” as well as conducting a more general regulation of working-​class family life. Historian Michael Willrich explains, “In the progressive rhetoric of socialized law, the identity of the family as the ‘social unit’ of the state—the engine of racial reproduction, the wellspring of life’s necessities, the nursery of child welfare—created a social interest in the family that trumped the interests of its individual members.”63 The arguments put forward by Addams, Hapgood, and Spencer carry different political implications, but all reconceive the boundaries of the domestic sphere. Hapgood’s Harper’s Weekly gave voice to the powerful early twentieth-​century conception of the everyday as a site that might be improved and perfected by expert john sloan’s intimate tenements  ( 85 )

oversight and managerial interventions. While Sloan did not share this worldview and, indeed, stated, “I am rather more interested in the human beings themselves than in the schemes for betterment” (April 15, 1909), In Her Place could nonetheless be coopted by it. That Progressive Era vision of everyday life gave way to the later theorizations of the everyday as defined by political oppression and individuals’ informal tactical resistance to it in the works of Luce Giard, Michel de Certeau, and others. In Greenwich Village in the 1910s, Sloan was on the fringes of the kind of avant-​garde art practice that explored such modes of resistance—as when he, Marcel Duchamp, and the poet Gertrude Drick (who styled herself “Woe”) climbed the Washington Square arch in 1917 to declare the Village an independent republic—but it never fully entered his art. Another painting featuring a woman at her window made by Sloan in 1913 does, though, suggest some resistance to the vision of women’s everyday lives as homebound domestic drudgery that could only be alleviated by top-​down state intervention. In Spring Planting, Greenwich Village (1913; fig. 22), the woman at the window, with her elbows rooted to the window ledge and her chin resting dolefully on her clasped hands, is not presented front and center in niche format, but as a background onlooker to the foreground scene occupied by three zesty, unencumbered women gathered to cultivate a small patch of soil. Though equipped with spades and rakes, and in one case working to break and turn the soil, these women do not seem much like gardeners, still less farmers. High-​heeled shoes and print dresses suggest that this is, rather, a temporary occupation, a hobby playfully taken up to their evident amusement. All three, and most obviously the daringly close-​cropped and carefully styled woman at right, are marked as bohemians, as representatives of the “short-​haired women and long-​haired men” associated with Greenwich Village.64 In line with Sloan’s association of this type with a hard-​fought rejection of wage slavery and oppressive convention, gardening here calls to mind the back-​to-​the-​soil movements and other expressions of antimodernity gaining popularity in left-​leaning and bohemian circles in early twentieth-​century America. Off-​grid and refusing the indolence supposedly enforced by the modernized domestic sphere, these joyous, performative gardeners offer a subversive reinterpretation of everyday homemaking. They prefigure John and Dolly Sloan’s escape from the tenement-​kitchen world into nature, to Gloucester, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1915 and later to Taos, New Mexico. Sloan’s gradual secession, in his living arrangement and his art, from that world that he had been so immersed in and so attentive to might map onto a modernist removal from the sites of everyday life and ordinary political struggle—a parting of ways from genre painting and from the working-​class woman left in her place. In Her Place offers, in the gas pipe, a hint at, glimpse of, or figure for the interconnected, penetrated domestic sphere. But the niche composition and other elements of the genre tradition that encouraged and enabled Sloan to see the everyday world around ( 86 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Fig. 22  John Sloan, Spring Planting, Greenwich Village, 1913. Oil on canvas, 26 × 32 in. (66 × 81.3 cm). Columbus Museum of Art, Museum Purchase, Howald Fund II, 1980.025. Photo: Art Resource, New York.

him with such earnest clarity limit the extent to which he might then articulate the complexity of what he saw, let alone interpret it. Taking up earlier pictorial strategies meant taking on the worldview they expressed, as exemplified by the niche picture’s insistence that a certain scene or interior space or individual might be framed, vignetted, and set apart from surrounding social structures. That vision of contained bourgeois selfhood was already a fantasy in the seventeenth-​century Dutch Republic, where the networks of trade and emerging empire and the boom-​and-​bust cycles of nascent market capitalism were implicating individuals in structures far outside their own control or understanding, but it was at least a plausible fantasy. Sloan’s sustained attempt to envision twentieth-​century life in a manner patterned closely after seventeenth-​century forms of picture-​making pushes up against quite different conflicts between modern and genre than those considered by Frank Jewett Mather and other contributors to the art-​critical discourse of the years around 1910. Genre painting loses purchase here not because the art world adopts new aesthetics but because the actual world ceases to look like the one the tradition depicted. john sloan’s intimate tenements  ( 87 )

Sloan turned to painting in the tradition of Dutch genre after visiting the Metropolitan Museum’s Hudson-​Fulton exhibition. That exhibition, part of a city​wide commemoration of the European colonization of the New York area, meshed with two subtler forms of colonialism: the mass acquisitions that positioned Old Master paintings at the core of prominent public and private collections (and as an ideal of fine art in America) and the Progressive elevation of the Dutch Republic, with its fastidious cleanliness as an ideal for everyday life, as a model for US society. Art historian Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw cites abhorrent racist imagery made for the Philadelphia Press and passages in Sloan’s diary that describe Black people in racist, dehumanizing language in a powerful indictment of both Sloan’s “deeply held and remarkably clear colonialist beliefs of white racial superiority” and art history’s failure to acknowledge their effect on his art and teaching.65 While many factors drew Sloan to the Dutch genre paintings he saw at the Metropolitan Museum, the apparent whiteness of the world they presented was surely among them. As they prevented him from seeing the complexity of networked, metropolitan housekeeping, Dutch genre compositions enabled Sloan to reproduce that white world, in scenes such as A Woman’s Work, which occlude the racial diversity of the neighborhood and city around them. The tender, intimate looking that led Sloan to see the gendered inequities of domestic labor was counterweighted by a refusal to see, and indeed active participation in, other forms of injustice. Sloan’s intimate picturing of Dolly’s and his neighbor’s domestic labor was at once an acknowledgment of the social significance of that work and a retreat from the wider world. Given Sloan’s struggle to sell paintings, those sketches and canvases and the ideas they contained remained in many ways private. In Her Place became part of the public, Progressive Era discourse about housekeeping through its relationship to a mass-​market magazine. Sloan made the work at least to some extent in dialogue with Harper’s Weekly’s concerns, and its appearance on the cover, together with Hapgood’s accompanying editorial, brought it—and perhaps related paintings, including A Woman’s Work and Spring Planting—within the magazine’s discursive frame. Sloan’s art, like Edmund Tarbell’s paintings and Elizabeth Shippen Green’s portfolios, comes closest to genre’s interpretive function at the point when it becomes proximate with words: that is, when it comes close to illustration. Where there was a subtlety to the way wealthy patrons of fine art insinuated a white worldview into the museums they funded, mass-​market magazines overtly stated their politics and made whiteness editorial policy. It was on the covers and advertising pages of such magazines that the early twentieth-​century genre illustration tradition explored in the following chapter took shape.

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3 Brand Ordinary Norman Rockwell and the Commercial Illustration of Everyday Life

T

he mass-​market magazines of the early twentieth century reframed and re-​envisioned American genre painting in advertising and editorial illustration. Illustrators took up the surface appearance and types and motifs of earlier traditions and sometimes alluded to specific works. At a deeper level, the production and reception of commercial illustration re-​created, in direct and analogous ways, the conditions in which genre schools and traditions had previously flourished. The early twentieth-​century proliferation of images in magazines such as Harper’s Monthly, but particularly the illustration- and advertising-​heavy weeklies like the Saturday Evening Post, established a repository of stock types and familiar scenarios through which narratives developed, in-​jokes ran, and a commonsense worldview was constructed and reinforced. The short stories, reportage, editorials, and advertising copy through which mass-​market magazines sought to establish a hegemonic Americanism provided genre illustration with a base in language as proximate as emblem books had been to seventeenth-​century Dutch genre painting, or political jokes and almanacs to antebellum American genre painting. Magazines and advertisers commissioned thousands of illustrations made by hundreds of illustrators working to more and less rigid commissions and within set formats and house styles. This suppressed personalities and idiosyncrasies, producing a school-​like communal imagery that became as familiar and ordinary as everyday life itself. While most illustrators toiled in relative obscurity, others, such as Elizabeth Shippen Green and Norman Rockwell, achieved national celebrity, establishing signature styles and building their own everyday worlds. All this was no small undertaking; as cultural theorist Stuart Hall acknowledged, “Hegemonizing is hard work.”1

By 1945, when he made Salesman in a Swimming Hole (see plate 1), and across his major Post covers of the 1950s, including Saying Grace (1951) and After the Prom (1957), Norman Rockwell made hegemonizing look if not easy, then seamless. The salesman swims in complacent comfort: no one will begrudge his trespass, nothing disturb his tranquility. These works draw on genre painting’s deep wells of familiarity and nostalgia as well as its typing, normative naturalism, and telling narrative detail. As Rockwell explained, “I like to do a picture which, instead of depicting a single incident or a single moment in time, traces the course of an action over a period of time. Here one can see that the salesman got out of his car, took off his clothes but not his shoes . . . and just before submerging, carefully laid his lighted cigar on his shoe, ready to be puffed the minute he emerges from the stream.”2 Such paintings have been widely read, as art historian Alan Wallach puts it, “as an adaptation of the genre tradition to the needs of a mass middle-​class audience,” and widely criticized for the way they so suited corporate, conservative agendas. “Rockwell’s American Arcadia,” explains Wallach, “a mythic world of benevolent adults, cuddly children, patriotic stalwarts, lovable eccentrics, and other small-​town types, furnished Post readers with an imaginative counterweight to American progress and ongoing modernization.”3 All the components of the salesman type, the dapper bowtie and natty shoes, are laid out, deconstructed, on the riverbank; the smoldering cigar and car stocked with branded samples wait patiently, so that following his dip into lost youth the swimmer may step back into his type and his role as both consumer and agent of consumerism. Rockwell had a tricky relationship with the term “genre painting.” A 1920 newspaper profile suggested he didn’t paint genre but folk, contributing to the down-​to-​earth public image he worked hard to cultivate.4 The fine-​art associations of genre painting sat awkwardly with that identity and with the realities of commercial illustration but met his need to be taken seriously as an artist. Decades later, attempting to have his cake and eat it, Rockwell embraced the highfalutin French term while preserving his persona. “I’m not an illustrator any more,” he told an interviewer in 1960. “I do genre. That’s spelled g-​e-​n-​r-​e.”5 While genre painting had been denigrated and dismissed by modernist art critics, it remained a step up from commercial illustration in the lingering hierarchy of genres, and so inclusion in the tradition worked to raise Rockwell’s status. This was true of critical comments, such as Clement Greenberg’s quip that nineteenth-​century Russian genre painter Ilya Repin “would not stand a chance next to a Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell,” which, while calling both artists kitsch, acknowledges Rockwell as the exemplar of hegemonizing commercial art and as a master painter of everyday life. But such comparisons more commonly took celebratory form, as in S. Lane Faison Jr.’s assertion, in the 1961 Norman Rockwell Album, that “Rockwell belongs to a line of humorous genre painters which originated at least as long ago as in seventeenth-​century Holland.” This rhetoric continued in the ( 90 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

posthumous “cultural elevation” of Rockwell, which, more than the reception of any other figure in this book, identifies him as a genre painter; as, indeed, “the [ Johannes] Vermeer of this nation’s domestic history.”6 Avoiding hyperbole, this chapter addresses the way that the production of commercial art led Rockwell to do the work of genre painting. Encountered far from the context in which they were made—in  galleries, on merchandise, or online—“Rockwells” like Salesman in a Swimming Hole appear as a fixed, stable imagery; over the decades “Norman Rockwell” has become shorthand for a small-​town worldview. But the adaptation of genre painting to commercial illustration was a more complex process than accounts of Rockwell’s work tend to acknowledge. This chapter begins with the way the national mass culture fostered by magazines and advertisers was built from the types and motifs of genre painting and other localized nineteenth-​century cultural practices. It then turns to commercial illustrators like Charles MacLellan and Robert Robinson, who, working in this context, developed the visual language that Rockwell would take up and perfect. Here a gently quantitative approach establishes the scale and variety of illustrations produced for the Post and other publications in the 1910s, to point to the way commercial illustration was a collective mass enterprise to which Rockwell at the start of his career was just one of many contributors. He quickly emerged as a leader in this field and was soon associated with the themes and motifs with which he is now synonymous. The chapter goes on to detail the way the development of that brand was closely tied to the demands of editors and advertisers in the period and the way it took on a life of its own as a Rockwellian world that clients could buy into and fans access through their imagination. That offer of inclusion was limited, though, as for much of his career Rockwell acquiesced to and reproduced the exclusions and prejudices of those he worked for. Like that of earlier contributors to the enterprise of American genre painting, his vision of everyday life was the product of the conditions in which it was formed. For Rockwell this was the complex, commercial sphere of mass-​market-​magazine illustration.

Commercial Types and the Genre Tradition To understand how Norman Rockwell became “Norman Rockwell,” it is necessary to first reconstruct the institutional frames and cultural contexts in which he began his work as a commercial illustrator and to consider the magazine that defined his career. Over the first decade of the twentieth century, the Saturday Evening Post established itself as America’s leading general interest magazine. By 1907 editor George Horace Lorimer settled on a cover design that became, in cultural historian Jan Cohn’s words, “unmistakable . . . a weekly symbol of its presence, its longevity, its vast circulation.”7 brand ordinary  ( 91 )

Post covers featured a single figure or small group, accompanied by a few props and hints at setting but located in blank white space, often though not always overlapping and obscuring Guernsey Moore’s distinctive masthead, occasionally framed in a blackline square or oval, and with minimal text along the bottom edge pointing to a particular feature of the magazine or trumpeting its sales figures. With infrequent exceptions to the rule and some advances in color reproduction, Post covers would look like this until the mid-1930s. That combination of repeated format and slight variation in content set a pattern for twentieth-​century mass culture, as did the magazine’s use of repetition and variation to establish a particular worldview. In his history of mass-​market magazines Richard Ohmann identifies the moment Munsey’s, Cosmopolitan, and the Ladies’ Home Journal dropped their cover price, increased advertising space, and emphasized illustration in the early 1890s as an important point of origin for twentieth-​century mass culture.8 Both Ohmann and Cohn, in her detailed account of Lorimer’s long, influential editorship at the Saturday Evening Post, argue that magazine publishers and editors used their mass circulation to push a clearly defined agenda. This took in elements of Progressive Era cultural uplift, forms of professional-​managerial class acculturation, and the ethos of consumer capitalism, which fostered national markets for the brands whose advertisements made the magazines profitable. Cohn suggests that Lorimer and like-​minded editors and publishers perceived an “unformed, unassimilated nation that lacked a unifying consciousness of Americanism” and used their magazines as a means of “creating America.”9 At times this took the heavy-​handed form of Edward Bok’s didactic advice to Ladies’ Home Journal readers or Lorimer’s vocal support for progressive Republicans in the Post around 1910, but it also meant the subtler task of establishing a national repertoire of types, jokes, opinions, general knowledge, and common sense. For this editors and advertisers drew on the existing stocks of nineteenth-​century popular culture, updated and expanded through endless repetitions and minor variations. Illustrations of cute kids and smiling African American servants appeared alongside pretty girls and their beaus, mischievous schoolboys and their cane-​wielding teachers, white-​bearded old men referred to as “codgers,” and, with the passage of time, First World War veterans, flappers, and hobos. Working on commission and for photomechanical reproduction made commercial illustration in some ways radically different from earlier kinds of genre art. But mass-​market magazine editors’ needs and new printing technologies in other ways reestablished the conditions in which genre painting had previously flourished. Art historian Wayne Franits shows how the urban centers of seventeenth-​century Dutch genre painting developed distinct iconographies, such as drinkers in Haarlem and servant girls in Delft; similarly, Elizabeth Johns characterizes antebellum American genre painting through its regional identifications, which included the Long Island ( 92 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

painter William Sidney Mount’s Yankee farmers and George Caleb Bingham’s Missouri River boatmen.10 While these highly localized forms of production and reception seem the exact opposite of national mass culture, they were the model editors like Bok and Lorimer sought to return to, in which a known audience’s tastes, needs, sense of humor, and so on could be both predicted and schooled. Jan Steen’s drunks and Mount’s farmers accrued meaning through proximity to a verbal and visual discourse, whether emblem books, almanacs, cartoon caricatures, or political jokes, that the artists could assume they shared with their audience. Mass-​market magazines produced swaths of shared verbal and visual discourse; the proliferation of editorial and advertising art in the proliferating weekly and monthly magazines meant that familiarity with a type or motif, which might have taken years to take hold in slower oral and print cultures, could now be established, adapted, and subverted in quickfire succession. Thus, over the course of the 1910s the illustrator Robert Robinson could introduce his “codger” type to Post readers as an old man bemused by the modern world, then give him the authority of a small-​town sheriff ’s badge and have him lord it over city-​slicker motorists, and then undermine that authority by showing small boys pelting him with snowballs.11 Around the time the Post settled on its iconic cover design, observers began to understand magazine illustration as a system made up of such types and stereotypes. A 1904 biographical dictionary identified Alice Barber Stephens with a group of narrowly defined types as “an illustrator whose favorite subjects are those of every-​day home life— the baby, the little child, the grandmother in cap and spectacles, etc.” Reviewing a 1912 illustration exhibition, Frederick James Gregg observed that “there is an endless succession of pretty or insipid women and conventionally good looking young men. There are groups of gamblers or farmers or what not.”12 In his 1907 “A Note on American Illustration,” Charles Caffin argues that the previous fifteen years had seen America lose its preeminence in book, magazine, and newspaper illustration as American publishers had come to value and insist on “something along the lines of what has already proved a success.” In the work of Charles Dana Gibson and other illustrators compelled by commercial logic to “rehash” their popular successes, “the types that had once been vital reappeared as puppets, stuffed with saw-​dust, and moved their wooden limbs to the obvious jigging of the showman’s strings.” Caffin goes on to explain that the popularity of the Gibson Girl spawned numerous pale imitations, and “so the ‘girl’ has been exploited in season and out of season, in every conceivable condition of complacent inanity, musing on her own charms or consciously submitting them to the besotted stare of her square-​jawed ‘beau.’ ”13 Harrison Fisher, Howard Chandler Christy, and numerous other male and female illustrators made numerous versions of the pretty girl or American girl for numerous magazine covers. Neysa McMein, known for her late 1910s flapper variants on the pretty girl type, told interviewers that she achieved career success by “studying out just what would fit into this magazine or that—and brand ordinary  ( 93 )

then going and telling them so!”14 The visual content of magazines such as the Post is here conceived as an evolving system into which new components can, and sometimes must, be fitted. Developing the sense of a system of types, Caffin sets these iterations of the girl alongside other “lucrative and popular vogue[s] in illustration,” including the “kid in art” and “sweater and breeches” scenes of colonial and frontier life. The complaint in each case is not with the quality of the illustrators’ work but with publishing conditions in which “many of them have been forced by the popularity which they have attained to go on and on producing work along the same groove of subject and manner. Accordingly, what started with being originality has become stereotyped by repetition.”15 Caffin’s striking, early use of this meaning of “stereotype” retains reference to its origins as a technique for printing multiple images but shades into the emerging use of the term to describe a way of perceiving and interpreting the world. It was not until fifteen years later, in Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion (1922), that careful attention was given to the way a “trickle of messages from the outside is affected by the stored up images, the preconceptions, and prejudices which interpret, fill them out, and in their turn powerfully direct the play of our attention, and our vision itself.” Lippmann explained that “in the individual person the limited messages from outside, formed into a pattern of stereotypes, are identified with his own interests as he feels and conceives them.”16 Caffin’s attention to kids in the context of commercial illustration was both contentious and timely, calling to mind the controversial repurposing of John Everett Millais’s A Child’s World (1886) as Bubbles to advertise Pears Soap two decades earlier, as well as the work of various high-​profile (predominantly female) contemporary illustrators such as Elizabeth Shippen Green and Jessie Wilcox Smith, or Grace Drayton, whose Campbell’s Soup Kids began to appear in 1905. Caffin did not have the Post solely or specifically in mind, but its 1907 covers tally closely with his analysis, featuring thirty-​one variations on the pretty girl, of which ten were contributed by Harrison Fisher; six “kid” covers, all but one made by J. C. Leyendecker; and five that might fall under the broad theme of “sweater and breeches,” including N. C. Wyeth’s rugged frontiersman (November 30, 1907). This was the heyday of the pretty girl, when what cultural historian Carolyn Kitch calls the “first visual stereotype” dominated the Post and other high-​circulation magazines.17 Caffin observed that the “kid in art” was for publishers “second in value only to the ‘girl and beau’ brand; perhaps even exceeds the latter, since it is supposed to appeal to persons of all age.”18 This proved to be prophetic, as kids and other comic types appeared with increasing frequency on Post covers, challenging, without displacing, pretty girls. Just three years later the kid was far more prevalent, with a range of artists now contributing covers featuring the type. Of the Post’s fifty-​three 1910 covers, twenty-​two were versions of the girl type, twenty-​one were kids, seven others ( 94 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

were comic types, including Robinson’s “codgers,” and three were historical or hunting scenes. Genre painting was always bound up with the creation, manipulation, and repetition of types. As Mariët Westermann observes, seventeenth-​century Dutch comic paintings of “peasants and low-​lifes” made for middle-​class buyers feature just “a few standard, endlessly repeated images of these social groups.” Similarly, Elizabeth Johns explains that in antebellum America “artists tapped into the evolving, contested network of social relations and prejudices already sorted out in typing (or being sorted out) that best satisfied the interests of their ambitious patrons.”19 This tendency became even more pronounced in the post–Civil War years, as artists like Thomas Waterman Wood and John George Brown became closely identified with a small group of frequently repeated types. By the 1870s, Wood was the painter of rustic old men, Brown of newsboys and bootblacks. Fans of Brown’s boys, such as the critic Nym Crynkle, enjoyed the fixed and familiar qualities of the type: “They are exuberant, sportive, reckless, mischievous, never vicious, deformed, or awry with an inheritance.”20 Crynkle’s 1894 Quarterly Illustrator appreciation of Brown includes a page of nine reproductions of street boy paintings set out in three rows of three (fig. 23). This grid accentuates the modularity of Brown’s single-​figure studies made during the 1880s, which were painted on canvases of approximately the same size (24 in. by 16 in.), and the fungibility of his boy types, all presented against near-​blank backgrounds with a telling gesture (a sly grin or open-​handed appeal) or prop (a dog or cat or boot or broomstick) to differentiate them. Caffin, in his Story of American Painting, published the same year as his “Note on American Illustration,” observes the same tendency in Brown’s boys as he found in illustrators’ commercial repetition of their types: “Have not their crude mixture of good and bad, of ugliness and attractiveness, their queer, intensely human, if distorted, individuality been scoured to a characterless propriety, and polished into a meek amiability by an application of moral sapolio, until they may be fit for the parlour but are no longer suggestive of the streets?” In what would become a familiar critique of popular culture, Caffin suggests this “softening of the type pleased a sentimental public.”21 Genre painting was also always a commercial form: in the absence of church or court patronage, painters in the Dutch Republic were reliant on private, middle-​class buyers, as were nineteenth-​century American artists. Repetition of the type to the point where bootblacks and newsboys were wholly synonymous with his name may have made Brown a figure of fun for the critics, but it also made him rich.22 Brown’s boys prefigured the marketing strategies of advertisers who sought to make brand names like Kodak and Sapolio displace generic terms like “camera” and “soap.” His character study compositions also prefigured the modular, fungible type-​with-​prop-​against-​ blank-​background format adopted by the Post and other magazines. By removing all but a few minimal signs of setting and social context, Brown made these boys his boys, brand ordinary  ( 95 )

Fig. 23  Page of John George Brown reproductions from an article by Nym Crinkle, “The Arabs of New York,” Quarterly Illustrator 2 (1894): 128. Smithsonian Libraries, Washington, DC.

their referent no longer found on New York streets but in his previous iterations of the type. Commercial illustrators clearly drew on the work of Brown and earlier genre painters, but this was less the appropriation or commercialization of their art than the fulfillment of its mass-​market potential.

Counting Cover Kids If the appearance, six months after the artist’s death, of Brown’s Paddy on the cover of the June 14, 1913, Survey magazine (fig. 10) marked the demise of the newsboy and bootblack both in genre painting and on the increasingly sanitized streets of New York, kid types were thriving on the covers of the Saturday Evening Post. Over the next few years (fig. 24*) Post cover kids would perform military salutes in makeshift uniform ( J. C. Leyendecker, July 5, 1913), perform handstands on an overturned barrel (Leyendecker, July 19, 1913*), grudgingly push an infant sibling in a baby carriage (Charles A. MacLellan, August 2, 1913*), fool around with a catapult during Sunday school (MacLellan, September 13, 1913), suffer an adjustment to their necktie before setting off for school (Leyendecker, September 20, 1913), grudgingly dry dishes (MacLellan, October 18, 1913*), push an enormous pumpkin in a wheelbarrow (Leyendecker, November 29, 1913), wrestle a quilt back from their sleeping brother (MacLellan, December 6, 1913), make a perilous first attempt at shaving with a straight razor (Leslie Thrasher, February 28, 1914*), beam with joy at some new full-​length pants (MacLellan, March 28, 1914), fish with a makeshift rod from a ramshackle jetty (Leyendecker, June 13, 1914), receive stern admonishment from a prim schoolmistress (Leyendecker, September 19, 1914), carve an enormous pumpkin (Sarah Stilwell-​Weber, November 7, 1914), industriously sew up a tear in their pants (Thrasher, January 23, 1915*), industriously scrub a shaggy hound (Thrasher, March 6, 1915), practice baseball pitching in Mother’s ornate mirror ( John A. Coughlin, April 24, 1915), get caught stealing apples by a switch-​wielding, straw-​hatted “codger” (Leyendecker, August 7, 1915), ride an out-​of-​ control donkey (Tony Sarg, October 2, 1915), cheekily pet a dog while sitting in a church pew beside a stern matron (Thrasher, October 16, 1915*), mock Grandpa as he struggles with arithmetic homework (MacLellan, November 6, 1915*), dismantle a clock to Grandmother’s dismay (MacLellan, February 26, 1916), whiz past a rotund businessman on a go-​cart (Leyendecker, March 11, 1916*), stand proudly while being measured for a suit by an elderly tailor (Leyendecker, April 15, 1916), and grudgingly push an infant sibling in a baby carriage while being mocked by carefree peers (Norman Rockwell, May 20, 1916*). In the three years between the valedictory appearance of Brown’s Paddy and Rockwell’s Post debut, nine artists contributed fifty-​six kid covers to the Post. This run of brand ordinary  ( 97 )

Fig. 24  Cover illustrations from the Saturday Evening Post: (top row, from left) J. C. Leyendecker, Children Playing Circus, July 19, 1913; Charles A. MacLellan, Boy Pushing Baby Carriage, August 2, 1913; MacLellan, Washing Dishes, October 18, 1913; (middle row, from left) Leslie Thrasher, First Shave, February 28, 1914; Thrasher, Patching His Pants, January 23, 1915; Thrasher, Dog in Church, October 16, 1915; (last row, from left) MacLellan, Homework, November 6, 1915; Leyendecker, Soapbox Racer, March 11, 1916; Norman Rockwell, Baby Carriage, May 20, 1916. Files licensed by Curtis Licensing Indianapolis, IN.

illustrations presents what literary historian Mark Turner describes as the problem of “seriality”: “the interpretative difficulties of singularity versus plurality, the relationship of the part to the whole in a culture of repetitive rhythms.”23 There is not world enough to discuss every Post kid cover without reducing each to the briefest outline, but the meaning of any one cover is reliant on repetitions and relationships that only become apparent across the whole. Each cover yields detail and invention to close looking, but sustained analysis seems false to the skimming, surface encounter—the editors’ quickfire decision or the consumers’ impulsive newsstand purchase—that they were designed for and subject to. Moreover, where Elizabeth Shippen Green’s seven sequenced Mistress of the House illustrations, or indeed her serial contributions to Harper’s Monthly, represent relatively contained series bound by the portfolio format and the hand of a single artist, Post covers and cognate illustrations create a messy and expansive seriality. As in twenty-​first-​century meme culture, types and motifs were to an extent common property that could be adapted, combined, or subverted by many hands across multiple platforms. As in the current moment, technological advances at the start of the twentieth century increased the speed and insistence with which series of self-​referencing images might develop and circulate. The list above is just the tip of the iceberg, as the Post was just one of many weekly and monthly magazines to regularly feature kids on its cover and in interior illustrations. Rockwell’s famous Boy with a Baby Carriage may thus be situated paradigmatically in relation to Post cover kids stretching back to their debut in Clarence Underwood’s December 5, 1903, Christmas-​themed illustration, or in syntagmatic relation to other May 1916 magazine covers, and interior editorial and advertising images, featuring kids. That Rockwell’s cover is the only one of these images that ever gets discussed points to the way mass-​market-​magazine illustration poses questions not only of “singularity versus plurality” but also of what literary scholar Franco Moretti terms “the other 99.5 percent” in reference to the discrepancy between the number of nineteenth-​century novels published and the number canonized (or in any sense remembered).24 While mass-​market-​magazine illustrations may be more rapidly apprehended than triple-​decker novels, their proliferation across multiple publications and formats means that a true understanding of the field requires visual equivalents to what Moretti identifies as “distant reading” practices—“sampling; statistics; work with series, titles, concordances”—of the kind gestured at here. The kid covers counted above relate more or less directly to the terms of the genre tradition. Indeed, several borrow from or allude to well-​known American genre paintings. The recently deceased Brown seems to have been on Leyendecker’s mind: his two July 1913 covers depicting kids in makeshift uniform and performing handstands quite directly reference Dress Parade (1878) and Heels over Head (1894) respectively, the latter of which had been reproduced the month before in the Survey; his June 1914 scene of brand ordinary  ( 99 )

improvised fishing from a pier recalls Brown’s A Thrilling Moment (1880). Beyond direct allusions of this kind, several illustrators combine types in the manner of their antebellum antecedents. Earlier American genre painters such as Richard Caton Woodville had repeatedly explored cross-​generational pairings to create tension and humor and to draw out the changing nature of everyday life in works such as Politics in an Oysterhouse (1848) and Old ’76 and Young ’48 (1849). To comparable effect, MacLellan, Robinson, and Thrasher regularly set their cheeky schoolboy types in tension with stern, pious, and befuddled grandparents, thus registering changing values and challenges to authority. In these and other ways, covers featuring kids and other comic types function in a manner analogous to earlier genre paintings. Coughlin, MacLellan, Robinson, Rockwell, Sarg, Thrasher, and Underwood all broadly conform to a house-​style normative naturalism characterized by the limited palette of the Post’s cover-​printing process but also by fine brushwork and careful shading, by attention to details of dress and deportment, and by facial expressions that are slightly exaggerated but not to the degree of contemporaneous newspaper cartoons. As in George Moore’s account of seventeenth-​century Dutch genre painting as an art in which “little personality is required” and “individual temperaments” rarely surface, a sublimation of individual style to collective expression might be identified here; indeed, for Coughlin, Sarg, Rockwell, and other artists seeking to join the established roster of Post cover contributors, the task was to “fit into” what had “already proved a success.” This was true of both style and subject matter. Leyendecker—the Post’s premier illustrator of the period, whose covers ranged widely in themes while retaining their distinctive idiom of broad strokes and stylized bodies— was the exception to the rule of normative naturalism and suppressed personality, but the kid covers he regularly contributed nevertheless conform to the Post’s iconography and its repository of everyday things.25 Across covers kids carry chalkboards and woven baskets; they wear broad-​brimmed straw hats in the country and large red bow ties when made to dress smartly for church; they frequently sport patches and the odd “academic tear” to their clothes; their homes contain block-​pattern quilts and highly polished tables. Genre painting is sometimes glossed as familiar painting, and Post covers produce a deeply familiar social scene. Storytelling motifs similarly recur over the decade across covers contributed by different artists. Boys steal apples, with varying degrees of success, in covers by Robinson (October 15, 1910) and Leyendecker (August 7, 1915); Leyendecker (August 19, 1911, May 22, 1915), MacLellan ( July 15, 1916), and Rockwell (August 9, 1919) all show boys frolicking in or being chased out of swimming holes. MacLellan (November 6, 1915) and Leyendecker (March 11, 1916) both pair kids with other types, respectively the befuddled old man and the rotund businessman, first introduced to the Post’s stock repertoire by Robinson. Rockwell’s May 20, 1916, boy with a baby carriage reiterates and improves upon MacLellan’s August 2, 1913, boy with a baby carriage as the addition of ( 100 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

jeering peers, a bottle with a nipple in the boy’s breast pocket, and the tether to prevent him from losing his hat deepen the narrative and heighten the humiliation. This kind of borrowing and circulation also finds precedents in earlier genre traditions, where, for example, art historian Eric Jan Sluijter identifies “the repetition of related motifs by different painters” in seventeenth-​century Dutch high-​life genre painting as “emulative imitation.” Such painting was—like the production of Post covers, which required illustrators to jockey for Lorimer’s and his art editors’ approval—“a pursuit in which self-​conscious artistic rivalry with other artists was paramount.”26 Through competition, and perhaps forms of unspoken collaboration, both practices establish coherent and readily identifiable iconographies. Like Brown’s boys, Post cover kids “are exuberant, sportive, reckless, mischievous, never vicious [or] deformed.” They are also always white, usually cute, and occasionally iconoclastic, grudging of chores forced upon them (like drying dishes) but enthusiastic about those they set their minds to (such as mending their own pants), and frequently reminded that the world is made by and for people other and larger than themselves. The insistent repetition of those traits fits Richard Ohmann’s and Jan Cohn’s reading of the Post and like publications within the framework for analyzing cultural hegemony developed by the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci. They show that Post short stories, editorial and advice columns, news reports, and advertisements contribute, often in small and subtle ways that their creators were barely conscious of, to a dominant discourse concerning class and capital. For example, Post cover kids’ contrasting responses to imposed and self-​selected tasks corroborate the magazine’s negotiation of self-​made or self-​reliant manhood into the structures of corporate, white-​collar work.27 Cultural historian Carolyn Kitch has shown the way iterations and variations of “the girl on the magazine cover” do specific kinds of “cultural work,” shaping and reflecting changing attitudes to women as access to education, professional status, and voting rights progressed. Scenes in which boys are made to do domestic chores might be broadly located in such accounts of changing gender roles. More broadly still, Post cover kids’ playful encounters with the adult world exist within constructions of childhood innocence in “golden age” book and magazine illustration, while their whiteness serves the magazine’s agenda of racial nationalism and racial exclusivity.28 But while individual covers made specific topical and satirical points, and each illustrator offered their own inventive twists and takes, and while kids frequently meet the discursive and political terms of the magazine, collectively and cumulatively Post cover kids primarily functioned as embodiments of the known and knowable type. This is not to say kids were unresponsive to or in other ways outside of historical time, but that where other types took on the magazine’s ideological heavy lifting, they served to reiterate that the world was predictable and familiar, and to remind readers and reassure advertisers that the nation might be subdivided into identifiable categories. brand ordinary  ( 101 )

That kids operated as signs of the known and familiar is made apparent across the 106 Post covers produced over the two years following the United States’ entry into the First World War on April 6, 1917. Of these, forty-​five covers feature adults who, whether throwing grenades on the front line or wearing Red Cross insignia on the home front, in some way reference the conflict. Kids appear just twenty-​one times, occupying less than a fifth of the cover space, where prewar they had taken more than a third. (Three of these covers appeared in the month following the declaration of war, presumably as the Post’s art editors absorbed the news.) Of the twenty-​one kid covers, ten feature Stilwell-​Weber’s cute, bucolic girls, which, like the twenty-​six straightforward pretty girl covers in the period, appear to exist in an idealized space apart from either everyday or world-​historical concerns. Of the remaining eleven kid covers, six reference the war by performing a Boy Scout salute (Rockwell, May 12, 1917), parading in dress-​up uniform (MacLellan, September 15, 1917; Rockwell, February 22, 1919), soliciting Red Cross contributions (Rockwell, September 21, 1918), daydreaming of battle at their desks (Robinson, October 12, 1918), or throwing their arms around a returning, uniformed brother (Katharine Wireman, December 14, 1918). While kids were thus involved in the Post’s wartime imagery, their diminished role indexes the disruption to patterns and cycles of everyday life. Likewise, their return, in droves, at the start of the following decade chimes with Warren G. Harding’s 1920 call not for “heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy.”29

Brand Ordinary © Norman Rockwell A 1920 New York Tribune profile explained, “Norman Rockwell paints folks. Not people, or what the studio hounds describe as ‘genre,’ but folks—like those we know and see every day.”30 Offering and then disavowing the term, this short statement instigates the dance of distinction around Rockwell and genre painting that carries on through his assertion “I do genre. That’s spelled g-​e-​n-​r-​e” to twenty-​first-​century exhibition catalogues. It also catches much of the appeal that he held for editors, advertisers, and audiences at the time. The insistence on just painting folks fits the public profile Rockwell was developing and downplays both the depth of his connection to genre painting and the professional clarity with which he worked to the demands of editors and advertisers. From Boy with a Baby Carriage on, Rockwell lay claim to the types and motifs circulating among commercial illustrators, so that just four years after his Post cover debut the Tribune could identify kids chasing dogs and “codgers” feeling the cold as specifically his folks. As Neysa McMein explained, being an illustrator meant “studying out just what would fit into this magazine or that.” The folksy persona means that Rockwell’s appeal is often ascribed to his love of small-​town life or affinity for cute kids rather than anything so coldly calculated, but in the first decade of his career he ( 102 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

developed and became synonymous with a brand of everyday imagery perfectly synced to the needs of editors and advertising professionals. In The Advertising Man (1922), the pioneering advertising designer, executive, and theorist Earnest Elmo Calkins offered advice for those hoping to make their way in the profession. This included the assertion “You must acquire some of the wisdom that [Clare] Briggs or [ John T.] McCutcheon or [ Jay Norwood “Ding”] Darling puts into his cartoons, and Norman Rockwell into his cover designs, what it has become the fashion to call ‘small-​town stuff.’ We are all of us, the whole nation, small-​town folks in this sense.”31 Calkins was a key figure in the professionalization and increased sophistication of advertising art and design in the early twentieth century, and it is significant that, just six years on from his debut Post cover, Rockwell was on his radar. Indeed, Rockwell is presented here as a go-​to point of reference for the kind of small-​town wisdom that had itself become shorthand for the national common sense that his primary employer, Ladies’ Home Journal and Saturday Evening Post publisher Cyrus Curtis, had made it his business to instill. Calkins goes on to tell the story of how Edward Bok’s induction as editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1889 involved a railroad journey in the company of his boss. “Whenever the train stopped at a small town,” Calkins explains, “they got off and walked up and down the streets of the town. Mr. Curtis showed Mr. Bok the medium-​sized homes of the middle-​class people, those who are neither rich nor poor, with their bits of lawn, the geranium plants in the flower beds, the children playing in the front yard.” These were the people that Curtis told Bok he intended to “publish a magazine for.”32 While this idea stems in part from the progressive aspiration to educate and uplift the emerging middle class, it also cleaves closely to the economic bottom line. As in Calkins’s proscription, “what they buy” was at the heart of these early, instinctual, forays into market research. One of Rockwell’s first successful appeals to Curtis Publishing’s target demographic came with an amusing winter scene painted for Piso’s for Coughs and Colds in 1920 (fig. 25). While snow covers the “bits of lawn” and the geraniums are not in season, the white domes of shrubs carefully placed on either side of the porch and the assiduously cleared path mark the setting as a modest, well-​maintained family home. The house is some distance from the neighboring property glimpsed at far left but connected to it by a snowplowed road, suggesting a location on the edge of a small town. Grandpa has stepped out carrying his woven shopping basket to run some errands but gotten carried away pelting his grandson with snowballs while the family dog, an equally enthusiastic spaniel, chases a younger child who slips head over heels on the ice. All this unfolds in front of Grandmother, who stands on the porch with her hands raised in alarm. There is indeed a degree of jeopardy in the scene: the younger boy seems distressed by his tumble; the older boy’s pained expression, together with the evident strain in Grandpa’s legs, indicate that the old man has put a little too much vim into his snowballing. brand ordinary  ( 103 )

Fig. 25  Norman Rockwell, Piso’s for Coughs & Colds advertisement, 1920. Norman Rockwell Museum.

Years later, echoing earlier characterizations of John George Brown’s types, Rockwell explained, “The people in my pictures aren’t mentally ill or deformed. The situations they get into are commonplace, everyday situations, not the agonizing crises and tangles of life.”33 Slipping on ice, getting carried away playing with grandchildren, and catching a winter cold are all everyday occurrences. And so too is taking Piso’s for Coughs and Colds, which is advertised on a rudimentary billboard that stands behind the figures, to the side of their house and part of their familiar world. Rockwell normalizes and naturalizes both problem and remedy by bringing Piso’s into the commercial illustration iconography of everyday life. Most obviously, the Piso’s advertisement borrows the white beard, round spectacles, and red scarf of Robert Robinson’s “old codger” type, which J. C. Leyendecker, Leslie Thrasher, Rockwell himself, and numerous other imitators had reiterated and nuanced on Post and Country Gentleman covers and for Fisk Tires “Time to Re-​tire” advertising campaigns. The tag line, “Good for young and old,” points to the way Rockwell’s painting also plays on the intergenerational theme developed in Thrasher’s Post kid covers that pit their protagonists against pious or befuddled grandparents. Closely observed details in the scene, such as the string that (in a reminder of the hat tether in Boy with a Baby Carriage) runs behind the older boy’s neck securing his mittens, or the way that his baggy pants are tucked into his socks just below the knee, ground it in a discourse of what “we know and see ( 104 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

every day” that was, in America in 1920, enmeshed in commercial illustrations’ stereotyped ways of seeing kids. The painting was clearly a breakthrough for Rockwell and his clients. In October 1920 he wrote to Einson Litho Inc. “to say how much I appreciate the fine reproduction of the Piso Ad. It is gratifying to see so faithful a reproduction.” This lithograph was distributed to retailers with an accompanying explanation from Piso’s: “We told Norman Rockwell to go to the limit and do his best to give druggists the finest piece of display they ever received. . . . It is good enough to win a place in any art gallery. It is fine enough to hold the attention of your public for months—even for years.” Piso’s took a full page in Life magazine to explain that “the sheer beauty and ‘human interest’ of the composition induced us to reproduce it as shown here, believing that the interest reflected to Piso’s will be sufficient to induce many to try a bottle, should the need arise.”34 It must have been gratifying for Rockwell to have his work treated with reverence at an early stage in his career. As for Piso’s, their statement indicates that they, like other companies, were coming to recognize that art, and especially “human interest” pictures, did the work of advertising without need for extensive copy. This awareness of the value of “human interest” was expressed in the burgeoning 1920s literature of advertising practice and critical appreciation of advertising art. In his contribution to the 1926 book Masters of Advertising Copy, executive Bruce Barton, whose Barton, Durstine and Osborn agency commissioned two series of advertisements for Edison Mazda Lamps from Rockwell, explained that “a little touch of human interest, a little of the common tragedy or hope or love or success or affection that runs through all our lives will out-​pull what may be technically a very much better advertisement.” This heartfelt appeal was typical of what advertising historian Roland Marchand describes as Barton’s ability “to imbue the quest for corporate legitimacy, both externally and internally, with . . . soul.”35 Calkins was similarly evangelical about advertising’s virtues, as when, taking Rockwell’s work as his primary example, he praised “the story-​telling power of some of the best painting” at the First Annual of Advertising Art. This exhibition, organized by the Art Directors Club and held at the National Arts Club in 1921 with a jury that featured Robert Henri and Joseph Pennell, is evidence of the enhanced status of commercial illustration. At a subsequent Annual, the fine art critic Lloyd Goodrich observed that Rockwell’s “straightforward photographic realism appeals directly and unaffectedly to two deep-​seated and widespread human instincts—the pleasure of recognition and the love of story-​telling.” Introducing a portfolio of Rockwell’s Edison illustrations, the trade publication Advertising and Selling explained, “Your ‘arty’ artist will arch the disdainful eye-​brow and deprecate the literal accuracy, the homely humor, the short-​lived caricature of Rockwell. Let him arch. Rockwell’s feet are on the ground that most of us tread. His figures we know are real people—for his models are his neighbors.”36 These commentators all found in brand ordinary  ( 105 )

Rockwell’s art the qualities and (perhaps by then guilty) pleasures of gentle humor, familiar types, and implied narrative long cherished in genre painting. These appraisals coincided with the first efforts to elevate advertising art, with commercial illustrations framed on gallery walls and presented in portfolios without captions or accompanying copy. This removal of the commercial context was built into the Annual of Advertising Art’s competition rubric, which encouraged assessment of work “only with regard to the merit of the subjects as paintings or drawings.” Following these cues, Calkins claimed that the best illustrations “tell their stories without the aid of a single line of text,” demonstrating this point by describing the anecdotes and types pictured in illustrations by Rockwell, Joseph Chenoweth, and Cushman Parker. Chenoweth’s advertisement for Royal Tailors shows a “country boy gazing longingly at the girl who is absorbed in a poster depicting a well-​dressed movie hero”; the illustration updates the sentimental stories of late nineteenth-​century genre painting, and quite specifically the scenes of rustic courtship such as Milking Time (1875) that Winslow Homer painted in the 1870s, while Calkins’s falls into the familiar critical mode of retelling the anecdote.37 Missing here, and from subsequent celebrations of Rockwell’s art that echo these terms, is a recognition of the wider context in which multiple iterations by many illustrators over years and decades had familiarized the public with the types and scenarios used, and swaths of editorial and advertising copy had schooled viewers in the kinds of stories told. Calkins and Goodrich were right to single Rockwell out from his peers, but viewing his paintings in isolation risks losing sight of the way they were enmeshed in the demands and discourse of commercial art. Where much of that advertising discourse was self-​celebratory, pioneering home economist Christine Frederick offered a witty, critical take on advertising’s pursuit of the “average woman” for Masters of Advertising Copy. She explains that Bok was fond of recalling the small-​town odyssey in which he “passed by a little cozy house in a small Ohio town and saw standing in the door a woman, whom he always afterwards visualized as the average woman for whom he was editing.” This vision is set in stark contrast to the purview of the average mid-1920s ad man, whose “habitat” was a narrow stretch of midtown Manhattan: “The type of ‘chicken’ which he knows and portrays so glibly, the eye-​brow-​shaved, massaged, short-​skirted doll of anemic New York life is a parasite and oddity to the total population of these American States. He would not find this type in Clyde Ohio, Goshen Indiana, Rock Hill South Carolina, Paris Kentucky, or all points west, and yet it is the consumers in these towns that buy the advertised washing machines, soaps, breakfast foods.” In a further attack on the limits of ad men’s imagination, another contributor to Masters of Advertising Copy complained, “Look how hard I fall for Will Rogers and Elsie Janis and Norman Rockwell and Mary Pickford and O. Henry; and anyone and anything that’ll make me feel ten degrees more human. . . . Aren’t there any people like these in the advertising business?”38 Rockwell ( 106 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

was very much in the advertising business, selling illustration that offered contrast but no challenge to Madison Avenue’s slick metropolitan worldview. Rockwell recalled that when in 1916 he set his mind on the cover of the Post, his first thought was to make an imitation Charles Dana Gibson pretty girl. “C-​R-​U-​D, crud,” his friend Clyde Forsythe told him on seeing this attempt in the studio they shared. “Terrible. Awful. Hopeless. You can’t do a beautiful seductive woman. She looks like a tomboy who’s been scrubbed with a rough washcloth and pinned into a new dress by her mother.”39 This inability to participate in the dominant illustration trend of the 1910s came to seem like a savvy business move during the 1920s. Frederick argued that “the P.G.” (the pretty girl) had become an “advertising anachronism” and that the use of seductive women as “bait” was a flawed strategy because the “P.G.” conjured by ad men and illustrators was designed to appeal to themselves and their (male) peers, rather than to the women who were the target market for a great deal of what was being sold. While sex, no doubt, continued to sell, advertising and commercial art in the 1920s developed a range of female types broader than those embodied by the Gibson Girl and her imitators. Frederick argued that to appeal to the average woman, advertising should drop the “chorus girl” in favor of “that type of woman who is really more powerfully appealing—the woman who is natural, sweet, intelligent and ‘homey’ but not homely.”40 It was this type of housewife that Rockwell painted again and again for magazine covers, advertisements, and propaganda posters throughout his career. This “ ‘homey’ but not homely” woman was one of the declaratively ordinary types around which Rockwell built his own distinctive brand.

A Rockwell America Across his prolific output of the interwar years Rockwell established a coherent and richly imagined vision of America. In a 1920 profile of Rockwell, the New York Tribune echoed the art critic Frank Jewett Mather’s claim that genre painting was necessary “to leave some worthy memory of our walk and conversation to posterity” in the suggestion that “a hundred years from now, when to-​day’s clothes and mannerisms will seem quaint and amusing, our sophisticated descendants will want to know just exactly what we were all like back in the dark dawn after the great war.” But where Mather disparaged illustration as “superficial and mannered,” the Tribune explained that answers would come from “the dusty files in their public libraries” that divulge “a magazine cover or an advertising drawing by Norman Rockwell.”41 This perception of Rockwell as social historian, like the folksy persona, extends into more recent appraisals and celebrations of his art. It is meaningful because Rockwell was meticulous about costumes, props, and details and because social and cultural trends, such as the emergence of crossword brand ordinary  ( 107 )

puzzles, teenagers, and television, can be traced over his long career. But it misses the way that, like all genre painters, he pictured a partial and particular everyday life, and like all commercial illustrators he took a perspective that was determined and supported by the magazines he illustrated. One of Rockwell’s gifts, but also one of the features of the mass-​market-​magazine industry, was the capacity to naturalize and normalize that worldview and to make multiple works fit together to create a mutually reinforcing whole. Over numerous editorial and advertising commissions Rockwell expanded the parameters of his world and its narrative and emotional terrain, establishing an intergenerational cast of types and a material realm of (branded) things. This was a light, enchanted place into which advertisers and fans, through commissions and flights of imagination, sought entry. For the first decade of his association with Curtis Publishing, Rockwell’s Post and Country Gentleman covers were defined by his “boy illustrator” tag and tended to feature kids in one kind of scrape or another, but he was free to pursue a wider range of subjects for the Literary Digest and other magazines as well as for advertisers. From the mid-1920s Curtis tied him to more or less exclusive terms for cover art and allowed him to picture the full range of types he had developed elsewhere. Thus, while Rockwell’s Post cover for January 29, 1921, depicts a cheeky boy in a makeshift apron peeling potatoes (fig. 26)—with eyebrows raised in amazement at a pirate story book and a bandaged thumb evidencing his distraction—his Literary Digest cover for the same date features a quite different protagonist and emotional range (plate 8). Here a woman leans tenderly over a bed to bring a patterned quilt up to the chins of her two sleeping daughters and their teddy bear. Slim-​waisted, as her white apron strings emphasize, and pretty, with her face glowing in the warm light of the bedside lamp, she is maternal, as seen in the gentle care with which she maneuvers the quilt, and practical, as her apron and sensible wristwatch indicate, and so embodies the “ ‘homey’ but not homely” housewife. The Literary Digest enabled Rockwell to branch out into new types and thus populate his world. Its full-​page, full-​color formats, like those offered by advertising commissions, facilitated a depth of social space denied by the Post’s white-background cover design. Thus, the sleeping girls sink into plumped pillows and sheets whose combination of sharp creases and gentle rumples suggest they have been recently laundered but then snuggled into. Their room contains drapes, a table, a lamp, a framed photograph, and, in the half-​light of bedtime at least, a rather odd-​looking toy elephant. Motifs, objects, and details recur across Rockwell illustrations for various magazine covers and advertising campaigns in the early 1920s. While in appearance and diligence this attentive mother is far removed from the Post’s distracted potato peeler—with whom she likely shared Rockwell’s studio and thoughts at some point late in 1920 and then the nation’s newsstands, mailboxes, and coffee tables for a week or so in early 1921— the two are connected by white aprons and the cyclical, repetitive work of cooking or ( 108 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Fig. 26  Norman Rockwell, cover, Saturday Evening Post, January 29, 1921. Author’s collection.

childcare that structures everyday domestic life. Unusually for Rockwell cover illustrations, the two images are presented in circular frames, set into the rectangular space of the magazine cover, reinforcing the connection suggested by their publication date. On the January 29, 1921, Post cover the margin around the circular image is left blank, but on the same day’s Literary Digest this area is filled with the nine-​patch wide-​sashing pattern lifted from the children’s quilt, bringing the magazine and its readers close to the space of the illustration: the material of the magazine shares qualities with the material of the quilt; readers hold the patterned cover between forefinger and thumb, as the mother holds the quilt.42 This pattern, thus emphasized, calls to mind a Rockwell bedtime scene from the previous year, the Edison advertisement Earnest Elmo Calkins had singled out for its “story-​telling power,” which shows a “boy reading in bed a pirate story by the light of a Mazda lamp, the shade cocked over to throw the light on his book.”43 Known variously as And Every Lad May Be Aladdin or Crackers in Bed (plate 9), this illustration features a similar quilt design and another child’s bedroom filled with warm, glowing lamplight. The distracted potato peeler, the mother tucking her children in, and the boy reading while eating crackers are part of the same domestic and social order and fit within a coherent worldview. Mass-​market-​magazine editorial and advertising content worked toward this kind of mutual reinforcement. For example, periodical studies scholar Ellen Gruber Garvey points to intersecting manifestations of the 1890s “bicycle craze” in magazine short stories, illustrations, news reporting, women’s health columns, and, of course, brand ordinary  ( 109 )

advertisements for bicycles. “Let sunshine flood them by day,” ran the copy for Rockwell’s first Edison advertisement, “and the light of Edison mazda lamps by night. For the light that shines in children’s rooms is magic stuff—the stuff of which memories are made.” Text alongside the second illustration in the series, And Every Lad, explained, “It looks like an ordinary room—but enter it reverently.”44 Edison Mazda copy of this kind (whether illustrated by Rockwell or by other artists), other products advertised with related imagery, and advertising and editorial copy concerning electric lighting, parenting techniques, interior design, and domestic technologies all bleed and blur between both And Every Lad and the Literary Digest cover. Thus, in a recent informal reflection on her grandfather’s painting, Abigail Rockwell describes a chance, decontextualized, encounter with And Every Lad that led her back to her particular affection for the Edison Mazda series, which “speaks to the adventure, enchantment, and safety of childhood.”45 A mesh of copy and imagery establishes children’s twilight, lamplit bedrooms as sites of everyday ritual and makes common sense of the magical thought that the warm glow of electric light expresses and indexes parents’ warm, protective feelings for their slumbering children. Rockwell’s illustrations can “tell their stories without the aid of a single line of text” in part because they originate within a magazine culture that habituated serial reading and cross-​referencing between proximate and disparate words and images. Praising another of Rockwell’s Edison Mazda advertisements, But You’ll Have Light at the Touch of a Finger (1926), in which a careworn woman sits in the thin light of a high window painstakingly fixing a gas lamp, the trade publication Advertising and Selling strategically retitled the picture and quipped, “His painting may or may not be thus-​and-​so, but his Woman Cleaning Lamps would be all right with us if she were signed Vermeer or De Hoogh [Pieter de Hooch].” Again, such claims are common both to contemporaneous and retrospective commentators. Anne Knutson, curator of the 1999–2000 exhibition Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People, observed that, just as period graphic designers used lightning bolts to enchant toasters and other new electrical appliances, Rockwell, in a 1926 Sun-​Maid Raisin advertisement (fig. 27), did “the same thing in ‘Fruit of the Vine’ but alluding to the secular light of Vermeer.” Vermeer’s light was secular as, no longer painting for the church but for bourgeois patrons, artists in the Dutch Republic turned their gaze and skill to the depiction of worldly things. Those patrons were, as art historian Marjorie Wieseman observes, attentive “to subtle variations in everyday objects”; they prized “distinctions in even something as mundane as white faience (tin-​glazed earthenware) dishes” as such connoisseurship was “a way of confirming their own sophisticated taste.”46 In Fruit of the Vine Vermeer-​like light illuminates a simple wooden table onto which a young woman pours raisins, to the delight of an older woman whose closed eyes, cupped hands, and outstretched fingers convey a sense of enchantment. ( 110 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Fig. 27 Norman Rockwell, Fruit of the Vine, 1926. Sun Maid Raisins Advertisement. Printed by permission of the Norman Rockwell Family Agency. Copyright the Norman Rockwell Family Entities.

Alluding and paying homage to Dutch compositions and motifs of course made Rockwell more like Edmund Tarbell and his peers than like Vermeer himself. Indeed, Rockwell spent the summer of 1912 at the Provincetown art school, led by Tarbell’s associate Charles Hawthorne. In his 1921 history of still-​life painting, curator Arthur Bye singled Hawthorne out from those artists who “derived much inspiration” from Vermeer as “the most accomplished of the group for he combines most happily figures and their associated objects.”47 To his advertising clients’ delight, Rockwell acquired Hawthorne’s (and his Dutch precursors’) way with the happy association of people and objects. Works such as And Every Lad and Fruit of the Vine create an enchantment around the acquisition, possession, and maintenance of everyday household objects that, like his envisioning of Christine Frederick’s “ ‘homey’ but not homely” housewife, precisely met the demands of the advertising industry. Another contributor to Masters of Advertising Copy, Charles Addison Parker, argued for the poetry of “the ordinary things that are advertised”: “Isn’t this very sheet of paper on which I write of a certain texture and adaptability and convenience to the size of the human hand? Aren’t we touching divine mysteries when we strike a match, or answer the telephone, or add up a column of figures?”48 brand ordinary  ( 111 )

In Rockwell’s Edison Mazda series, electric light is associated with various Progressive Era ideals, including community cohesion, as people sing together by lamplight, and self-​improvement, as children read in bed, but also with a more abstract sense of progress itself. “On every birthday another candle is added, for light is a symbol of progress,” explains the text for one Rockwell illustration, insisting, like all Edison Mazda advertisements, on the science behind such claims with reference to “the great Research Laboratories of the General Electric Company.” A 1927 Popular Science magazine featured General Electric engineer Dr. Marvin Pipkin’s invention of the “inside frosted bulb.” The article is illustrated with a graphic showing “steps in the progress of illumination in 2500 years” that lead from the saucer lamp to the Pipkin bulb and explains that “no one institution has made greater contribution in recent years to illuminating progress than [General Electric’s Laboratories at] Nela Park.” A visitor to the facility is quoted as saying that “Nela Park is a place where the light of tomorrow shines today.”49 The optimism about the efficient, interventionist state that characterized the Progressivism of the early 1910s is transferred here to corporate technological advances. Less obviously, Sun-​Maid Puffed raisins changed everyday lives also, as the text beneath Fruit of the Vine explains: “Many a woman has confessed she could hardly believe her eyes. You know how the old kind came—all squeezed together in a mass. . . . Yet these are loose! You can pour them right into the measuring cup! A striking improvement!” It is this distinction, and her discernment that it will ease the labor of baking, that occasions the older woman’s delighted response. To the right of Rockwell’s illustration, pioneering home economist Sarah Tyson Rorer invokes a sense of culinary knowledge shared among a community of women: “I wish I knew the names of all the women who use my cook books. I should like to tell them this: Whenever my recipes say seeded raisins, write Sun-​Maid Puffed there.” Other Sun-​Maid advertisements included “Mary Dean,” who, in an advertisement that featured Rockwell’s Market Day Special illustration, encouraged women who might like recipe “suggestions for yourself or your little girl” to write to her “care of Sun-​Maid Raisins, Fresno, California.”50 Drawing on the commercial illustration motif of intergenerational exchange established in Post cover encounters between kids and “codgers” and Elizabeth Shippen Green’s late 1910s Ivory Soap advertisements, Rockwell’s Fruit of the Vine brings the coast-​to-​ coast mass-​media dialogue of the surrounding copy back to the intimate, domestic, and matrilineal. Twenty-​first-​century developments in media and technology have scaled up and drawn attention to such interconnected messages and narratives. Henry Jenkins and other theorists use the term “convergence culture” to describe “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences.”51 While internet-​era “multiplicity” is different in kind from the early twentieth-​century mass-​market model of magazines like the Post ( 112 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

and the Literary Digest, there is a strong sense that content flows between Rockwell’s work for Curtis Publishing, Funk and Wagnalls, Fisk Tires, Piso’s, Edison, Sun-​Maid, and other publishers and manufacturers. In the early 1920s fans of the artist would need to buy or at least keep an eye on several weekly publications, scouring their covers and advertising pages in order to keep abreast of all his work. From the sum of that work, encountered if not every day then at least weekly or monthly and over years and eventually decades, a “Rockwell America” emerges with its own characters and community values, its own sense of humor and narrative logic. If boys trespass in a swimming hole, they will be spotted and chased by a stick-​wielding rustic; when mothers tuck children into bed, they do so with a loving, heavy-​lidded gaze. To take a second term from recent media theory, this is “transmedial storytelling.” “More and more,” Jenkins explains, “storytelling has become the art of worldbuilding, as artists create compelling environments that cannot be fully explored or exhausted within a single work or even a single medium.”52 Again, working back from twenty-​first-​ century stories told simultaneously across feature film series, websites, video games, and comic books to early twentieth-​century magazine illustration may seem like a stretch. But doing so illuminates the worldbuilding quality, the cumulative meaning—eventually amassed over 322 Post covers and numerous series of images made for advertising campaigns, but also encompassing the work of precursors, peers, and imitators—that might be retrospectively identified as the Rockwellian. Rockwell was quite clear about what that meant, defining it not only against the “deformed” and the “agonising crises . . . of life” as he did in his 1961 autobiography, but in the positive terms of a short 1936 essay on the “Commonplace”: “The commonplaces of America are to me the richest subjects in art. Boys batting flies on vacant lots, little girls playing jacks on the front steps; old men plodding home at twilight, umbrellas in hand—all of these things arouse feeling in me.”53 From early in his career Rockwell received letters from fans proposing scenarios for pictures. For example, in the fall of 1923 Ernest C. McNeel wrote from Toronto to describe a scene recalled from his summer vacation at Coney Island: “In one of those ‘drop a penny and take a look’ arcades, I saw a small boy letting the world drift by while he gave his entire attention to the pantomime of the ‘weaker’ sex sporting in a bathroom. All this regardless of the fact that the penny-​slot machine was labelled ‘For Men Only.’ He wasn’t tall enough to stand on the floor and view the pictures, so he perched on a portion of the legs, giving him a toe-​hold, so to speak.”54 Such contributions to Rockwell’s world were encouraged: asked years later about how he generated ideas he explained, “I keep a file of possible ones, letters from readers, clippings and notes.” While McNeel’s comic scenario did not make it into the Rockwell canon, the scene described, especially the poetic-​license suggestion that the boy be depicted holding a Bible, precisely catches the mix of innocence and innuendo that scholar Richard brand ordinary  ( 113 )

Halpern identifies as a central, if overlooked, aspect of that oeuvre.55 On other occasions, correspondents composed poems inspired by illustrations, and teachers described setting students’ theme papers based on Rockwell covers. In one such instance, a Venice, California, newspaper reported Rockwell’s gracious reply to local schoolchildren Spenser Wilde, Betty Gray Bowling, and John Niemand, whose theme papers developed from his September 28, 1929, Post cover—in which a barefoot hobo boy and his shaggy mutt greet a well-​groomed collie who sits beside the golf clubs and expensive luggage of an unseen but presumably wealthy owner, perhaps leading to cross-​class, cross-​generation, cross-​species friendship and a radical change of fortunes featuring adoption, grooming parlors, a Horatio Alger–style rise as apprentice to this lonely captain of industry . . . —had been mailed to the artist as a prize for being the best in their class.56 In contemporary media studies this is fan fiction, evidence of the way that worldbuilding artworks “provide resources consumers can use in constructing their own fantasies.”57 As is apparent from the way that by the late 1920s Rockwell’s illustrations could no longer be easily parsed—“boy with a baby carriage,” “boys being chased out of swimming holes”—but demand instead convoluted sentences, imagined before-​and-​ after scenarios, and, indeed, whole theme papers, his America had become a detailed, intricate, and narratively complex one. Recent discussions of transmedial storytelling and worldbuilding art have tended to focus on science fiction or fantasy worlds in which fans become immersed or lost. Rockwell’s small-​town normative naturalism offered a less remote fantasy but a fantasy nonetheless, as acknowledged in his stated exclusion of the “mentally ill or deformed” and the related statement “I paint life as I would like it to be.”58

Another America Citizens of Rockwell’s included “ ‘homey’ but not homely” housewives, world-​weary fathers, and variously amused, vexed, and bemused, but always kindly, doctors, cobblers, store clerks, and soda jerks. These types became familiar and relatable to millions of Post readers, though by no means all Americans.59 The complacent comfort of Salesman in a Swimming Hole derives from the white privilege that assures the swimming salesman that should his transgression be discovered it will be met with nothing worse than gentle mockery. This contrasts sharply with Richard Wright’s account of the mortal danger of entering a swimming hole (and many other everyday but supposedly transgressive acts) for African Americans in this period. In Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), Bobo is lynched and Big Boy flees town when they are caught in a swimming hole near a white woman. Like other cultural constructions of “small-​town stuff,” Rockwell’s was a community based on (white, heteronormative) exclusivity, whose endless reiteration and cultural ( 114 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

prominence sent a strong message to those left out. Moreover, Rockwell’s benign cast of cover characters acculturated viewers to typing as a humorous, inconsequential way of seeing the world and so normalized and reinforced the malignant stereotypes found inside the Post. The point is not that Rockwell’s paintings contain overtly racist stereotypes or messages, but that they were an acquiescent part of a system in which those stereotypes and messages circulated. The April 17, 1920, Post, with J. C. Leyendecker’s gap-​toothed boy singing with all his might from a hymnbook on the cover and Rockwell’s And Every Lad advertisement inside, featured an installment from Octavus Roy Cohen’s long-​running series of Florian Slappey detective stories, which worked harsh caricatures of African Americans into the magazine’s wider construction of common sense. Cohen introduces Slappey as a “languid, bored little Afro-​American fashion plate” who is pleased to be back in his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, as “the provincialism of his racial brethren in the neighboring cities bored him to extinction.” The story goes on to mock the pretensions of “Birmingham’s colored élite” as they attempt to stage the work of “Mistuh Shakspere.”60 The following year, in an instance of the kind of “worldbuilding” the Post encouraged, Cohen’s protagonist is casually referenced in an exchange between Wildcat and Dwindle Daniels in a racist local color story by another contributor, Hugh Wiley. “Wust cleanin’ I ever got in a cube ruckus come off a Bumminham boy name’ Florian Slappey,” Wildcat explains before setting out his plan, “to start me a fried-​fish wagon in Poteland.”61 It was the pervasiveness of such depictions that led the writer George Schuyler to observe, “The mere mention of the word ‘Negro’ . . . conjures up in the average white American’s mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappy [sic] and the various monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists.”62 This was the outcome of Curtis Publishing’s hegemonizing. Post covers rarely featured the explicit racism of Cohen’s and Wiley’s stories or the caricatured illustrations by J. J. Gould that accompanied them. Rockwell recalled that Lorimer, “who was a very liberal man, told me never to show colored people except as servants,” and accordingly the issue of race was primarily marked on Post covers by the absence of nonwhite people.63 As Schuyler notes in his reference to Aunt Jemima, African American men and women did feature more prominently in the era’s advertising. E. V. Brewer’s 1924 Cream of Wheat advertisement From Sunrise to Twilight (fig. 28) is typical of the artist’s long-​running series of illustrations for the cereal company. Like Rockwell’s Edison Mazda and Sun-​Maid images, it locates the product within an everyday setting, in this case a kitchen with glowing fire and neatly arranged crockery like many other genre constructions of domestic space. In an instance of commercial illustration’s self-​reflexive playfulness, the face of Rastus the Cream of Wheat chef in the scene is aligned with the face beaming out from a Cream of Wheat calendar tacked to the wall, the double breaking the naturalism of the scene and emphasizing the chef ’s brand ordinary  ( 115 )

Fig. 28 E. V. Brewer, From Sunrise to Twilight, 1924. Cream of Wheat advertisement. The University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-​Champaign.

status as a reproducible stereotype. He stands behind, at the shoulder and at the service of, the white woman and child, an overtly servile servant who meets Lorimer’s directive and thus meshes with the editorial content of the publications in which the advertisement was placed. Once again exercising the degree of freedom afforded by advertising commissions, Rockwell at least tested those boundaries in his 1926 advertisement for Pratt and Lambert “61” Floor Varnish (fig. 29). Here an African American man appears to be defined primarily by his skill as a musician, to the delight of a boy who joins in with the banjo by beating sticks on the varnished, and thus resilient, floor. With his receding hairline, splayed legs, and position to the left of the composition, Rockwell’s figure quite strongly recalls Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Banjo Lesson (1893). The homage succeeds in summoning some of that painting’s seriousness and investment in the integrity of its protagonist: Rockwell’s banjo player is neither overtly caricatured in the manner of Gould’s illustrations nor overtly marked out as a type as in Brewer’s advertisements; absorbed in his art, the musician is more compelling than the joke about the floorboards. ( 116 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Fig. 29 Norman Rockwell, The Banjo Player, 1926. Pratt & Lambert Varnish Products Advertisement. Printed by permission of the Norman Rockwell Family Agency. Copyright the Norman Rockwell Family Entities.

But the contrasts with Tanner’s painting are significant also. Albert Boime argues that in his series of scenes of everyday life made in the early 1890s Tanner “identifies himself with his subject matter and thus subverts the original social intention of genre.” This approach contrasts with the work of one of Tanner’s teachers, Thomas Hovenden, who, while treating “African-​Americans with more dignity and sympathy than most previous white genre painters,” nonetheless enacts the tradition’s tendency to condescension. Boime points to the “tattered clothes” of the smiling couple in Hovenden’s Sunday Morning (1881), arguing that “the joke, however, is on them as they betray satisfaction with their conspicuously inferior lot.”64 Rockwell introduces a substantial rip in the trousers of his banjo player to similar effect. Furthermore, where Tanner’s protagonist likely teaches a son, nephew, or grandson, Rockwell’s musician plays with but also performs for a white boy, losing the sense of family knowledge passed from one generation to the next. Although the boy looks up to the banjo player from the floor, when the music stops he will once more look down on him as one of his family’s paid employees. As they have swept the rug aside to stomp on, bash, and so potentially damage the floorboards, the man and boy are aligned; there is at least a suggestion that they are both soon to be reprimanded for this transgression. Depicted in a moment of grace, but not wholly removed from the servile position of Rastus and Aunt Jemima or the infantilizing association with childhood brand ordinary  ( 117 )

mischief, the banjo player suggests the way that marginalized identities might be tentatively accommodated within Rockwell’s world. This depiction of an African American subject would remain—along with his 1943 Freedom of Worship poster and 1946 Post cover, Boy in a Dining Car—among the few exceptions in Rockwell’s predominantly white oeuvre until his late career move to Look magazine and his civil rights works of the 1960s. The power of those Look covers, The Problem We All Live With (1964) and New Kids in the Neighborhood (1967), derives in part from the way they assert African American children’s right to inclusion not only within the education system and middle-​class suburbs but also within Rockwell’s America and thus the long genre tradition. As those pictures make clear, Rockwell was a genuinely liberal man and likely at the progressive edge of his peer group’s thinking on race in the 1920s as he was by the 1960s. But he also clearly bent to fit the institutions that supported his art and made him wealthy, in his obsequiousness to Lorimer, in his adoption and adaptation of Post house style and motifs, and even in his infrequent depictions of subjects outside those parameters. His typical presentation of white people in clean, comfortable spaces reinforced the sense of a mainstream everyday world from which nonwhite people were markedly excluded. The everyday qualities of that world, its cozy familiarity and cyclical repetition, its mundanity and boredom, even, pointedly contrasted with the upheavals, deprivations, and precarities that those outside this Rockwellian America faced. In his 1961 autobiography, My Adventures as an Illustrator, Rockwell gives a vivid account of how he conceived the celebrated Four Freedoms of 1943 while lying in bed one night. “As the minutes ticked by, all empty and dark, I suddenly remembered how Jim Edgerton had stood up in a town meeting and said something that everybody else disagreed with. But they had let him have his say. No one shouted him down. My gosh, I thought, that’s it. There it is. Freedom of Speech. I’ll illustrate the Four Freedoms using my Vermont neighbors as models. I’ll express the ideas in simple, everyday scenes. Freedom of Speech—a New England town meeting. Freedom from Want—a Thanksgiving dinner.”65 While these paintings draw, respectively, on recent experience and an annual celebration, it is striking that the effort to picture Freedom from Fear (plate 10) in a “simple, everyday scene” led back to the bedtime routine he had pictured for a Literary Digest cover more than twenty years earlier (plate 8). Norman Rockwell’s worldbuilding vision of ordinary life was so compelling and pervasive that even Norman Rockwell believed in it. In Charles Caffin’s and other commentators’ observations about visual types in the 1900s, and certainly by the time Rockwell hit his stride in the early 1920s, the power of commercial illustration to shape an American sensibility and worldview was palpable. Walter Lippmann does not name Rockwell or commercial illustration in his influential 1922 study Public Opinion, but he comes close. Developing his definition of the ( 118 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

stereotype through reference to visual art, Lippmann quoted art historian Bernard Berenson’s suggestion, made in a nuanced account of evolving iconographies, that “we soon fall into the habit of moulding whatever we look at into the forms borrowed from the one art with which we are acquainted.” From here the argument turns to the process and meaning of Americanization, and then to the way in which stereotypes—the agitator, the intellectual, the Harvard Man, the Greenwich Villager, and so on—fix the world so one can confidently say, “He is from Main Street.” “The subtlest and most pervasive of all influences,” Lippmann argues, “are those which create and maintain the repertory of stereotypes.”66 This was what the Post, with the help of its roster of illustrators, set out to achieve. Soon after Lippmann’s book appeared, Jessie Willcox Smith’s friend Edith Emerson wrote, admiringly, that the illustrator’s “ideals . . . have been woven into the fabric of contemporary thought, and her forms are impressed upon the consciousness of innumerable mothers, who hope that their children will look like the children she paints.”67 Three decades later Wright Morris claimed, “[Rockwell] has taught a generation of Americans to see. They look about them and see, almost everywhere they look, what Norman Rockwell sees.”68 Smith and Rockwell did not achieve that kind of subtle and pervasive influence alone; they contributed with myriad other illustrators to a far larger commercialized and institutionalized re-​envisioning of everyday life. At the end of the 1930s, and shortly before Rockwell placed his art at the service of the government’s war propaganda drive, Clement Greenberg cast his Post covers as kitsch and as equivalents to Soviet state art. These comments have taken on disproportionate significance, and Greenberg has become a highbrow bogeyman in subsequent “cultural elevation” of Rockwell. The real point, though, was that Rockwell had perfected a habituated way of seeing the world. Tucking children into bed is, of course, an ordinary occurrence, a simple, everyday scene that Rockwell could have lit on in the same way he did the town meeting. But the parallels between Freedom from Fear and his 1921 Literary Digest cover are striking. For sure, father is present in the later work, in his office clothes and with his folded newspaper that bring the world outside into the sacred space of the children’s bedroom. And those children are boys, not girls, the foreground toy a doll, not a stuffed elephant, the scene lit not by a lamp but light flooding up the stairwell from downstairs rooms to which the parents will return to pore over the Bennington Banner’s reports of “bombings” and “horror” and worry and pray. But the children on the bed still lie along the center of the composition, and the foreground object is still at bottom right, and the scene is still lit from behind. Mother, though a little more careworn, still bends forward in the same solicitous manner, holding the sheets with the same delicate grip. The children still sink into pillows and sheets, producing the same rumples and creases, and they still sleep two-​a-​bed. brand ordinary  ( 119 )

In retrospect, Rockwell liked this Freedom least. Perhaps its intimate domestic setting went against the need to make something bigger, to say something more, that he and many other artists felt in the face of the war. Perhaps also Freedom from Fear was most like the pictures of everyday life that he made year after year for the Post and was thus most constrained by the assumptions and exclusions of that form. Freedom of Worship, with its close-​up amalgam of praying hands and faces, including those of a Black man and woman, looks least like a Post cover or genre painting. Rockwell confessed that Freedom from Fear was based on the “rather smug idea” that Americans could say, “Thank God we can put our children to bed with a feeling of security, knowing they will not be killed in the night.”69 That message did its work in part because, though their faces are nestled in pillow and quilt, these boys are unmistakably Rockwell boys, who had grudgingly minded younger siblings and been chased out of swimming holes and in other ways signified knowable continuity on the covers of the Post, in which the Four Freedoms were first published, for the preceding twenty-​five years, through war years and boom years and Depression years.

( 120 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Color Plate 1  Norman Rockwell, Salesman in a Swimming Hole, cover illustration from the Saturday Evening Post, August 11, 1945. Files licensed by Curtis Licensing Indianapolis, IN. Printed by permission of the Norman Rockwell Family Agency. © The Norman Rockwell Family Entities.

Color Plate 2  Jerome Myers, Street Carousel, 1906. Oil on canvas, 27 ¾ × 22 ⅝ in. (70.5 × 57.5 cm). Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Eva Underhill Holbrook Memorial Collection of American Art, Gift of Alfred H. Holbrook, GMOA1947.151.

Color Plate 3  Edmund C. Tarbell, Girls Reading, 1907. Oil on canvas, 25 × 30 in. The Middleton Family Collection.

Color Plate 4  Elizabeth Shippen Green, The Library, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, August 1905. The University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-​Champaign.

Color Plate 5  John Sloan, Scrubwomen, Astor Library, 1910–11. Oil on canvas, 32 × 26 in. (81.3 × 66.7 cm). Munson-​Williams-​Proctor Institute, Utica, New York, Museum Purchase 58.87. Photo: Munson-​Williams-​ Proctor Institute / Art Resource, New York.

Color Plate 6  John Sloan, A Woman’s Work, 1912. Oil on canvas, 31 ⅝ × 25 ¾ in. (80.3 × 65.4 cm); framed: 38 ¼ × 32 ⅜ × 2 ½ in. (97.2 × 82.2 × 6.4 cm). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Amelia Elizabeth White 1964.160 © Delaware Art Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of The Cleveland Museum of Art.

Color Plate 7  John Sloan, In Her Place, Harper’s Weekly, October 4, 1913. Author’s collection.

Color Plate 8  Norman Rockwell, cover, Literary Digest, January 29, 1921. Author’s collection.

Color Plate 9  Norman Rockwell, And Every Lad May Be Aladdin, Edison Mazda Advertisement, 1920.

Color Plate 10  Norman Rockwell, Freedom from Fear, 1943. Oil on canvas, 45 ¾ × 35 ½ in. (116.2 × 90.2 cm). Printed by permission of the Norman Rockwell Family Agency. Copyright the Norman Rockwell Family Entities.

Color Plate 11  Malvin Gray Johnson, Thinning Corn, 1934. Oil on canvas, 22 × 30 in. (55.9 × 76.2 cm). Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, LA.

Color Plate 12  Anton Refregier, The Park Bench, 1930. Oil on canvas, 22 × 30 ½ in. (55.9 × 77.5 cm). Courtesy of Jonathan Boos, New York.

Color Plate 13  Ben Shahn, Puddlers’ Sunday, ca. 1938. Tempera on board, 17 3⁄16 × 25 1⁄16 in. (43.7 × 63.6 cm). Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Albert Hackett (Frances Goodrich, class of 1912) 1979.4.1. © Estate of Ben Shahn / VAGA at ARS, New York and DACS, London 2022.

Color Plate 14  Ben Shahn, Vacant Lot, 1939. Watercolor and gouache on paper adhered to masonite, 19 × 23 in. (48.3 × 58.5 cm). Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1941.390. Photo: Allen Phillips / Wadsworth Atheneum. © Estate of Ben Shahn / VAGA at ARS, New York and DACS, London 2022.

Color Plate 15  Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series, 1940–41, panel no. 25, “They left their homes. Soon some communities were left almost empty.” Casein tempera on hardboard, 12 × 18 in. (30.48 × 45.72 cm). Acquired 1942, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. © The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2022.

Color Plate 16  Jacob Lawrence, A Family, 1943. Gouache, ink and pencil, with glue on paper, 22 ⅝ × 15 ⅝ in. (57.4 × 39.6 cm). Museum of Modern Art, Gift of Mrs. Maurice Blin, 684.1971. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York. © The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2022.

4 The 1930s Genre Painting Revival

D

uring the first decades of the twentieth century American genre painting rarely made the headlines. Frank Jewett Mather’s 1907 “Status of Genre” appeared in variant form in three publications. Art and general interest magazines, such as Art and Progress and Harper’s Monthly, featured historical genre painting and occasionally discussed recent developments in the form. Critics sometimes linked contemporary painters like Edmund Tarbell and illustrators like Norman Rockwell to genre precedents, whether Johannes Vermeer or John George Brown. But genre painting was not a category around which exhibitions were organized or books written, and few artists—even those like Tarbell or John Sloan, who were enmeshed within the tradition—consciously conceived of themselves as genre painters. All this changed in the interwar years. During the 1930s American genre painting was institutionalized (or, more precisely, reinstitutionalized). In newspaper reviews and art publications “genre painting” became an important critical term, curatorial and patronage activities restored the purpose of category terms such as “genre” and “landscape,” and American artists responded to these developments by engaging in complex, generative ways with the tradition’s practices and conventions. This chapter therefore focuses less on works of art than on the ways in which they were acquired and displayed, artists funded and nurtured, and exhibitions curated and criticized. It traces the institutionalization of genre painting through the magazine the Arts, which developed the critical discourse in which genre painting was revived; patrons, including Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and the Harmon Foundation, who for various reasons encouraged artists to make genre painting; the acquisition, curatorial framing, and critical reception of nineteenth-​century genre paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other galleries; and a series of exhibitions, initiated by the Whitney Museum of American Art, that established a historical genre

painting canon and proposed ways it might extend into the 1930s. In these contexts the thematic and stylistic parameters of genre painting were debated and challenged: what kind of stories could narrative painting in the 1930s tell? Could a genre painting contain abstraction and other modernist forms? To what extent was the genre bound to a white, male, heteronormative vision of everyday life? The answers to these questions come from curators and critics but also from artists who began to respond to and intervene in the tradition and to consciously think of themselves as genre painters— or in opposition to genre painting. The institutionalization of American genre painting took place in the context of the Great Depression. Between Homer, Ryder, Eakins at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in 1930 and the 1935 Whitney Museum exhibition American Genre: The Social Scene in Paintings and Prints, 1800–1935, the scale of the economic crisis became apparent, putting millions on the breadline and shaking America’s national identity to the core. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal promised economic recovery based on vast federal government intervention that involved, among other things, the extension of the state into numerous facets of everyday life. The Depression reshaped the art world too, with artworks one of the luxuries sacrificed by middle-​class Americans and artists joining those on the breadline. The New Deal Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), which ran from December 1933 to June 1934, initiated a wave of federal patronage that would last for almost a decade. Art made under these auspices contributed to a broader shift, which historian Michael Denning calls the “laboring of American culture,” that brought the representation of ordinary working people to the fore across painting, photography, literature, and film. Regionalist painting, which tended to picture rural and small-​town life and to emphasize American national identity, and social realism, a left-​wing political art that sought to dramatize the workers’ struggle against capitalism, emerged as competing forms for representing an expanded sense of ordinary life in America, from midwestern homesteads to New York homeless shelters. Just as these developments in contemporary painting responded to the Depression, so the rediscovery of nineteenth-​century genre painting can be understood within what cultural historian Morris Dickstein describes as a widespread “taking stock of neglected American traditions at a time when morale was low and faith in the system . . . had taken a terrible beating.”1 Paintings of everyday life, both historical and contemporary, became sites of nostalgia and controversy in these circumstances. Paintings of everyday life also became part of a living tradition in the context of the genre painting revival. In the years around 1910 Sloan made dozens of works that were genre paintings in every sense other than that no one named them as such. By the late 1930s it was commonplace for critics and other artists to refer to Sloan as a genre painter. This changed how his paintings worked and what they meant, as it became possible to trace a line of humor through antebellum street scenes to his New ( 122 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

York sidewalks or to see his studies of tenement housekeeping within a long tradition of domestic interiors. In periods and places where genre painting flourished, artists were able to riff on one another’s types and motifs and expect audiences to follow their twisting and turning of generic conventions. By the late 1930s Dorothy Varian, who had studied with Sloan at the Arts Students League, painted interior scenes that consciously responded to the genre painting tradition surveyed at the Whitney Museum, where she had been a member of the Studio Club, and discussed and dissected by the circle of artists and writers in Woodstock, New York, where she lived. Her genre paintings suggest dialogue with other nineteenth- and twentieth-​century genre paintings, as critics recognized when one of her works was included in the 1939 Downtown Gallery exhibition Contemporary American Genre. As the history of the 1930s revival demonstrates, genre paintings need other genre paintings to work in this way.

The Arts and the Roots of the Revival The genre painting revival took hold in the early 1930s, but its roots can be traced back to the emergence of American Scene and regionalist painting and the revival of folk and genre painting and Currier and Ives prints during the previous decade.2 Running from 1920 to 1931, the Arts magazine developed the defining terms of the genre painting revival and launched the careers of several art-world figures who would help to institutionalize it in the 1930s. Editor Forbes Watson and associate editor Lloyd Goodrich, together with core contributors Virgil Barker and Alan Burroughs, repeatedly drew out the simplicity, humor, and commonplace themes of both historic and contemporary art; emphasized rural, small-​town, and “provincial” life outside New York; and celebrated “American” and “native” qualities. Watson would become the technical director of the PWAP; Goodrich wrote for the Arts on painters, including Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Edward Hopper, whom he would champion as guest and then chief curator at the Whitney Museum.3 The Arts in the 1920s was the springboard for the genre painting revival of the 1930s. While liberal and wide-​ranging, and open to art from Europe and beyond, the Arts was, in Watson’s words, “not afraid to enjoy American work just because it is American.”4 This tended toward the generative exploration of national history and identity urged in Van Wyck Brooks’s 1918 essay “On Creating a Usable Past,” but at times, in the hands of contributors such as Thomas Craven and Helen Appleton Read, shaded into what the Nation’s Anita Brenner characterized as “a violent nationalism . . . more anti-​foreign than exuberantly patriotic.” Following George Bellows’s memorial exhibition in 1925, Watson wrote that the artist was “uncontaminated by European culture”; twelve years later Read described Sloan as “100% American.”5 The urge to define a national culture the 1930s genre painting revival  ( 123 )

prompted the recovery of a range of nineteenth-​century forms; where Mather and other Progressive Era critics had emphasized genre painting’s Dutch origins, the focus was now on colonial and antebellum painters as the beginnings of a distinctly American genre tradition. The generative strain of Americanism was to the fore in Barker’s reviews of two 1924 Whitney Studio Club exhibitions. Of Early American Art, curated by the painter Henry Schnakenberg, Barker observed, “The discovery of our artistic past which is now progressing with increasing rapidity satisfies more than the collecting instinct.” That progression was from Abby Rockefeller’s and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s initial enthusiasm for Americana toward the serious scholarship on folk art at the museums they supported, culminating in MOMA’s American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man (1932). Barker detected “the tang of reality” in cigar-store “Indians” and James Bard’s painting Hudson River Steamboat “Alida” (1847). “They are,” he argued, “actually and adequately expressive of their time; they form a genuine contribution to cultural history.”6 Barker returned to the Studio Club for a “small group of canvases by E. L. Henry,” cautioning that if these late nineteenth-​century genre paintings “inevitably raise a smile today, that smile can have about it no slightest taint of patronage; it is a smile of unaffected pleasure in a vision of the world so utterly simple.” In terms that would become familiar in the revival of Henry and his peers, this lack of a “sophisticated awareness” ensured an honest “record.”7 These were the conceptual frames in which nineteenth-​century folk art and genre painting would be displayed and rendered “usable” during the interwar years. “American art has never been so American as in the years preceding the Civil War,” declared Goodrich, with his typical mix of nostalgia and nativism. His long 1924 essay on Homer began by claiming that the painter’s family “was Yankee almost as far back as there were Yankees in America,” and, as Goodrich himself later reflected, “stressed the unique native character of his early work, dismissed as provincial by most previous criticism.”8 The essay focused on the young artist’s fresh, autodidactic eye and journalistic observation of everyday life. Contemporaries including Hopper and Charles Burchfield were described, and described themselves, in similar terms. Hopper praised Burchfield for his “honest delineation” and placed him in a lineage of “race-​conscious” painters that includes Eakins, Homer, Sloan, and Bellows. By the mid-1920s the Arts had, as art historian Andrew Hemingway observes, established a set of criteria for American art that emphasized and celebrated whiteness, masculinity, and “racial heritage,” as well as “vigor” and “native stock.” It had also begun to suggest that these qualities, as well as fresh subject matter, might be found beyond New York City, as when Barker likened Burchfield to Sherwood Anderson in his attempts “to record the inwardness of the mid-​western small town.”9 These were the first stirrings of the American Scene and regionalism, both of which overlapped and fed into the 1930s genre revival. ( 124 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Fig. 30  Molly Luce, Suburbia, 1924. Photograph in the Molly Luce Papers, Syracuse University Libraries, Special Collections Research Center.

With the Arts’ familiar emphasis on native roots, and in one of the magazine’s first uses of the term, Burroughs explained that through awareness of her “New England ancestry . . . one prepares for what is Molly Luce’s most evident bent—the study of the American scene.”10 Among the works reproduced in the article, Suburbia (1924; fig. 30) takes a bird’s-​eye view of a New Jersey landscape of modest homes, dotted trees, and rolling hills. In the foreground a railroad station, its tracks cutting a sharp line through the scene, generates anecdotal details of people waiting in cars and running to make the train, and occasions the row of Model T Fords parked on the bridge. Luce, who, following relocation to Boston, came to be known as the Bruegel of Beacon Hill, developed a pastiche style that played on the depiction of modern subjects in historical idioms. In later paintings fashionably dressed skiers take the place of Bruegel’s returning hunters in Winter Sports (1934), and a landscape of fields and trees is filled with industrial waste in Salvage (1938). Several other artists in the period worked in this way, including Grant Wood and Doris Lee, who incorporated elements from Bruegel, Currier and Ives, and antebellum genre scenes in her humorous paintings.11 Reviewing Schnakenberg’s Americana exhibition, Barker was prompted to warn contemporaries who “dearly love a joke in paint” that “the way of artistic salvation for us does not lie along that of antiquarianism.”12 Luce and Lee were steeped in American art history but rarely took the lesson too seriously, leading Burroughs to describe Suburbia and other works as combining “knowledge and play.” He also suggested that they were by turns “whimsical, fantastic, polite, charming, etc.” This range of low-​key affects fits with the sentiments and sensibilities of strains of genre painting and contrasts with the at times bombastic aspirations of the male artists associated with regionalism and the American Scene. the 1930s genre painting revival  ( 125 )

Fig. 31  Thomas Hart Benton, The Lord Is My Shepherd, 1926. Tempera and oil on canvas, 33 ⅜ × 27 7⁄16 in. (84.8 × 69.7 cm). Purchase. Inv. N.: 31.100. New York, Whitney Museum of American Art. © 2021. Digital image Whitney Museum of American Art / Licensed by Scala.

American Scene painting encompassed landscapes, townscapes, and portrait types as well as paintings of everyday life but coincided with the concerns of the genre revival taking shape in the Arts, especially in its emphasis on the peripheral and ordinary, and on artists’ connection to place. In a 1924 review, titled “In Missoura” to catch the artist’s colloquialism, Goodrich appraised Thomas Hart Benton’s watercolor studies of “Missouri mountain country.” Benton’s early Missouri work and similar paintings made on Martha’s Vineyard, including The Lord Is My Shepherd (1926; fig. 31), explore the local types and everyday scenes typical of the genre tradition. In the late 1930s he would claim kinship and artistic connection with the antebellum genre painter George Caleb Bingham, known for his Missouri River scenes. For Goodrich, Benton shared Burchfield’s “ability to present the character of a place” but tended toward the grotesque, with a “natural flair for caricature, somewhat akin to the comic strip.”13 In the mid-1930s the critic Lewis Mumford, who had long admired Benton’s work but was dismayed by the “Riptail Roarer from Pike County” persona he took on when anointed leader of the midwestern regionalists by Time magazine, observed that the artist’s “real talents . . . ( 126 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

begin at the point where his ballyhoo gestures and his sentimental rhetoric leave off.” Mumford identified Benton’s ink-​and-​wash “studies of places and characters, particularly in the remoter parts of the Mississippi Valley and in Texas,” as important works, “both graphically and historically.”14 In contrast to the subsequent roaring and ballyhoo, The Lord Is My Shepherd carries an “aura of quietude” and in various ways signals that this is “a private setting that is at once sacred and commonplace.”15 Benton’s thoughtful explorations of region and identity in the 1920s hint at the larger-​than-​life provocations he would produce in the following decade in their defamiliarizing perspectives and distorted figures. Whether playfully, like Luce, or in earnest, as Benton appeared to be, the Arts and the wider 1920s art world fostered knowing returns to earlier modes of painting and to mundane and regional subject matter.

Genre Painting and Patronage “Genre painting” and similar category terms originate from and become meaningful within systems of patronage. Genre painting began when seventeenth-​century painters turned from serving court and church to picturing bourgeois patrons to themselves. Luce’s Suburbia was shown in a solo exhibition at the Whitney Studio Club, of which she was a member. Benton’s The Lord Is My Shepherd was among the first paintings purchased for the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum when it opened in 1931. It featured in the Museum’s 1935 American Genre survey (under its original title, The Meal), as did Luce’s Currier and Ives–inflected The Zoo (1926). During the 1920s the Arts and the Studio Club shared the patronage of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and her colleague Juliana Force and a close-​knit group of contributors who variously performed editorial duties, curated exhibitions, wrote about one another’s paintings, painted one another (as in Peggy Bacon’s 1934 portrait of Goodrich), or married one another— as with Burroughs and Luce, Forbes and Nan Watson, and Bacon and Alexander Brook. Many of the Studio Club artists spent at least part of their time at the Woodstock art colony. While the Club was not exclusive and members numbered in the hundreds, this formation could be seen as a comfortable clique, a creative community, or a system of patronage.16 In the interwar years such forms of patronage worked to include groups previously excluded from the art world but also to reinforce its boundaries. The Studio Club and later the Whitney Museum were, significantly, art institutions led by and accessible to women. While it is striking that few of the many talented women who studied with Sloan and Robert Henri in the 1900s were able to sustain fine art careers, several of those who came through the New York Art Students League and other schools in the late 1910s and early 1920s and then joined the Studio Club flourished. As art historian Janet Wolff observes of these circumstances, “the high the 1930s genre painting revival  ( 127 )

visibility of women artists and their success in terms of exhibitions and sales has to be seen as the product of a complex social network of friendships, patronage, and personal relationships.” While the Studio Club women were by no means an aesthetically coherent or homogenous group—including, for example, satirist Mabel Dwight, precisionist Elsie Driggs, and postimpressionist Marguerite Zorach—Wolff and others observe that Whitney and Force’s aesthetic leant heavily toward forms of realism.17 Luce, like Isabel Bishop, Anne Goldthwaite, Katharine Schmidt, and Varian, made still life, portrait, and landscape paintings, but aspects of their shared formation particularly attuned these women to the genre revival. A fascination with folk art and Americana encouraged them to explore their connection to the art of the past, while their proximity to New York museums, and to art critics and art historians, helped them to a broad frame of reference. The group also shared a strong sense of humor, as Bacon’s and Dwight’s satirical prints but also the women’s correspondence and retrospective accounts make clear. This perhaps led them to see the humor in nineteenth-​century genre painting missed by those contemporaries determined to mine it for social history. Both the Studio Club and the Arts came to an end around the time funds and attention turned to the opening of the Whitney Museum in November 1931. But by this point they had established a framework and language for historical and contemporary American art concerned with recording everyday life and expressing a sense of (often regional or out-​of-​the-​way) place. They had also fostered painters attuned to these ideas who worked knowingly, with humor and sincerity, within this loosely defined tradition. Many of these artists were represented in the Whitney Museum collection, and while some struggled for sales and livelihood without the direct patronage of the Studio Club, others were well positioned within the Depression-​era art world. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was not the only patron in town. Nor was she the only benefactor concerned to support artists and groups previously marginalized in an art world dominated by white men. During the interwar years, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Harmon Foundation, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, the PWAP, and then the Federal Arts Project (FAP, 1935–43) facilitated the art careers of white women and African American men and women, who, with notable exceptions, had previously struggled to make, exhibit, and sell their art. Elizabeth Olds, who was not associated with the Whitney in this period, was the first woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship to support European travel and art education. On returning to the United States in the early 1930s she contributed to the PWAP and then the FAP, making prints that explored the processes of everyday life and writing perceptively about this practice. While Henry Ossawa Tanner and Meta Warrick Fuller provide complex exceptions to the rule, African American artists rarely featured in the mainstream art press or in museum and gallery exhibitions prior to the 1920s. In the broad context of the Harlem Renaissance, and then with the Second Renaissance under federal patronage, African ( 128 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

American muralists, sculptors, and painters gained a degree of institutional recognition and support. Some, including Elizabeth Catlett, Allan Rohan Crite, Edwin Harleston, Palmer Hayden, Malvin Gray Johnson, William H. Johnson, Lois Mailou Jones, Jacob Lawrence, Archibald Motley Jr., and Horace Pippin made work in and against the genre tradition. Engaging with institutions meant that artists had to name and categorize their art in ways that those operating outside them, for better or worse, rarely had to. Thus, in his 1929 application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, Motley stated, “I would paint compositions and genre-​pictures—paintings depicting the various phases of negro life.”18 His painting had already been described in this way in a 1925 Chicago News article that explained, “While Henry Tanner son of the Negro bishop, who became the Negro’s most celebrated painter, turned to religious themes young Motley, making cross-​country trips with his father on a [Pullman] diner to pay his way through art school, found himself drawn to a study of the everyday life of his own people as he saw them in their own environment.”19 Other African American painters were discussed in similar terms. A decade later, in his obituary for Malvin Gray Johnson, James A. Porter explained that following a period of experimentation, “with unwonted energy he completed a series of canvases, depicting genre aspects of Negro life and rural and agrarian aspects of Negro life.” Made in Brightwood, Virginia, these works were “among the best painted records of contemporary Negro types of social life.”20 The Harmon Foundation’s 1937 biographical file on Crite states that he “has specialized for some time in paintings and drawings depicting the life of colored people in a northern city, with especiall attention to the neighborhood in which he lives.”21 The statements made by and about Motley, Johnson, and Crite correspond with the complex negotiation African American artists and writers in this period made with the forms and conventions of Euro-​American art and literature and also suggest the way that African American art was produced within the same discursive frames that shaped the genre painting revival. Applying for financial support often meant fitting into the terms and conventions of conservative institutions and, as in the case of genre painting, working (or at least stating one would work) in a tradition that had for decades normalized whiteness and othered and stereotyped African American identity. Art historians Mary Ann Calo and Jacqueline Francis discuss the limitations and possibilities of the portrait type in this context. Calo explains that the Harmon Foundation’s and other patrons’ emphasis on “genre portraits” steered African American artists into a form that encouraged “the reification of racial types that were easily recognizable according to established codes of representation,” while Francis considers the way Johnson and other artists in the period responded by challenging and experimenting with the form.22 By depicting African American life in idioms proximate to those in which it had previously been ridiculed, Johnson, Motley, and others could subvert, but also risked affirming, stereotypes. the 1930s genre painting revival  ( 129 )

Johnson’s Thinning Corn (1934; plate 11), which would be selected from among the work based on his trip to Virginia to feature in a 1936 genre painting survey exhibition, depicts one man and two women tending corn in rounded, rhyming forms that suggest sturdy bodies working in unison. These gently exaggerated figures stretch normative naturalism, but no more than the elongated limbs and modeled folds of Benton’s The Lord Is My Shepherd, registering Johnson’s earlier period of formal experimentation while staying within genre’s stylistic parameters. All three figures’ faces are obscured by shoulders that reach down toward the ground or by the broad-​brimmed hats that they each wear. Johnson thus plays on the notion of “contemporary Negro types,” giving these figures a generic quality but avoiding any form of typing or caricature. The painting is grounded in the cycles and repetitions that characterize everyday life as it positions the three curved backs along parallel lines of corn that indicate the ongoing nature of the work at hand. Like Benton’s painting Cradling Wheat, also made in 1936, or Ben Shahn’s 1935 Resettlement Administration photograph Cotton Pickers, Pulaski County, Arkansas, or Dorothea Lange’s 1937 Farm Security Administration photograph Filipinos Cutting Lettuce, Salinas, California, Johnson’s painting finds in this pattern of bent backs against unending crops a formal language and iconography for the exhausting, finger-​shredding work of stoop labor. Like Lange’s photographs, Johnson’s Virginia paintings might serve as “records” of agrarian labor but also advance a critique of working conditions. Similarly, Johnson’s practice challenges the expectation that African American artists paint their “own people.” While born in North Carolina, he went to art school and lived his adult life in New York and, like Lange and Shahn, traveled to view rural life with an aesthetic and an eye shaped by urban experience. Thinning Corn is thus one instance of an artist operating within and to an extent against the conventions of genre and his patrons’ “established codes of representation.” Some African American artists, such as illustrator E. Simms Campbell, refused to work in these ways. “My drawings are not confined to Negros,” Campbell explained when invited by the Harmon Foundation to show work at the Texas Centennial. “They are universal in their humor and to be a partisan to segregation . . . well, it goes against the grain.”23 Others, such as Crite and Harleston, who had both studied with Tarbell at the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston, were comfortable painting their communities in conventional, even conservative, genre idioms. Still others, such as Lawrence, who received a Julius Rosenwald Fund grant to paint The Migration Series (1940–41), made paintings that, as chapter 5 argues, work within the genre tradition but call into question its conventions and supposedly self-​evident constructions of everyday life. If the forms of patronage extended to African American artists during the 1920s and 1930s insisted on particular subject matter and ways of seeing, so too did federal support for art under the New Deal. The PWAP ran from December 1933 to June 1934, with activity and attention centered around an April 1934 Corcoran Gallery exhibition. ( 130 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

It was closely aligned with the Whitney circle—with Watson named as technical director, Force leading the New York regional committee, and Goodrich vetting applications from New York artists—and the museum’s view of American art.24 Force attracted controversy and protest by funding established artists associated with the Whitney Museum, including Sloan, over those in real need of relief, while directives issued by Watson and program director Edward Bruce replicated the discourse around American art advanced by the Arts and then the Whitney Museum. “The American scene should be regarded as a general field for subject matters for paintings,” they instructed regional directors.25 Former Studio Club member George Biddle, who as a school friend of President Roosevelt was a powerful advocate of the PWAP, aligned it with contemporary artists’ increasing “social self awareness which is so different from the earnest, egotistic individualism” of earlier generations. This new awareness, Biddle argued, found fullest expression in “mural painting and the genre lithograph.”26 Artists employed by the PWAP, including Johnson, Shahn, and Paul Cadmus, featured in genre painting exhibitions in the later 1930s. These institutional encouragements and imperatives to make genre painting developed in dialogue with a critical, curatorial, and artistic reengagement with the nineteenth-​century tradition, across a series of exhibitions of which the Studio Club’s 1924 E. L. Henry retrospective was an outlier.

Out of the Attic A degree of consternation likely greeted the profusion of historical genre paintings on display in New York by spring 1935. The influential art critic Helen Appleton Read explained that these canvases had dropped from view over the past half century as “homely anecdotes of American life . . . were considered even more provincial and inelegant by those who inherited them than the native school of landscape painting and were therefore lost sight of in their migration from parlor to attic and subsequently to junk shop or antiquarian society.”27 But in the 1930s major acquisitions and exhibitions granted prominence to nineteenth-​century American genre painting in the early formation of MOMA, the encyclopedic collection of the Metropolitan Museum, and the Whitney Museum’s construction of a national art history. Each institution displayed works reclaimed from the attic or, less romantically, purchased at auction or brought up from the museum storeroom, and each presented them differently, drawing varied responses. This prompted a wave of exhibitions over the course of the decade, with smaller galleries mounting their own genre retrospectives and contemporary artists staking their claim to the tradition. During this period, as art historian Alan Wallach explains, “the modernist canon was as yet barely formed and MOMA, like the fledgling Whitney Museum, was on the the 1930s genre painting revival  ( 131 )

lookout for art-​historical precedents.”28 Museum director Alfred H. Barr Jr. proposed Homer, Ryder, Eakins as MOMA’s opening exhibition in 1929, an honor that eventually fell to Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh. This signaled his determination to make these artists—who were central to the American canon as defined in the Arts and then by the Whitney Museum—part of MOMA’s genealogy of modern painting. The nascent and reactive tenor of Barr’s early programming, writing, and thinking is apparent in his catalogue essay, which suggests that “in 1930 Homer, Ryder and Eakins seem of considerably more importance than they did in 1920.” The assertiveness of 1936’s Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition and diagram was yet to come, as MOMA worked through the dominant critical discourse of the period. “Homer’s naïve enthusiasm for American scenery (despised word!),” Barr explained, “may have far more meaning for the immediate future, especially for us, than have the recent more sophisticated experiments in decorative and formal distortion of the great Parisians.” Other influential figures at the museum thought similarly, with Holger Cahill stating, “There is a certain homely honesty in American genre painting, and in Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins it produced work of sterling quality.”29 Homer, Ryder, Eakins set its protagonists’ genius against the gaudy, overwrought Gilded Age; these were sui generis figures who transformed and transcended the forms and circumstances in which they worked. No such claims were made for George Caleb Bingham. Prior to the Metropolitan Museum’s 1933 acquisition of Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845; fig. 32), posthumous interest in Bingham had largely been confined to works such as Fern Helen Rusk’s 1917 biography, which was published to coincide with the state centennial and celebrated him as a Missouri artist and politician.30 In the Metropolitan Museum’s Bulletin, curator Harry B. Wehle offers a brief account of the midwestern fur trade before announcing that “a curiously intimate picture recording this Missouri River life recently appeared on the New York market and has now been bought by the Museum.” Fur Traders is significant for the history it depicts, and Bingham is presented as an artist whose “means prove adequate to make refreshing and worth while his simple endeavour to show his spectator what he saw before him.” Wehle likens Bingham’s “instinctive sense of form and vivid naturalism” to “the early paintings of Winslow Homer”—that is, to Homer before the individualistic genius took hold.31 Downplaying artistry and accentuating veracity worked to position Fur Traders as, in a recent coinage, a form of “documentary.” This strategy makes sense in the context of the wider Metropolitan Museum collection, where the painting served as a cultural artifact of Manifest Destiny alongside other objects that tracked the sweep of world history. But, as art historian Bruce Robertson observes, the high-​profile acquisition was a “tipping point for canonization” as, accessioned and on view in a prestigious New York museum, Bingham “suddenly became a player in the narrative of American art history.”32 His significance—and the

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Fig. 32  George Caleb Bingham, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, 1845. Oil on canvas, 29 × 36 ½ in. (73.7 × 92.7 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, Morris K. Jesup Fund, 1933, 33.61.

significance of antebellum genre painting more generally—would be hotly contested as different institutions and voices sought to frame and reframe that history. “Today,” as Wallach notes, “MOMA seems an unlikely place to stage the revival of a nineteenth-​century American genre painter.”33 George Caleb Bingham: The Missouri Artist, 1811–1879 featured eighteen oil paintings ranging from early scenes of frontier life such as Fur Traders, Raftsmen Playing Cards (1847), and Shooting for the Beef (1850) to the later political works Stump Speaking (1853–54) and The Verdict of the People (1854–55), as well as preparatory sketches, etchings, and lithographs. It thus expanded the range of Bingham’s work known in New York, placing quiet, contemplative scenes like Fur Traders alongside rowdy, crowded paintings of dancing boatmen and boisterous political campaigns. Where Wehle introduced Fur Traders as an artifact of antiquity, Barr’s catalogue foreword locates George Caleb Bingham alongside Homer, Ryder, Eakins in a series intended not as a “venture in 19th century archaeology but because in different ways the work shown and the personalities behind the

the 1930s genre painting revival  ( 133 )

work are pertinent to our times.”34 Central to this was a claim for the formal qualities of paintings made by Homer and Eakins, and by Bingham too. Formalism was a vexed matter for MOMA in this period. Barr conceded in his Homer, Ryder, Eakins introduction that, in 1930, “ ‘Form’ is no longer an end but is again subordinate to other values,” but nonetheless went back to his teachers at Princeton and Harvard, Frank Jewett Mather and Arthur Pope, to solicit formalist catalogue essays.35 Mather’s Homer is firmly at odds with the figure presented in Goodrich’s 1924 the Arts essay: the early journalistic assignments are characterized not as immersion in ordinary life but as an opportunity to study composition dispassionately while working on subjects devoid of personal investment; his later achievement is as “a great constructor and draughtsman, never rich in overtones of sentiment, unconcerned with refinements of handling or with supererogatory graces of decoration.”36 Pope’s brief essay stresses Bingham’s formal relationship to European history painting and the complex arrangement of planes and foreground details in his late political scenes.37 Shortly after the exhibition opened, Barr wrote Pope: “You have perhaps noticed that your article was extensively quoted in last Sunday’s times and was in several of the evening papers of Saturday. I am especially pleased that your article should have been included since I was rather afraid that the documentary and antiquarian aspects of Bingham’s art would be overemphasized. Of course, we would never have had a Bingham exhibition had he not been a master of his problem from an aesthetic point of view.”38 This was a somewhat creative reading of the press reception. “There is no distinction of style” about Bingham, Royal Cortissoz insisted. “He was a mildly competent, mildly interesting practitioner, whose local legend may well be revived as a matter of pious courtesy.” Praising the concurrent Gaston Lachaise retrospective as a rare instance of MOMA fulfilling its “chief mission” by giving space to a “distinguished modern artist,” Lewis Mumford expressed regret that “the museum has, it is true, countered this act by presenting at the same time the Americana of George Caleb Bingham, a mid-​nineteenth-​century worthy from Missouri, but that matter I prefer to turn over to the Raised Eyebrows Department, although it may easily belong to the Obituary Column.”39 While conservative and modernist voices continued to emphasize the “antiquarian aspects” of Bingham, Barr did succeed in pushing the view that his art was “pertinent.” Helen Appleton Read told Brooklyn Daily Eagle readers that “the rediscovery of Bingham’s painting has been occasioned by the effort to find our cultural lares penates. American landscape, graphic humor, and folk art have yielded unexpected riches which can serve in the creation of a usable past. American genre on the other hand has not been rediscovered to any considerable extent.” Read claimed that “Bingham seems to have been the only painter of the time whose esthetic beliefs coincided with Emerson’s” and that his river boatmen and wily politicians answered Emerson’s charge in “The Poet,” which she slightly paraphrases, that ( 134 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

“we do not, with sufficient plainness or sufficient profoundness address ourselves to life, nor do we chant our own lives and circumstances.”40 While not quite biting on Barr’s formalist bait, Read saw in Bingham an aesthetic that elevated the commonplace. A revival of the Emerson-​Whitman tradition that celebrated “our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries” ran through New Deal arts projects, Carl Sandburg’s poetry, and other forms of 1930s culture, as did an emphasis on art grounded in local, lived experience. Read held Bingham up as an artist immersed in his region and in “the life he loved and knew best,” in contrast to contemporary painters’ “self-​conscious effort to seek out American themes in the hope that the subject matter would evoke an American quality.”41 Benton echoed this strategy in his condemnation of the New York art world and subsequent efforts to align himself with Bingham as a “Missouri artist.” MOMA’s odd-​couple pairing of Lachaise and Bingham provided the opportunity for the left-​wing critic Elizabeth McCausland to elucidate similar distinctions between the conditions of antebellum and contemporary artistic production. The exhibitions demonstrated the difference “between the self-​conscious artist and the somewhat less self-​conscious artist,” between “a highly self-​conscious society where art has to a large degree been divorced from any organic relation with life . . . [and] a simpler social organization, where what the artist does meets a direct and tangible need of all of the people or many of the people.”42 While few discerned usable formal precedent in Bingham’s painting, he was taken up as a Jacksonian “common man” whose significance for the 1930s lay in his deep connection to the time and place and everyday life that he painted. In March 1935 the Whitney Museum mounted American Genre: The Social Scene in Paintings and Prints (1800–1935) in its Eighth Street galleries. In typical fashion, Time spun a “polite rivalry,” explaining, “Two months ago the Museum of Modern Art called the attention of Manhattan esthetes to an almost forgotten genre painter named George Caleb Bingham, who was Missouri’s favorite 70 years ago. Last week the Whitney Museum went its rival one better by filling three floors with other genre paintings by Bingham, his predecessors, contemporaries and followers in one of the most interesting exhibitions of the year.”43 Rather than being central to the Whitney exhibition, as Time implied, Bingham was represented by just two works—Shooting for the Beef (1850) and an engraving made after The Jolly Flatboatmen (1846)—as part of a wide-​ranging survey in which David Gilmore Blythe’s bustling Pittsburgh scenes and William Sidney Mount’s whittling, bargaining Yankee farmers as well as works by Eakins, Henry, Homer, and Eastman Johnson all featured more prominently. This exhibition constituted the first serious attempt to establish an American genre painting canon. Following its 1933 acquisition, the Metropolitan Museum presented Bingham’s Fur Traders as an “instinctive” record of a significant phase in American history, instigating a strain of 1930s art commentary that took nineteenth-​century genre painting as a straight record of social history and even as a precursor to the era’s documentary the 1930s genre painting revival  ( 135 )

practices. MOMA repositioned the painting within the oeuvre of an artist who “was master of his problem from an aesthetic point of view,” and emphasized formal qualities pertinent to contemporary art. Barr and his colleagues saw in Bingham a plain-​spoken clarity of vision and vernacular aesthetic that they traced into their presentation of contemporary art such as Walker Evans’s 1936 American Photographs. At the Whitney, Goodrich located Bingham within a wide-​ranging survey of the national genre painting tradition, inviting viewers and reviewers to identify continuities and breaks and recurring and emerging concerns, both in American painting and in American everyday life. The Whitney’s exhibition made overt the other institutions’ gestures toward contemporary relevance by hanging nineteenth-​century genre paintings within a continuous survey that ran right up to 1935.

American Genre at the Whitney Goodrich’s curatorial selections and catalogue essay for American Genre draws together ideas introduced in the Arts and developed at the Whitney Museum and MOMA, while also presenting fresh discoveries from wide-​ranging research and trips to several northeastern galleries and private collections. His essay broadly follows the contours of the established history, describing an antebellum heyday coincident with “the rise of Jacksonian democracy in the 1830’s, which brought a new sense of the importance of the common man, and a strong nativist sentiment” and a postbellum decline in American genre painting precipitated by artists’ and collectors’ turn to Europe and the “ostentation and cosmopolitanism” of the Gilded Age. The exhibition thus consolidated the position of Mount and Bingham as antebellum progenitors, Eakins and Homer as genius artists who took up and elevated American genre painting against the grain of their era, and the late nineteenth-​century careers of Henry, Johnson, and John George Brown as “a survival” of the tradition “rather than a new departure.” But it also expanded the scope of the genre revival so that, as Read put it, the exhibition would “doubtless reintroduce to the art loving public” figures such as Richard Caton Woodville. “Here we meet David G. Blythe,” wrote the New York Times critic Edward Alden Jewell, expressing enthusiasm for a painter whose “infectious humor” had been missed since the peak of his popularity in the 1850s.44 The canon was also extended geographically westward with works by George Catlin and Charles Deas, and into print with the inclusion of Currier and Ives lithographs and wood engravings from Harper’s Weekly and Godey’s Lady’s Book. Bringing together this diverse range of more than one hundred pre-1900 works produced fresh insight into the nineteenth-​century representation of everyday life. Where previous commentators had tended to view historical genre paintings as a ( 136 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

“documentary” record of social history, Goodrich recognized their nostalgia and romanticism and saw the way that these and other qualities were shaped by patrons’ tastes. “Most of the painters had been country boys, as had their patrons,” he observed, “and rural themes must have offered an escape from the complexity and ugliness of urban life into what seemed a simpler and purer world.” This insight attuned Goodrich to other forms of evasion, such as the way that, while the farmyard was frequently the setting, “everyday work was not often pictured.” The hard work of agricultural labor was sublimated by scenes of “ ‘nooning’ or fiddling and dancing,” and industrialization and urbanization were rarely depicted.45 The survey thus illuminated the generic features of genre painting; in picturing fur traders loafing on their boat, Bingham may not, as Wehle suggested, have simply shown “his spectator what he saw before him,” but instead adapted motifs shared with earlier “nooning” paintings by Mount and others. Rediscovery and canon formation were only part of the story told by American Genre. The nineteenth-​century paintings were displayed in the first-​floor gallery, with visitors then invited to mount the stairs and explore a second-​floor selection from the period 1900 to 1935. A further ascent led to a third-​floor exhibition of prints and illustrations spanning 1800–1935. Some commentators embraced the exhibition’s thesis, including Jewell, who explained that the contemporary painters “carry forward, in the pictures here brought together, the theme of the older men, but in painting idioms that, of course, differ saliently from those of the nineteenth century.”46 Other visitors proved more skeptical, though. At its best Goodrich’s selection challenged formal and thematic assumptions about what a contemporary genre painting might be, prompting and provoking insight from critics and innovative responses from the curators of the genre exhibitions that followed in its wake. Where assembling the nineteenth-​century exhibition had taken a substantial research effort and extensive loans from other museums, Goodrich’s twentieth-​century examples were drawn, primarily, from the Whitney’s own collection and New York commercial galleries. Work dating back to the early years of the century by the Ashcan School painters Bellows, William Glackens, and Sloan hung alongside that of their peers Jerome Myers, Glenn O. Coleman, and Eugene Higgins and near-​contemporaries Reginald Marsh, Burchfield, and Hopper, as well as artists who had more recently come to prominence. Paintings such as Sloan’s Chinese Restaurant (1909) and Myers’s Street Shrine (1928) were, by the mid-1930s, unproblematic additions to the genre canon. Indeed, in a 1939 article reflecting on the wider genre painting revival, Jewell declared, “Yes, much of John Sloan’s early work may be thought to continue with no disconcerting break—if with differing emphasis and in the artist’s own individual style—a genre tradition to which belong characteristic portrayals of everyday life by William S. Mount, Eastman Johnson,” and others.47 Ashcan urban subjects had over time come to seem familiar, and even conservative critics who were generally more the 1930s genre painting revival  ( 137 )

resistant to the Whitney’s provocation embraced Sloan and his peers in the same terms they applied to their nineteenth-​century predecessors: Cortissoz enjoyed Glackens’s “warm” presence in the exhibition; Mary Morsell felt Myers shared nineteenth-​century genre painters’ “optimism.”48 The second-​floor exhibition was in many ways a summation and formal recognition of the revivalism and self-​conscious exploration of historical sources that Whitney patronage had fostered over the previous decade. The most recent paintings and prints in the exhibition were drawn from various cliques and factions, including Studio Club alumni, Fourteenth Street School painters, regionalists, and social realists. As Morsell observed, there was sufficient crossover with the Corcoran Gallery’s April 1934 PWAP exhibition for American Genre to “do much to clarify the values and significance of last winter’s momentary dramatization of the native scene under the aegis of the P. W. A. P.”49 Philip Evergood and Paul Cadmus were among the painters who likely came to Goodrich’s attention in his administrative role for this program and whose work featured in both the Corcoran and Whitney exhibitions. Time magazine’s influential December 1934 “U.S. Scene” article, which acknowledged the PWAP’s significance in stimulating public interest in art and revealing the “definite regional traits” mapped by its overview of the scene, also overlapped Goodrich’s selection, identifying Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Wood as leaders of a midwestern regionalist movement and Burchfield, Marsh, and Luce as important practitioners of regional painting.50 Luce’s The Zoo, from the Whitney collection, embodied the thesis of American Genre by taking the form of Currier and Ives’s bird’s-​eye views of nineteenth-​century parks and skating rinks to depict a twentieth-​century scene. Goodrich’s framing of American Genre thus fits wider traits and trends in 1930s American art. The characterization of genre’s waxing and waning fortunes as nineteenth-​century painters and patrons veered between “native” and “foreign” influences and between earthy Jacksonian democracy and Gilded Age ostentation creates obvious parallels with the turn from Parisian modernism and the Jazz Age to the American Scene and the New Deal. Exhibition research files indicate that Thomas Hovenden’s Aint That Ripe (ca. 1884–85) and a Theodore Robinson painting described as Girl Aiming Gun were both excluded on the basis that they were “rather single figure than [A]merican scene.” This note points to Goodrich’s wider conflation of genre painting with the interwar construction of the American Scene, so that its emphasis on overtly “native” subject matter, on regional locales, and on supposedly masculine themes and styles seeps into the appraisal of earlier works. As art historian William Truettner explains, American Scene painting, and notions of honesty and simplicity bound up in its subject matter and representational form, became a lens through which to view nineteenth-​century American art during the interwar years.51 American Genre was also informed by the economic circumstances of 1935. Goodrich’s observation that ( 138 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

nineteenth-​century genre painting placed no “emphasis on the bent back, the foreclosed mortgage, the abandoned farm” seems conditioned by the prevalence of those features in Depression-​era agrarian life as well as their representation in contemporary painting and documentary photography. A complex looping back and forth shaped the exhibition, as the discourse around contemporary American art informed selection decisions regarding the nineteenth-​century canon, which in turn framed the terms and expectations of viewers when invited to see contemporary paintings as extensions of that tradition. American Genre thus offers a striking example of canon-​formation as a fluid dialogue between present and past.

American Stories? American Genre drew attention to continuities between historical and contemporary genre painting, but also to points of rupture around narrative and politics. On first encountering Hopper’s Room in New York (1932; fig. 33) at the 1932 Whitney Biennial, Cortissoz declared that “the theme is pure banality.”52 While happy to identify the subject matter of such works as precisely that of everyday life, the absence of narrative content akin to the anecdotes of Bingham and Mount meant critics struggled to see them as genre paintings. Room in New York was also shown at American Genre, framed by a press release that explained that, “emphasizing as it inevitably must, the ‘story-​telling’ element,” the exhibition featured “those examples which not alone illustrate some interesting phase of American life, but do so by aesthetic means.” Perhaps prompted by this somewhat apologetic introduction, Henry McBride’s review, titled “Story Telling Art,” began by reveling in nineteenth-​century anecdotal humor before arguing that for contemporaries “the story takes second place and so the story is no longer the real thing in the picture.” Of Office at Night (1940), which like Room in New York depicts a man and woman seen through a window, Hopper insisted, “I hope it will not tell any obvious anecdote, for none is intended.” He made several statements of this kind, often occasioned by his wife’s speculations about the figures she posed. In a 1955 interview Josephine suggested that the woman in Cape Cod Morning (1950) was “looking out to see if the weather is good enough to hang out her wash.” Edward, differentiating himself from but acknowledging an anxious generic connection to the era’s best-​known storytelling illustrator, replied, “Did I say that? You’re making it Norman Rockwell.”53 These repeated assertions about what he had or had not said or what the picture might or might not tell reinforce the sense that Hopper’s paintings at once promise and withhold the possibility of narrative. The tension between formalism and narrative found dramatic expression in Emily Genauer’s exhibition review, which ran with the subheading “Genre Show at Whitney, on Heels of Abstract One, Traces the Whole Bitter Conflict.” The Whitney’s previous the 1930s genre painting revival  ( 139 )

Fig. 33  Edward Hopper, Room in New York, 1932. Oil on canvas, 29 9⁄32 × 36 ⅝ in. (74.4 × 93 cm). Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust, 166.1936. © Heirs of Josephine Hopper / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London 2022.

exhibition, Abstract Painting in America, “concerned itself with the formal elements of picture technique, with mathematical harmonies, dynamic structure, plastic design, texture, line and color.” By contrast, Genauer explained, “The genre show . . . emphasizes story content.” Hopper could be aligned with formalism, as when Burchfield introduced his 1933 MOMA solo exhibition as the work of a “pure painter, interested in his material for its own sake, and in the exploitation of his idea of form, color, and space division.”54 Room in New York is on these terms a painting of rhymed grids, sharp diagonals, and strong contrasts between light and dark planes. But seen in a context that “emphasizes story,” and in the same museum if not on the same floor as nineteenth-​century genre paintings, narrative elements pop from the canvas. The man’s necktie and waistcoat, dark gray like the exterior walls, are stiffly in place so that he remains his public, professional self, connected to the outside world by workwear and newspaper. By contrast the woman’s red dress aligns her with the soft furnishings of the domestic interior, including the lampshade and upholstered armchair, and her ( 140 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

exposed arms and collarbones suggest, with the prominent bow at the back, the ease with which it might be removed. These hints at advances spurned, like the finger poised to strike the piano key and break the tension, suggest what came before and will come after. Read in this way, Hopper’s couple-​in-​a-​room tells as much of a story as Mount’s farmers-​in-​a-​yard or Rockwell’s housewife-​at-​chores. Genauer suggested that that for contemporaries, “the story has served as a springboard from which the artist might leap into a purely personal, subjective interpretation.”55 Rather than an absolute break with narrative, the difference perhaps lay in the tenor of the story told. While Hopper resisted psychological readings just as much as anecdotal ones, he was immersed in the debates about Freud and psychoanalysis that shaped New York intellectual life, and it is hard not to see heavy silences and internal conflicts in paintings like Room in New York. Hopper was also influenced by Edgar Degas, studying his work when in Paris and in Paul Jamot’s 1924 monograph, which Josephine gifted him.56 The painting titled Interior (1868–69), but often called The Rape, which Jamot discusses, and which was in a private collection in Philadelphia in the 1930s, offers an obvious model for a man and woman in a domestic setting freighted with emotional, physical, or sexual violence. Degas called this scene “my genre painting,” drawing attention to the way it takes elements of the generic repertoire, including bourgeois domesticity, implied conversation, and even stock types, but turns them to the dark themes of realist and naturalist literature. This approach aligned with the ideas of the influential critic Louis-​Edmond Duranty, who developed a “theoretical framework” for the revival and modernization of genre painting in mid-​nineteenth-​century Paris.57 While the Whitney circle never established any such formal program, Hopper and others made genre paintings that work in similar ways. Raphael Soyer, dubbed the “East Side Degas” by Esquire magazine, developed the troubled couple in a room motif in paintings such as Intimate Interior (1933) and Furnished Room (ca. 1935). Reviewing Soyer’s 1938 solo exhibition, Margaret Breuning suggested that these works “might be called genre paintings or conversation pieces as most of them, groups or single figures, contain an implicit story.” Soyer’s stories were told through attention to “bodily gesture that parallels habit of mind” and with economy “uncluttered by a morass of detail.”58 As in earlier efforts toward modern genre painting, narrative content could be kept from slipping into the anecdotal or merely illustrative. The question of genre painting’s political content was similarly slippery. Soyer was represented at American Genre not with a domestic interior but by In the City Park (1934; fig. 34), in which three ragged men slump on a bench in Union Square. Smoking and staring out with careworn eyes, these are the “silent, non-​demanding” figures he recalled painting throughout the 1930s.59 The motif was typical of Fourteenth Street School contributions to American Genre: Isabel Bishop’s painting The Club (1935) and Reginald Marsh’s etching The Jungle (1934, now known as East Tenth Street Jungle) the 1930s genre painting revival  ( 141 )

Fig. 34  Raphael Soyer, In the City Park, 1934. Oil on canvas, 38 × 40 in. (96.5 × 101.6 cm). Private collection.

depict destitute men in sympathetic but not overtly political terms. If approaches to narrative varied between the Whitney’s first and second floors, this emphasis on negative experience produced a sharper division. “Downstairs, where the older work is on view, all is romance, prosperity, sentiment and peace,” Cortissoz explained. “A short walk up the stairs and the visitor is landed in the midst of bitterness and anything but genteel poverty.” The contemporary paintings were “dreary,” “gloomy,” and “hideous,” and even when they shared motifs with their nineteenth-​century precursors something was awry. Benton’s The Lord Is My Shepherd was, Cortissoz lamented, “a picture that downstairs would have been all peace and mild contentment, but is rather not, here.” By contrast, Genauer took Goodrich’s insight into antebellum genre painting’s nostalgic and sentimental construction of everyday life and turned it to barbed critique of “the old unquestioning optimism; the idealization of home and fireside and nature; the stupid blindness to the existing social order.” Contemporary artists’ attention to “the old, the destitute and the sick; the squalor of city slums; the poverty of drought-​stricken fields” was, from this perspective, a positive break with moribund tradition.60 By hosting a genre painting exhibition during the Depression, the Whitney Museum drew out the contrasting political implications of the everyday. Morsell complained ( 142 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

that on entering the second-​floor galleries “one at once feels a great sense of pity for the artists of today. So many of them never seem to have gotten beyond Fourteenth Street and the more obvious facts of the depression.” She went on to argue that Bishop, Marsh, Soyer, and their peers scorn to record the steady rhythm of American bourgeois life still devoted to its favorite routine pursuits despite the depression. The prize fight, it must be admitted, claims several canvases, but where are baseball and golf and fishing and camping, which still figure prominently as national pastimes. In canvas after canvas one finds the unemployed grouped tragically in Union Square or the Bowery, but where are the millions of movie fans and the farmers who sit with their families in their electrically lighted parlors, listening with childlike pleasure to the radio during winter evenings?61 Bound to the cyclical and unexceptional rhythm and routines of daily life, genre painting was, when seen in this way, a deeply conservative tradition. Who would look to such an art for the true record of rupture and crisis? And was the everyday experience of the 1930s that of sharecroppers and manual laborers forced into economic migration and destitution or of the middle class who lost savings and tightened their belts but kept their homes, jobs, and hobbies? American Genre performed a kind of art world diplomacy as political differences between the various factions supported by the Whitney had escalated to a war of words in the months prior to its opening. Fourteenth Street School expressions of social concern and paintings by left-​wing social realists hung alongside works by Benton and other regionalists. These included Grant Wood’s drawings for Dinner for Threshers (1934), a mural that, according to Time’s “U.S. Scene” article, “bears as genuine a U.S. stamp as a hotdog stand or baseball park.”62 This kind of rhetoric provoked pointed critique from the left. “Do not glorify Main Street,” Raphael Soyer’s brother Moses cautioned. “Paint it as it is—mean, dirty, avaricious. Self glorification is artistic suicide. Witness Nazi Germany.” Benton responded by charging New York artists with a narrow, metropolitan understanding of American life shaped by Marxism and other foreign ideas; in turn, the abstract painter Stuart Davis, who often acted as a spokesman for artists on the left, accused Benton of “jingoism and chauvinism” and making art amenable “to any Fascist or semi-​Fascist government.”63 Only a category as capacious as the everyday could accommodate these polarized positions. This was a problem for left-​wing critics, including the Marxist art historian Meyer Schapiro, who argued that genre painting offered insufficient means to articulate “revolutionary ideas.” Soyer attended the New York John Reed Club, which ran between 1929 and 1935 to encourage and support communist art and literature, and exhibited the 1930s genre painting revival  ( 143 )

Park Bench (n.d.), a painting on a similar theme to In the City Park, at the Club’s 1933 The Social Viewpoint in Art exhibition. Reviewing this exhibition, Schapiro objected to the inclusion of “any picture with a worker, a factory or a city-​street, no matter how remote from the needs of a class-​conscious worker,” and argued that “the mere presence of such ‘social’ elements in a picture does not indicate any social viewpoint.”64 Unsurprisingly, given the conflict that would erupt two years later, he was particularly concerned by the presence of a painting of African American men playing dice, likely Crapshooters (ca. 1928), by “Benton, for whom the real goal of art is the reproduction of ‘American Life.’ But this ‘life’ is conceived as a meaningless, picturesque, turbulent activity.”65 In a subsequent expansion of this critique, Schapiro argued that Benton “poses the stable, unpolitical everyday world and the corresponding historical past as the proper subjects for art. If we must not escape from this world, neither should we try to change it.”66 Soyer’s In the City Park and related depictions of homeless men by Bishop and Marsh similarly lacked the capacity to convey or inspire change; indeed, like Benton’s Crapshooters and The Lord Is My Shepherd, they fit under the broad genre painting category of closely observed types caught in moments of inactivity, whether at leisure, loafing, or sitting quietly after a meal. In a careful reading of Soyer’s painting, and of Schapiro and other critics’ comments on it, Andrew Hemingway argues that In the City Park does offer nuanced political critique in its juxtaposition of unemployed men and the Washington Monument and in its “undercurrent of sexual longing.” Like other genre paintings, though, it “addressed politics at a fairly low level, and often through symbolism and allusion so as not to disrupt the illusion that it showed the ordinary and typical.”67 A painting of everyday life has, by definition, limited capacity to imagine or depict change, a break from routine, a rupture, still less a revolution. The committed social realist painters who feature in the Whitney’s American Genre, including Ben Shahn, Philip Evergood, and Anton Refregier, sought to break from the constraints of genre painting. Refregier’s The Park Bench (1930; plate 12) also features a destitute man on a bench, this time sleeping beneath crumpled newspaper sheets. But Refregier eschews normative naturalism with flat blocks of color and texture that press against the picture plane and in other ways defamiliarize the composition. The limbs that protrude at sharp angles from under the newspaper suggest a broken, disarticulated body rather than a coherent form. The sleeping man is one of three discrete elements that abut and overlap one another but that in scale and tone refuse to quite occupy a single three-​dimensional space. In the top left quadrant of the canvas a liveried chauffeur walks a tiny dog whose wealthy owner’s red roadster is parked in the background, while the right-​hand side depicts the backs of a line of roughly dressed men entering a homeless shelter. The composition connects these elements to one another not by physical contiguity but as parts in an overarching social structure. The unending line of anonymous men entering the shelter asserts that the man on the bench is ( 144 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

one of many. The chauffeur, in his militaristic uniform and gleaming boots, is a vaguely menacing physical presence but is undermined by his subservient, emasculating task. A worker too, he is a tool of the class represented by the roadster and the tall building behind him and thus a part of the structure that forces men into shelters and onto the streets. Were the sleeper and the chauffeur able to access the purview that the painting offers they might come to consciousness of their shared class interests. Out of the everyday subject matter of sleeping, waiting, and walking a dog, and in a manner sufficiently conventional for Goodrich to consider it genre painting, Refregier articulates a revolutionary idea. This early easel painting points toward the complex compression and juxtaposition of figures and groups representing labor and capital that would characterize the mural projects, including the Rincon Annex Post Office in San Francisco, for which Refregier is best known. Shahn was also represented at American Genre by an early work, The Jury Box–Mooney-​Billings Case (1933), drawn from his The Mooney Case series. As chapter 5 shows, embedding scenes of everyday life in large-​scale mural compositions and presenting them within multiwork series were among the ways that Shahn and Jacob Lawrence sought to move “beyond genre” in the early 1940s. Soyer’s subtle storytelling was praised as a form of modern genre painting, but in the politicized context of John Reed Club exhibitions that refusal of direct statement was seen as a limitation. While some artists, such as Refregier, moved toward overtly political content and so toward the scale and ambition of history painting, others, such as Shahn, pursued a quieter politics located in the small stories of everyday life.

Inside/Outside In Mount’s The Power of Music (1847; fig. 35), an African American man stands outside a barn door, seemingly absorbed by a white fiddler playing for two white companions inside the barn. In Richard Caton Woodville’s War News from Mexico (1848; fig. 36), an African American man and child look up from bottom right at a group of white men gathered around a newspaper on the porch of the American Hotel. In E. L. Henry’s Sharpening the Saw (1887), an African American boy peers in from the threshold of the white protagonist’s workshop. All three paintings display the “social logic of spatial forms,” which, as literary scholar Ivy Wilson explains, meant that “blacks often share the same physical precincts with whites but all too often do not occupy the same social domain.”68 All three paintings featured in the Whitney Museum’s American Genre exhibition, but neither the catalogue introduction nor the critics acknowledged the recurring motif. One reviewer explained that Mount’s paintings were admirable only as “a social record” and were “uniformly obvious in sentiment.” By contrast, recent art histories the 1930s genre painting revival  ( 145 )

Fig. 35  William Sidney Mount, The Power of Music, 1847. Oil on canvas, 17 1⁄16 × 21 1⁄16 in. (43.4 × 53.5 cm); framed: 26 ⅜ × 30 11⁄16 × 2 15⁄16 in. (67 × 78 × 7.5 cm). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Fund 1991.110.

have found in such works ambiguous play on and between white Yankee and African American types and complex consideration of their positions at the center and margins of the social scene. “The social relations here are thought-​provoking,” Elizabeth Johns observes of The Power of Music. Johns’s study was the first to fully acknowledge antebellum genre painting’s encoded political connotations, picking out the subtle way that Mount’s “black man may be outside, but he is not otherwise demeaned.”69 American Genre presented many art-​historical discoveries and generated insight into nineteenth- and twentieth-​century painting. But, largely oblivious to the visual puns and compositional manipulations that have since been identified, and at best indifferent to nineteenth-​century genre painting’s stereotyping and racial nationalist construction of America, the exhibition also contained significant oversights and exclusions. While some omissions were no doubt down to the contingencies of organizing a major loan exhibition, others carried significant implications. Goodrich’s rejection of William Ranney’s The Sleigh Ride (1852) as “a little softened and rounded, and grocery-​calendar,”70 could be understood as a simple matter of curatorial taste, but as the allusion to commercial art here indicates, such judgments stem from deeper structures of thought. As Morsell explained, it was the Whitney’s “general ban upon honest illustrators and the capitalization of ‘art artists’ ” that led to the absence of “baseball and golf and fishing” and “farmers who sit with their families in their electrically lighted parlors” and all that set “the steady rhythm of American bourgeois life.” This was, precisely, ( 146 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Fig. 36  Richard Caton Woodville, War News from Mexico, 1848. Oil on canvas, 27 × 25 in. (68.6 × 63.5 cm). Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, 2010.74. Photography by Edward C. Robison III.

Norman Rockwell’s America, as Goodrich knew: a decade earlier he had praised Rockwell’s Edison Mazda Lamps illustrations at the 1926 Annual Exhibition of Advertising Art, and hailed him as the leader of the “rural school of painters.”71 But the Whitney practiced a nuanced dance of distinction so that, while Currier and Ives lithographs and Harper’s Weekly woodcuts featured prominently among the third-​floor graphic works, twentieth-​century illustration was represented by “art artists” such as Isabel Bishop, and there was no place for advertising art or Saturday Evening Post covers. Such inclusions would have drawn attention to the proximity, disavowed by the Whitney if not the artists themselves, between genre paintings made by 1930s “art artists” and commercial genre illustration. Many of the artists featured in American Genre had produced, or would go on produce, commercial illustration. Including Post covers and similar works would have also acknowledged that the Whitney Museum was, like Curtis Publishing, engaged in constructing a vision of national life with white men (and in circumscribed roles white women) at its center and other groups pushed to the periphery. Goodrich’s rejection of “single-​figure” studies was a somewhat crude yardstick for maintaining focus on the “social scene” that also worked to privilege the public sphere, which, especially in the nineteenth century, was dominated by men. There is thus a tail-​wagging-​dog element to his claim that American genre painters “pictured the 1930s genre painting revival  ( 147 )

a masculine world.” He dismissed the “saccharine” late nineteenth-​century “cult of the languid lady” as at odds with the needs of an “energetic and practical race,” and so Edmund Tarbell and his peers, whose dialogue with seventeenth-​century Dutch high life painting had once seemed a vital continuation of the genre tradition, were represented in the exhibition by a single work, William Merritt Chase’s A Friendly Call (1895).72 Similarly, Lilly Martin Spencer’s studies of maids and mistresses in domestic settings, including Shake Hands? (1854) and Kiss Me and You’ll Kiss the ’Lasses (1856), could be dismissed as both single-​figure and sentimental. The complex social and domestic histories that recent scholarship has traced in Spencer’s works did not fit Goodrich’s sweeping characterization of nineteenth-​century America as “energetic and practical.” While several of her less prominent male contemporaries were identified and revived over the course of the 1930s, the traces of Spencer’s antebellum popularity were not picked up until the pioneering work of art historian Mary Bartlett Cowdrey in the mid-1940s. This meant that contemporary paintings by and of women, and most strikingly Doris Lee’s bustling domestic scene Thanksgiving (1935), which did not appear in American Genre but was on view at the concurrent Corcoran Gallery of Art Biennial, lacked precedents in the canon established during the 1930s genre revival. Across the thirties Lee established a rich, humorous dialogue with art-​historical sources including Bruegel, Currier and Ives, and antebellum genre painting, but her echo of Spencer has only recently been noted.73 Where African American men and women and children featured in American Genre’s nineteenth-​century survey in the more and less stereotyped forms presented by Mount, Woodville, and Henry, Black figures were almost entirely absent from the contemporary art on display. No African American artists were represented in the exhibition and none of the second-​floor paintings depicted Black people. In the third-​floor prints exhibition, two lithographs—Adolf Dehn’s Up in Harlem (1932), which inhabits even as it satirizes a “slumming” outsider’s perspective, and John Steuart Curry’s Mississippi Noah (1934), which draws on the racist stereotypes of the era’s commercial illustration—were the miserable exceptions to the rule. Many of the white artists featured in the exhibition, including Benton, Marsh, and Caroline Speare Rohland, did depict, in other paintings, scenes of African American life. The whiteness of the contemporary work selected may have been conditioned by Goodrich’s sense of white experience as normative and so as everyday life, as may the nonselection of nonwhite artists and subjects. Just as Henry Ossawa Tanner’s genre paintings of the 1890s offered well-​known examples that might have been borrowed, from collections such as Hampton University in Virginia, to introduce African American self-​representation into the first-​floor gallery, so works by African American contemporaries who had, whether out of personal choice or to fit institutional preferences, participated in the genre revival were surely visible and accessible to the Whitney Museum. ( 148 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

For example, in his PWAP role Goodrich would have encountered Malvin Gray Johnson, whose paintings of African American life in the South, such as Thinning Corn, seem obvious candidates for inclusion in American Genre. Following Johnson’s death in October 1934, a memorial exhibition ran concurrently with American Genre at Anna Reed’s midtown Manhattan Delphic Gallery in spring 1935. That Johnson’s work fitted some period conceptions of genre painting was apparent when the Harmon Foundation’s Evelyn Brown wrote Johnson’s widow, Betty, requesting that once released by the Delphic Gallery some paintings be loaned to the College Art Association (CAA), who “would like to have ‘Thinnin’ Corn’ [sic] in an exhibition of International Genre from the 16th Century to the present day.” Johnson’s work would, Brown explained, help the CAA show “how the ‘American Scene’ which has aroused so much discussion fits into the history of genre painting.”74 That Johnson and other artists were overlooked by the Whitney points to the exclusion of African American experience from normative constructions of everyday life. It also reinforces what art historian Jacqueline Francis terms “racial art discourse,” wherein the Harmon Foundation’s “Negro Art” exhibitions, rather than mainstream thematic shows like American Genre, were deemed the appropriate frame for the work of African American artists.75 In the weeks prior to American Genre opening, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Artists’ Union both held exhibitions of antilynching art. In a pattern familiar to northern liberal conceptions of racism, the New York art world was more able to accommodate representations of African American experience when it took the form of horrific acts of violence committed by aberrant white southerners than to acknowledge the everyday structures of racial inequality and oppression that defined Black life in northern cities. While the violence and spectacle of a lynching might appear to remove the event from the sphere of the everyday and thus from the purview of genre painting, the regularity with which the flag declaring “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday” was flown from the NAACP’s New York headquarters between 1920 and 1938 asserted otherwise, as would Richard Wright’s 1937 essay “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” which details humiliation, arbitrary punishment, and the threat of lynching as daily experience for African Americans in the South.76 Neither structural racism nor the horror of lynching found a place in American Genre’s vision of everyday life. The potentially disruptive impact of marginalized experiences on American Genre is at least suggested by Paul Cadmus’s Shore Leave (1933; fig. 37), which depicts sailors at leisure in Riverside Park. A related canvas, The Fleet’s In!, had caused controversy at the April 1934 Corcoran Gallery PWAP exhibition. Senior navy personnel had demanded removal of this “most disgraceful, sordid, disreputable, drunken brawl, wherein apparently a number of enlisted men are consorting with a party of street-​walkers and denizens of the red-​light district”; the resulting scandal made Cadmus, in the words of one newspaper headline, “Famous Overnight.”77 Nothing in either painting overtly identifies the the 1930s genre painting revival  ( 149 )

Fig. 37  Paul Cadmus, Shore Leave, 1933. Tempera and oil on canvas, 33 × 36 in. (83.8 × 91.4 cm). Gift of Malcolm S. Forbes. Inv. N.: 64.43. New York, Whitney Museum of American Art. © 2021. Digital image Whitney Museum of American Art / Licensed by Scala. © Jon F. Anderson, Estate of Paul Cadmus / VAGA at ARS, New York, and DACS, London 2022.

women as “street-​walkers,” and art historian Jonathan Weinberg argues that the navy’s real, unvoiced concern was with Cadmus’s covert messaging regarding the sailors’ sexuality. The Fleet’s In! features a civilian wearing a red tie offering a sailor a cigarette, while in Shore Leave another civilian touches a sailor’s shoulder and gestures to his own red tie.78 By including codes through which gay men identified themselves to one another in the 1930s, as well as a sailor lying with legs splayed and head nestled in his companion’s knee in Shore Leave, Cadmus queers these scenes. Like several artists in the period, including Marsh and the influential teacher Kenneth Hayes Miller, Cadmus brought Renaissance painting techniques and compositional strategies to his scenes of exuberant urban sexuality. Defending himself against the navy’s accusations, he appealed to art history: “A satirical painter chooses to paint the seamy side of life usually. Why did ( 150 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Hogarth paint ‘The Rake’s Progress’ and ‘The Harlot’s Progress?’ ”79 He thus insinuates coded sexuality into a long history of art. Goodrich, given his involvement in the PWAP and as a cosmopolitan New Yorker, must surely have been aware of these paintings’ connotations. Including Shore Leave in American Genre acknowledged that there might be more than one way of seeing everyday life. Just as Cadmus’s paintings reveal the layers of coded meaning and otherwise unrecorded experience that shape gay men’s lives, so white women like Lee and Luce and African American men and women like Johnson and later Jacob Lawrence and Elizabeth Catlett could, when given the space and opportunity, use elements of the genre tradition to speak back to constructions of everyday life as a steady, apolitical sphere. A more diverse genre canon begins to ask the telling question Whose everyday life? The inclusion of works by Spencer, Tanner, or Johnson in American Genre would not have redressed the balance in an overwhelmingly white, male tradition. But their absence underscores the way that the Whitney Museum, the 1930s genre revival, and the broader construction of the American genre canon was, with noted exceptions such as the CAA genre exhibition, conceived from a white, male perspective. Genre painting’s depiction of nothing more than everyday life appears to make it a humble, minor art form, but that seemingly small claim—this is what ordinary looks like—took on greater significance in the context of an economic crisis that impacted demographics in radically different ways and in the context of a racially divided nation.

“That Abused Word: Genre” The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1939 Life in America exhibition offered, according to curator Hermann Warner Williams Jr., “the substantial pork and beans of American art, not its soufflés or meringues.” In the New Yorker Robert Coates observed, “Like nearly everything else about town at the moment, the exhibition was planned with the World’s Fair in mind and so must be considered for its historical and educational value and for its appeal as sheer pageantry (hooray for America, and so on) in addition to its interest as a straight collection of paintings.” Or, as Ella Siple, writing in the Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, put it, “Here art becomes the servant of history.” That history was familiar from lead curator Harry Wehle’s earlier account of George Caleb Bingham’s Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, now expanded to frame a sweeping 290-picture “people’s history.” Privileging ordinary life and everyday experience, Wehle outlined a narrative driven by Manifest Destiny and racial nationalism that culminated with America, on the eve of the First World War, “inhabited by more than a hundred million people of European origin and descent, clustered in great cities and spread out over the land—enterprising, rich, modern.” “The Indian the 1930s genre painting revival  ( 151 )

aborigines,” Wehle explained, “had been pushed back and back, consigned at last to reservations and forgotten.”80 The works selected to tell this tale were an eclectic mix of amateur and professional portraiture, folk art, and landscape and genre painting, testimony to the breadth and depth of the historical and curatorial exploration of eighteenth- and nineteenth-​century objects conducted over the preceding decade but also a reflection of the limitations of that visual record or at least the 1930s conception of it. While landscape paintings and a good deal of portraiture were on view, genre painting formed the backbone of the exhibition. The term “genre,” and the extended critical debate that it provoked in the period, were not mentioned in the Life in America exhibition catalogue; indeed, the exhibition’s stated purpose was to put aside aesthetic concerns in order to use art as “illustrative material.” The Metropolitan Museum was just one of several institutions—including the CAA (1935), the Carnegie Institute (1936), the American Folk Art Gallery (1938), and the Fogg Museum, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Downtown Gallery (all 1939)— to present exhibitions that built on American Genre and perpetuated its influence. There is substantial crossover between Goodrich’s nineteenth-​century survey and the genre paintings included in the Life in America exhibition, which in turn informed Williams’s later Mirror to the American Past (1973). Elizabeth Johns lists this book in her 1991 American Genre Painting as one of two “major works in the field,” the other being another Whitney publication, Patricia Hills’s The Painters’ America (1974). In Mirror to the American Past Williams writes that by the early 1970s, “the only American painters specializing in genre whose work has been published in detail are a few of the most important figures, such as Mount, Woodville, Ranney, Henry, Bingham, Homer, and Eakins.”81 With the exception of Woodville, who was represented by a single work, and the “grocery-​calendar” Ranney, who was excluded, this list maps precisely to the most prominently featured nineteenth-​century painters in American Genre. On these terms, the Whitney was thus successful in institutionalizing a canon of historical genre painting. Where Life in America pushed 1930s curators’ and critics’ tendency to take antebellum genre painting as face-​value documentary record, New England Genre, which ran concurrently at the Fogg Museum in Boston, offered a more nuanced take. This was a Harvard Museum Class project intended, according to exhibition committee minutes, “1. To give us Museum experience 2. [demonstrate] intellectual quality.”82 These detailed minutes record both objectives as students worked on loans, publicity, and other practicalities while wrangling with some of the bigger questions of their theme. Although somewhat hamstrung by the rigid stipulation that “objects must represent activities of everyday-​life in the New England scene and by New England artists,” which led to quibbles over what state artists were born in and how much time they spent there, the class was in other ways expansive and insightful.83 An advertisement soliciting loans from the ( 152 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

New England public asked “to borrow statuary, carvings, samplers, pottery and plates, glass prints, water color and oil paintings; only restriction is that subject-​matter must be concerned with scenes of every-​day life.”84 While not all these objects made it into the exhibition, the inclusion of John Rogers’s small painted plaster sculptures of genre types and groups, which were popular desk and mantelpiece ornaments in the 1890s, as well as needlework and circus playbills, extended genre beyond paintings and prints. The list of titles generated by protracted debates about what to call the exhibition draws out many of the challenges in characterizing genre painting. The committee minutes listed “The Art of the Prosaic,” “The New England Story,” and the speculative “_______: Reflections of Life in New England.” A list kept in the records but separate from the formal minutes included some more left-​field suggestions: “New England Narrative Art,” “New England Vernacular Art,” “Domestic Art in New England,” “Bourgeois Art in New England,” and “From Cotton Mather to Sacco-​Vanzetti.”85 Again, these titles probe the questions: What is genre painting’s relationship to everyday life? To what extent is genre bound to storytelling or able to convey (regional) history? Is it necessarily “bourgeois” and—as in the final suggestion’s reference to the Italian American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were executed in Boston in 1927 for a murder many believed they did not commit—can it be politically engaged? Milton Brown was selected to write the catalogue’s introduction. Reflecting many of the ambiguities that the Museum Class had wrestled with, as well as the wider critical debate instigated by American Genre four years earlier, Brown began with the observation that “of all the artistic categories, genre happens to be the most difficult to define.” He then characterized genre as “not only an iconographic type but also an attitude”: “Genre art depicts the ordinary activity of ordinary people. It is the art which finds its source of inspiration and its subject matter in the everyday life of the people. It is a contemporary picture of contemporary life. . . . Because genre is fundamentally a comment upon daily life, there may be as many approaches to genre as there are ways of looking at life.”86 Rejecting the nationalist tendency of much 1930s art history, the essay and exhibition reestablished the generative relationship between American and European genre painting: many “typical and humble scenes” of New England life were deemed to bear the “quality of intimate human activity which we find among the Dutch Little Masters”; Tarbell and William McGregor Paxton were returned to the canon as artists who “found in the mannered social graces of a sheltered life reminiscences of a more ordered world” and recalled “that older painter of graceful leisure, Vermeer.”87 While the Museum Class contemplated extending their survey to the 1930s, with Miss Young recommending Hopper (“although not essentially a New England ‘genre’ painter”), the idea was rejected and so Brown and his peers did not address the question of what “a contemporary picture of contemporary life” in their own time might look like.88 the 1930s genre painting revival  ( 153 )

That question came into focus at Contemporary American Genre at the Downtown Gallery in November 1939. This exhibition covered some similar ground to the Whitney’s selection of twentieth-​century genre painters, with Nicolai Cikovsky featuring in both shows, but also included abstract works that challenged the parameters of the 1930s genre revival, including a painting by Stuart Davis. In an attack on both social realism and regionalism of the kind supported by the Whitney, Davis asserted that abstract painting was contemporary in ways that “all painting of the domestic naturalism type, whether of the home-​town booster or proletarian variety” and whether depicting “the chicken yard, the pussy cat, the farmer’s wife” or “the picket line, the Dust Bowl, the home relief office, the evicted family, etc.,” could not be. For Davis, in a similar vein to Schapiro’s critique of Benton, “Domestic naturalism always affirms a static world in which everyday color, shape, and perspective is familiar, and which conveys the sentiment that they will always be just like that.” In its backward-​looking tendencies, 1930s American painting was “right back with the [ John] Rogers Groups and J. G. Brown’s ragged little shoeshine boys.” Anita Brenner had made a related point in her prescient review of the John Reed Club’s 1933 Social Viewpoint exhibition. Artists who sought to address “contemporary actualities” were mistaken in returning to “pre-​modern methods,” as, Brenner argued, “they cannot adequately and movingly paint or carve their time and place in the technical and emotional terms of another age.” While often doctrinaire, Davis grounded his arguments in lived experience: “An artist who has traveled on a steam train, driven in an automobile, or flown in an airplane doesn’t feel the same way about form and space as one who has not.”89 He believed that the formal techniques of modern painting, including montage and collage, and distortion, defamiliarization, and abstraction, expressed modern everyday life in ways that received realism or “domestic naturalism” rooted in earlier social orders could not. Davis was then an unlikely inclusion in Contemporary American Genre, but Edith Gregor Halpert defiantly hung his Artist in Search of a Model (1931) under that heading at the Downtown Gallery. While Goodrich was generally more successful in establishing a nineteenth-​century genre painting canon than persuading other critics and curators to extend the tradition into the twentieth century, this exhibition was the exception to the rule. Committed to creative freedom and genuinely engaged with avant-​garde culture, Halpert was also known as a “very wide-​awake operator.”90 Contemporary American Genre was at once a commercially motivated attempt to capitalize on the publicity surrounding genre painting and a provocative intellectual challenge. Both motives are apparent in the brief catalogue statement, which begins by citing “the enthusiastic response” to other genre exhibitions as “evidence [of ] the wide appeal of genre material” and then quotes rather selectively from Brown’s introduction, emphasizing that genre “is a contemporary picture of contemporary life,” before concluding, “In the examples here on view, one will find twenty-​seven approaches, recording in so ( 154 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

many different ways, varied aspects of contemporary life in America.”91 The exhibition included various forms of abstract and modernist painting, including Georgia O’Keeffe’s Front of Ranchos Church, N.M. (1930) and John Marin’s Bryant Square (1932) as well as Davis’s Artist in Search of a Model. If Contemporary American Genre offered a forward-​looking approach, it also reproduced the historical limitations of the American genre tradition. Alongside Davis and O’Keeffe hung Anne Goldthwaite’s Alabama Interior and a painting by Cikovsky described as “Southern Negro eating watermelon.” A review of Goldthwaite’s 1938 solo exhibition mounted a protests-​too-​much defense of her work on the basis that while her “picturesque negro figures with their lanky mules in the Southern scenes are amusing they are not caricatures; they are human documents, not comic strips.”92 These paintings point to genre’s difficulty in freeing itself from conventionalized ways of seeing everyday life and the tradition’s deep reserves of stock types and stereotypes. Such an art could, as in Life in America, serve narrow, bigoted visions of everyday life. As Halpert confessed to Alain Locke in 1941, prior to reading his Negro Art: Past and Present (1936) and viewing Lawrence’s The Migration of the Negro (1940–41), she had been wholly ignorant of the work of African American artists. However, her 1941 survey American Negro Art, frequent inclusion of Horace Pippin in group exhibitions during the 1940s, and long-​term position as Lawrence’s dealer were among the first significant steps taken to represent Black artists in the mainstream New York art world.93 Contemporary American Genre contained a tension between remaining close to the tradition while pursuing the inclusivity that would shape subsequent Downtown Gallery projects. As with previous attempts to define genre, some commentators willingly ceded authority to the gallery. For example, Art News critic Jeannette Lowe explained that the Downtown had, “by way of a Fogg Museum discussion of New England genre[,] . . . achieved a new definition of the term and sorted out several classifications.”94 For others, though, this was a step too far. Jewell, who had previously supported Goodrich’s extension of the American genre tradition into the twentieth century, concluded that Contemporary American Genre stretched the category term to a breaking point: “If an at best nebulous term is to retain for us even a semblance of the particular meaning it has long held, then I’m afraid we shall have to question the use to which it is now put at the Downtown Gallery.” Clearly relishing the way that the exhibition teased the boundaries of the generic provocation, Jewell arranged the paintings on view on a sliding scale, suggesting that “we might agree to call Anne Goldthwaite’s ‘Alabama Interior’ . . . genre,” identifying “borderline” works by Cikovsky, Samuel Halpert, and Dorothy Varian alongside “quasi-​qualified aspirants” including Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s contribution, before concluding, “And so it goes, until we reach abstractions by John Marin and Stuart Davis which (not through any artistic fault of their own) bring the the 1930s genre painting revival  ( 155 )

little genre experiment to a finis suffused with laughter.”95 Cortissoz took a similar line, complaining that while the exhibition’s title carried a “popular ring” it was ultimately a “misnomer” as “contemporary art ought to be able to get along with designations of its own, without confusing the issues of old and new.” “For most of us, at any rate,” Cortissoz ventured, “ ‘genre’ suggests through ancient usage, homey, intimate life, life steeped in sentiment.” This conservative critique limits genre painting to the expression of a bounded range of historical experiences and acknowledges that its generic repertoire might not be defined by anything so objective as the presence of narrative or stock types or two or more figures, but by something looser and less tangible, like hominess or intimacy. A digest report of the exhibition, which quotes Jewell’s and Cortissoz’s claims, carried the headline “That Abused Word: Genre” and suggested that “perhaps the word ought to be junked altogether.”96 Dorothy Varian’s Reading War News was, for Jewell, a “borderline picture” at Contemporary American Genre. (Two years later, in 1941, Peter Juley photographed a work titled War News, with the date at bottom left smeared out; see fig. 38.) In it, Varian, a Whitney Studio Club alumna enmeshed in the New York art world that had fostered the genre painting revival, works with various aspects of the tradition. Motif and title, but not mood or style, echo Woodville’s War News from Mexico, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Life in America shortly before Contemporary American Genre opened. In Woodville’s painting a diverse group who gather around a newspaper in a public, though stratified and segregated, forum respond in rapt and rowdy ways to its reports; in Varian’s a young couple sit in their silent, private sphere in slumped resignation and unworded anguish at the news. Lowe, who was on board with Halpert’s expansive view of contemporary genre, drew out the painting’s proximity to and distance from the tradition’s conventional tone and affect: “Rich and colloquial as is Dorothy Varian’s painting, Reading the War News is quite far from coziness.”97 Varian’s painting is in this way akin to Hopper’s and Soyer’s domestic interiors, with their hints at silent, interior conflict. Lowe’s remark suggests the way Varian and other artists could rely on viewers in the late 1930s to make connections and contrasts back to the genre tradition; to mark, for example, the way Reading War News is like and unlike earlier scenes of home and hearth. Varian’s couple have hastily rearranged the furniture, pushing sofas once neatly positioned on either side of the fireplace haphazardly together to make a nest, an enclosure within the already enclosed room. The painting thus figures both the retreat of everyday life from public spaces like Woodville’s hotel porch, and the national insularity and isolationism that had fueled the “rediscovery of America” and the genre painting revival. In this and other ways Varian follows the genre painting practice of investing ordinary things and spaces with meaning. The couple’s modern, minimal hearth creates a dark void at the center of the composition. The sofas, the crumpled newspapers, and ( 156 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Fig. 38  Dorothy Varian, War News, 1941. © Peter A. JuIey & Son / Smithsonian American Art Museum.

the flower painting askew on the wall portend greater upheaval to follow. Out of this mess the woman stares imploringly, a modern stripped of the hominess and sociability that might once have given succor in a time of crisis. To Davis’s charge that “domestic naturalism” was a static, backward-​looking art, Varian’s painting offers a scene and idiom that articulate a contemporary crisis not despite but because of their knowing reference back to and position within a long genre tradition. Varian uses newspapers, as many nineteenth-​century genre painters and twentieth-​century social realists did, and as Norman Rockwell would with the Bennington Banner in 1943’s Freedom from Fear, to introduce political and topical events and contexts into an everyday scene. But where Woodville’s War News from Mexico makes “extra” painstakingly legible and the newspaper the vibrant center of attention, in Varian’s Reading War News the woman has cast her newspapers aside, while the man looks at a vaguely marked and nearly blank page. It is not the newspaper but the couple’s anguished demeanor that carries the story of the war. Reading War News was a product of and response to the genre painting revival, as were, the next chapter argues, Ben Shahn’s and Jacob Lawrence’s paintings of the early the 1930s genre painting revival  ( 157 )

1940s. Lewis Mumford referred to his 1930s contemporaries as “a people . . . addicted to crazes over periods and antiquities,” and the decade-​long buzz around genre painting was sustained by journalists recycling each other’s copy and bandwagon-​jumping galleries spotting a way to repackage storeroom relics.98 That the genre painting revival was in part an art-world fad does not mean that individual and institutional participants were not committed to it or shaped by it. Nor does it wholly explain the relative brevity of the revival, which carried over into the immediate postwar period but left little trace beyond that point and barely registers in subsequent histories of American art. Alan Burroughs’s 1936 Limners and Likenesses (1936) was about the only book-​length history written in the spirit of the genre painting revival, while Oliver Larkin’s 1949 Art and Life in America explores and offers critical distance on many of its claims. But after this, and until now, near-​silence. The Second World War radically reconfigured the terms and contexts in which art was made: in its blanks and nullity, Varian’s painting asks, what could a genre painting say about world war, anyway? The Cold War likewise changed the politics and mood in which art was displayed and criticized and art history written. But as well as these changes of circumstance, the genre revival perhaps came to an end because it never quite resolved its manifold tensions or plotted a convincing way forward. The most significant painting to emerge from the revival, the work of Shahn and Lawrence, acknowledges the limitations of, and seeks to move beyond, genre.

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5 Ben Shahn and Jacob Lawrence Beyond Genre Painting

T

his chapter is not about works like Dorothy Varian’s Reading War News (1939; see fig. 38) that seem to fit the terms of contemporary art made in the genre tradition. It considers instead two artists who move beyond without wholly abandoning genre painting. In John Sloan’s intimate tenement scenes, close observation of and immersion in twentieth-​century everyday life produced insights that exceeded the limits of the niche picture and other genre conventions through which they were presented. Ben Shahn and Jacob Lawrence were, like Sloan, artists deeply concerned with the everyday lives of ordinary people, who, through largely autodidactic scholarship, came to a rich sense of both history and art history. Like Sloan also, their personal experiences provided a particular access to everyday life, but where his conception remained grounded in Dolly’s kitchen, Shahn and Lawrence achieved a far broader compass. Shahn’s wide-​ranging participation in the New Deal radically expanded his understanding of ordinary people in a modern state. Lawrence constructed—from his daily experience of Harlem life, the resources of Harlem’s scholars and sermons and public library, and downtown encounters with social realist art practice—an everyday world that contained South and North, past and present, shacks and tenements, the unfinished history of slavery and abolition, and the day-​to-​day struggle of African American women and men. To express their expanded understanding of everyday life, both Shahn and Lawrence made art that was often grounded in and contained elements of genre painting but that used defamiliarizing and nonnaturalistic form as well as library research, photographic sources and techniques, wall-​sized scale, text, sequence, and seriality to move beyond the confines of the isolated scenes of everyday life.

Ben Shahn’s Sunday Paintings In Sunday Painting and Puddlers’ Sunday (ca. 1938; fig. 39 and plate 13) Shahn places, respectively, one man alone and a group of seven men with a Buick in nondescript landscapes. These vistas are unappealing; neither cultivated farmland nor wilderness, they offer little sense of the pastoral or sublime. Swaths of dun-​colored road, mud, and parched grass dotted with tall stems, scrubby bushes, and small trees stretch out below cloudy skies. The meadow in Sunday Painting is, as Shahn’s biographer Selden Rodman observed, “depressingly banal.”1 The men are identified with labor by the lone man’s enlarged hands, which, clasped behind his back, evidence some form of manual work temporarily arrested, and by the term “puddler.” Puddling was skilled, dangerous work in iron manufacturing but increasingly obsolete in modern steel production; “puddler” seems to serve in Shahn’s title as a folksy word for steelworks laborers. But just as their surroundings eschew the conventions of landscape painting, these men are not obviously heroized nor victimized, neither engaged in muscular feats nor in rags or on crutches, in the manner of social realist representations of workers. This is their day off, which they spend walking alone in a field and talking in small groups on a quiet stretch of road. Sunday Painting and Puddlers’ Sunday are purposefully, emphatically banal. Shahn came late to the genre painting revival. He returned from Europe at the start of the Depression, determined like many of his peers to make politically committed art. This first found expression in three series of small paintings of historical and topical events: The Dreyfus Affair, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, and The Mooney Case, made between 1930 and 1933. It then informed his work as a photographer, graphic artist, and muralist for various New Deal agencies between 1935 and 1943. During this period Shahn had the opportunity to see several exhibitions of nineteenth-​century American genre painting and observe his contemporaries’ response to that tradition— his The Jury Box–Mooney-​Billings Case (1933) was a slightly off-​topic inclusion in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1935 American Genre exhibition—but also to assimilate the lessons of his eye-​opening documentary road trips and challenging mural commissions. The initial easel paintings made out of these disparate experiences broadly align with the work of social realist painters such as Philip Evergood and Anton Refregier in their direct expression of left-​wing politics. Acknowledging that social realism was “a variety of genre painting,” the art historian David Shapiro observes that it took “as its main subject matter certain significant or dramatic moments in the lives of ordinary poor people” such as evictions and strikes. With the inclusion of slogans on posters and placards, raised fists, and caricatured bosses, policemen, and strike breakers there is “almost always, implied or explicit, a criticism made of the capitalist system.”2 Thus, as discussed in chapter 4, Refregier’s The Park Bench (1930; plate 12) locates destitute men in a symbolic representation of the system that oppresses them, while Shahn’s Man ( 160 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Fig. 39  Ben Shahn, Sunday Painting, ca. 1938. Oil on canvas, 15 × 23 in. (38.1 × 58.5 cm). Kennedy Museum of Art, Ohio University. © Estate of Ben Shahn / VAGA at ARS, New York and DACS, London 2022.

by the Railroad (1935–36) depicts a wounded miner on crutches in a harsh landscape of company houses and political posters. It was not until the late thirties that Shahn began making the seemingly quieter scenes of everyday life, including Sunday Painting and Puddlers’ Sunday, shown as Sunday Paintings at Julien Levy Gallery in spring 1940. In the careful postwar reframing of Shahn’s career undertaken in collaboration with Rodman and the curator James Thrall Soby, the Sunday Paintings and related works are understood to operate within, but also to move beyond, the American genre tradition. Existing explanations of the title Sunday Paintings obscure its full meaning. The suggestion that the paintings were made on weekends around commissioned murals catches the sense of an artist stepping back from large-​scale projects, but is inaccurate, as most were made on an extended sabbatical between two mural projects when, as the artist wrote Levy, “I’ve painted for Shahn and posterity.”3 In a less literal sense, the exhibition alludes to “Sunday painters,” one of the many (problematic) terms for the “primitive,” “folk,” and “self-​taught” artists celebrated by 1930s exhibitions, including Holger Cahill’s influential 1932 American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). It was probably with this show in mind that Diego Rivera claimed Shahn’s 1933 Mooney Case “contains all the technical assets of French bourgeois art, as well as naiveté of the ‘American Folk Art’ style, and the broken chiaroscuro and confusion of the world city of New York.”4 Echoing Rivera’s words, ben shahn and jacob lawrence  ( 161 )

Soby explained in his essay for Shahn’s 1947 retrospective at MOMA that while “folk art and folk song” were present in his work, “far from being a ‘Sunday painter,’ Shahn knows everything that can be of use to him about the advanced forms of contemporary art here and abroad.”5 The title Sunday Paintings frames Shahn’s art as a form of pastiche, a knowing layering of folk and modern elements. Sunday Paintings also expresses the thematic coherence, the insistent Sundayness, that connects several works across the exhibition. Levy stipulated that works be shown without titles. But soon after the exhibition closed Shahn wrote the gallerist, “Titles ought to be superfluous to paintings, still, the flesh is weak and the absence of them left me with a sense of emptiness and lack of orientation.” The list of twenty-​one titles supplied included W.P.A. Sunday, Sunday Painting, Puddlers’ Sunday, and Sunday Football. Soby picked up on this connection, explaining that “if some of [Shahn’s] pictures belong to a series conceived on Sunday excursions through the New Jersey countryside this is because his subjects are relaxed on that day, and he has always been interested in what people do when in theory they do nothing at all.”6 Another painting, Pretty Girl Milking a Cow (1939–40), in which a man sits alone among sparse trees and scattered leaves, legs crossed at the ankle and playing a harmonica, was titled, by Bernarda Bryson Shahn, for an Irish ballad that begins, It being on a fine summer’s morning, As birds sweetly tuned on each bough, I heard a fair maid sing most charming, As she sat milking her cow.7 In Pretty Girl and Sunday Painting the protagonist is subsumed by their environment so that only their hat protrudes above the horizon; in Puddlers’ Sunday the men’s beige clothes merge with the bland ground. Especially when seen, as they were at the MOMA retrospective, alongside mural studies and social realist paintings focused on labor unrest and urban poverty, the sense of a rustic world apart seems central to the Sunday Paintings. These settings must surely have been a surprise to those aware of Shahn’s Brooklyn roots and social realist formation. Mostly made by New Yorkers, social realism was an urban art that used skyscrapers to express capitalist wealth and power and factories to embody labor’s oppression. As Shapiro observes, its “only landscapes are at least partly cityscapes.”8 But between the 1933 Mooney Case series and the 1938–40 Sunday Paintings Shahn had been on quite a trip. His work for New Deal agencies had taken him through the South and the Midwest and to Washington, DC; he had then settled with his family in Jersey Homesteads, a new-​build town in the central New Jersey countryside. In 1935 Shahn was employed by the Resettlement Administration (RA) as an ( 162 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

“Associate Art Expert” in the Special Skills Section. Before starting this job he was sent by Roy Stryker, the head of the Historical Section, to witness and photograph the conditions that the RA Sections had been set up to record and inform the public about. This trip yielded more than eight hundred photographs, which contributed to the RA archive and became source material for subsequent paintings. As Shahn later recalled, it also “shook” him up: “I realized everything I had gotten about the condition of miners or cotton pickers I’d gotten on 14th Street.”9 As in critic Mary Morsell’s complaint that at the Whitney’s American Genre exhibition too many artists “never seem to have gotten beyond Fourteenth Street and the more obvious facts of the depression,” the area around Union Square, where Shahn had made street photographs of destitute men in the early 1930s, had become a cliché of artistic engagement with urban poverty. Morsell’s prescription for artists for whom “East Fourteenth Street is still a cosmos in itself ” was that the “Guggenheim Committee create special scholarships requiring the recipients to take a leisurely year’s tour from Maine to California via the Greyhound Bus Lines.”10 While Shahn’s tour took a slightly different form and route, it did lead him to reconsider his art and its politics. Observers picked up on this change of tone and tack. Shahn showed two paintings in Philadelphia in 1939 that one critic described as “amusing pieces” depicting “squatty, little men, caricatures perhaps, amusing in themselves.” In Sunday Football (1939), “two of these inimitable figures are peeping through cracks of a high board fence, obviously watching the fracas going on inside.”11 Across the twenty-​one Sunday Paintings there is a shift from striking miners to folksy “puddlers” and from picket lines to Sunday excursions, with the seemingly quieter scenes—including all four paintings with Sunday in their title—setting the mood. Robert Coates’s New Yorker review was titled “Slight Letup,” suggesting an amusing interlude or lightening of the tone. Coates pointed to the exhibition’s thematic continuity, explaining that “en bloc, the group—ranging from the lunchroom owner with the Tammany face to the shirt-​sleeved workingman, sitting lonely but happy, playing his harmonica in a park—represents the reactions of about as keen and intelligent an eye as we have around today.” Soby, too, noted this shift: “From a savage commentary on a West Virginia coal strike he could turn to the poignant Vacant Lot, so penetrating in its evocation of childhood isolation and absorption in play.”12 Responses to the Sunday Paintings were far removed from those that Shahn’s politically charged series and socially conscious murals had provoked.

“In the Tradition of Genre” Shahn attributed the turn in his art to his time on the road and in the field as a documentary photographer, but New York galleries also provided art-​historical models and ben shahn and jacob lawrence  ( 163 )

precedents. Given his inclusion in the exhibition, it is likely Shahn saw America Genre at the Whitney, which ran while he was in New York dealing with his vetoed Riker’s Island Penitentiary mural. It is also plausible that Shahn read the reviews that repeatedly contrasted nineteenth-​century genre painting with contemporary art. Shahn was back in the city for his Bronx Post Office mural Resources of America during the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and it again seems likely that he would have visited the concurrent Life in America exhibition, given the convergence of its themes with aspects of his work and that he was staying in Yorkville, just a few blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.13 Shahn stated that Resources of America aimed “to show the people of the Bronx something about America outside New York. So I painted a cotton picker, along with another panel showing a woman tending spindles in a city mill. I painted wheat fields, and power dams as well as steel workers and riveters.”14 Curator Harry B. Wehle set out Life in America’s similarly expansive survey: “What had Americans looked like through the centuries since they encountered the Indians and established the first white settlements? How did they live, and what were their characteristic enterprises and pastimes?” The exhibition featured Missouri boatmen, depictions of California gold prospectors, and scenes of frontier life. The subject matter of Resources of America had been fixed when the design was submitted in 1938, so Wehle’s historical survey did not directly inform Shahn’s geographic one. But the nineteenth-​century genre paintings at the Metropolitan Museum were present for Shahn as he turned to Sunday Paintings. Indeed, the turn to leisure from Resources of America’s focus on production might be aligned with Life in America, which follows the 1930s orthodoxy that in their “pictures of ordinary, everyday American ‘folks,’ ” nineteenth-​century genre painters “took no heed of distracting political conditions on the one hand or of the stupendous development of railroads and manufactures on the other.”15 Wehle describes Americans as a people “forever whittling something, or chewing something,” expending restless energy in mundane habit. Something like this detachment from the spheres of work and politics shapes the everyday world of Sunday Paintings, or so the accounts given by Shahn’s friends Rodman and Soby suggest. In his essay for the retrospective, Soby explains that “since 1931, when he suddenly reached maturity as an artist, [Shahn] has been unmistakably an American painter, as American as nineteenth century genre artists like Charles Caleb Ward and Eastman Johnson. On the whole he has not shared the earlier painters’ devotion to homely anecdotes, though sometimes he has drawn near them in this regard, if always on far less obtrusive terms.”16 This was the same language, and the same kind of vacillation, with which critics and curators had described contemporary artists’ relationship to anecdote and narrative during the 1930s genre painting revival discussed in chapter 4. Locating him “among the democrats of the 1930s who looked back to the Jacksonian era for inspiration, ( 164 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

[and] rediscovered the popular art of that period,” Rodman argues that The Meaning of Social Security mural, begun shortly after the Sunday Paintings exhibition, like all of Shahn’s important pictures of this period . . . belongs in the tradition of genre—of those artists for the people who had interpreted man to himself “by showing how he behaves on simple and present occasions.” It joined the company of [William Sidney] Mount, who wrote that he had had enough of the grand style and whose picture of a Negro winning a goose in a raffle had been praised by Walt Whitman for eluding the minstrel-​show stereotype; of [George] Caleb Bingham, that political rebel and painter of Breughel-​like political rallies; and of the early Winslow Homer who recorded for Harper’s the unheroic side of the Civil War.17 In this passage Rodman quotes another member of Shahn’s circle, the art historian Oliver Larkin, who read drafts of the manuscript and supplied an uncredited blurb.18 In his 1949 survey Art and Life in America, which Rodman draws from extensively, Larkin explains, “Genre, despite the many occasions when it mingles with other modes, has for its essential purpose nothing more heroic than to interpret man to himself by showing how he behaves on simple and present occasions.” Larkin surveys American art history in terms informed by the political and cultural debates of the 1930s, and this definition is shaped by and provides critical reflection on the decade’s genre revival.19 Rodman and Soby wrote, with Shahn’s cooperation and substantive input, in a “Cold War climate” that made it expedient to emphasize American identity—as in the title Portrait of the Artist as an American—and downplay or reframe political commitment and content.20 Rodman’s praise for the way the Sunday Paintings “fixed the isolation of the individual in a single image” fits the individualistic Cold War rhetoric of 1951. But it also affirms the sense that there is some lack of ambition or purpose in genre painting, as implied by Larkin’s “nothing more heroic” or, in still more negative terms, in the “pinchedness” and “resignation to the minor” Clement Greenberg identified in his scathing review of Shahn’s retrospective.21 Such accounts miss, ignore, or willfully obscure aspects of Shahn’s Sunday Paintings and the genre tradition they draw on. While Wehle’s introduction for Life in America stuck to the 1930s script by characterizing historical genre painting as apolitical, archival research for the exhibition hinted at a different story. The catalogue includes diligently researched entries for all 290 works that focus on the specific event or scene depicted, typically providing an anecdotal detail, a quote from a period novel or traveler’s journal, or, occasionally, a contemporary review. The entry for Mount’s Coming to the Point (1854) explains that “a contemporary newspaper account describes this familiar incident of the horse-​and-​ buggy era: ‘This is an image of pure Yankeeism and full of wholesome humor. Both of ben shahn and jacob lawrence  ( 165 )

the yeomen seem to be “reckoning,” both whittling, both delaying. The horse, which is the object of their crafty evocations, stands tied as “sleek as a whistle,” waiting for a change of owners.’ ”22 This is actually the New York Herald’s response to Mount’s 1835 Bargaining for a Horse, which Coming to the Point reworks, but it importantly gives access to an antebellum sensibility, to a skeptical eye alive to conning and deception and to an ear attuned to the period’s “issue-​charged jokes.” Elizabeth Johns’s 1991 study American Genre Painting takes “an image of pure Yankeeism” as the title to its opening chapter. Bargaining for a Horse, Johns explains, referenced political horse-​trading, “a usage that had just entered the linguistic marketplace to describe Democratic politicking, the cynical vernacularism placed politics in the economic sphere.”23 A little further digging, of the kind undertaken by Johns and other art historians half a century later, might have led the Metropolitan Museum’s curators to consider the newspaper in Woodville’s War News from Mexico (1848; see fig. 36) as a sign of new styles and technologies of communication, or to probe the politics in his Politics in an Oysterhouse (1848), which was first exhibited as A New York Communist Advancing an Argument. Mount and Woodville hid politics in plain sight, in pictures that ostensibly depicted Americans just whittling and chewing their way through life. Could Shahn have been alive to this, and perhaps in ways his contemporaries were not? Detached from antebellum discourse, there is still something slick and duplicitous about Mount’s whittling horse-​traders that would have been available to keen-​eyed visitors to Life in America. Johns points to the way preparatory sketches for Bargaining for a Horse show Mount’s struggle to “devise his painting so that the words crucial to the humor would be suggested by the image rather than being written in it.”24 Social realist painting similarly sought to make scenes of everyday life carry political messages, perhaps attuning its practitioners to such strategies in earlier art. Moreover, Shahn shared something of the antebellum genre painter’s punning, double-​dealing sensibility, as in the bifurcated title Sunday Paintings, which invites a credulous viewer to see at face value paintings of “Sunday excursions through the New Jersey countryside.” Shahn worked closely with Soby on the MOMA retrospective and allowed him to describe the Sunday Paintings in these terms, even though just a few years earlier he had carefully crafted Puddlers’ Sunday and Sunday Painting from his photographs of a steel strike in Warren, Ohio (1937; figs. 40 and 41). In Shahn’s genre paintings, as in Mount’s and Woodville’s, men standing around talking might not just be standing around talking.

Waiting and Whittling In July 1937 Shahn made an extended series of photographs documenting the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ “Little Steel Strike,” protesting the decision of Republic ( 166 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Fig. 40  Ben Shahn, untitled photograph, ca. 1937. Ben Shahn Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Steel and other “little” manufacturers not to follow “big” U.S. Steel’s reluctant unionization. Rather than submitting these negatives to Stryker, whose photographic Historical Section had moved to the Farm Security Administration (FSA), he filed them under “Steel Country” in his personal archive. In her groundbreaking work on Shahn’s archival practices, Laura Katzman lists the weapons, blockades, and “signs stating ‘Detour,’ ‘Road Closed, Bridge Out,’ and ‘Scabbies are Welcome, Come on down’ ” that he photographed. Shahn did not record direct physical violence, but, as Katzman explains, “his pictures suggest the strike’s tense atmosphere, and his written account notes that the ‘pickets,’ distrusting of newspapers, ‘tried to smash a news-​photographer’s camera.’ ”25 Shahn’s photographs and writing also attend to the lulls in the rhythm of the strike: “At the C.I.O. headquarters there is suspense in the air. There are men on the steps waiting to go on picket duty, and inside more men waiting”; “We stop and talk to the men [on the pickets]. They carry sticks or clubs, some of them elaborately whittled during the long hours of watching.”26 The file shows men, who elsewhere wield clubs and guard blockades, on their downtime, sitting, talking, contemplating, and waiting. ben shahn and jacob lawrence  ( 167 )

Fig. 41  Ben Shahn, untitled photograph, ca. 1937. Ben Shahn Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

The photograph that became the source for Puddlers’ Sunday shows a group of nine men with a Buick in a nondescript landscape. Shahn’s archive reveals the layered meanings of Puddlers’ Sunday. His field notes record the testimony of Mr. Heath, a “scab” caught crossing the picket line: “Well, next one of the men said he knew what ought to be done with me, and he had a rope in the car. Then they drove me some place.”27 Puddlers’ Sunday seems less banal when it contains the possibility that the Buick may have a trussed-​up scab in the trunk. This may be a step too far. But there is, on second glance at both photograph and painting, something menacing about these “puddlers,” bulky beneath their baggy shirts, arms folded resolutely, two figures with hands raised to their mouths as if plotting. The painting accentuates this sense by removing two men from the photograph’s right-​hand group so that the man with hand to mouth who had been chatting to a colleague now stares off into the distance. If Shahn wanted to depict a Sunday excursion, why draw from a series of photographs documenting a volatile strike? If he wanted to depict a volatile

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strike, why excise all but the most oblique reference—the meticulously lettered “F486Z Ohio 1937” plate—from the painting? In a prescient 1933 essay, Jean Charlot attends to the way that newspaper photographs of the Sacco and Vanzetti and Tom Mooney trials shape Shahn’s art. For the camera and Shahn, Charlot writes, “a man, however intellectually eminent, will exist mainly through the bunch of folds and creases which are his clothes, his buttons, his shoe-​laces, his grotesque shadow on a brick wall, the baroque mouldings on the arm of his chair, while his mouth and eyes may be summed up by three inconspicuous slits.”28 “Photography and politics are,” Katzman writes, “inextricably linked for Shahn, who wanted to retain the documentary specificity of his sources.”29 Puddlers’ Sunday retains the photographic bulges and creases at one puddler’s midriff and another’s uneasy posture as he leans on the Buick. In such details Shahn’s paintings of everyday life carry an archival trace of their politicized origins. In West Virginia in 1935, at the start of his work for the RA/FSA, Shahn made the photograph Striking Miners, Scotts Run, West Virginia, which he repurposed as the painting Scotts Run, West Virginia (1937); the two photographs captioned Watching Football Game, Star City, West Virginia, which he repurposed as the painting Sunday Football; the photograph of men hunkered down on a curbstone captioned Scene in Omar West Virginia, which he repurposed as W.P.A. Sunday (1939); three photographs of a long line of waiting men titled Payoff at Pursglove Mine, Scotts Run, West Virginia, which he repurposed as Unemployed (1938); a photograph of four African American men by advertising signs for Schlitz and Budweiser beer and Coca-​Cola captioned Sunday in Scotts Run, West Virginia; two photographs captioned Waiting for Relief Agent, Scotts Run, West Virginia and Waiting for Relief Check, Scotts Run, West Virginia; and several shots captioned Citizens of . . . or Scene in. . . . of men standing or sitting doing nothing. Further down the road he shot Men Loafing in Crossville, Tennessee and Men Loafing, Crossville, Tennessee. Words were important to Shahn, and while those repetitive titles were in part down to the RA/FSA’s bureaucratic requirements, they also spoke to the conditions he encountered. Shahn found something similar when he photographed strikers waiting and watching in Warren, Ohio, for his own source files in 1937, and again when he returned to the state to photograph the “Ohio Harvest” for the FSA in 1938.30 The Sunday Paintings form part of a meshwork of mutually reinforcing photographs, paintings, titles, and captions in which waiting, unemployment, striking, and Sunday leisure become inextricably entwined. The Sunday invoked by the Sunday Paintings, and perhaps in the “Sunday” photographs and captions too, was, for Shahn, something more than a day of the week. Having painted a mural for the school at Jersey Homesteads in 1936, Shahn moved his family to the town in 1938. He later told a journalist that his recently adopted hometown

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“looks too much like Sunday every day of the week.”31 This sounds like an inveterate New Yorker’s response to rusticated surroundings, an evocation of the shapeless, listless day of rest stretched out to a permanent condition. “I have found New Jersey very stimulating,” Shahn told another journalist. “So many people consider it a dull state, but that is a good thing in a way.”32 That Shahn’s Sunday Paintings were at least in part stimulated by his relocation to a “dull state” would not have surprised the critic who observed, “Everybody sits around dejected, grim as though waiting for something to happen to them—and something not very inspiring at that.”33 This critique catches a quality present in many of the paintings. Sitting or standing around with nothing to do, or waiting in line for a check or a job or for something to happen, held a particular range of meanings in the late 1930s. In their 1937 sociological study Middletown in Transition, Robert and Helen Lynd observed that during the Depression “enforced leisure drowned men with its once coveted abundance, and its taste became sour and brackish.” Sunday lost its appeal when there was no work surrounding it. Amid a national crisis that provoked a deep questioning of national identity and self-​worth, waiting was a particularly troubling condition. As cultural theorist Joe Moran observes, “Wealth and status in advanced capitalist societies rest on the capacity to accumulate resources such as money, skills, knowledge and information. Waiting is the opposite of this kind of accumulated resource: it is simply passing time, time that could be spent doing something more useful.”34 Waiting was a defining feature of the Depression, taking its most desperate form in breadlines but experienced in milder ways by large swaths of the population as they engaged with the New Deal’s radically expanded state bureaucracy. Shahn would later complain that during his brief stint on the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) “we had to go to one of the high schools to get our money for the work we were doing, the [same] salary as the CWA [Civil Works Administration]. . . . I was pretty damn bitter having to stand in line.” In 1959 he told an interviewer, “The core of my work is lonely waiting.”35

Beyond Genre In his 1957 Charles Eliot Norton lecture “The Biography of a Painting,” Shahn explained, “I had once believed that the incidental, the individual, and the topical were enough; that in such instances of life all of life could be implied. But then I came to feel that that was not enough. I wanted to reach farther, to tap some sort of universal experience, to create symbols that would have some such universal quality.”36 Scholars have explored this embrace of the universal in terms of Shahn’s response to the Cold War, his turn to mythic and biblical imagery, and his humanism.37 In the years around 1940, and while still firmly grounded in the incidental and individual scenes that characterize genre ( 170 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Fig. 42  Winslow Homer, The Veteran in a New Field, 1865. Oil on canvas, 24  × 38  in. (61.3 × 96.8 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876–1967), 1967, 67.187.131.

painting, Shahn’s work already sought to “reach further.” The section on Sunday Paintings and The Meaning of Social Security in Selden Rodman’s Portrait of the Artist as an American is titled “Beyond Reportage and Genre.” The man in Sunday Painting was, like the men in Puddlers’ Sunday, reworked from the Little Steel photographs, with the banal field and details of dress and posture preserved and the foreground metal box and distant industrial buildings excised. While directly connected to this 1937 photograph, Sunday Painting also resonates with a more distant source, Veteran in a New Field (1865; fig. 42), one of the nine paintings that made Winslow Homer the most prominent artist at the Metropolitan Museum’s Life in America. Whether allusion, homage, or coincidence, that resonance runs deeper than the rhyme of man in field with crops to his ankles and hat breaching the horizon. It is present in the sharp-​line delineation of the men’s hands and the hang of their shirts and britches set against looser, more generalized backgrounds. And it is there too in the sense of both figures’ movement deeper into their fields as a retreat into the agrarian everyday: a turning away from conflict and history, from swords to plowshares, to quiet contemplation amid a bitter strike. Homer offered more than a Yankee reference point to shore up Shahn’s Cold War American identity. Charlot’s essay on Shahn appeared in the same issue of the little magazine Hound and Horn as “Remington and Homer,” the poet John Wheelwright’s tribute to the richness and pathos the latter achieved in painting “the sturdy unathletic boyhood of America before the Civil War.”38 For Wheelwright, modernization deprived American artists of “the subject-​matter of their greatest painter,” and so to follow Homer the contemporary “American painter of ritual must base himself on the everyday”: “The daily life of workers and farmers, country auctions of foreclosed farms, nocturnal street meetings, picket lines and breadlines, industrial or governmental massacres.”39 This list bears a striking correlation to what Shahn would photograph and paint ben shahn and jacob lawrence  ( 171 )

over the subsequent decade. Both Homer and Shahn honed their sharp line drawing as apprentice lithographers and spent influential years documenting major events in American history before turning to paintings of everyday life that reach for something larger. Just as Homer’s late paintings set the fishing folk and lifeboatmen he sketched in Cullercoats in northeast England and on the Maine coast against existentially freighted seas and skies, Shahn, from the Sunday Paintings on, pitches figures and motifs from his photograph and clipping files into increasingly abstract and universalized settings. Vacant Lot (plate 14), like Sunday Painting, depicts a lone figure in a large, banal space, and, like Handball (1939), derives from photographs Shahn made between 1932 and 1935 of boys playing sports in New York. These works were frequently identified as the best of the Sunday Paintings and quickly acquired by major collections. In Vacant Lot, on wasteland in front of a vast brick wall, a small boy swings a baseball bat, a motif readily associated with genre painting’s construction of the ordinary. In 1936 Norman Rockwell declared, “The commonplaces of America are to me the richest subjects in art. Boys batting flies on vacant lots; little girls playing jacks on the front steps.” Shahn would not have balked at this connection: he shocked a group of art students by telling them that “Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers which I admire very much sometimes” were “high in content value though . . . deficient in design and color.” In a 1944 interview Shahn suggested his similarity to and difference from Rockwell: having identified the commonplace content of Vacant Lot, “Next comes the problem of how to present it in the most dramatic way I can—the big and little relationships of color and tone, like the big red brick wall dwarfing the boy playing ball all alone.”40 This formal relationship between big and little was also apparent in Shahn’s conception of the painting’s themes. When he confessed his weakness for titles to Julien Levy, Shahn’s list included a brief description of the paintings before the proposed name. The line for what would become known as Vacant Lot runs from mundane motif to universalizing biblical allusion: “10, Boy batting ball against brick wall—‘Man Doth not Live by Bread Alone.’ ”41 Before Shahn exhibited Sunday Paintings he worked motifs and figures from them— including the boy from Vacant Lot and the men on a curbstone in W.P.A. Sunday—into designs for The Meaning of Social Security mural, which he began shortly after the exhibition closed (1940–42; fig. 43). Subsequent correspondence stresses, though, that the Sunday Paintings were conceived as independent works: of Willis Island Bridge (1940), Shahn told MOMA curator Dorothy Miller, “This theme was used again in mural, 1940–42, in social security bldg. Washington, but this painting was not a study for the mural.”42 The Meaning of Social Security moves from the unemployed workers and abandoned invalids of the Depression’s early years to an America remade by New Deal state intervention. Nominally celebrating the 1935 Social Security Act, it mostly depicts more

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Fig. 43  Carol M. Highsmith, Ben Shahn mural located at the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, Washington, DC, 2011. Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. © Estate of Ben Shahn / VAGA at ARS, New York and DACS, London 2022.

visually striking New Deal projects, including carpenters constructing timber-​frame RA houses and welders working on bridges and dams. The Sunday Paintings’ genre figures and motifs are relocated within this sweeping narrative of the Depression and New Deal. Shahn was a total participant in the New Deal. Following his early experience as a PWAP relief claimant, he traveled to many of the areas worst hit by the Depression and to government relief and resettlement projects as a photographer for the RA/FSA, worked as a graphic artist and desk​bound administrator for Special Skills in Washington, DC, won Treasury Section mural commissions, offered unwavering devotion to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and voluble praise and criticism of New Deal policies, and, at Jersey Homesteads, lived in one of its experiments in high modernist planning. From this purview Shahn developed a deep understanding of ordinary people’s experience of the modern state and an acute sense of the way political oppression and resistance shape everyday life in even its most mundane phases. The individual’s lived experience of the state lies behind Shahn’s oft-​quoted assertion, “My own painting then had turned from what is called ‘social realism’ into a sort of personal realism,” and informed his conception of the “universal experience” he painted in pursuit of.43

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Everyday Resistance in the New Deal Workscape Industries such as steel production and coal mining impact and define every aspect of their surrounding environment, creating workscapes. Historian Thomas Andrews contrasts a landscape “scene that can be taken in at a glance and represented on a single canvas or within a photo frame” with the workscape, which is “not just an essentially static scene or setting neatly contained within borders, but a constellation of unruly and ever-​unfolding relationships—not simply land, but also air and water, bodies and organisms, as well as the language people use to understand the world, and the lens of culture through which they make sense of and act on their surroundings.”44 Recognizing the limitations of the single frame or “static scene” as they attempted to document coal-​mining regions and industrial-​scale agriculture, several RA/FSA photographers, and in particular Shahn and Dorothea Lange, began making photographs in carefully captioned and sequenced series. Anne Whiston Spirn observes that while Shahn was the first to use a paragraph of text to introduce each sequence of photographs, Lange “set the standard” for what became known as the General Caption. Spirn, quoting Lange’s 1939 Guggenheim Fellowship, explains, “To tell the story of ‘people in their relations to their institutions, to their fellowmen, and to the land’ many photographs need to be grouped by subject, arranged, cross-​referenced, and ‘buttressed’ by words.”45 Narration and montage combine in similar ways in pioneering documentary filmmaker Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936). Shahn understood documentary film— including Lorentz’s work but also We Are the People, the film about the RA new-​build town of Greenbelt, Maryland, that he tried to make with Walker Evans—as akin to murals, both mediums offering the potential to develop complex visual narratives and reach broad audiences.46 Captioned photo series, documentary films, and murals all move beyond the individual frame or static scene to engage the totality of the workscape. RA-planned communities like Greenbelt and Jersey Homesteads, and vast infrastructure projects such as those implemented by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), were New Deal manifestations of what ethnographer and political theorist James Scott terms high modernist ideology: “schemes to improve the human condition” that involve top-​down planning and social engineering. This ideology is, Scott explains, “best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-​bound, version of the self-​confidence about scientific and technical progress . . . commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.”47 The 1933 Act authorizing the TVA empowered its board of directors to develop an integrated plan addressing navigability and flood control, reforestation and land use, agricultural and industrial development, electric power generation, and unspecified “other purposes.” This wide-​reaching remit leads Scott to call it “the United States’ high modernist experiment and the granddaddy of all regional development projects.”

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He argues that it became, in the hands of high modernist ideologues such as its chairman, Arthur E. Morgan, a scheme to impose modernity on a “backward” region and to produce “a transformed population.” Another executive, David Lillienthal, warned that this agenda posed “the danger of regimentation, pouring human beings and communities into a model fashioned from above.”48 Covering parts of West Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas, the TVA was in the process of transforming the region Shahn traveled through on his 1935 documentary road trip. He worked people and scenes photographed on that trip into the Sunday Paintings and The Meaning of Social Security and included a TVA engineer holding a blueprint in Resources of America. In Seeing Like a State and Weapons of the Weak Scott details the complex reasons that high modernist initiatives flounder on the ground, often with disastrous consequences for the ordinary people on whom they are imposed, as well as the forms of resistance that those people enact. These are not typically formal protest movements and do not involve parties, trade unions, or indeed any such organization. Scott identifies “infrapolitical” actions, or acts of everyday resistance, including “foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on.”49 The men Shahn photographed sitting and standing around in Omar, West Virginia, and loafing in Crossville, Tennessee, were not actively opposing the redevelopment of their region, but neither were they actively participating in it. Across photographs, paintings, and murals Shahn shows people doing nothing, sometimes on strike but more often at rest, at leisure, waiting, simply not participating in the modern state being imposed upon them. This sustained attention to working people not working reveals a form of everyday political experience. Shahn encountered a great deal of drama and suffering on his road trips, and it would have been quite possible for him to have missed the barely visible way high modernist planning was imposed on and resisted by recalcitrant populations. Moreover, Shahn supported New Deal interventionism such as the RA and TVA. As art historian Warren Carter argues, in The Meaning of Social Security mural, “under the guise of celebrating the Social Security Act, Shahn also pays homage to those vast projects that represent the New Deal state at its most interventionist, and therefore, its most progressive.”50 But, strikingly, in the moment that he conceived the Sunday Paintings and The Meaning of Social Security, his daily life was shaped by a personal encounter with high modernist planning when he moved to Jersey Homesteads. This town’s relationship to New Deal technocracy is complicated, as RA involvement was grafted onto a grassroots project in which Jewish American garment workers from Manhattan’s Lower East Side paid $500 into a farm, factory, and housing cooperative. While elements of this vision remained in place, including a core of the original homesteaders, the RA took control of administration and design.

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Fig. 44  Louis Kahn, sketch for Jersey Homesteads, 1935. Louis I. Kahn Collection, The University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

In his 1972 history of the community, the photographer Edwin Rosskam, who settled there in 1953 on Shahn’s recommendation, posits that while not “necessarily corrupt or power-​hungry,” the RA “paper-​shufflers” responsible for allocating housing and other administrative duties inevitably “couldn’t help thinking in terms of budgets and requisitions rather than human beings.” Rosskam identifies an equivalent to this bureaucratic high modernism in the work of lead architect Alfred Kastner and his assistant Louis Kahn, who, in “the spare functionalism of [their] design” for Jersey Homesteads, were “influenced by the sophisticated rectilinear purity of Le Corbusier.”51 Interwar European avant-​garde architecture was the antithesis of the nostalgia and hominess celebrated during the 1930s genre revival. “Away with coziness! Only where comfort ends, does humanity begin,” declared Adolph Behne, while Le Corbusier attacked “the cozy interior as a ‘sentimental hysteria’ which is rooted in feelings of loss caused by modernity.”52 While Rosskam’s description of the architects is caricatured and exaggerated, Kahn’s sketches (1935; fig. 44) do articulate a modernism that, like the planning ideology of the TVA, sought to make “new citizens” of its inhabitants. Rosskam contrasts Kahn’s vision with the expectations of the “immigrant tailors” who, with a “composite of the ideal derived from the illustrations in the Saturday Evening Post” in their minds, had moved to Jersey Homesteads imagining “cozy cottages, perhaps with scrolled woodwork gingerbread around gabled roofs,” and found themselves “rendered acutely uncomfortable by the concrete boxes with their floor-​to-​ceiling windows and their flat roofs.”53 Rosskam explains that residents were not allowed to make changes to their homes, such as bricking up the floor-​to-​ceiling windows or even painting the walls, without permission from the planners. But a photograph taken by

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Fig. 45 Arthur Rothstein, Scene at the New Jersey Homesteads Cooperative, Near Hightstown, New Jersey, December 1936. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-​USF34-005687-D.

the RA/FSA photographer Arthur Rothstein soon after the first homesteaders arrived suggests the tactics with which dwellers in such environments have always subverted planners’ plans (1936; fig. 45). Beside a single-​story realization of Kahn’s sketch hang lines of washing hitched to a nearby tree, disrupting the clean balanced lines and reinstating the habits of improvised homemaking that the homesteaders had developed in Lower East Side tenements. Shahn converted the garage of his Kahn-​designed home into a studio and painted with his garment-​worker neighbor’s wash fluttering outside and their complaints carrying on the breeze. He reframed figures photographed in the charged atmosphere of a steelworkers’ strike, recasting them as “puddlers” and placing them in bland, rustic settings and designed murals that relocate motifs from small-​scale genre paintings into wall-​sized surveys of the New Deal workscape. The former blur the boundary between political activity and mundane everyday life, while the latter set individuals against the impersonal scale of high modernist planning. Without wholly parting ways with the American genre tradition, Shahn strove to make scenes of everyday life mean something more. In the late 1950s Shahn reflected that while on the road as a documentary photographer, he had “come to know well so many people of all kinds of belief and temperament, which they maintained with a transcendent indifference to their lot in life. Theories had melted before such experience.”54 This tends to be taken as a rejection of Marxism and should be understood within Shahn’s postwar reframing of his prewar politics. But when Shahn talked about moving away from “theories” and the “social,” he was also bearing witness to what happens when top-​down ideological vision comes up against the resistant, recalcitrant everyday.

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Jacob Lawrence’s Domestic Interiors From the corner of the room a crack spreads across the ceiling and the walls, and the rain that pours down outside the window also pours onto the floor. Three figures occupy the cramped space: one, down on her knees, takes on the thankless task of wringing rainwater from a rag into a large pail; the others adopt still more futile stances, staring up at the crack. There is something amusing about these three, about their craned-​neck, armless awkwardness, about the predicament of water leaking into a bathroom even. In a painting of everyday life in the manner of Jan Steen or William Hogarth this might be a “dissolute household,” and the joke might be that the crack and leak symbolize the homeowners’ moral laxity. But that is not what Jacob Lawrence’s Rain No. 1 (1937; fig. 46) conveys. If the painting makes a joke, it does so in an oblique, deadpan idiom and offers no moralizing judgment. In other ways too, Rain seems at once like and wholly unlike a genre painting. It is, matter-​of-​factly, a domestic interior: floor, ceiling, walls, window, occupants, chores. But the green-​smeared plaster of the cell-​like room, the muted palette punctuated by blocks of vivid yellow, and the sharp lines and flat planes are far from the “homey, intimate life” of home and hearth celebrated during the 1930s genre revival. Like Shahn’s Sunday Paintings or Dorothy Varian’s Reading War News, Lawrence’s scenes gain layers of meaning when viewed in relation to the genre painting tradition. In his domestic subject matter Lawrence differs from Shahn, whose paintings, often derived from his street and documentary photography, tend to inhabit exterior, public, male space. It is men, with some notable exceptions, who occupy the sidewalks and scrub ground of Shahn genre scenes. Indeed, and again with notable exceptions, social realist painting in general followed the broad tendencies of 1930s left-​wing culture in making white working-​class men the primary symbols of class struggle. Lawrence shared social realism’s aim of imbuing everyday scenes with political meaning and Shahn’s need to move beyond genre. The formal qualities of his work, and in particular its insistent seriality, grant historical depth and geographic reach to paintings like Rain that might otherwise be viewed in isolation as one-​line jokes, as one family’s problem. But, as detailed in Lawrence’s sixty-​panel series, which he originally titled The Migration of the Negro (1940–41) and in 1993 renamed The Migration Series, and in the paintings and series on everyday life in Harlem that precede and follow it, the Great Migration was a different kind of story to that told by social realism, with different politics and different protagonists. Lawrence’s family had joined the Great Migration, moving from South Carolina and Virginia to Atlantic City, where he was born in 1917, and then, via Easton, Pennsylvania, on to Harlem when he was thirteen. Rain was made just seven years later and shown during February 1938 at the 135th Street YMCA in Presenting Jacob Lawrence in ( 178 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Fig. 46  Jacob Lawrence, Rain No. 1, 1937. Tempera on paper, 28 ½ × 20 ¾ in. (72.4 × 52.7 cm). Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund. Photo: The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation / Art Resource, New York. © The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, and DACS, London 2022.

an Exhibition of Painting. His mentor, Charles Alston, introduced Lawrence as “particularly sensitive to the life about him; the joy, the suffering, the weakness, the strength of the people he sees every day.”55 Lawrence later recalled that it was Alston who had first encouraged him to take on these subjects, “to look around . . . take the material at hand . . . and develop it.” Acknowledging that this was good advice, Lawrence explained, “I didn’t take it right away,” as the March 1938 Federal Theatre Project production of William DuBois’s Haiti “made me aware of the pictorial possibilities of Negro history.”56 This account elides the long hours at the 135th Street New York Public Library that shaped Lawrence’s understanding of African American and African diaspora history and his enrollment at the downtown American Artists School, a successor to the John Reed Club where social realist teachers including Philip Evergood and Anton Refregier led students to “an understanding of modern society itself, its forces, tendencies, and conflicts which can only serve to deepen his aesthetic outlook and capacities.”57 But ben shahn and jacob lawrence  ( 179 )

the movement dramatized—from easel paintings of everyday life to multipanel historical series—animates and complicates his work within and against the genre tradition. Recent accounts of Lawrence’s career set his early scenes of Harlem life against both the large-​scale murals made by contemporaries including Alston and Aaron Douglas and the ambitious historical turn that his own work took. Marta Reid Stewart suggests that in paintings like Rain Lawrence “replaced Douglas’s Social Realist epics with intimate genre scenes that revealed the private lives of black Americans.” Introducing her comprehensive account of Lawrence’s life and art, Painting Harlem Modern, Patricia Hills describes “Harlem genre scenes, using a limited palette and simple shapes and focusing on the comings and goings of ordinary people,” to stress that Lawrence would soon move on to bigger things. Hills explains that in embarking on his historical series, “Lawrence determined to expand his subject matter beyond simple genre scenes of Harlemites, as satisfying as those paintings were to both himself and his audience.”58 While emphasizing the groundbreaking nature of the historical series, this claim reinstates a hierarchy of genres, placing genre painting beneath history painting and creating a sharp division between the two. Absorbing a range of historical and art-​historical sources in an environment that encouraged art expressive of social and political ideas, Lawrence made genre scenes that were rarely “simple genre scenes.” In 1930s Harlem domestic emergencies like leaking bathrooms were not simply domestic emergencies. Langston Hughes, who would befriend and collaborate with Lawrence in the 1940s, points to their structural and political significance, and the exploitation and precarity facing Harlem residents, in his 1940 “Ballad of the Landlord.” The poem begins with the complaint “Landlord, landlord, / My roof has sprung a leak,” which leads to eviction, violent confrontation, and the tenant’s eventual incarceration.59 Lawrence’s Rain and Hughes’s “Ballad” record the history of the neighborhood’s decline from the African American enclave of fine homes and a burgeoning middle class, celebrated in the early Harlem Renaissance, to a slum of densely packed and poorly maintained single-​room apartments in which landlords inflated rents and ignored regulations. In the 1930s there was a tendency for voices within the community to blame this decline on migrants from the South, whom sociologist E. Franklin Frazier called “ignorant and unsophisticated peasant people without experience [in] urban living.”60 This was not Lawrence’s view, as the caption “The Negroes who had been North for quite some time met their fellowmen with disgust and aloofness” for panel 53 of The Migration Series makes clear. Rain and other paintings acknowledge the problem of displacement from rural to urban conditions from a position of shared experience and empathy. Lawrence’s understanding that Harlem was a hostile environment for migrants is conveyed through his stylistic disavowal of genre painting’s orderly, cozy, and intimate construction of domestic space; his interiors rarely offer a compositional “entrance for the eyes” of the kind developed by seventeenth-​century Dutch genre painters. Viewers ( 180 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

are not drawn in or invited to linger, to get snagged in cluttered details or bedded down in folds of soft fabric. Lawrence would later tell the art historian Avis Berman, “I have always liked a kind of structure that happens to be geometric. It’s clean.”61 Where naturalistic effects such as chiaroscuro and perspectival recession can work to embed figures in their social and domestic surroundings—work to make them at home, that is—the shapes of Lawrence’s people and objects sit adjacent to, or are layered onto, one another. The flatness of his shapes and the absence of texture and detail give little sense of the improvisations and adaptations through which genre painting’s subjects have long signaled that they inhabit their world. Domestic space in paintings such as Rain is profoundly unhomelike. It might also be called “unhomely,” as in Homi Bhabha’s term for “the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world in an unhallowed place.” In Bhabha’s primarily literary examples, “the intimate recesses of the domestic space become sites for history’s most intricate invasions. In that displacement the border between home and world becomes confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting.”62 The crack in the wall in Rain might figure the breach of domestic space by the world beyond it. Lawrence’s women and men may be stumped not just by what to do about the rainwater on the floor but what to do with themselves, in this place, a Harlem tenement room. Their befuddlement might be that of a family who have recently moved from a board shack in Georgia to the harsh New York climate and the demands of maintaining a brick-​and-​concrete apartment. The “unhomely” is, for Bhabha, “a paradigmatic post-​colonial experience.” To voice the everyday experience of African Americans—the subjects of “domestic colonialism”—newly migrated to northern ghettos, Lawrence developed a profoundly unhomely mode of expression.63 When his work gained widespread critical attention in the early 1940s, several art critics explained the look of his paintings in the language of modernist formalism, as in Aline Louchheim’s assertion that “Lawrence sees in terms of pattern in bright primary color, unmodulated” and that “form is simplified in order to articulate the essentials.” But the artist Elizabeth Catlett, reviewing a group of Lawrence’s Harlem scenes, pointed to the social and political significance of that essentialism. “His style of painting with almost elemental color and design is a perfect means for the expression of the fundamental needs of the Negro,” Catlett explained in 1944. “There are no fripperies, no superficialities, no unnecessary additions. He strips his material to the bone.”64 Catlett would pursue her own stripped graphic style in the linoleum cut I Am the Negro Woman series of 1946–47. Lawrence’s style, and the language with which Catlett describes it, resonate with Adam Clayton Powell Sr.’s “Valley of Dry Bones” sermon, which takes the flight from Egypt to speak of a people unhomed. This is not the only Harlem to be found in the genre scenes Lawrence showed at his YMCA exhibition. As Alston noted, his art is alive to “the joy, the suffering, the ben shahn and jacob lawrence  ( 181 )

Fig. 47  Jacob Lawrence, Ice Peddlers, 1936. Tempera on paper, 26 × 19 ½ in. (66.7 × 49.5 cm). The Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art. Photo: The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation / Art Resource, New York. © The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, and DACS, London 2022.

weakness, the strength of the people he sees every day.” Christmas and Halloween Sand Bags (1937) record ceremonial and carnivalesque disruptions of everyday routine, the latter breaking out into exuberant, violent action. A very early work, Ice Peddlers (1936; fig. 47), is made in a more naturalistic style that hints at illustration practice. The scene is peppered with quirky anecdotes: a man is wedged into the sash window he precariously cleans; a boy braces himself against a window frame as he yanks a pet on a string from the sidewalk; a woman with a towering headwrap does chores at an open window; a bucket swings from a hook outside. Here the viewer is invited to dwell on these urban incidents, to take in the scene and the neighborhood like the peddlers who loaf by their ice cart, one resting his buttocks on its edge, the other seated on an upturned barrel. But Lawrence’s art and thinking evolved rapidly, and Ice Peddlers was soon followed by Rain’s stark bathroom and the harsh colors and sharp angles, and Black prostitutes ( 182 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

and white johns, of the brothel scene Interior (1937). By the time he made The Migration Series Lawrence was at best ambivalent about living conditions in Harlem and other northern cities. “As well as finding better housing conditions in the North,” runs the caption for panel 47, “the migrants found very poor housing conditions in the North. They were forced into overcrowded and dilapidated tenement houses.” Moreover, by this point, Lawrence had recognized his migrant community’s intergenerational nostalgia for the world left behind and developed a deep historical sense of Harlem’s connection to the rural South.

Everyday Agency Lawrence’s early Harlem paintings Rain and Interior express historical consciousness in their unhomely style. The historical series Toussaint L’Ouverture (1938), Frederick Douglass (1939), and Harriet Tubman (1940) take on that style and continue to address displacement and oppression, making heroic Black lives a narrative and historical foundation for the “unhomed” community. The Migration Series, which Lawrence painted on a Julius Rosenwald Fund grant during 1940 and 1941, returns to ordinary people, connecting past to present and South to North in telling the story of the Great Migration, which began during the First World War and continued through to the 1970s. More Harlem scenes, made in 1942 and shown in 1943, bring the clarity and conviction of Lawrence’s mature style and the weight of the historical series to the everyday life of the neighborhood. The conception and exhibition of Lawrence’s work as series insist on the relationship between individual panels, and meaning accrues across series that refer back and forth to one another. Lawrence “strips . . . to the bone” both the subject matter of individual paintings and the forms and genres he inhabits; for example, history painting is pared back in Toussaint L’Ouverture to puncture the pomp and excess of its grand manner and point to the protagonist’s absence from that record. This reflexivity to medium was grounded in an art-​historical awareness shaped, like that of many New York artists, by the city’s vast public collections. “By the ages of 14, 15, 16,” Lawrence later told Henry Louis Gates, “I was making visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”65 Within the unified style and format of The Migration Series Lawrence incorporates landscape painting in panel 13’s abandoned, sun-​scorched fields, where “crops were left to dry and spoil”; abstraction in panel 7’s rendering of rapid passage through that landscape; still life in the shoulder of meat and slices of bread on a board in panel 44; natural history illustration, even, in panel 9’s boll weevils on cotton; but most pervasively genre painting, in panels that show men and women working, waiting, walking, talking, eating, sleeping, holding infants, reading letters and newspapers, and boarding trains. ben shahn and jacob lawrence  ( 183 )

The connection between these paintings of everyday life and Lawrence’s earlier representation of heroic individuals illuminates the agency of ordinary people and the world-​historical significance of the Great Migration. In her study of representations of Black heroism, Celeste-​Marie Bernier points to Lawrence’s retrospective assertion that he made the Harriet Tubman series because “the Negro woman has never been included in American history.” In his depiction of Tubman, Bernier argues, “Lawrence sought not only to dramatize a ‘superior type,’ ” as Aaron Douglas had in his 1930–31 Spirits Rising mural, “but also a more multifaceted representation of Black female heroism.”66 Bernier finds this complex heroism in an illustration in Lawrence’s children’s book Harriet and the Promised Land (1968) that “offers intimate access to the diminutive and hunched-​over body of Tubman as she washes hardwood floors within a stark domestic interior. Such a seemingly timeless and unperiodized image resists historical specificity to indict the ongoing suffering of Black women as they perform debilitating labor across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-​first centuries.”67 In Lawrence’s lifelong meditation on forms of African American agency, Tubman’s activism merges with domestic labor and less visible forms of everyday resistance. In panel 57 of The Migration Series, “The female worker was also one of the last groups to leave the South” (1940–41; fig. 48), a Black woman dressed in white works a vast swath of cloth in the vat before her, the clothes drying all around indexing the ongoing, cyclical nature of domestic labor. The distinction between history painting and genre painting breaks down around this point. In his 1925 “A Song to a Negro Wash-​Woman” Langston Hughes celebrates such workers as the foundation of community cohesion and generational progress: “Yes, I know you, wash-​woman. / I know how you send your children to school, and high school, and even college.” Here, as in Hughes’s 1930 novel Not Without Laughter, the wash-​woman’s labor is the foundation of intergenerational social mobility. The historian Carter G. Woodson, whom Hughes briefly worked for as research assistant and whose research Lawrence drew on, made similar claims in his 1930 essay “The Negro Washerwoman, a Vanishing Figure.” Observing that “her life without exception was one of unrelenting toil for those whom she loved,” Woodson argues that because of “the rise of the race from drudgery and the mechanization of the industrial world the washerwoman is rapidly passing out.” The lateness of Lawrence’s working woman, in not yet leaving drudgery or the South and as panel 57 of a sixty-​panel series, indicates this self-​sacrificing role, the community bonds and responsibilities that may have delayed departure, and the particular challenge of migration for women rendered immobile by “arms elbow-​deep in white suds.”68 Oliver Larkin saw genre painting as having as “its essential purpose nothing more heroic than to interpret man to himself.”69 But Lawrence’s movement from historical series to The Migration Series in 1940–41 to the group of Harlem paintings that followed in 1942–43 was not a turn away from Black heroism so much as its reframing within the sphere of everyday life. The Migration Series narrates an intimate epic. Where ( 184 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Fig. 48  Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series, 1940–41, panel no. 57, “The female workers were the last to arrive north.” Casein tempera on hardboard, 12 × 18 in. (30.48 × 45.72 cm). Acquired 1942, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. © The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, and DACS, London 2022.

Shahn showed the top-​down imposition of modernity and thus the New Deal workscape as a site of oppression, Lawrence told the bottom-​up story of the Great Migration as, in historian Isabel Wilkerson’s words, “the first big step the nation’s servant class ever took without asking.”70 Migration was driven in part by labor markets and other socioeconomic forces, but it was also always the result of everyday acts and individual agency.

South and North In The Migration Series, three panels—20 (fig. 49), 26, and 30—show groups of people in the South, absent the overt signs of either harsh conditions or mass movement that ben shahn and jacob lawrence  ( 185 )

Fig. 49  Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series, 1940–41, panel 20, “In many of the communities the Negro press was read continually because of its attitude and its encouragement of the movement.” Casein tempera on hardboard, 18 × 12 in. (45.7 × 30.5 cm). New York, Museum of Modern Art. Gift of Mrs. David M. Levy. Acc. n.: 28.1942.10. © 2021. Digital image: The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence. © The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, and DACS, London 2022.

mark much of the first half of the series. In panel 20, five men standing on bare ground outside nondescript wooden buildings share two newspapers; in panel 26, two men lean against a fence that a third perches atop, their faces revealing varying reactions to the talk that passes between them; in panel 30, four figures huddle about a table in the corner of an almost bare room. Scenes of people reading newspapers and talking are staples of the genre tradition, where, as in Shahn’s or Richard Caton Woodville’s paintings, they may be doing more than just reading newspapers and talking. As a Metropolitan Museum regular immersed in American history, Lawrence may have visited Life in America, which ran the year before he made The Migration Series, and seen Woodville’s War News from Mexico and Politics in an Oysterhouse, in which newspapers figure prominently. In the purposefully limited expressive range of his idiom—with ( 186 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

the three foreground figures’ eyes staring in different directions—Lawrence hints at a community’s varied responses to a single piece of news, as Woodville does in War News from Mexico. Here, as in Dorothy Varian’s Reading War News or Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Fear (1943), the depiction of newspapers was a common strategy for connecting everyday scenes to topical events. In panel 20, the red of the newspapers hints at hot, subversive content, connecting it to the clandestine efforts of African American railroad porters who tossed bundles of the Chicago Defender from southbound trains. Again, like War News from Mexico, where the title provides necessary context, Lawrence’s caption clarifies the historical significance of the scene: “In many of the communities the Negro press was read continually because of its attitude and its encouragement of the movement.” Panel 10, “They were very poor,” and panel 25, “After a while some communities were left almost bare” (plate 15), are stark southern domestic interiors. The latter takes Lawrence’s stripped style to its limit. Three planes, rendered as wooden planks, intersect in the corner of a room whose only feature is a window with an ill-​fitting blind pulled down to obscure the daylight. Because “open defiance was normally foolhardy” on antebellum plantations, James Scott observes that “forms of stubborn resistance” came to the fore and that “the history of resistance to slavery in the antebellum U.S. South is largely a history of foot dragging, false compliance, flight, feigned ignorance, sabotage, theft, and, not least, cultural resistance.” Scholarship on African American history concurrent with Lawrence’s own research, including Herbert Aptheker’s 1937 essay “American Negro Slave Revolts” and Raymond and Alice Bauer’s 1942 “Day to Day Resistance to Slavery,” drew attention to the revolt leaders Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner but also to “less spectacular” forms of resistance, including “slowing up of work, destruction of property, malingering and self-​mutilation.” Where desertion was, like open defiance, not possible for most enslaved people, in the Jim Crow South, as the historian Robin D. G. Kelley writes, “the most pervasive form of black protest was simply to leave.”71 Or, as John Dollard put it in a 1937 book available to Lawrence: “Oftentimes, just to go away, is one of the most aggressive things that another person can do, and if the means of expressing discontent are limited . . . it is one of the few ways in which pressure can be put.”72 The Migration Series contains few of the placards, raised fists, or other overt gestures of defiance that mark contemporaneous social realist painting, but the empty shack in panel 10 speaks louder than words its rebuke to an unjust system. Its silence, and the silence of the neighboring shacks and fields and woods, is the absence of those who would have worked the land that now lies fallow and at day’s end collapsed onto cots now stripped and cold. That message is amplified in the contrast between panel 10’s meagre meal and panel 44’s still life of meat and bread captioned “Living conditions were better in the North,” or between panel 25’s empty room and panel 47, in which eight Black ben shahn and jacob lawrence  ( 187 )

Fig. 50  Installation view of the exhibition Paintings by Jacob Lawrence, October 10–November 5, 1944. Photographer: Soichi Sunami. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York.

figures sleep side by side beneath colorful sheets in what the caption identifies as an “overcrowded and dilapidated” tenement. The Migration Series’s numbered sequence and general movement from South to North—which, in slave narratives’ upward, northward journeys from bondage to freedom and in Harlem Renaissance accounts of the migration as passage from feudal to modern life, is figured as forward movement through space and time—encourage a linear progression from panel 1 to 60. But when installed in its entirety, as at MOMA in 1944 (fig. 50), Lawrence’s series offers multiple sight lines and directions of travel to viewers as they move through gallery space looking backward as well as forward and seeing nonsequential contrasts and connections as they negotiate corners and move closer to or further from the walls. Scenes of a better life, and even those of overcrowded tenements, send back a defiant message to the deserted spaces of the South. But panels that depict the abandoned life of the South also echo in and haunt the northern scenes. Lawrence did not know from his own experience shacks like the one in panel 25—though he quickly sought them out,

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traveling south soon after completing The Migration Series—and so they are products of his imagination but also of the communal memory of Harlem and other centers of migration. Structures that had once been homes stood empty all across the South and were carried in bittersweet memories by migrants scattered across the North. When northern panels and captions in The Migration Series point to the better, they invoke the bare table of “They were very poor” and the abandoned room of “After a while some communities . . .” as the worse. When panels and captions describe cramped, substandard northern housing, those empty southern rooms surface again, insinuating a continuum of lived experience that undercuts any easy sense of progress that might arise from the linear numbering of Lawrence’s series. They resonate also with Harlem scenes made before and after The Migration Series: with the bare, angular interior of Rain, and with the group of thirty Harlem paintings Lawrence would begin in the summer of 1942 upon returning to New York following his year-​long trip to the South.

A Family Viewed on its own and under the title by which it is now catalogued at MOMA, A Family (1943; plate 16) comes as close to a homey domestic interior as anything Lawrence made in this period. The walls are painted, the floor has carpet, and the window has curtains and a shade. A potbellied stove heats the food and the room. The prominently placed broom and dustpan signal cleanliness (and thus virtue in the resilient iconography of the genre tradition). Outside the sky is blue. The figures themselves—father, mother, two children, and a babe in arms—are declaratively a nuclear family. They appear to engage one another in conversation. Their clothes are clean and bright, and the father wears workman’s overalls and has a coat he has hung on a hook. There is a coffee pot on the table, there are bowls full of food, and the boy reaches out to take a second helping. This work was one of thirty paintings of Harlem life that Lawrence exhibited in May 1943 at Edith Gregor Halpert’s Downtown Gallery. Two years earlier Halpert had read Alain Locke’s Negro Art: Past and Present (1936) and contacted its author to discuss an exhibition that would bring African American art into her gallery and thus the mainstream New York art world. They met at the 135th Street Library, where they likely viewed The Migration Series, which quickly became central to Halpert’s plans. The Migration Series was shown twice at the Downtown Gallery in November and December 1941, first in a solo exhibition and then in Halpert’s survey of African American painting. The series was then acquired by MOMA and the Phillips Collection, which took thirty panels each, but toured galleries around the country before finally

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being shown at MOMA in October 1944. In 1942 Lawrence joined Halpert’s Downtown Gallery roster alongside Shahn. Lawrence spent the period when The Migration Series was on view at the Downtown Gallery and then the first part of 1942 in the South before returning to New York to make the Harlem paintings. By the time these works were on view in spring 1943, Lawrence had been drafted into the US Coast Guard. When the Harlem paintings were exhibited in spring 1943, the comfortable home life of A Family was imbued with a heightened meaning. Looking down the length of a food-​laden table that stretches away from the viewer into the picture, with a happy family arranged along its sides, is A Family not just a little like its moment’s most visible image of abundance and good cheer? Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Want (1943) appeared in the Saturday Evening Post two months before Lawrence’s Harlem exhibition opened at the Downtown Gallery. The way Lawrence’s mother cradles her baby at the head of the table even, oddly, takes the place of Rockwell’s mother setting down her vast Thanksgiving turkey. The Harlem paintings and the Four Freedoms were made in parallel in the summer and fall of 1942, so Lawrence could not have seen Rockwell’s work. But firmly behind the war effort, he may have been similarly motivated to make a home front image, a vision of precious, precarious normalcy to be protected at all costs. Outlining future plans to interviewer Elizabeth McCausland, he insisted “But—we must get the war won first.”73 Home front images that, like Rockwell’s Four Freedoms, depicted those American values for which the war was fought held bittersweet meaning for African Americans. In late 1943, during his Coast Guard deployment, Lawrence wrote to Halpert from St. Augustine, Florida: “In the North one hears much talk of Democracy and the four Freedoms, down here you realize that there are a very small percentage of people who try to practice democracy. Negroes need not be told what Fascism is like, because in the south they know nothing else.”74 The vision of a comfortable family life in Harlem symbolized, as it had in the early 1920s, a better future for all African American people. A Family might then offer a straightforwardly positive contrast to Lawrence’s depiction of life in the South, of a kind that the northern panels in The Migration Series never quite provide. While Lawrence was traveling in 1942, Halpert had pressed him for paintings for individual sale to appease the demand from private collectors generated by The Migration Series. The New York art world’s embrace of Lawrence was a positive development, but it did signal, especially when set against the lack of interest in other African American painters, the amenability of his art to a mainstream liberal worldview. Critics and curators oftentimes conflated Lawrence’s genial personality with the content of his painting and used the elements of abstraction in his art to avoid engagement with its politics. In 1944, when The Migration Series was on view at MOMA, Aline Louchheim focused on Lawrence’s “simplification of form”; in 1960 (remarried and now Aline Saarinen) she explained, “If Lawrence’s subject matter, both in the formal and informal stories, is largely concerned with Negroes, it is simply because as a ( 190 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Negro this is material he knows and finds moving. He is no militant racist.”75 But as Toni Morrison said of Lawrence, “No easy sentiment drips from his brush.”76 Potbellied stoves had long been embraced by American genre painters and illustrators as symbols of homey, slightly shabby comfort and (both literal and figurative) warmth. Lawrence’s family’s stove is anthropomorphized with its pot-​handle smile and frying pan eyes to such a degree that it pushes the painting toward a caricatured representation of domestic bliss. In 1943 James A. Porter described Lawrence as having “a pronounced talent for abstract design, coupled with a rare sense of humor,” but like subsequent commentators who make similar claims did not detail his jokes.77 The genre tradition invested ordinary things with layers of allusion and association, encouraging and schooling viewers to look for encoded, bifurcated meanings in scenes of everyday life. Mid-​twentieth-​century paintings that engaged the tradition sometimes used its conventions to make subtle reference to the period’s complex racial politics. In her nuanced analysis of Rockwell’s Shuffleton’s Barbershop (1950), art historian Jennifer Greenhill argues that the foreground stove figures a Black presence, outside and apart from the cozy community of white backroom musicians, in an echo of William Sidney Mount’s The Power of Music (1847; see fig. 35). Greenhill observes that “a weird offshoot” of its place within American domestic iconography “made the stove into a cipher of black identity. Black skin was linked with stoves, soot, and smoke in a range of media— from popular advertisements and book illustrations to paintings and film.”78 Stoves blacken white faces, are likened to Black bodies, and come alive in grotesque minstrel form in early twentieth-​century popular visual culture. Lawrence’s image hints at this discourse, locating the smiling stove just behind the seated family in the position taken by Rastus, the Cream of Wheat chef, in E. V. Brewer’s From Sunlight to Twilight (1924; see fig. 28) and other early twentieth-​century advertising illustrations. As a complex joke, an instance of both genre painting’s punning on everyday things and African American signifying practice, Lawrence’s stove takes on a range of potential meanings. Its smiling, servile positioning recalls Rastus and other racist stereotypes that shaped perceptions of African American domestic roles. In this it hints at the service sector jobs like butlers and concierges that supported an emerging northern African American middle class of the kind Lawrence’s family represented, and it insinuates a vestigial memory of the smiling, nodding performance demanded by Jim Crow. It is in all these ways a manifestation of Homi Bhabha’s “unhomely,” an “intricate invasion” wherein the racist discourse of the outside world penetrates the domestic interior. It perhaps also passes comment on Lawrence’s own position as a Black artist embraced by the white art world: might the grinning stove be a sublimated acknowledgment that this scene of Harlem domesticity was a little too eager to please? Hard to unsee or to comfortably resolve, the potbellied stove unsettles A Family as a stable, comfortable domestic interior. ben shahn and jacob lawrence  ( 191 )

This Is a Family Living in Harlem In the Downtown Gallery’s May 1943 exhibition catalogue, A Family was presented as This is a family living in Harlem in a carefully captioned and sequenced group that makes its precarious domesticity even more apparent: 1 This is Harlem 2 Most of the people are very poor Rent is high Food is high 3 They live in old and dirty tenement houses 4 They live in fire traps 5 Often three families share one toilet 6 This is a family living in Harlem 7 The mother and father go to work 8 The children go to school 9 If the family can afford it, their baby is sent to one of the few day nurseries available 10 In the evening the mother and father come home from work 11 When Christmas comes they buy a tree and presents for the children 12 And then they go to sleep79 McCausland likened Lawrence’s caption sequences to the “shooting scripts” prepared by Roy Stryker at the RA/FSA for documentary photographers like Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn, who in turn captioned and sequenced their photographs to create sophisticated ethnographic studies. Lawrence would have been aware of these practices through his time at the American Artists School, contact with Shahn at the Downtown Gallery, and friendship with MOMA film curator Jay Leyda. Lange believed her photographs needed to be sequenced and “buttressed” with captions to convey their meaning, and this need was perhaps still more pressing for Lawrence, as what he sought to communicate was outside mainstream discourse and open to misinterpretation. If, viewed in isolation, A Family could be taken as a straightforwardly positive representation of urban domestic life, when listed as This is a family living in Harlem and buttressed by this extended sequence of words and images it could not. A Downtown Gallery press release explained that “the thirty paintings comprise a related series entitled ‘Harlem,’ and present a social document of extraordinary and timely interest.” The exhibition catalogue lists the Harlem paintings with numbered captions akin to, though typically shorter than, those accompanying The Migration Series.80 In a radio interview, Lawrence explained, “In 1941, there was a John Brown Series . . . and in 1943, the Harlem Series.”81 In 1943 Lawrence and his gallery understood the Harlem paintings as a series to be viewed in relation to, and in the same manner as, ( 192 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

his previous serial works. However, in correspondence with scholars in 1979 and 1999, Lawrence stated that the Harlem paintings “were not a series, but a theme.”82 Lawrence loved jazz, in which a series “implies relation and succession” while a theme is “a harmonized melody . . . followed by a succession of improvised variations.” On this basis cultural theorist Jani Scandura suggests that “while a viewer might read the painting captions of the Harlem group in a narrative progression as is appropriate for the series paintings, the relationships between the Harlem panels and the captions that narrate them are better seen as polyphonic and multidirectional.”83 This perhaps overstates the linearity of the earlier series—eliding the back-​and-​forth between South and North, past and present, worse and better in The Migration Series in particular—but draws out the significance and complexity of the relationships between panels in Lawrence’s work. Lawrence’s telling late-​life interventions, such as retitling The Migration Series, must be acknowledged, and “theme” illuminates the ways the Harlem paintings work differently from those that preceded them. But theme need not wholly displace the initial conception of the work as a series. The first painting listed in the Downtown Gallery catalogue, “This is Harlem,” which Richard Powell describes as a “perspective-​defying townscape,” functions like an establishing shot in an RA/FSA shooting script, providing an overview in which subsequent scenes are located.84 The series then moves in, with increasing specificity, to focus on a particular tenement building. The fifth caption, “Often three families share one toilet,” focuses in on a single floor of that tenement and introduces the word “family.” Panel 6, “This is a family living in Harlem,” instigates a seven-​panel sequence that tracks the daily life of this family, as the shift to “the mother and father” and “the family” indicates. There is work and school, stability and routine, and money for Christmas presents. But the clause “If the family can afford it” introduces precarity, as they sometimes cannot meet basic needs, and scarcity, as they have limited access to nurseries and other amenities. Moreover, following the logic of both shooting script and series, their clean, orderly apartment is located within an old, dirty, fire-​trap tenement, and they are one of those three families sharing a single toilet. Lawrence told McCausland that he worked in series because he “wanted to tell a lot of things. This was the only way I could work and tell the complete story.”85 Lawrence’s serial strategies further bind the family into their community. Their table may rhyme with Rockwell’s Freedom from Want but it exactly aligns with a more proximate image, the second panel, “Most of the people are very poor Rent is high Food is high,” in which a woman sits alone at a table that extends into an almost empty room and is bare save for four coins and a slip of paper. The same compositional device, in which a rectangular shape, this time a section of flooring, extends into the scene from the bottom left, recurs in the third panel, “They live in old and dirty tenement houses” (1943; fig. 51). The carpet in the hallway is the same blue as the one in the family’s ben shahn and jacob lawrence  ( 193 )

Fig. 51  Jacob Lawrence, Harlem Series, “They live in old and dirty tenement houses,” 1943. Gouache on paper, image: 21 ⅜ × 14 ⅜ in. (54.3 × 36.5 cm); sheet: 22 5⁄16 × 15 5⁄16 in. (56.7 × 38.9 cm). Museum Purchase: Helen Thurston Ayer Fund. Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon, 43.9.1. © The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2022.

apartment; the door, numbered 5, that opens from this dirty tenement corridor could be their door; the woman alone at her bare table, their neighbor. As in John Sloan’s In Her Place (1913, see plate 7), where a gas pipe signals the place of the tenement apartment within the wider, networked city, Lawrence shows exposed pipework running through this hallway, connecting the apartments within the building. Corridors, gas pipes, plumbing, and stove flues are among the recurring “medial objects” that literary historian Kate Marshall identifies in novels from this period—including Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934) and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940)—wherein infrastructure materially and metaphorically creates networked connections within urban communities.86 In Lawrence’s series those connections extend out beyond the family’s tenement. While they eat and then sleep, captions state that “20. In the evening evangelists preach ( 194 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

and sing on street corners,” but also that “15. You can buy bootleg whiskey for twenty-​five cents a quart” and, as the accompanying panel shows, fall into a stupor listening to a radio plugged into the same electricity grid that lights children’s bedrooms and the Harlem Hospital free clinic (panel 23) and library reading room (panel 28). Benedict Anderson describes Victorian city novels as “a complex gloss upon the word ‘meanwhile,’ ” and so a means to imagine community bonded by simultaneity.87 For Lawrence, to be a “family living in Harlem” means living with others in a community of similarity and difference, and with a shared set of underlying conditions. As family, street, religious, social, and night life go on, panel 24 reports, “The undertakers do a good business,” emphasizing the basic condition of a slum environment in which fire traps and poor sanitation lead to high mortality rates. The series closes with panels depicting rent strikes and the possibility of collective activism that might redress those conditions and injustices. Lawrence devotes seven of his thirty Harlem panels to one family, and so invests in family and home as a key element of the community and of everyday experience. He inserts a linear sequence into his otherwise “polyphonic and multidirectional” presentation of Harlem, following the family through their commute, working day, and return home. But by framing them with the other captions and panels, Lawrence calls into question the isolated scene, the nuclear family, the domestic sphere, and the individual’s daily round as meaningful categories of experience, thus troubling the ideological underpinnings of conventional genre paintings. While the Harlem paintings were on view, The Migration Series circulated in a Fortune magazine portfolio titled “. . . and the migrants kept coming” and toured regional galleries. This ongoing visibility, together with the logic of Lawrence’s insistent seriality, encourages dialogue between the two series. The sufficiency, if not abundance, of the Harlem family’s meal recalls by contrast The Migration Series panel “They were very poor”; their bright-​colored walls and various possessions call to mind the empty room of “After a while some communities were left almost bare.” A disquieting effect of the stylistic consistency and distinctiveness of Lawrence’s work is that the family’s banal routine—work, home, bed—is pictured in essentially the same format and idiom elsewhere used to show child labor, men shackled, and the lynch mob’s noose. Shahn was on the road or in Washington, DC, when Lawrence began to participate in the New York art world in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The pair met at the Downtown Gallery in summer 1942, when Lawrence returned from his time in the South and Shahn resumed his working relationship with Halpert. During this period both pursued an art after genre painting that revealed everyday life in its mundane specificity but also showed its structural complexity and world-​historical significance. Each spoke of the other fondly in later years, and there is a strong reciprocity between their ben shahn and jacob lawrence  ( 195 )

art and ideas. Shahn would later state that he and other RA/FSA photographers “tried to present the ordinary in an extraordinary manner,” but a striking, or, more precisely, unstriking, feature of the paintings that he and Lawrence made around 1940 is that they offer nothing that transcends or transfigures the everyday, finding instead a visual idiom contiguous with its banality.88 That idiom takes verbal form in Shahn’s matter-​of-​fact captions for his RA/FSA photographs, like Waiting for Relief Check, Scotts Run, West Virginia, and in Lawrence’s deadpan titles: 11 When Christmas comes they buy a tree and presents for the children 12 And then they go to sleep Lawrence’s paintings are grounded in a specificity of community, place, and experience, but the disenchantment expressed here—not with Jim Crow or absentee landlords but with nine-​to-​five routine and consumer culture—was felt in this moment not only in Harlem but downtown, in the first stirrings of the Beat movement, and in Paris, where Henri Lefebvre was at work on the Critique of Everyday Life (1947). In Everyday Life in the Modern World (1968), Lefebvre described the inadequacy of bourgeois satisfaction as a meaningful end in itself and observed that the resultant “sense of unrest that pervades everyday life is one of the main themes of contemporary literature.” Lefebvre makes no mention of painting but claims this theme also dominated theater, cinema, and philosophy, and he explains that while some works “depict everyday life in sadistic or masochistic detail” and others make it “more degrading even than it is,” a significant strain in culture explored and exposed the problem of satiety. Puddlers’ Sunday and related works show aggrieved and confrontational men without naming their grievance or what they confront. Farah Jasmine Griffin argues that the final step in African American migration narratives involves a reckoning with “the sophistication of modern urban power” and a disenchantment with northern cities.89 Among the implications of Lawrence’s Harlem paintings is that with a home and food on the table and presents at Christmas some absence remains in the family’s experience. The turn here is from the 1930s labor politics and rent protests of the Old Left to the nebulous disaffection that would come to characterize the postwar counterculture and the emergence of the New Left in the 1960s. Shahn’s practice of moving from politically charged photographic sequences to paintings that contain at most traces of those origins prefigures the migration of his and Lawrence’s art from the site of its politics. In 1943 Lawrence’s Harlem paintings had been immediately dispersed among public and private collections, losing the serial or thematic logic that bound these scenes of everyday life together. A 1954 Life magazine feature titled “Painter of Protest Turns to Reflection” explained that “the theme ( 196 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

of social justice has permeated Shahn’s work and kept him to a realistic style. But now instead of bitter protests against oppression, his colorful and strongly composed work is more characterized by bittersweet portrayals of men, women and children who stand alone and lost and sad.” A caption states that the 1947 painting Spring Idyll (now Spring), in which the motif of figures at repose shares much with Sunday Painting and Pretty Girl Milking a Cow, dramatizes “the young lovers’ feeling of aloneness and timeless detachment from the world.”90 Removed from the photographs, sequences, and mural compositions that locate them as subjects of the technocratic modern state, Shahn’s figures become merely sad and lonely. Both he and Lawrence remained in proximity to genre painting even as they sought to move beyond it and in so doing risked their art’s assimilation back into its comfortable, conservative terms. Aline Saarinen’s purposefully simple statement, “Jacob Lawrence likes to tell stories,” contributes to a postwar profile in which the urge toward narrative was seen to define his art. “Lawrence’s paintings of the last year,” she explains, “tell the pleasant story of neighborhood life.”91 Thus decontextualized, Shahn’s and Lawrence’s work could be taken as simple scenes of everyday life, apart from the living tradition that ran in America from genre painting’s antebellum heyday, through its abeyance in the years around 1900, to its adaptation by mass-​market magazines in the 1910s and its complex, multifaceted revival in the interwar years.

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Conclusion A Genre America

‌“R

unning in seven league boots, I pursue a genre America, to capture it all in my butterfly net,” enthused Honoré Sharrer in the 1946 Fourteen Americans exhibition catalogue. “I want to praise and caress the great majority, the American working people. Every curve of their lives I want to render with fanatical sensitivity and creative realism.”1 The exhibition was one of a series that the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) held, as curator Dorothy Miller explained, “to provide a means of studying certain phases of contemporary art in various parts of the United States.” There is an exuberance to Sharrer’s statement, postwar and free of some of the demands of social realism, perhaps, and also an expectation: that a “genre America” exists; that her peers will share her sense of what it looks like; that painting in pursuit of it will continue to have a place in the world. Miller likened Sharrer to another of the fourteen, Alton Pickens, based on their shared concern with “the cruelty and the revealing commonplace of city streets.” Catalogue descriptions of two other artists also draw on the keywords of the 1930s genre painting revival: Loren MacIver offers “the simple magic that evokes the significance of the ordinary”; Saul Steinberg’s drawings for the New Yorker contain “the oddities of everyday italicized with the razor’s edge of humor.”2 Two of the four paintings Sharrer showed, The Country Fair and In the Parlor, were intended to be among “eight panels which will form the two sides of a triptych” and eventually became the left side of her five-​panel Tribute to the American Working People (1951; fig. 52). As in Ben Shahn’s and Jacob Lawrence’s move beyond genre painting through murals and series, Sharrer conceived her scenes of everyday life within ambitious, multipart schema. Falling chronologically between MOMA’s exhibition of Lawrence’s The Migration Series in 1944 and its retrospective devoted to Shahn in 1947, Fourteen Americans could, in its

Fig. 52  Honoré D. Sharrer, Tribute to the American Working People, 1951. Oil on composition board, overall 38 ¾ × 77 ¼ in. (98.5 × 196.2 cm). Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation (1986.6.97). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. Photo: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC / Art Resource, New York. © Estate of Honoré Sharrer.

curatorial framing of Sharrer and Pickens, be taken as another continuation and expansion of the genre revival. But Fourteen Americans documents a moment of art-world uncertainty. Sharrer’s four small genre paintings hung alongside works by Mark Tobey and Robert Motherwell, precursors to abstract expressionism. Miller’s efforts to bring these disparate practices together are necessarily vague and capacious: “What concerns these artists is not the problem of technique as such, or even the popular reaction to new ways of doing things, but the utterance or revelation which the technique is to embody.”3 In the 1930s and early 1940s exhibitions of genre painting at MOMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art took place alongside shows devoted to abstract painting, folk art, “Romantic art,” and industrial design. As late as 1946 it was not apparent to an insider like Miller that abstract art would soon come to dominate her institution and redefine the course of American art or that its practitioners and champions would refuse the kind of connection and dialogue with other art forms she proposed. The Fourteen Americans catalogue and James Thrall Soby’s Ben Shahn essay were among the last occasions on which MOMA spoke the language of the genre painting revival. In the late 1940s the Museum hosted the opening salvo in a long-​running war of words between Motherwell and Shahn, deaccessioned its folk-​art collection, and turned, decisively, toward ( 200 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

nonrepresentational painting and sculpture. Acknowledging the earnest commitment that artists, curators, and critics made to genre painting in the prewar years prompts recognition that there were other paths, that history could have happened differently, that the critical certainties of any given moment, including our own, may melt into air. One way to conclude would be to draw a line here, to say that not 1861 or 1913 but 1945, that freighted date in the history of American art, marks the end point for American genre painting. Thus, the Second World War and the Cold War rescaled politics from the domestic to the global, and paintings of everyday life, which were relevant to the concerns of the Progressive Era and the New Deal, had nothing to say to the threat of nuclear annihilation. Or the claims of modernist formalism and medium-​specificity first voiced in anglophone criticism in the 1900s won out in the late 1940s in Jackson Pollock’s drips and slashes and Clement Greenberg’s strident formulations, consigning painting with any trace of anecdote or genre to the category of minor art. But such a conclusion would go against the spirit of this book, which has shown the way genre painting lived on as a lonely enterprise outside institutional frames or in adapted form in periods when it was deemed obsolete. It is also untrue. Edward Hopper and Norman Rockwell, for example, continued to pursue their prewar artistic trajectories into the 1960s, the former showing no more interest in the term “genre painting” than he had during the 1930s revival, the latter embracing it as part of his elevation into high art. Participants in the 1930s revival adapted their genre art, taking on elements of abstraction, as in Doris Lee’s paintings of the 1950s, or pushing the element of pastiche implicit in the combination of historical idiom and contemporary subject matter toward Pop Art, as in Sharrer’s later work.4 Moreover, the tendency to periodize by the dates of wars emphasizes rupture in some spheres of life over continuities and smaller adaptations elsewhere; as the emergence of second-​wave feminism in the postwar period makes clear, the commitments of prewar Progressivism were not simply swept aside. That movement’s assertion of the personal as political and the art that later developed out it, including Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Private Performances of Personal Maintenance as Art (1970) and Mary Kelly’s Post-​Partum Document (1973–79), placed everyday domestic experience among its central concerns. Americans did not stop making genre paintings or finding new forms for an art of everyday life after 1945. They did, though, once again stop talking about genre painting. When Hopper and Raphael Soyer complained of their exclusion from an art world dominated by abstraction, they did so as realists, in a short-​lived journal called Reality, not genre painters. When the process of establishing a canon and historical survey of American art was taken up with renewed vigor and weighty institutional backing during the Cold War, genre painting was displaced by a line that ran from the awe and scale of Hudson River School landscapes to the awe and scale of abstract expressionism. Art historian William Truettner points to the way that in this moment abstract canvases were said to contain conclusion  ( 201 )

American landscape painting’s “natural forces” in “objectified” form and the way formalist terms for abstract painting were applied to the work of nineteenth-​century landscape painters such as Thomas Cole. This approach, which as Truettner observes carried a strong “nationalist imperative,” ran through to the 1976 MOMA exhibition The Natural Paradise, which hung Cole and his peers alongside Pollock and other abstract expressionists in ways that were seen to illuminate both bodies of work.5 Attention to “the common man” and interest in Jacksonian democracy had created such an imperative for looking back to and making connections with nineteenth-​century genre painting in the 1930s. In the postwar period those concerned with shaping national narratives were keen to consign the politics of both the 1930s and the American genre tradition to the past. When genre painting came back into scholarly focus in the last decades of the twentieth century, it was through scholarship that sought to historicize and periodize, to explain the specific conditions that shaped genre’s antebellum heyday, for example, rather than to connect it to a broader national character or tradition. John Sloan was among the more prominent artists to drop from view after the 1930s genre revival and during the postwar period. Sloan made genre paintings in an early twentieth-​century moment when the term was rarely used and peers understood his art in relation to Hogarthian graphic satire but not the genre tradition. He struggled to sell these works, and even his friend and advocate John Butler Yeats was left to wonder, of a painting he clearly admired, “Why does this picture interest anyone?”6 To Sloan’s chagrin the same paintings that had been met with indifference when he was committed to making them in the 1910s became popular and valuable in the 1930s, by which point he had moved on to very different aesthetic and thematic concerns. That decade’s renewed interest in nineteenth-​century genre paintings and revival of genre practices among contemporary painters created a context in which Sloan’s earlier work could be seen as a continuation of and intervention in a long, living tradition. One answer to the question of why genre painting is called genre painting is that categorization and generic convention are intrinsic to the form. Genre paintings are reliant on convention, familiarity, and the shared, known, accreted meaning of motifs and types, and on the grammar of niche compositions or domestic interiors, to construct and reconstruct the everyday. Genre paintings need to be seen as genre paintings and in relation to other genre paintings. Both the 1930s genre painting revival and the subsequent rejection of the term had material consequences for the way paintings of everyday life functioned and were understood. As an art of conventionalized types and habituated ways of seeing, genre painting carried the capacity to fix a worldview, which was harnessed by the hegemonizing forces of twentieth-​century mass media and cultural institutions. The uses to which the Saturday Evening Post of the interwar years and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1939 World’s Fair tie-​in exhibition Life in America put genre painting correspond to ( 202 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Walter Benjamin’s 1939 assertion that it “was an art which refused to know anything of history.”7 A narrow, unchanging vision of everyday life is presented as normative experience. The 1930s genre revival can be seen in this way as an isolationist effort to stay and shut out the world-​historical rise of totalitarianism and the looming Second World War. Indeed, the late nineteenth-​century German bourgeoisie’s embrace of genre painting, which occasioned Benjamin’s remarks, prefigures that moment as a willful turning away from the tensions and fissures that would lead to the First World War and the rise of fascism. But in a twist Benjamin might have appreciated, twentieth-​century American painters frequently used the stable, static qualities of the genre tradition as a fixed point against which to articulate historical change. The glimpses of a networked city of pipelines and grids in Sloan’s tenement kitchens and Lawrence’s Harlem hallways, as they insinuate change into the conventionalized genre setting of home and hearth, work in this way, as does the penetration of that space by world-​historical events in Dorothy Varian’s Reading War News (1939) and Rockwell’s Freedom from Fear (1943). Lawrence achieved this effect in formal terms also, refusing the aesthetic and palette of coziness to create stark, harsh domestic interiors expressive of the unhomed community produced by the world-​historical Great Migration. Both the hegemonizing and counterhegemonic power of genre paintings are lost when they cease to be named and viewed as such. The most successful twentieth-​century genre painters—those who sustained the longest careers or wrung the most meaning from the form—were those who created their own conventions and contexts. Here, once more, Rockwell and Lawrence make unlikely bedfellows. Over a six-​decade career making commercial illustration for mass-​market magazines and corporate advertisers Rockwell built a body of work so vast that it seems to stand alone, to have its own independent history and conventions of type and motif, so that an hour at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, grants viewers full access to its everyday life. Rockwell’s works are sufficiently self-​referential and self-​reinforcing that they need knowledge of neither the wider artistic traditions they draw on nor the mainstream magazine and advertising culture from which they emerged to function as genre painting. Working on the margins of mainstream culture, though with institutional support from the Federal Art Project, a Rosenwald grant, and his Downtown Gallery contract, Lawrence established a set of formal and thematic counterconventions. Because there was no existing visual record of the African American history or lived experience that he sought to picture, Lawrence’s serial productions had to be self-​reliant; to achieve the reference, allusion, and dialogue between images vital to genre painting, the Harlem panels call back and forth to one another and out to panels from other series. A fair criticism of this book’s treatment of Lawrence is that approaching him through his engagement with (and disavowal of ) genre painting emphasizes the aspects conclusion  ( 203 )

of his art most proximate to white practices and traditions. This isolates him from other African American artists, including Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, and Horace Pippen, who made pictures of everyday life that were less easily assimilated by collectors and museums at the time or conventional art histories in retrospect. Genre painting needs institutional framing, and to exist in a body of like works. It is an art that has a limited capacity to accommodate highly individualized self-​expression or radical breaks from consensus. It can foster community and communicate shared values, binding it, nostalgically and historically, to moments of egalitarian national dialogue, whether Jacksonian democracy or the New Deal of FDR’s fireside chats. But it also reinforces the exclusivity and exclusions of those moments through condescension and stereotyping. In this sense it is a profoundly conservative form. What becomes of an art of consensus and convention in an era of fracture, plurality, and individualism? In the later twentieth century pastiche, or knowing imitation, became inseparable from irony. This makes it difficult to see, for example, Edmund Tarbell’s relationship to Johannes Vermeer as in any way serious, or to paint anything like a genre painting that escapes irony, whether at the point of production or reception: John Currin’s knowing art-​historical references or Thomas Kinkade’s apparently sincere but often mocked cozy realist painting. This point registers in John Ashbery’s very New Yorker quip that Sharrer’s Tribute to the American Working People was “a collaboration between Norman Rockwell and the brothers van Eyck,” which makes fun of the idea of a coherent, continuous practice running from the fifteenth-​century Northern Renaissance to mid-​twentieth-​century New York.8 But that only seems ridiculous if rupture and discontinuity are understood to be more powerful forces than continuity and the gradual layering and accretion of meaning. When twentieth-​century American paintings were made and seen in the genre tradition, artists and viewers versed in its conventions could find meaning in slight twists and minor deviations, the relations of similarity and difference through which new works take their place in a living series. Genre painting, especially when under threat or out of favor, thus presents a heightened instance of the way all genres must be learned and inhabited to function. For all the limitations and dead ends encountered in tracing genre painting’s early twentieth-​century history, that endeavor also reveals the way that constraint promotes invention and that reckoning with the lacunae and historical baggage pushed artists to fresh insight. Looking at works made in, around, and sometimes against genre painting in the first half of the twentieth century offers a history of the construction of everyday life in the period, and some record—however rose-​tinted, oblique, critical, or strange— of everyday life itself.

( 204 )  Re-​e nvisioning the Everyday

Notes Introduction 1. Hickey, “Kids Are All Right,” 120. 2. Riley, “Old Swimmin’-Hole,” 5. 3. W. Benjamin, “Review of Sternberger’s Panorama,” 161–62. 4. R. Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children, 18. 5. Bedell, Moved to Tears; Cao, End of Landscape. 6. Quoted in Morgan, George Bellows, 96. 7. Doezema, George Bellows, 147–62. 8. Quoted in Zurier, Picturing the City, 25. 9. Huneker, “Eight,” 475. 10. McHale, “Revisiting Realisms,” 55–56. 11. Jewell, “Pinning Down Our Elusive ‘Genre,’ ” 143. 12. Crow, “Chardin at the Edge of Belief,” 91. 13. Van Dyke, “Painting,” 476. 14. Dimock, introduction to “Remapping Genre,” 1379. 15. Faison, introduction to Finch, Norman Rockwell Album, 6. 16. Cortissoz, “American Life Art Exhibition,” 15. 17. Richard W. Stimpson, 2 Cornell Street, Worcester, MA, to Fogg Art Museum, May 23, 1939; Henry R. Hope to Richard W. Stimpson, May 29, 1939, Box 102, Correspondence, 1939, New England Genre.

18. Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 7, 11. 19. Felski, “Invention of Everyday Life,” 15. 20. Associated Press, “Roosevelt’s Speech,” 4. 21. Berger, Sight Unseen, 11–40; I. Wilson, Specters of Democracy, 103–25; Boylan, Ashcan Art, 1–12; Wallach, “Norman Rockwell Museum,” 284–85. 22. R. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 132. 23. [Mather], “Status of Genre Painting,” 8; Goodrich, American Genre, 9; Johns, American Genre Painting, 197; Lubin, Picturing a Nation; Burns, Pastoral Inventions; Greenhill, Playing It Straight; E. Shapiro, “J. D. Chalfant’s Clock Maker”; Baradel, Painting at the Threshold. 24. Larkin, Art and Life in America; M. Brown, American Painting. See Wallach, “Oliver Larkin’s ‘Art and Life in America.’ ” 25. Greenberg, “Review of an Exhibition of George Bellows,” 2:310. 26. Lobel, John Sloan, 120; Hickey, “Kids Are All Right,” 121; D. Shapiro, Social Realism, 14; Hills, Painting Harlem Modern, 4. 27. H. Weinberg, “Cosmopolitan and Candid Stories,” 113.

Chapter 1 1. Myers, Artist in Manhattan, 37. 2. Hale, Jan Vermeer, 230. 3. S. G. W. Benjamin, Art in America, 116. 4. [Mather], “Status of Genre Painting,” 8 (reprinted as “Status of Genre Painting,” Nation, 125); Mather, “To Revive the Art,” 260–61. 5. Mather, “Authority in Art Criticism.” 6. [Hutchins], “ ‘Genre’ Painting in This Country,” 6. 7. “Spring Academy,” 6; Huneker, “Seen in the World of Art,” 4. 8. S. G. W. Benjamin, Art in America, 116; Pattison, “Layton Art Gallery,” 212. 9. Moore, Modern Painting, 214. 10. Fromentin, Old Masters, 132–33.

11. Pattison, “Layton Art Gallery,” 212. 12. Quoted in Baur, American Genre Painter, 27–28. 13. Hills, Eastman Johnson, 70–71. 14. Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist, 300–328; Weisberg, Redefining Genre, 9; Crynkle, “Arabs of New York,” 129; Caffin, Story of American Painting, 99–100. 15. [Mather], “Status of Genre Painting,” 8. 16. Caffin, “Art of Edmund C. Tarbell,” 72; John Sloan, Diaries, November 8, 1906. 17. “Special Exhibitions at the Dealers.” 18. M. Brown, American Painting, 28; Homer, Robert Henri and His Circle, 129. 19. C. Owen Lublin, “Arts and Decoration,” Town and Country, in Jerome Myers File; Mather, “Some

American Realists,” 16; D. Phillips, “Jerome Myers,” 483. 20. M. Brown, American Painting, 28. 21. D. Phillips, “Jerome Myers,” 484; D. Phillips, Collection in the Making, 50; letter to Robert McIntyre, June 11, 1942, quoted in D. Scott, “Spirit of Revolt,” 328. 22. [Pène du Bois], “Jerome Myers,” 257. 23. Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 64. 24. Ngai, “Cuteness,” 815. 25. Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 76–77. 26. Baury, “Message of Proletaire,” 404; Myers, Artist in Manhattan, 132; Baury, “Message of Proletaire,” 404. 27. John Sloan, Diaries, April 15, 1909; Huneker, New Cosmopolis, 5; Bourne, “Trans-​National America,” 90. 28. Huneker, “Around the Galleries,” 537; Myers, Artist in Manhattan, 204. 29. Baury, “Message of Proletaire,” 410, 411–12; quoted in Holcomb, “Forgotten Legacy,” 91. 30. Hoppin, World of J. G. Brown, 76 and 88–97. 31. Burns, Pastoral Inventions, 302. 32. [Pène du Bois], “Who’s Who in American Art?,” 323; Stott, Holland Mania. 33. Myers, Artist in Manhattan, 75; D. Phillips, “Jerome Myers,” 485; Leader, “Boston School and Vermeer,” 172–76. 34. “Best Picture in America.” 35. Huneker, “Ten American Painters,” 554. Huneker’s text refers to a Tarbell “exterior,” but as New England Interior was definitely the painting exhibited this was likely an error. 36. [Hutchins], “ ‘Genre’ Painting in This Country,” 6; Cox, “Recent Work of Edmund C. Tarbell,” 259. 37. Gaskell, Vermeer’s Wager, 222. 38. James, American Scene, 252, 255; Haviland, Henry James’s Last Romance, 91. 39. Robert F. Brown, oral history interview with Morton S. Vose; Fairbrother, Bostonians, 92n95. 40. Cox, “Recent Work of Edmund C. Tarbell,” 259. 41. Huneker, “Nine American Painters,” 556. 42. Dow, Composition, 24. 43. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, 59. 44. Dyer, Pastiche, 2. 45. Baer, Poetry of Everyday Life, 7–10. 46. Caffin, Story of American Painting, 106. 47. [Mather], “Status of Genre Painting,” 8. 48. Greenberg, “Review of an Exhibition of Dutch Painting,” 2:8–9. 49. Huneker, “Around the Galleries,” 538, 537; Myers, Artist in Manhattan, 121. 50. Wood, “Problem of Modern Interior Painting,” 251; see S. Shaw, “Turn-​of-​the-​Century Interiors.”

( 206 )  Notes to Pages 27–53

51. Hollander, Entrance for the Eyes, 2; Baer, Poetry of Everyday Life, 29. 52. Wood, “Problem of Modern Interior Painting,” 256. 53. Wood, “Genre Painting.” 54. Caffin, “Tarbell,” 66–67. 55. [Mechlin], “Painter of American Interiors,” 20–21. 56. See Hemingway, “American Art Pre-1940,” 63; Underwood, Charles H. Caffin. 57. W. Wright, “Aesthetic Struggle in America,” 208–10. 58. See Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism.” 59. “Prospectus,” 18; Harker, America the Middlebrow, 8; Underwood, Charles H. Caffin, 107. 60. D. Scott, “Spirit of Revolt,” 308. 61. When reproduced in 1907 in Caffin’s Story of American Painting, The Tambourine was listed as “East Side Scene” in the collection of James Speyer. 62. “Special Exhibitions at the Dealers,” 201. 63. Hamilton, “What the Settlement Stands For,” 7; on disputes within the urban reform movement, see Carson, Settlement Folk, 124–26; Baury, “Message of Proletaire,” 404. 64. M. B. S., “Trend”; Survey, “Life Song of the People,” 33. 65. “Futility of American Art,” 266, 268. 66. Caffin, “Tarbell,” 65. 67. Ibid., 72; Croly, Promise of American Life, 368; Caffin, “Art of Frank W. Benson,” 105. 68. Caffin, Art for Life’s Sake, 225. 69. [Mather], “Status of Genre Painting,” 8. 70. O’Leary, At Beck and Call, 213. 71. Mechlin, “Painter of American Interiors,” 20. 72. See Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art. 73. Lloyd, “American Illustrators,” 807; Mechlin, “Some American Figure Painters,” 193. 74. Huneker, “Ten American Painters,” 554; Truettner and Denenberg, “Discreet Charm of the Colonial,” 100–103. 75. See Gretton, “Difference and Competition.” 76. [Mather], “Status of Genre Painting,” 8. 77. Caffin, Story of American Painting, 343–44; Caffin, “Note on American Illustration,” 1218. 78. A. Brown, “Day Off,” 381. 79. Armstrong, “Representative American Women Illustrators,” 520–29; Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, 61. 80. Howard, “ ‘ The Favorite Corner,’ by J. W. Alexander,” 402. 81. Scanlan, “God-​Gifted Girls,” paras. 26, 28. 82. O’Leary, At Beck and Call, 217. 83. Strasser, Never Done, 164–68. 84. John Sloan, Diaries, August 28, 1906; Holcomb, “Forgotten Legacy,” 91.

Chapter 2 1. [Mather], “Status of Genre Painting,” 8. 2. Ibid. 3. Caffin, Story of American Painting, 373, 374. 4. John Sloan, Diaries, December 19, 1907; all further citations are given in the text as entry dates in parentheses. Barrell, “Real Drama of the Slums,” 560. 5. Jewell, “Pinning Down Our Elusive ‘Genre,’ ” 227; Pach quoted in Brooks, John Sloan, 227. 6. Denis, “Cézanne—I,” 214, 207; [Lionel Cust], “Jan Steen,” 236; Cox, “Dutch Painting,” 246. 7. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 68, 71. 8. Ibid., 88, 87, 56. 9. Meixner, “Popular Criticism of Jean-​François Millet.” 10. Barrell, “Real Drama of the Slums,” 559. 11. Curtis, “Hudson-​Fulton Memorial Exhibit,” 141. 12. Cox, “Dutch Painting,” 246; Cortissoz, “Old Dutch Masters,” 167, 162–63. 13. Stott, Holland Mania; Curtis, 140; Cortissoz, “Old Dutch Masters,” 166. 14. Snyder and Zurier, “Picturing the City,” 175; Hollander, Entrance for the Eyes, 149–200. 15. Henri, Art Spirit, 17; D. Scott, John Sloan, 32. 16. Yeats, “Work of John Sloan,” 21; references to Caffin and Denis are, respectively, to Story of American Painting and “Cézanne—I.” 17. Yeats, “John Sloan’s Exhibition,” 258. 18. Franklin, “Pilgrim Father, Native Son,” 309. 19. Quoted in ibid., 308. 20. Hills, “John Sloan’s Images,” 157. 21. Lobel, John Sloan, 137. 22. Coyle and Schiller, John Sloan’s New York, 50–57; Lobel, John Sloan, 138. See also Gelburd, “John Sloan’s Veiled Politics and Art.” 23. Simons, “Co-​operation and Housewives,” 11. 24. “Cheapest Commodity.” 25. Friedan, Feminine Mystique, 15. 26. “Current News of Art.” 27. Hopkins, “Women March,” 13, 30–31. The connection between A Woman’s Work and these illustrations is made in H. Weinberg, American Impressionism, 290–91. 28. Hopkins, “Women March,” 13; Todd, “New Woman” Revised, 29–30. 29. Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 166–69.

30. Cowan, More Work for Mother, 102–50. 31. On She’s Got the Point, see Hills, “John Sloan’s Images,” 168. 32. Barnard, “Woman’s Place,” 7. 33. Young quoted in Zurier, Art for the Masses, 140. 34. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 97. 35. See Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies; Sheringham, Everyday Life. 36. Trentmann, “Politics of Everyday Life,” 524, 523. 37. Quoted in ibid., 521. 38. Hopper, “John Sloan,” 169. 39. See Hills, “John Sloan’s Images,” 162–63. 40. Interview in 1948 quoted in Kwiat, “Robert Henri,” 620. 41. Hollander, Entrance for the Eyes, 50. 42. Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-​Century Genre Painting, 116. 43. Baury, “Message of Bohemia,” 262. 44. Hollander, Entrance for the Eyes, 5. 45. John Sloan, Effect of Two Flat-​Irons Left on a Window Sill (1913). Graphite on paper, 7 × 4 15⁄16 in. (17.8 × 12.5 cm). Delaware Art Museum, Gift of Helen Farr Sloan, 2000, 2000-22. 46. Moore, Modern Painting, 215–16. 47. Hollander, Entrance for the Eyes, 49. 48. Blanc, Grammar of Painting and Engraving, 174. 49. Boylan, Ashcan Art; Coco, John Sloan’s Women. 50. Giard, “Nourishing Arts,” 151. 51. Quoted in Frisby, Georg Simmel, 119. 52. “Norman Hapgood,” 21. 53. Hapgood, “In Her Place,” 5. 54. Cowan, More Work for Mother, 63–68. 55. See Klimasmith, At Home in the City, 90–127. 56. Tallack, New York Sights, 71. 57. Trentmann, “Politics of Everyday Life,” 542–43. 58. Giard, “Nourishing Arts,” 157. 59. Addams, “Women’s Conscience and Social Amelioration,” 252. 60. Ibid. 61. Hapgood, “In Her Place,” 5. 62. Spencer, “Marriage Today and Tomorrow,” 14. 63. Willrich, City of Courts, 129. 64. See Beard and Berlowitz, Greenwich Village. 65. G. Shaw, “Decolonization of John Sloan.”

Chapter 3 1. Hall quoted in Lipsitz, “Struggle for Hegemony,” 146. 2. Finch, Norman Rockwell Album, 47.

3. Wallach, “Norman Rockwell Museum,” 282–83. 4. Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist, 322.

Notes to Pages 36–90  ( 207 )

5. Guitar, “Close Up Visit,” 29. 6. Greenberg, “Avant-​Garde and Kitsch,” 1:16; Faison, introduction to Finch, Norman Rockwell Album, 6; Gans, “Can Rockwell Survive,” B8; Hickey, “Kids Are All Right,” 120. 7. Cohn, introduction to Covers of “The Saturday Evening Post,” xiii. 8. Ohmann, Selling Culture. 9. Cohn, Creating America, 9–10. 10. Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-​Century Genre Painting, 135–39, 160–61; Johns, American Genre Painting, 24–25. 11. Fagg, “ ‘Bewhiskered Rustic.’ ” 12. Clement-​Waters, Women in the Fine Arts, 324; Gregg, “Illustrators and Some Other Artists,” 15. 13. Caffin, “Note on American Illustration,” 1218. 14. McMein quoted in Kitch, Girl on the Magazine Cover, 138. 15. Caffin, “Note on American Illustration,” 1218. 16. Lippmann, Public Opinion, 24. 17. Kitch, Girl on the Magazine Cover. 18. Caffin, “Note on American Illustration,” 1219. 19. Westermann, Worldly Art, 81; Johns, American Genre Painting, xiii. 20. Crynkle, “Arabs of New York,” 131. 21. Caffin, Story of American Painting, 99–100. 22. Gallati, “Taste, Art, and Cultural Power,” 53–54; Hoppin, World of J. G. Brown, 15–19. 23. M. Turner, “Unruliness of Serials,” 12. 24. Moretti, “Slaughterhouse of Literature,” 207. For a rare look at Rockwell’s peers, see Roettger, Rivals of Rockwell. 25. On Leyendecker, see Greenhill, “How to Make It.” 26. Sluijter, “Emulative Imitation,” 37–38. 27. Ohmann, Selling Culture, 44–47; Cohn, Creating America, 5–7; Pendergast, Creating the Modern Man, 111–66. 28. Kitch, Girl on the Magazine Cover, 37–74; Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, 51–71; Cohn, Creating America, 85–86 and 195–96. 29. Harding, “Readjustment.” 30. New York Tribune, “Norman Rockwell,” 2. 31. Calkins, Advertising Man, 147–48. 32. Ibid., 150, 151. 33. N. Rockwell, My Adventures, 35. 34. “Big Guns”; Piso’s, advertisement, 261. 35. Barton, “Human Appeals in Copy,” 62; Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul, 163. 36. Calkins, “Art Directors Exhibition,” 16; Goodrich, “Note on Advertising Art,” 338; Advertising and Selling Fortnightly, untitled portfolio, 27–28. 37. Art Directors Club, “Annual of Advertising Art,” vii; Calkins, “Art Directors Exhibition,” 16. 38. C. Frederick, “Advertising Copy,” 225, 237; Parker, “Wanted,” 221.

( 208 )  Notes to Pages 90–120

39. N. Rockwell, My Adventures, 107. 40. C. Frederick, “Advertising Copy,” 234. 41. [Mather], “Status of Genre Painting,” 8; “Norman Rockwell,” 2. 42. Thanks to Jenny Robertson for the quilting information; for the tactile qualities of magazine materiality and illustration in this period, see Greenhill, “Flip, Linger, Glide.” 43. Calkins, “Art Directors’ Exhibition,” 16. 44. Garvey, “Reframing the Bicycle.” See also Garvey, Adman in the Parlor; Edison Mazda Lamps, “Stuff of Which Memories,” inside cover; Edison Mazda Lamps, “And Every Lad,” 77. 45. A. Rockwell, “Crackers in Bed.” 46. Advertising and Selling Fortnightly, untitled portfolio, 28–29; Fleeson, “Finding Rockwell at Home,” H01; Wieseman, “Acquisition or Inheritance?” 56. 47. Bye, Pots and Pans, 206; on Rockwell’s study with Hawthorne, see Claridge, Norman Rockwell, 112; N. Rockwell, My Adventures, 84–87. 48. Parker, “Wanted,” 213. 49. Edison Mazda Lamps, “More Light,” 68; Payne, “$10,000,000 ‘Accident,’ ” 24. 50. Sun-​Maid, “Fruit of the Vine,” 47; Sun-​Maid, “Market Day Special,” n.p. 51. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 2. 52. Ibid., 116. 53. N. Rockwell, “Commonplace,” 11. 54. Ernest C. McNeel to Norman Rockwell, November 8, 1923. Norman Rockwell Fan Correspondence Collection, Norman Rockwell Museum. 55. Guitar, “Close Up Visit,” 30; Halpern, Norman Rockwell. 56. “Artist Is Inspiration.” Norman Rockwell Fan Correspondence Collection, Norman Rockwell Museum. 57. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 97. 58. N. Rockwell, My Adventures, 34. 59. On the exclusivity of Rockwell’s vision, see Harris, “View from the City.” 60. Cohen, “Mistuh Macbeth,” 12. 61. Wiley, “C.O.D.,” 18. 62. Quoted in Roberts, Blackface Nation, 290. 63. Quoted in Wallach, Norman Rockwell Museum, 284. 64. Boime, “Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Subversion of Genre,” 419. 65. N. Rockwell, My Adventures, 313. 66. Lippmann, Public Opinion, 89–90. 67. Quoted in Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, 64. 68. W. Morris, “Norman Rockwell’s America,” 133. 69. N. Rockwell, My Adventures, 315.

Chapter 4 1. Denning, Cultural Front, xvi–xvii; Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark, 448. 2. Cassidy, Marsden Hartley; Madsen, “Reviving the Old and Telling Tales.” 3. L. Clark, Forbes Watson, 104. 4. Quoted in Goodrich, “ ‘ The Arts’ Magazine,” 80. 5. Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past”; Brenner, “Art,” 72; Watson’s article appeared in the New York World and was quoted in J. M., “Bellows and His Critics,” 294. 6. Barker, “Notes on the Exhibitions” (March 1924), 161. 7. Barker, “Notes on the Exhibitions” (April 1924), 223. 8. Goodrich, “Winslow Homer,” 185; Goodrich, “ ‘ The Arts’ Magazine,” 82. 9. Hopper, “Charles Burchfield,” 10; Hemingway, “ ‘ To Personalize the Rainpipe,’ ” 383–85; Barker, “Notes on the Exhibitions” (April 1924), 219. 10. Burroughs, “Young America,” 117, 115. 11. See Doss, “Grant Wood’s Queer Parody”; Fagg, “Doris Lee’s Senses of Humor.” 12. Barker, “Notes on the Exhibitions” (March 1924), 161. 13. Goodrich, “In Missoura,” 338. 14. Mumford, “The Three Bentons,” 159. On Benton’s correspondence with Mumford and response to these reviews, see Mazow, Thomas Hart Benton, 18. 15. Mazow, Thomas Hart Benton, 79, 80. 16. See Goodrich, Whitney Studio Club; Berman, Rebels on Eighth Street, 142–82; Wolff, AngloModern, 18–20. 17. Wolff, AngloModern, 30; A. Weinberg, “Real Whitney,” 25. 18. Archibald Motley Jr., “Plan for Study,” Archibald Motley, Jr. Papers. 19. M. Williams, “Negro Wins Prizes,” 22. 20. James A. Porter tribute to Malvin Gray Johnson from Opportunity, reprinted in Harmon Foundation, Negro Artists, 8, 9, Harmon Foundation, Inc., Records. 21. “Biographical Data on Allan Rohan Crite,” February 19, 1937, Box 74, American Negro Artists, Harmon Foundation, Inc., Records. 22. Calo, Distinction and Denial, 139; Francis, Making Race, 83–86; Ott, “Labored Stereotypes.” 23. E. [Ernest] Simms Campbell to Evelyn Brown, April 27, 1936, Box 73, American Negro Artists, Harmon Foundation, Inc., Records. 24. On the Whitney and the PWAP, see Scott and Rutkoff, New York Modern, 188–93. 25. Ibid., 191.

26. Biddle, “Art Renascence,” 429. 27. Read, “George C. Bingham,” C5. 28. Wallach, “Regionalism Redux,” 260–61. 29. Barr, Homer, Ryder, Eakins, 6; Cahill, “American Art, 1862–1932,” 10. 30. Rusk, George Caleb Bingham, 1. 31. Wehle, “American Frontier Scene,” 120. 32. Robertson, “Tipping Point,” 2. 33. Wallach, “Regionalism Redux,” 260. 34. Barr, foreword to George Caleb Bingham, 5. 35. Barr, Homer, Ryder, Eakins, 6; on Barr’s formation, see Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., 45–49; on Barr and formalism, see K. Wilson, Modern Eye, 107–12. 36. Mather, “Winslow Homer,” 10. 37. Pope, “Bingham’s Technique and Composition,” 15. 38. Alfred Barr to Arthur Pope, February 5, 1935, Registrar Exhibition Files, Exh. #38a, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 39. Cortissoz quoted in Time, “In Missouri,” 44–45; Mumford, “Lachaise and O’Keeffe,” 147. 40. Read, “George C. Bingham,” C5. 41. Ibid. 42. McCausland, “Modern Museum,” 6E. 43. “Social Scene.” For the relationship between MOMA and the Whitney, see Scott and Rutkoff, New York Modern, 163–93. 44. Goodrich, American Genre, 5, 9; Read, “Whitney Museum Surveys,” C5; Jewell, “Art of a Century,” 19. 45. Goodrich, American Genre, 6. 46. Jewell, “Art of a Century,” 19. 47. Jewell, “Pinning Down,” 143. On Sloan’s inclusion in American Genre, see Sanders, “American Scene.” 48. Cortissoz, “American Life Art Exhibition,” 15; Morsell, “Whitney Museum,” 3. 49. Morsell, “Whitney Museum,” 3. 50. “U.S. Scene,” 26. 51. Truettner, “Nature and the Native Tradition,” 145. 52. Quoted in Levin, Edward Hopper, 242. 53. “Press Release,” in “Planning (includes press release, 1935),” Box 2, Folder 53, American Genre; McBride, “Story Telling Art,” New York Sun, Box 3, Folder 6, “Publicity (clippings),” American Genre; Levin, Edward Hopper, 325; “Art: Gold for Gold,” 72. 54. Genauer, “Realism Versus Expressionism,” New York World Telegram, Box 3, Folder 6, “Publicity (clippings),” American Genre; Burchfield, “Edward Hopper,” 16. 55. Genauer, “Realism Versus Expressionism.”

Notes to Pages 122–141  ( 209 )

56. Levin, Edward Hopper; on Freud, see 93–94, on Degas, see 183–84. 57. Sidlauskas, “Resisting Narrative,” 678, 679. 58. Salpeter, “Raphael Soyer,” 58; Breuning, “Art in New York,” 22. 59. Goodrich, Raphael Soyer, 84. 60. Cortissoz, “American Life Art Exhibition”; Genauer, “Realism Versus Expressionism,” n.p. 61. Morsell, “Whitney Museum,” 3. 62. “U.S. Scene,” 26. 63. Soyer, “Second Whitney Biennial,” 7. 64. Kwait [Schapiro], “John Reed Club.” 65. Ibid. 66. Schapiro, “Populist Realism,” 55. 67. Hemingway, Artists on the Left, 72. 68. I. Wilson, Specters of Democracy, 104. 69. E. C. Sherburne, “A Century of American Genre,” Boston Christian Science Monitor, in “Publicity (clippings),” American Genre, Box 3, Folder 6; Johns, American Genre Painting, 120. 70. Lloyd Goodrich, “Selection Notes and Research, 1935,” American Genre, Box 2, Folder 57. 71. Morsell, “Whitney Museum,” 3; Goodrich, “Note on Advertising Art,” 338. 72. Goodrich, American Genre, 8–9. 73. Lubin, Picturing a Nation, 159–204; Masten, “ ‘Shake Hands?’ ”; Cowdrey, “Lilly Martin Spencer”; Fagg, “Doris Lee’s Senses of Humor,” 65–66. 74. Evelyn S. Brown to Mrs. Betty Johnson, June 3, 1935, Box 76, American Negro Artists, Harmon Foundation, Inc., Records. 75. Francis, Making Race, 11. 76. R. Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children, 1–13. 77. Quoted in A. Morris, Censored Paintings, 66. 78. J. Weinberg, Speaking for Vice, 37–39. See also Katz, “Hide/Seek,” 32. 79. On Cadmus, see Gardner, “Mastering the Old Masters”; “Mr. Cadmus’ Painting Makes Him Famous Overnight,” American Weekly clipping in Juliana Force, Scrapbook of Works Progress

Administration, 1933–1934, Whitney Museum of American Art, Juliana Force Papers. 80. H. Williams, “Life in America,” 78; Coates, “Art Galleries: Life in America,” 72; Siple, “Art in America,” 83; Wehle, introduction to Life in America, xv. 81. Johns, American Genre Painting, 205n4; H. Williams, Mirror to the American Past, 8. 82. “Museum Class Exhibition Regular Meeting,” January 19, 1939, Box 101, History and Correspondence, New England Genre. 83. Henry R. Hope to Paul Sachs, March 7, 1939, Box 101, History and Correspondence, New England Genre. 84. “Item: Feb 16, 1939 Newspaper Add [sic],” Box 101, History and Correspondence, New England Genre. 85. Museum Class Exhibition Executive Committee Meeting, February 9, 1939, and “List of titles,” Box 101, History and Correspondence, New England Genre. 86. M. Brown, introduction to New England Genre, 5–6. 87. Ibid., 20–21. 88. “Museum Class Exhibition Regular Meeting,” January 19, 1939, Box 101, History and Correspondence, New England Genre. 89. Davis, “Abstract Painting Today,” 125–26; Brenner, “Revolution in Art,” 268; Davis, “What About Modern Art and Democracy?,” 16. 90. Pollock, Girl with the Gallery, 112. 91. Halpert, Contemporary American Genre, n.p. 92. Breuning, “Art in New York,” 23. 93. Shaykin, Edith Halpert, 123–26. 94. Lowe, “Artistic Attitude,” 23. 95. Jewell, “Pinning Down Our Elusive Genre,” X9. 96. Royal Cortissoz, “American Genre”; “That Abused Word: Genre,” unattributed newspaper clipping, dated November 15, 1939, Box 55, Downtown Gallery Records. 97. Lowe, “Artistic Attitude,” 23. 98. Mumford, “Miniatures and Heirlooms,” 96–97.

Chapter 5 1. Rodman, Portrait of the Artist, 78. The Sunday Paintings were made between 1938 and 1940, but exact dates within that range are difficult to establish. 2. D. Shapiro, Social Realism, 14. 3. For this explanation, see Pohl, Ben Shahn with Ben Shahn’s Writings, 60; Ellis, “Ben Shahn’s Sunday Paintings,” 19; Ben Shahn to Julien Levy June 5, 1940, Julien Levy Papers. 4. Diego Rivera, foreword to The Mooney Case, Downtown Gallery May 2–May 20, 1933, exh. cat., Box E, Stephen Lee Taller Ben Shahn Archive. 5. Soby, Ben Shahn, 4.

( 210 )  Notes to Pages 141–163

6. Ben Shahn to Julien Levy, June 5, 1940; Soby, Ben Shahn, 4. 7. Anon, “The Pretty Maid Milking Her Cow,” in O’Connor, Irish Com-​All-​Ye’s, 58. 8. D. Shapiro, Social Realism, 14. 9. Greenfeld, Ben Shahn, 113–14; H. Phillips, oral history interview with Ben Shahn. 10. Morsell, “Whitney Museum,” 3. 11. “Artists from Entire U.S. Exhibit Here in Show,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin (October 21, 1939), Box 31, “Clippings 1936–45,” Ben Shahn Papers.

12. Coates, “Art Galleries: Slight Letup,” 59; Soby, Ben Shahn, 12. 13. See Linden, Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals, 68–75; Greenfeld, Ben Shahn, 152. 14. Morse, Ben Shahn, 62. 15. Wehle, introduction to Life in America, xxv. 16. Soby, Ben Shahn, 11–12. 17. Rodman, Portrait of the Artist, 75–76. 18. Oliver Larkin to Ben Shahn, December 23, 1951, “Letters, 1929–1990,” Box 16, Ben Shahn Papers. 19. Larkin, Art and Life in America, 214; Wallach, “Oliver Larkin’s ‘Art and Life.’ ” 20. Pohl, Ben Shahn: New Deal Artist. 21. Greenberg, “Review of an Exhibition of Ben Shahn,” 2:174. 22. “Coming to the Point.” 23. Johns, American Genre Painting, 29. 24. Ibid., 29. 25. Katzman, “Source Matters,” 19. 26. Text begins “In Warren Ohio . . .” and appears undated and unattributed under “Writings by Others, Not Shahn-​Related, 1935–1966,” Box 28, Ben Shahn Papers. 27. “In Warren Ohio,” 4–5. 28. Charlot, “Ben Shahn,” 634. 29. Katzman, “Politics of Media,” 106. 30. On Shahn’s 1938 Ohio photographs, see Raeburn, Ben Shahn’s American Scene. 31. Rodman, Portrait of the Artist, 78. 32. “Artist Paints for ‘Causes,’ Eschewing Commercial Work,” Box 31, “Clippings 1936–45,” Ben Shahn Papers. 33. Quoted in Rodman, Portrait of the Artist, 77. 34. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown in Transition, 246; Moran, Reading the Everyday, 8. 35. H. Phillips, oral history interview with Ben Shahn; quoted in Pohl, Ben Shahn with Ben Shahn’s Writing, 115. 36. Shahn, Shape of Content, 45. 37. Pohl, Ben Shahn: New Deal Artist; Chevlowe et al., Common Man, Mythic Vision; Katzman, Drawing on the Left. 38. Wheelwright, “Remington and Winslow Homer,” 611. On Wheelwright and Hound and Horn, see Wald, Revolutionary Imagination, 98. 39. Wheelwright, “Remington and Winslow Homer,” 631. 40. N. Rockwell, “Commonplace,” 11; Rodman, Portrait of the Artist, 25; Morse, Ben Shahn, 61. 41. Ben Shahn to Julien Levy, June 5, 1940. 42. Information given to Dorothy Miller by Ben Shahn, October 20, 1949, Museum of Modern Art, Ben Shahn Artist Files. 43. Shahn, Shape of Content, 40. 44. Andrews, Killing for Coal, 125. 45. Spirn, Daring to Look, 11.

46. Webster, “Ben Shahn and the Master Medium.” 47. J. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 4. 48. Ibid., 6; J. Scott, “High Modernist Social Engineering,” 24, 25. 49. J. Scott, Weapons of the Weak, xvi. 50. Carter, Figuring the New Deal, 242. 51. Rosskam, Roosevelt, New Jersey, 41. On Kahn and Jersey Homesteads, see Goldhagen, Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism, 15–16; on New Deal community building and housing, see Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 461–63. 52. Van Herck, “ ‘Only Where Comfort Ends,’ ” 123, 124. 53. Rosskam, Roosevelt, New Jersey, 42, 41. 54. Shahn, Shape of Content, 40. 55. M. Brown, Jacob Lawrence, 10. 56. Transcript of Jacob Lawrence radio interview with Randy Goodman, May 23, 1943, Artist Notebooks, Downtown Gallery Records, ellipses in original. 57. Quoted from Art Front in Marquardt, “American Artists School,” 17. See Willis, “Schomburg Collection,” 19. 58. Stewart, “Women in the Works,” 56; Hills, Painting Harlem Modern, 4, 57 (italics added). 59. Hughes, “Ballad of the Landlord,” 402. 60. E. Franklin Frazer, quoted in Osofsky, “Decade of Urban Tragedy,” 342. 61. Quoted in Hills, Painting Harlem Modern, 145. 62. Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” 141. 63. The term “domestic colonialism” found currency in Robert L. Allen’s Black Awakening (1970) but originated earlier. See Calderón-​Zaks, “Domestic Colonialism.” 64. Louchheim, “Lawrence,” 15; Elizabeth Catlett, “Art with a Message,” quoted in Hills, “Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series,” 141. 65. Quoted in Gates, “New Negroes, Migration, and Cultural Exchange,” 21. 66. Bernier, Characters of Blood, 331. 67. Ibid., 341. 68. Hughes, “Song to a Negro Wash-​Woman,” 41; Woodson, “Negro Washerwoman,” 270, 269. 69. Larkin, Art and Life in America, 214. 70. Wilkerson, Warmth of Other Suns, 11. 71. J. Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 33–36; Bauer and Bauer, “Day to Day Resistance,” 388, 390; Kelley, Race Rebels, 25. 72. Dollard, Caste and Class, 302. 73. McCausland, “Jacob Lawrence,” 154 . 74. Jacob Lawrence to Edith Halpert, undated, Box 24, Downtown Gallery Records. 75. Louchheim, “Lawrence,” 16; Saarinen, Jacob Lawrence, 9 . On Lawrence’s painting in this later

Notes to Pages 163–191  ( 211 )

period, see Powell, “Harmonizer of Chaos,” 147–63; Hills, “Jacob Lawrence’s Paintings.” 76. Quoted as epigraph to Leach, I See You. 77. Porter, Modern Negro Art, 141. 78. Greenhill, “View from Outside,” 79. 79. Downtown Gallery, Lawrence Catalogue, May 6, 1943, Box 24, Artist Files: Jacob Lawrence, Downtown Gallery records. 80. Downtown Gallery Press Release, May 6, 1943, and Lawrence Exhibition catalogue, Box 24, Artist Files: Jacob Lawrence, Downtown Gallery Records. 81. Transcript of Randy Goodman radio interview with Jacob Lawrence, May 23, 1943, Box 24, Artist Files: Jacob Lawrence, Downtown Gallery Records.

Conclusion 1. Sharrer, “Artist’s Statement,” 62. 2. Miller, “Foreword,” 7, 8. 3. Ibid., 7. 4. Wolfe, “Vicious, Tender, Meticulous,” 56–69. 5. Truettner, “Nature and the Native Tradition,” 149. 6. Yeats, “Work of John Sloan,” 21. 7. W. Benjamin, “Review of Sternberger’s Panorama,” 161–62. 8. Museum of Modern Art, “Honoré Sharrer.”

( 212 )  Notes to Pages 191–204

82. Nesbett and DuBois, Jacob Lawrence, 70. 83. Scandura, Down in the Dumps, 125. 84. Powell quoted in Hills, Painting Harlem Modern, 177. 85. McCausland, “Jacob Lawrence,” 154. 86. Marshall, Corridor. 87. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 25. 88. Morse, Ben Shahn, 133. 89. Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, 80; Griffin, “Who Set You Flowin?,” 10. 90. “Painter of Protest,” 96, 99. On misreadings of this painting, see Pohl, Ben Shahn: New Deal Artist, 40–50. 91. Saarinen, Jacob Lawrence, 3, 9.

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Index Italicized page references indicate illustrations. Endnotes are referenced with “n” followed by the endnote number. abstract expressionism, 200–202 abstraction, 3–4, 15, 36–38, 122, 139–40, 154–55, 183, 190, 200–202 Addams, Jane, 40, 84–85 advertising and American Genre, 147 Aunt Jemima, 115, 117 bicycle craze in, 109–10 Campbell’s Soup, 28, 94 Cream of Wheat, 115–16 Edison, 105, 109–13, 115 Fisk Tires, 104, 113 art of Green, Elizabeth Shippen, 50–52 human interest in, 105–7 Ivory Soap, 50–52 in mass-​market magazines, 89–91 Pears Soap, 94 Piso’s for Coughs and Colds, 103–5 Pratt and Lambert, 116–17 publications about, 103, 105, 106, 110, 111 art of Rockwell, Norman, 91, 91, 105–17 Royal Tailors, 106 Sun-​Maid, 110–13, 115 Advertising and Selling, 105, 110 African Americans experience of everyday life, 4, 114, 178, 181 genre paintings of, 116–17, 144, 145–48 genre paintings by, 149, 151, 155, 189, 190 heroism, 183–84 history of, 179, 187, 203 and patronage, 128–30 persecution of, 88, 149 stereotypes of, 23–24, 92, 115–18, 191 See also Harlem; Johnson, Malvin Gray; Lawrence, Jacob agrarian labor, 130, 137, 171 Alger, Horatio, 30, 114 Alexander, John White, 52 The Favorite Corner, 49 Alston, Charles, 179–82 Altman, Benjamin, 77 American Artists School, 179

American Folk Art Gallery, 152 American genre painting antebellum, 1, 8, 11, 92–93, 100, 125, 131–36, 145–48, 165–66, 202 canon of, 121–22, 124, 135–36 historiography of American, 13–14, 121–23, 152 patronage of, 121–22, 124–31, 137–38 revival of, 3, 7, 13–15, 19–25, 121–58, 160, 164–65, 176, 178, 197, 199–203 See also genre painting American Scene, 123, 125–6, 138 Anderson, Benedict, 195 Anderson, Sherwood, 124 Andrews, Thomas, 174 Aptheker, Herbert, 187 Armory Show, 17, 22, 28, 38 Art and Progress, 37, 39, 43, 121 Art Directors Club, 105 Annual of Advertising Art, 105, 147 Artists’ Union, 149 Arts, the, 121, 123–28 Art Students League, 123, 127 Ashbery, John, 204 Ashcan School as genre painters, 5, 14, 23–24, 137–38 and Myers, Jerome, 18, 25–27 as modern painters, 14, 64 and ugliness, 6–7, 24, 61 and whiteness, 12 Astor, John Jacob, 58 Astor Library, 57–58, 61–62 Atlantic City, 178 Atlantic Monthly, 29 Bacon, Peggy, 127 Balzac, Honoré de, 56 Barbizon School, 60 Bard, James Hudson River Steamboat “Alida,” 124 Barker, Virgil, 123–24 Barnard, Seymour “Woman’s Place–A Nursery Rhyme,” 71 Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 132–34, Barrell, Charles Wisner, 56–57, 60 Barton, Bruce, 105 Bauer, Raymond and Alice, 187

Baury, Louis “Message of Bohemia, The,” 78 “Message of Proletaire, The,” 28–30, 40 Baxandall, Michael, 34–35 Bearden, Romare, 204 Beat movement, 196 Behne, Adolph, 176 Behrman, Ethel Knapp, 65 Bellows, George Forty-​Two Kids, 4–7, 5 as genre painter, 4–7, 137 memorial exhibition, 123 Bennington Banner, 119, 157 Benjamin, S. G. W., 19–20, 22 Benjamin, Walter, 11 critique of genre painting, 4, 203 Benson, Frank W., 31, 39 Benton, Thomas Hart, 3, 138, 143, 148, 154 Cradling Wheat, 130 Crapshooters, 144 Lord Is My Shepherd, The, 126–27, 130, 142, 144 Berenson, Bernard, 119 Berman, Avis, 181 Bernier, Celeste-​Marie, 184 Bernstein, Mrs. 73 Bhabha, Homi, 181, 191 Biddle, George, 131 Bingham, George Caleb, 93, 132–37, 139, 165 Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, 132–33, 133, 135–36, 151 Jolly Flatboatmen, The, 135 Shooting for the Beef, 135 Bishop, Isabel, 128, 143–44, 147 Club, The, 141 Blanc, Charles, 80 Bloch, Herman, 64 Blythe, David Gilmore, 135, 136 bohemians, 76, 78, 86 Boime, Albert, 117 Bok, Edward, 92–93, 103, 106 Bonnard, Pierre, 76 Bookman, 28 Borch, Gerard ter, 22, 43, 45, 78, 80 Boston, 35, 125 Boston School, 42–43 as genre painters, 6, 24–25, and Green, Elizabeth Shippen, 49–52 Sloan, John, dislike of, 25, 52–53, 59 and Vermeer, Johannes, 31–33 Boston Sunday Herald, 31 Bourne, Randolph, 29 Bower, Collier, Dr., 73–74 Braquemond, Pierre, 36 Brenner, Anita, 123, 154 Breton, Jules, 59

( 226 )  Index

Breuning, Margaret, 141 Brewer, E. V. From Sunrise to Twilight, 115–16, 191 Briggs, Clare, 103 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 134 Brooks, Van Wyck “On Creating a Usable Past,” 123–24 Brown, Alice “Day Off, A,” 47–48 “Discovery, The,” 44–45 Brown, Evelyn S., 149 Brown, John George, 13–14, 136, 154 Jolly Lot, A, 24 American Farmer, 21 as antiquated, 20–23 Dress Parade, 99 Heels over Head, 40, 99 Myers, Jerome, likened to, 25–26 Paddy, 40–41, 97 Thrilling Moment, A, 100 types in art of, 18, 25–26, 29–30, 95–97, 96, 101, 104 Brown, Milton American Painting, 14 on Myers, Jerome, 26 New England Genre, 153–54 Bruce, Edward, 131 Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder, 31, 125, 148, 165 Bryson, Norman, 10 Burchfield, Charles, 124, 138, 140 Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 58, 60, 62, 77, 151 Burns, Sarah, 30 Burroughs, Alan, 127 and Arts, the, 123 on Luce, Molly, 125–26 Limners and Likenesses, 13, 158 Cadmus, Paul, 149–51 and Public Works of Art Project, 131, 138 The Fleet’s In!, 149–50 Shore Leave, 149–50 Caffin, Charles Art for Life’s Sake, 42 as critic, 19, 38, 39 on genre painting, 35–36, 38 on illustration, 93–94, 118 on Brown, John George, 23, 95 misogyny of, 46, 49 on Sloan, John, 56 on Tarbell, Edmund, 31, 37–38, 39, 42, 44, 49, 52 Cahill, Holger, 132, 161 Calkins, Earnest Elmo Advertising Man, The, 103 on Rockwell, Norman, 103, 105–6, 109 Calo, Mary Ann, 129 Campbell, E. Simms, 130

Carnegie Institute, 5, 152 Carter, Warren, 175 Catlett, Elizabeth, 129, 151, 181, 204 I Am the Negro Woman, 181 Certeau, Michel de, 11, 72, 80, 86 Cézanne, Paul, 58–59 Channing, Grace Ellery, 44–45 Charlot, Jean, 169, 171 Chase, William Merritt, 148 Chenoweth, Joseph, 106 Chicago, 84 Chicago Defender, 187 Childe Hassam, Frederick, 24 Christy, Howard Chandler, 93 Cikovsky, Nicolai, 154–55 Civil War, American, 125, 165, 171 Civil Works Administration, 170 Clark, T. J., 58–60 Cleveland Herald, 22–23 Coates, Robert on Life in America, 151 on Shahn, Ben, 163 Codman, Catherine, 35 Cohen, Octavus Roy, 115 Cohn, Jan, 91–92, 101 Cold War, 158, 165, 170–71, 201–2 Cole, Thomas, 202 College Art Association international genre exhibition, 149, 151–52 Collier’s, 69, 71, 81 Congress of Industrial Organizations, 166–67 convergence culture, 112–13 Corcoran Gallery Public Works of Art Project exhibition, 130, 149 Cortissoz, Royal, 38 on American Genre, 142 on Contemporary American Genre, 156 on Benton, Thomas Hart, 142 on Bingham, George Caleb, 134 definition of genre painting, 9, 156 on Dutch genre painting, 61 on Glackens, William, 138 on Hopper, Edward ,139 on Tarbell, Edmund, 31 Cosmopolitan, 92 Coughlin, John A., 97, 100 Country Gentleman, 104, 108 Cowdery, Mary Bartlett, 148 Cox, Kenyon, 38, 62 on Tarbell, Edmund, 31–34 on Dutch genre painting, 58, 60–61 Craftsman, 56, 60 Craig, Frank “Barre Was Making Himself the Attraction of the Hour,” 44–45

Craven, Thomas, 123 Crite, Allan Rohan, 129–30 Croly, Herbert, 42 Crouch-​Hazlett, Ida, 65 Crynkle, Nym, 23, 95–96 Currier and Ives, 3, 123, 125, 127, 136, 138, 147, 148 Currin, John, 204 Curry, John Steuart, 138 Mississippi Noah, 148 Curtis, Cyrus, 103 Curtis, Natalie, 60–61 Curtis Publishing, 108, 113, 115, 147 cute, 18, 27–30, 43, 92, 101–2 Darling, Jay Norwood “Ding,” 103 Davis, Stuart, 3, 143, 157 Artist in Search of a Model, 154–55 Dayton, Grace, 28, 94 Degas, Edgar Interior, 141 Dehn, Adolf Up in Harlem, 148 Delphic Gallery, 149 Denis, Maurice, 58–59, 62–63 Denning, Michael, 122 Dewing, Thomas Wilmer, 49 Dickens, Charles, 56 Dickstein, Morris, 122 Dimock, Edith, 27–28 documentary, 132, 135–37, 139, 152, 169, 174–75, 177, 192 Dollard, John Caste and Class, 187 domestic colonialism, 181 domestic labor Addams, Jane, on, 84–85 in Dutch genre painting, 62 Green, Elizabeth Shippen, and, 47–52 Lawrence, Jacob, and, 178, 180, 183–85 Sloan, Dolly, and, 58, 70–76 politics of, 65–66 Progressivism and, 81–82, 88 Rockwell, Norman, and, 108–9 Sloan, John, and, 55, 57, 58, 64–71, 78–81, 88 resistance to, 86 Dou, Gerrit, 76–78 Self-​Portrait, 77 Douglas, Aaron, 180 Spirits Rising, 184 Dow, Arthur Wesley, 34 Downtown Gallery, 203 American Negro Art, 189 Contemporary American Genre, 13, 123, 154–56 Migration of the Negro, The, 189 Drick, Gertrude, 86 Driggs, Elsie, 128

Index  ( 227 )

DuBois, William Haiti, 179 DuBois Shaw, Gwendolyn, 88 Duchamp, Marcel, 86 Duranty, Louis-​Edmond, 141 Dutch genre painting, 1, 3, 11, 24, 89, 111, 124, 153 collective expression in, 22, 100–101 and colonialism, 88 domestic labor in, 62 fijnschilder, 76 interiors, 30–37, 43, 61, 180 local iconographies in, 92–93 at Metropolitan Museum of Art, 58, 61, 77, 88 niche compositions in, 76–80 patronage of, 8, 22, 95, 110, 127 Sloan, John, and, 53, 58, 60–62, 77, 86–88 Tarbell, Edmund, and, 18, 148 See also de Hooch, Pieter; Dou, Gerrit; genre painting, Leyster, Judith; Steen, Jan; Vermeer, Johannes Dutch Republic, 3, 11 bourgeois selfhood in, 87 progressive “mania” for, 31, 42, 61, 88 Dwight, Mabel, 128 Eakins, Thomas, 123, 131, 134, 135, 136 Swimming Hole, The, 9 Eastman, Max, 66 Easton, PA, 178 Einson Litho Inc., 105 Emerson, Edith, 119 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 134–35 Encyclopaedia Britanica, 8, 10 Esquire, 141 Evans, Walker, 136, 174 Evergood, Philip, 138, 145, 160, 179 everyday life advertising and, 104, 106, 112 agency in, 183–85 African American experience of, 4, 114, 178, 181 banality of, 139, 160, 171–2, 195–96 boredom in, 118, 145, 167–70 change in, 100, 144 complexity of, 82–85, 195 disaffection with, 196 genre painting and, 2–4, 22, 24, 34, 36, 41, 55, 108, 136, 139, 153, 204 in Great Depression, 9 improvisation in 82, 177, 181 magazines and, 8, 89, 91 material qualities of, 47–49, 55, 80 multiplicity of, 151, 159 nostalgic visions of, 1, 4, 142 as normative, 122, 148–49 New Deal and, 122, 151 pleasures of, 1, 4, 143, 181–82

( 228 )  Index

politics of, 4, 53, 57, 67, 83, 86, 145, 151, 156, 166, 169, 173, 177 and progressivism, 38, 85–86 repetition in, 102, 118, 130, 143, 184 resistance in, 86, 173–77, 187 theories of, 10–12, 71–72, 86 See also agrarian labor; domestic labor Faison, S. Lane, Jr., 9, 90 Falter, John, 1 fan correspondence, 113–14 fan fiction, 114 Federal Arts Project, 128, 203 Federal Theatre Project, 179 Fenollosa, Ernest, 34 feminism early twentieth-​century, 65–67, 80 Greenwich Village, 81 in Harper’s Weekly, 81–82 second-​wave, 65, 72 Fenway Court, 33 Fielding, Henry, 57 Joseph Andrews, 76 First World War, 52, 92, 102, 183, 203 Fischer, Anton Otto Cheapest Commodity on the Market, The, 66–67 Fisher, Harrison, 93–94 Fogg Museum New England Genre, 9, 13, 152–54 folk art, 123–24, 134, 152, 200 Force, Juliana, 127–28, 131 Forsythe, Clyde, 107 Fortune “. . . and the migrants kept coming,” 195 Fourteenth Street School, 138, 143 Francis, Jacqueline, 129, 149 Franits, Wayne, 76–77, 92 Frazier, E. Franklin, 180 Frederick, Christine, 106–7, 111 Freud, Sigmund, 141 Fromentin, Eugène, 22, 29 Fry, Roger, 38 Fuller, Meta Warrick, 128 Gaboriau, Émile, 74–75 Gallienne, Richard Le, 50 Gardner, Isabella Stewart, 33 Garvey, Ellen Gruber, 109–10 Gates, Henry Louis, 183 Gaul, Gilbert, 21 Genauer, Emily, 139, 142, 145 genre painting anecdote in, 19, 24, 38, 131, 139–40, 164, as antiquated, 2, 17–18 critical discourse of, 10–11 cross-​generational theme in, 100, 104, 112

definitions of, 4–9, 24, 153, 155–56, 165, 202–4 detail in, 72, 76, 80, 82 and everyday life, 2, 12 familiarity of, 1, 8, 21–22, 89–90, 104, 118 as historical record, 24, 107–8, 124, 132, 135–37, 151–52, 179, 184 humor in, 2–3, 8–9, 52, 56, 67, 90, 100, 106, 122–23, 128, 136, 165–66, 191 and illustration, 2–3, 9, 13–14, 43–46, 90–93, 121, 141, 203 and language, 38, 43, 63, 88, 89, 166 and modernism, 35–38, 87, 140–41, 154 and modernity, 137, 164 niche compositions in, 76–77, 80, 82 and nostalgia, 1, 4, 14, 30, 36, 90, 137, 142 and politics, 4, 52, 141–45, 153, 164, 166 story in, 1, 15, 100–101, 122, 139–41, 193 See also American genre painting, Dutch genre painting genre theory, 8–9 Georgia, 181 Giard, Luce, 11, 80–81, 84, 86 Gibson, Charles Dana, 93, 107 Gibson Girl, 93, 107 Gilded Age, 132, 136, 138 Gillmore, Inez Haynes, 65 Glackens, William, 24–25, 137–38 Gloucester, MA, 67, 86 Godey’s Lady’s Book, 136 Goldthwaite, Anne, 128, 155 Good Housekeeping, 50 Goodrich, Lloyd and Arts, the, 123 as curator of American Genre, 13, 136–39, 142 on Benton, Thomas Hart, 126 on Homer, Winslow, 123–24, 134 and Public Works of Art Project, 131, 148, 151 on Rockwell, Norman, 8–9, 105–6, 147 Gould, J. J., 115–16 Gramsci, Antonio, 101 Great Depression, 9, 120, 122, 138–39, 142–45, 160, 163, 170, 172–73 Great Migration, 178, 183–85, 188–89, 196, 203 Green, Elizabeth Shippen, 89 advertising art of, 50–52, 94 and Boston School, 49–52 domestic labor in the art of, 47–52 as genre painter, 2, 15, 88 exclusion from period criticism of, 46 interiors in art of, 46–50 Ivory Soap advertisement, 50–52, 51 Library, The, 46, 49–50, plate 4 and magazines, 18–19, 45, 49–52 Mistress of the House, The, 46–50, 99 and series, 50, 99 Sewing Room, The, 46–47, 49–50

Greenbelt, MD, 174 Greenberg, Clement, 201 on Ashcan School, 14 on Rockwell, Norman, 90, 119 on Shahn, Ben, 165 on Vermeer, Johannes, 36 Greenhill, Jennifer, 191 Gregg, Frederick James, 93 Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 196 Guggenheim Foundation, 128–29, 163, 174 Harding, Warren G., 102 Harlem Renaissance, 128, 188 Hale, Philip, 31–33 Hall, Stuart, 89 Halpern, Richard, 113–14 Halpert, Edith Gregor, 154–55, 189–90 Halpert, Samuel, 155 Hals, Frans, 45, 60–61 Hamilton, James H., 40 Hammershøi, Vilhelm, 36 Hampton University, 148 Hapgood, Norman, 81–82, 85–86 Harleston, Edwin, 129–30 Harlem, 148, 159, 178–84, 189–96, 203 Harlem Renaissance, 128–29, 180, 188 Harmon Foundation, 121, 128, 149 Harper’s Monthly, 18, 40, 89, 121 and Green, Elizabeth Shippen, 45–50, 99 Tarbell, Edmund, and, 37, 39, 42, 44–45 Harper’s Weekly feminism in, 81–82 Homer, Winslow, in, 66, 165 Progressivism in, 81–82, 85–86 Sloan, John, and, 57, 78–79, 81–85, 85, 88 wood engravings from, 136, 147 Yeats, John Butler, article for, 63 Harvard, 9, 134, 170 Hayden, Palmer, 129 hegemony, 89–90, 101, 114–15, 118–19, 202–3 Hemingway, Andrew, 124, 144 Henri, Linda, 73 Henri, Marjorie Organ, 78 Henri, Robert, 5, 25, 56, 59, 62, 73–76, 105, 127 Henry, E. L., 13, 17, 21, 124, 131, 135, 136, 148 Sharpening the Saw, 145 Henry, O., 21, 106 Hills, Patricia, 23, 64–65, 180 Higgins, Eugene, 60 history painting, 8, 134, 145, 180, 183–84 Hogarth, William, 56, 57, 58, 151, 178, 202 Sloan, John, likened to, 56, 61, 67 Hollander, Martha, 78–80 Homer, Winslow, 152 at American Genre, 135–36 in the Arts, 123–24

Index  ( 229 )

Homer, Winslow (continued) Bell Time, 66 as genre painter, 6, 20 Four Boys Bathing, 9–10 Milking Time, 106 at MOMA, 122, 132–34 Old Mill (The Morning Bell), 66 and Shahn, Ben, 165, 171–72 Snap the Whip, 30 Veteran in a New Field, 171 Hooch, Pieter de, 22, 31, 61, 110 Interior of a Dutch House, 36 Hound and Horn, 171 housework. See domestic labor Hope, Henry, R., 9 Hopkins, Mary Alden, 69 Hopper, Edward, 3, 123–24, 156, 201 Cape Cod Morning, 139 as genre painter, 15, 153 at MOMA, 140 Office at Night, 139 and Rockwell, Norman, 139 Room in New York, 139–41, 140 on Sloan, John, 73 Hopper, Josephine Nivison, 139 Hovenden, Thomas Aint That Ripe, 138 Breaking Home Ties, 23 Sunday Morning, 117 Howard, W. Stanton, 49 Hudson-​Fulton exhibition, 58, 61, 77, 88 Hudson, Henry, 61 Hudson River School, 201 Hughes, Langston “Ballad of the Landlord,” 180 Not Without Laughter, 184 “Song to a Negro Wash-​Woman, A,” 184 Hull House, 40, 84–85 Huneker, James as critic, 19, 38 on Brown, John George, 21 “Fabulous East Side, The,” 28 on Myers, Jerome, 29 on Tarbell, Edmund, 31, 34, 43–44 Hunt, William Morris Bathers, The, 9 Hutchins, Will, 20, 33 illustration at American Genre, 137, 146–47 exhibitions of, 105–6 and genre painting, 2–3, 9, 13–14, 43–46, 90–93, 121, 141, 203 golden age of, 101 for Harper’s Monthly, 45–46

( 230 )  Index

as historical record, 107–8 for Masses, the, 66–67 potbellied stoves in, 191 for Punch, 78, 81 for Saturday Evening Post, 7–8, 91–96 and series, 100 and stereotypes, 118–19 storytelling in, 105–6, See also Caffin, Charles; Green, Elizabeth Shippen: Rockwell, Norman; Sloan, John impressionism, 4, 14 and genre painting, 21–22, 24–25, 37, 46, 76 Sloan, John, and, 2, 53, 56, 61 Tarbell, Edmund, and, 18, 31, 34, 42 Independent, 25, 38–40 “Futility of American Art, The,” 41–42 influence, 34–35 interiors, 176 as gendered setting, 49–50 Green, Elizabeth Shippen, and, 18, 46–52 Lawrence, Jacob, and, 178, 180–81, 187, 189, 191 modern, 36–37, 141, 156 Sloan, John, and, 55, 78–80, 122–23 Tarbell, Edmund, and, 18, 31–35 See also Dutch genre painting; Green, Elizabeth Shippen; Sloan, John; Tarbell, Edmund C. Janis, Elsie, 106 Jacksonian democracy, 135, 136, 138, 202, 204 Jamot, Paul, 140 Japanese art, 34 James, Henry, 33, 35 Jazz Age, 138 Jenkins, Henry, 112–13 Jersey Homesteads, 162, 169, 173–77 Jewell, Edward Alden on antebellum genre painting, 136 on Contemporary American Genre, 155–56 on Sloan, John, 57, 137 John Reed Club, 143–45 Social Viewpoint in Art, The, 144, 154 Johns, Elizabeth American Genre Painting, 13, 92–93, 95, 166 Johnson, Eastman, 6, 14, 135 at American Genre, 136–37 as antiquated, 13, 25 formalist qualities, 35–36 Old Stage Coach, The, 5, 19–24, 20, 27, 29, 63 Old Kentucky Home, 23 and Shahn, Ben, 164 Johnson, John G., 60 Johnson, Malvin Gray, 12, 129–31, 151 and Public Works of Art Project, 131, 148 Thinning Corn, 130, 148, plate 11 Johnson, William H., 129

Jones, Lois Mailou, 129 Juley, Peter, 156 Julien Levy Gallery, 161–62 Kahn, Louis sketch for Jersey Homesteads, 176 Kaneko, Josephine Conger, 65 Kastner, Alfred, 176 Katzman, Laura, 167, 169 Keene, Charles, 57, 78, 81 Kelly, Mary Post-​Partum Document, 201 Kelley, Robin D. G., 187 Kinkade, Thomas, 204 Kirstein, Lincoln, 34 Kitch, Carolyn, 94, 101 Kuniyoshi, Yasuo, 155 Lachaise, Gaston, 134–35 Ladies Home Journal, 50, 92, 103 landscape, 4, 131, 134, 174 in American art history, 14–15, 201–2 as category term, 6, 121 Lawrence, Jacob, and, 183 in Life in America, 152 Luce, Molly, and, 125 modernist, 38 Shahn, Ben, and, 160–62 Sloan, John, and, 67 Lange, Dorothea Filipinos Cutting Lettuce, 130 Larkin, Oliver, Art and Life in America, 13, 158, 165, 184 Lawrence, Jacob, 3–4, 151, 157–58, 199–200 and abstraction, 181, 183, 190–91 use of captions (see Lawrence, Jacob: use of titles) Christmas, 182 and documentary photography, 192–93 domestic labor, 178, 184–85 and Downtown Gallery, 189–90 Family, A, 189–92, plate 16 Frederick Douglass, 183 as genre painter, 14, 129, 145, 178, 180, 183–86, 189–91, 195, 197 and the Great Migration, 178 Halloween Sand Bags, 182 Harlem, 159, 178–84, 189, 192–95, 203 Harlem Series, 178, 184, 192–95; as domestic interiors, 189–91, 193–94; at Downtown Gallery, 192–93; as series, 192–93; “They live in old and dirty tenement houses,” 193–94 Harriet and the Promised Land, 184 Harriet Tubman, 183–84 humor, 191, 196 Ice Peddlers, 182

Interior, 183 interiors, 178, 180–81, 183 John Brown, 192 and Life in America, 186 The Migration Series, 130, 155: domestic interiors (in panels 10 and 25), 187–88 (panel 25, plate 15), in panel 47, 183, 187–88; domestic labor (in panel 57), 184–85; exhibition and sale of, 188–90; forms of painting (in panels 7, 9, 13 and 44), 183; as genre painting, 183, (in panels 20, 26 and 30), 185–87, 186; and Harlem Series, 189–90; and history of migration, 183–85; at MOMA, 188–90; panel 53, 180; as still life (panel 44), 183, 187; title of, 178 and nostalgia, 183 and politics, 181, 190, 196–97 Presenting Jacob Lawrence in an Exhibition of Painting, 179 Rain No. 1, 178–83, 179, 189 and series, 178, 180, 183, 192–95, 203 and Shahn, Ben, 3–4, 159, 185–86, 190, 192, 195–96 and social realism, 178–79 and South, the, 178, 180, 183–90, 193, 195 use of titles, 3, 159, 178, 180, 187, 189, 192–93, 196 Toussaint L’Ouverture, 183 and unhomely, 181, 183 Layton Art Gallery, 22 Le Corbusier, 176 Lee, Doris, 125, 151, 201 Thanksgiving, 148 Lefebvre, Henri, 11, 71–72, 196 Left, Old and New, 196 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 38 Levy, Julien, 161–62, 172 Lewis, Lena Morrow, 65, 70 Leyda, Jay, 192 Leyendecker, J. C., 94, 104 and Brown, John George, 99–100 Children Playing Circus, 97–98 cover, Saturday Evening Post, April 17, 1920, 115 illustration style of, 100 Skinny Dipping Boys, 6–9 Soapbox Racer, 97–98 Leyster, Judith Young Lady Holding a Lute with a Music Score on Her Lap in a Candlelit Interior, A, 46–47 Life, 28, 69, 105, 196 Lillienthal, David, 175 Lippmann, Walter Public Opinion, 94, 118–19 Literary Digest “To Revive the Art of Every-​Day Life,” 19–21, 25 Rockwell, Norman, cover for, 108–10, 113, 118–19

Index  ( 231 )

Little Steel Strike, 166–69, 171 Lobel, Michael, 64–65 Locke, Alain Negro Art: Past and Present, 155, 189 Look, 118 Lorentz, Pare Plow That Broke the Plains, The, 174 Lorimer, George Horace, 91–93, 101, 115, 118 Louchheim, Aline, 181, 190–91, 196 Lowe, Jeannette, 155, 156 Lublin, C. Owen, 25 Luce, Molly, 3, 127–28, 151 Salvage, 125 Suburbia, 125, 127 Winter Sports, 125 Zoo, The, 127, 138 Luks, George, 24–25 Mary Ellis, 26 in Phillips Collection, 39 Lynd, Robert and Helen Middletown in Transition, 170 Macbeth Gallery Eight, The, 25 MacIver, Loren, 199 MacLellan, Charles A., 91, 100, 102 No Swimming Here, 7–8 Boy Pushing Baby Carriage, 97–98 Washing Dishes, 97–98 Homework, 97–98 Manet, Édouard, 14, 24, 36, 56 Marin, John Bryant Square, 155 Marsh, Reginald, 138, 142, 144, 150 East Tenth Street Jungle, 141 Marxism, 11, 71–72, 101, 143, 177 Masses, 57, 65–67, 70–71 and Harper’s Weekly, 81 Sloan, Dolly, and, 70 Sloan, John, and, 65–66, 70, 71 “Women’s Number” (1911), 65–66 Masters of Advertising Copy, 105, 106, 111 Mather, Frank Jewett, 87 as critic, 19–20, 38, 39 on Winslow Homer, 134 on illustration, 45 on Jerome Myers, 24–26, 40–41 misogyny of, 46 on Sloan, John, 53, 56 “Status of Genre Painting,” 13, 33, 121: decline of genre painting, 20–21; Dutch genre painting, 24, 124: and illustration, 45–46, 107; impressionism and genre painting, 24–25, 36; intimism and genre painting, 76; revival of genre painting, 24–25, 41, 55–56 on Tarbell, Edmund, 24–25, 43

( 232 )  Index

“To Revive the Art of Everyday Life,” 19–21 McBride, Henry, 139 McCausland, Elizabeth on Bingham, George Caleb, 135 and Lawrence, Jacob, 190, 192 McCutcheon John T., 103 McMein, Neysa, 93–94, 102 Mechlin, Leila editor of Art and Progress, 39 on Tarbell, Edmund, 38, 42 Midwest, 12, 122, 126 Millais, John Everett Child’s World, A, 94 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 121 Altman bequest, 77 American Stories, 14 Bingham, George Caleb, acquisition, 131–33, 135–36 Hudson-​Fulton exhibition, 58, 61, 77, 88 Lawrence, Jacob, and, 183, 186 Life in America, 151–52, 155, 156, 156, 164, 166, 171, 186, 202 Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin Metsu, Gabriël, 22, 45, 80 migration, 18, 25, 72, 143 See also Great Migration Miller, Dorothy, 172, 199–200 Miller, Kenneth Hayes, 150 Millet, Jean François, 59–60, 62 Gleaners, The, 60 modernism, 17, at Armory Show, 17, 22, 28, 38 and Ashcan School, 14 architectural, 176 Armory Show, 17, 22, 28, 38 French, 59 and genre painting, 9, 19, 24, 35–39, 53, 87, 122, 154–55, 201 and Lawrence, Jacob, 181 and Myers, Jerome, 42 and Sloan, John, 56 and Tarbell, Edmund, 42 See also impressionism; Museum of Modern Art; postimpressionism modernization, 3, 11–12, 20, 38–40, 83, 90, 141, 159, 171, 173–76, 188 Monet, Claude, 24, 36, 56 Montross Gallery, 31 Mooney, Tom, 160–62, 162, 169 Moore, George, 57 Modern Painting, 22, 78, 81, 100 Moore, Guernsey, 91 Moretti, Franco, 99 Morgan, Arthur E., 175 Morris, Wright, 119 Morrison, Toni, 191

Morsell, Mary on Myers, Jerome, 138 on American Genre, 142–43, 146, 163 Motherwell, Robert, 200 Motley, Archibald, Jr., 129 Mount, William Sidney, 2–4, 6–7, 13–14, 136–37, 139, 148 Bargaining for a Horse, 166 Coming to a Point, 165–66 farmers in art of, 93, 135, 136, 141 Power of Music, The, 145–46, 191 Mumford, Lewis, 157 on Benton, Thomas Hart, 126–27 on Bingham, George Caleb, 134 Munsey’s, 92 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 36 School, 31, 130 Museum of Modern Art, 131–36, 172, 200 American Folk Art, 124, 161 Ben Shahn, 161–62, 166, 199–200 Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh, 132 Cubism and Abstract Art, 132 Edward Hopper: Retrospective Exhibition, 140 Fourteen Americans, 199–200 Homer, Ryder, Eakins, 122, 131–32, 134 George Caleb Bingham, 133–36 Natural Paradise, The, 202 Paintings by Jacob Lawrence, 188–90, 199 Myers, Jerome, 2–3, at American Genre, 137–38 Artist in Manhattan, 25 Band Concert Night, 39 Corner Mart, 29 cute in work of, 27 Dutch identity of, 30 as genre painter, 15, 17–19, 56, 137–38 Girls, The, 36 and modernism, 36, 38 in Phillips Collection, 39 sentiment in work of, 25–28, 35, 36, 42 and Sloan, John, 2, 28, 53, 60 and slum neighborhoods, 25–30, 39–40, 53 Street Carousel, 19, 25–29, plate 2 Street Shrine, 137 in Survey “Graphic” issue, 40–41 Tambourine, The, 26–27, 39 types in art of, 18, 25–30 Nation, 20, 123 National Academy of Design, 21, 41 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 149 National Arts Club, 105 nationalism, 123–24, 134, 146, 151–53, 202 New Deal, 122, 130, 138, 159, 170, 172–77, 201, 204 New Jersey, 166, 170

New York Call, 64–65 New York City advertising types, 106 art outside, 123–24, 135, 164 art world, 135, 149, 156, 189–90, Ashcan School painting of, 5, 24–25, 57 Bronx Post Office, 164 Brooklyn, 162 commercial galleries in, 137 “discovery” of, 61, 88 East River, 4–6 genre painting exhibited in, 20, 77, 128, 131–33, 163–64, 183 Greenwich Village, 73, 81, 83, 86–87, 119 Lower East Side, 2, 19, 26–31, 39–40, 175 modernity of, 17, 72, 72, 81, 82–83, 161 Public Library (135th Street), 179, 189 World’s Fair, 1939, 164 University Settlement of, 39–40 New Yorker, 151, 163, 199, 204 New York Evening Post, 20 New York Herald, 166 New York Sun, 67 New York Times, 40, 134, 136 New York Tribune, 102, 107 Ngai, Sianne, 27–28 normative naturalism, 42, 90, 100, 114, 130, 144 (see also realism: received) nostalgia, 176 and Arts, the, 124, 137 and genre painting, 1, 4, 14, 30, 36, 90, 137, 142 and Great Depression, 122 and Great Migration, 183 and Myers, Jerome, 35–36, 53 and Rockwell, Norman, 1–2, 90, 183, 204 Oakley, Violet, 48 Ohmann, Richard, 92, 101 Olds, Elizabeth, 128 O’Keefe, Georgia Front of Ranchos Church, NM., 155 O’Neill, Rose, 28 Orpen, William, 36 Ostade, Adriaen van and Isaac van, 45 Pach, Walter, 57 Pankhurst, Christabel, 71 Parce, Lida, 65 Parker, Charles Addison, 111 Parker, Cushman, 106 Paris genre painting in, 141 modernism in, 59, 132, 138 post-​war modernity of, 72, 81, 196 pastiche, 35, 204 Paterson strike, 70

Index  ( 233 )

Paxton, William MacGregor, 33, 153 Pène du Bois, Guy, 27 Pennell, Joseph, 105 Pickford, Mary, 106 Philadelphia, 59, 73, 84, 163 Philadelphia Press, 88 Phillips, Duncan on Myers, Jerome 26–27, 31 Memorial Gallery, 39 Phillips Collection, 36, 189 Pickens, Alton, 199–200 Pippen, Horace, 129, 155, 204 Pissarro, Camille Two Young Peasant Women, 58–60, 59 Pollock, Jackson, 201–2 Pope, Arthur, 134 Popular Science, 112 Porter, James A., 129, 191 postimpressionism, 38, 58–59, 76, 128 potbellied stove, 189, 191 Powell, Adam Clayton, Sr., 181 Powell, Richard, 193 “Pretty Maid Milking Her Cow, The,” 162 Princeton, 134 Progressive Era. See progressivism progressivism in advertising, 112 and domestic labor, 57, 65, 81–82, 88 Domestic Relations Courts, 85 and Dutch Republic, 31, 42, 61, 88 and everyday life, 85–86 and genre painting, 2, 38–42, 46, 201 and magazines, 39–41, 46, 65, 81, 92, 103 and Myers, Jerome, 18, 28–29, 38–41 and New Deal, 174–75 politics of, 12 and private sphere, 85 and Sloan, John, 81–82, 88 and Tarbell, Edmund, 18, 42, 53 and urban reform, 28, 39–40, 72 propaganda, 3, 64, 71, 119, 145–46 Provincetown, MA, 111 Public Works of Art Project, 122, 124, 128, 130–31, 170, 173 Punch, 78, 81 puddler, 160, 177 Quinn, John, 28 Rabelais, François, 57 Ranney, William, 146 Read, Helen Appleton, 123, 131 on Bingham, George Caleb, 134–35 realism Ashcan School, 4–7, 14, 18, 25, 57

( 234 )  Index

received, 3–5 6, 14, 154 (see also normative naturalism) and Rockwell, Norman, 6, 105 Sharrer, Honoré D., and, 199 Whitney Studio Club and, 128 See also social realism Reality, 201 “Red Rose Girls,” 48–49. See Green, Elizabeth Shippen; Oakley, Violet; Smith, Jessie Wilcox Reed, Anna, 149 Refregier, Anton, 3, 179 as genre painter, 15 Park Bench, The, 144–45, 160, plate 12 Rincon Annex Post Office mural, 145 regionalist painting, 122–24, 128, 138 Rembrandt van Rijn, 30–31, 60–61 Repin, Ilya, 90 Resettlement Administration, 130, 162–63, 173–77 Riis, Jacob, 25, 40 Riley, James Whitcomb “Old Swimmin’-Hole, The,” 2, 5 Rivera, Diego, 161 Robinson, Robert, 91, 93, 95, 100, 102, 104 Robinson, Theodore, Girl Aiming Gun, 138 Rockwell, Abigail, 110 Rockwell, Norman and advertising, 91, 91, 105–17 And Every Lad May Be Aladdin, 109–11, plate 9 After the Prom, 90 Banjo Player, The, 116–17 Boy in a Dining Car, 118 (Boy with a) Baby Carriage, 97–101, 98, 102, 104, 114 But You’ll Have Light at the Touch of a Finger, 110 childhood of, 8 “Commonplace,” 113, 172 cover, Literary Digest, January 29, 1921, 108–10, 118–19, plate 8 cover, Saturday Evening Post, January 29, 1921, 108–9 cover, Saturday Evening Post, September 29, 1929, 114 cultural elevation of, 91, 119, 201 domestic labor in art of, 108–9, 140 early career of, 107–9, 111 Edison advertisements, 105, 109–13, 115 fans of, 113–14 and First World War, 102 Freedom from Fear, 118–20, 157, 187, 203, plate 10 Freedom from Want, 190, 193 Freedom of Worship, 118, 120 Four Freedoms, 118–20 Fruit of the Vine, 110–11 as genre painter, 15, 90–91, 102, 121, 201 and Hopper, Edward, 139

humor in art of, 105–6 Market Day Special, 112 My Adventures as an Illustrator, 118 New Kids in the Neighborhood, 118 Norman Rockwell Museum, 203 “No Swimming,” 8, 114 Piso’s for Coughs and Colds advertisement, 103–5, 104 Pratt and Lambert advertisements, 116–17 Problem We All Live With, The, 118 and realism, 6, 105 Salesman in a Swimming Hole, 1–4, 89, 114, plate 1 and Saturday Evening Post, 1, 4, 7, 89–91, 100, 102–3, 108–9, 115, 118 Saying Grace, 90 and Second World War, 118–20 and series, 110–13 and Shahn, Ben, 172 and Sharrer, Honoré D., 204 Shuffleton’s Barbershop, 191 small towns in art of, 102–3, 114 as social historian, 107–8 status of, 89–91 storytelling in art of, 105–6, 113–14 Sun-​Maid advertisements, 110–13, 115 and Tarbell, Edmund, 111 and Vermeer, Johannes, 1, 90, 110–11 and whiteness, 12, 114–18 Rodman, Selden, 160–61, 164–65, 171 Rogers, John, 3, 153, 154 Rogers, Will, 106 Rohland, Caroline Speare, 148 Roth, Henry, Call It Sleep, 194 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 12, 173, 204 Roosevelt, Theodore, 12, 72 Rorer, Sarah Tyson, 112 Rosenwald Fund, 128, 130, 183, 203 Rosskam, Edwin, 176 Rothstein, Arthur Scene at the New Jersey Homesteads Cooperative, Near Hightstown, New Jersey, 177 Rowlandson, Thomas, 57 Rusk, Fern Helen, 132 Russell Sage Foundation, 40 Ryder, Albert Pinkham, 132 Sacco and Vanzetti, 153, 160, 169 Sandburg, Carl, 135 Sarg, Tony, 97, 100 Saturday Evening Post, 176, 202 and American Genre, 9, 147 cover types of, 91–102, 108–09, 112 First World War covers of, 102 and Green, Elizabeth Shippen, 18, 50 history of, 89–92

illustrators (not Rockwell) for, 7–8, 91–95, 97–102 representation of race, 114, 118 Rockwell, Norman and: covers for, 90, 98–103, 107–09, 113, 118, 120; and Jacob Lawrence, 190; nostalgia of, 1, 4; and Post illustrators, 7–8, 97–101; and Ben Shahn, 172 Schaeffer, Mead, 1 Schmidt, Katharine, 128 Schnakenberg, Henry, 124–25 Schapiro, Meyer, 143–44 on Benton, Thomas Hart, 144, 154 Schuyler, George, 115 Scribner’s, 39 Scribner’s Sons, Charles, 74–75 Scott, James C. 174–75, 187 Scotts Run, WV, 169 Second World War, 72, 118–20, 156–58, 190, 201–3 sentiment, 176 and genre painting, 2, 4, 9, 22–24, 95, 106, 142, 148, 156 and Myers, Jerome, 18, 25, 28–30, 35, 36, 39–44, 53 series and advertising, 105, 110, 115 Catlett, Elizabeth, and, 181 and genres, 10 Green, Elizabeth Shippen, and, 18, 50, 99 Lawrence, Jacob, and, 3, 159, 178, 180, 183, 192–95, 203 Rockwell, Norman, and, 110–13 Shahn, Ben, 145, 159–63, 174 Seven Arts, 64 Shahn, Ben, 157–58, 199–200 at American Genre, 144–45, 160, 163 archive, 163, 167–68 “Biography of a Painting, The,” 170 use of captions (see Shahn, Ben: use of titles) Dreyfus Affair, The, 160 as genre painter, 3–4, 15, 159–60, 163–66, 172–73, 177, 197 Handball, 172 and Homer, Winslow, 165, 171–72 and Jersey Homesteads, 162, 169, 173–77 Jersey Homesteads mural, 169 Jury Box–Mooney–Billings Case, The, 145 and Lawrence, Jacob, 3–4, 159, 185–86, 190, 192, 195–96 and Life in America, 164, 166, 171 Man by the Railroad, 160–61 Meaning of Social Security, The, 165, 171, 172–73, 175 Mooney Case, The, 160–61 murals of, 3, 145, 160–65, 169, 171, 172, 175 at the Museum of Modern Art, 161–62, 166, 171 and the New Deal, 11–12, 162–63, 170, 172–77 and New Jersey, 166, 170

Index  ( 235 )

Shahn, Ben (continued) Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, The, 160 photograph titles, 169, 174 photography of, 160, 163, 166–75, 196–97 and politics, 164–65, 172–73, 175, 196–97 Pretty Girl Milking a Cow, 162, 197 and Public Works of Art Project, 131, 170, 173 Puddlers’ Sunday, 160–62, 166, 168–69, 171, 196, plate 13 and Lawrence, Jacob, 3–4, 159, 185–86, 190, 192, 195–96 Resources of America, 164, 175 and RA/FSA photography, 163, 167, 169, 173–74, 176–77, 196 Riker’s Island Penitentiary mural, 164 and Rockwell, Norman, 172 Scotts Run, West Virginia, 169 and series, 145, 160, 162–63, 174 and small towns, 12 Spring, 197 strikes, 166–69, 175 steel strike photographs (untitled), 161–68, 167, 168, 171 steelworkers, 160, 164, 165–67, 177 Sunday Football, 162, 163, 169 Sunday Painting, 160–62, 161, 166, 171–72, 197 Sunday Paintings, 161–66, 169–71, 175, 178 use of titles, 3, 159–62, 169, 172, 174 Unemployed, 169 and universal experience, 170–71, 173 Vacant Lot, 163, 172, plate 14 and waiting, 167, 169–70, 175 Waiting for Relief Check, Scotts Run, West Virginia, 196 We Are the People, 174 Willis Island Bridge, 172 and work, 160 W.P.A. Sunday, 162, 169, 172 Shahn, Bernarda Bryson, 162 Shapiro, David, 160, 162 Sharrer, Honoré D., 199–201 Country Fair, The, 199 In the Parlor, 199 Tribute to the American Working People, 199–200, 204 Shaver, J. R., 28–30, 40 When the Slot Machine Stuck, 29–30 Shaw, Gwendolyn DuBois, 88 Simmel, Georg, 11 Simon, Lucien, 39 Simons, Algie Martin, 70 Simons, May Wood, 65, 69, 70, 80 Siple, Ella, 151 Sloan, Dolly depictions of, 70–71, 75–76 and domestic labor, 58, 70–76

( 236 )  Index

health issues of, 73 and socialism, 70, 74 and suffrage Sloan, Helen Farr, 64 Sloan, John, 2–3, 159 apartments of, 72, 83–84 “Aw, Susie, be them dishes washed?” 69 American identity of, 123 on bohemianism, 76–78, 86 diary of, 57, 73–75, 76–77, 83–84 dislike of Boston School, Green, Smith, and Pyle, 25, 52–53, 59 Dolly Sewing, 75–76 and Sloan, Dolly, 70–76 domestic labor in the art of, 55, 57, 58, 64–71, 78–81, 88, 203 and Dutch genre tradition, 61–62, 77, 86–88 Easter Eve, 56 as genre painter, 5–6, 14–15, 24–25, 53, 55–57, 63–64, 86–87, 121–22, 137–38, 202 Hairdresser’s Window, 63 and Harper’s Weekly, 78, 81–85, 85, 88 Herself, 76 and Hogarth, William 56, 61, 67 humor in art of, 67, 78 and illustration, 53, 57, 69–70, 73–74, 78–82, 85–86 and impressionism, 53, 56, 61 interiors, 55, 78–80, 122–23 In Her Place, 78–88, 194, plate 7 and Keene, Charles, 78 lived experience of, 72–76, 83–84 and Masses, the, 65–66, 70, 71 McSorley’s Back Room, 63 Memory, 73, 75 “Miss Hallroom. . . ,” 78–79 and modernity, 11 and Myers, Jerome, 2, 28, 53, 60 niche compositions in art of, 77–80, 86–87 in Phillips Collection, 39 Play on the Rocks, 67 and politics, 58, 64–65 and Public Works of Art Project, 131 racism of, 88 and realism, 7 Red Kimono on the Roof, 67–68 Scrubwomen, Astor Library, 58–63, 76, plate 5 She’s Got the Point, 70 Six O’Clock, Winter, 83 on slum neighborhoods, 28 Spring Planting, Greenwich Village, 86–87 and suffrage, 69–71 as teacher, 73, 123, 127 on urban reform, 28, 86 and utilities, 12, 82–84, 86 and voyeurism, 55, 80

Window on the Street, A, 77–78 Woman with Etching Tray, 73, 75 Woman’s Work, A, 63–69, 76, 88, plate 6 Women’s Page, The, 82 slumming, 148 slums, 25–30, 39–40, 53, 56, 142, 180, 195 small towns, 12, 90–91, 93, 102–3, 106, 114, 122–24 Smith, Jessie Wilcox, 48–50, 53, 94, 119 Snyder, Robert, 61 Soby, James Thrall, 161–65, socialism American Socialist Party, 65 Sloan, Dolly, and, 70, 74 Sloan, John, and, 58, 64–65, 70 and suffrage, 70–71 social realism, 122, 138, 143–45, 154, 160–62, 173, 178–79, 187, 199 Social Security Act, 1935, 172 South, the, 130, 149, 155, 162, 178, 180, 183–90, 193, 195 South Carolina, 178 Soyer, Moses, 143 Soyer, Raphael, 3, 141–45, 156, 201 Furnished Room, 141 In the City Park, 141–42, 144 Intimate Interior, 141 Park Bench, 144 Spencer, Anna Garlin, 85 Spencer, Lilly Martin, 12, 13, 151 Kiss Me and You’ll Kiss the ’Lasses, 46–47, 148 Shake Hands? 148 Speyer, James, 39–40 Springfield Republican, 20 St, Augustine, FL, 190 Steen, Jan, 31, 45, 57, 58, 61, 178 drunks, 93 Easy Come, Easy Go, 63 Steinberg, Saul, 199 Stephens, Alice Barber, 93 stereotypes, 2, 12, 23–24, 93–94, 105, 115–19, 129, 146, 148, 155, 191, 204 See also types Stevens, Alfred, 33 Stieglitz, Alfred, 21–22, 38 still life, 6, 10–11, 38, 76 Stilwell-​Weber, Sarah, 97, 102 Stockbridge, MA, 203 story, 1, 15, 100–101, 105–6, 122 Stryker, Roy, 163, 167, 192 Studio, 36–37 suffrage, 65, 69–71 Survey, 40–41, 97, 99 swimming holes, 1–9, 12, 90–91, 100, 113–14, 120 Taine, Hippolyte, 57 Tallack, Douglas, 82–83

Tanner, Henry Ossawa, 12, 128–29, 148, 151 Banjo Lesson, The, 116–17 Taos, New Mexico, 86 Tarbell, Edmund C., 2, 46, 49, 148, 153 and Boston School, 6 and Dutch genre tradition, 18–19 and Green, Elizabeth Shippen, 51–52 as genre painter, 15, 56, 88, 121 Girl Crocheting, 31–33, 35 Girl Reading, 31, 34, Girls Reading, 37–38, 44, plate 3 and illustration, 43–46, 47 Josephine and Mercie, 44 and modernism, 36–38 New England Interior, 31–33, 32, 35, 43–44 Preparing for the Matinee, 33 and Rockwell, Norman, 111 and Sloan, John, 59 as teacher, 130 and Vermeer, Johannes, 31–35, 42, 43, 204 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 42 Ten, the, 24, 31, 34 tenements in Harlem, 180, 188, 193–95 housekeeping in, 67, 78–80, 81–82, 177 Lawrence, Jacob, and 159 Sloan, John, and 55, 61, 71–83 middle-​class observers of life in, 82 Teniers, David, the Elder, 31 Tennessee, 169, 175 Tennessee Valley Authority, 12, 174–75 Thoré-​Bürger, Theophile, 33 Thrasher, Leslie 100, 104 Dog in Church, 97–98 First Shave, 97–98 Patching His Pants, 97–98 Time, 126, 135 “U.S. Scene,” 138, 143 Tobey, Mark, 200 Treasury Section murals, 173 Trentmann, Frank, 72, 83 trompe l’oeil, 76 Truettner, William, 138, 201–02 Tubman, Harriet, 183–84 Turner, Nat, 187 types, 2–3 in advertising, 106–7 in art of Brown, John George, 21, 29–30, 95–97, 96, 101 codger, 92–93, 95, 97, 102, 104, 112 collective development of, 97–101 Gibson Girl, 93, 107 homey housewife, 107–9, 114 kid, 3–8, 18, 25–30, 92, 94, 97–102, 104–05, 108–9, 118–19 pretty girl, 92–94, 102, 107

Index  ( 237 )

types (continued) in magazine illustration, 7–8, 89, 91–95 in art of Myers, Jerome, 18, 25–30 racial, 129–30 racist, 12, 23–24, 114–18, 145–48, 191 salesman, 90 in art of Shahn, Ben, 163 Yankee, 93, 145–46, 165–66 See also stereotypes Ukeles, Mierle Laderman Private Performances of Personal Maintenance as Art, 201 Underwood, Clarence, 99, 100 unhomely, 181, 183, 203 University Settlement of New York, 39–40 uplift, 38–39, 92, 103 van Eyck, Jan, 204 Varian, Dorothy, 3, 128 as genre painter, 15, 123 Reading War News, 155–57, 159, 178, 187, 203 Vesey, Denmark, 187 Vermeer, Johannes, 3–4, 6–7, 14, 46, 121 Concert, The, 33, 35 at Hudson-​Fulton exhibition, 58, 61 Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, 31 and modernism, 36–37 Music Lesson, The, 33 and Rockwell, Norman, 1, 91, 110–11 and Tarbell, Edmund, 31–35, 42–43, 153, 204 Virginia, 130, 178 Vlag, Piet, 66 Voce, Robert C., 33–34 Vuillard, Edouard, 76 Wallach, Alan, 89, 131–32, Warren, OH, 166, 169 Ward, Charles Caleb, 164 Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 50 Washington, DC, 162, 172–73, 195 Watson, Forbes, 123, 127, 131 Watson, Nan, 127 Wehle, Harry B., 132–33, 151–52, 164 Wentworth, Eleanor, 65 West Virginia, 169, 175 Wiley, Hugh, 115 Wheelwright, John, 171 whiteness at American Genre, 148–52 in Arts, the, 124, and genre painting, 12, 24, 88, 129 in Saturday Evening Post, 101, 114–18 in social realism, 178 Whitman, Walt, 57, 76, 135, 165

( 238 )  Index

Whitney Biennial, 1932, 139 Whitney, Gertrude Vanderbilt, 67, 121, 127–28 Whitney Museum of American Art, 123, 127–28, 200 Abstract Painting in America, 140 American Genre: Ashcan School at, 137–38; George Caleb Bingham at, 135–36; canon– formation at, 3, 121–22, 131–32, 135–39; exclusion and inclusion at, 8–9, 42–43, 145–51; Edward Hopper at, 139–41; influence of, 123, 151–52, 154; overview of, 135–39; politics at, 141–45; Anton Refregier at, 144–45; Ben Shahn and, 144–45, 160, 163–64; Raphael Soyer at, 141–43; storytelling art at, 139–41 and Public Works of Art Project, 131, 149 Whitney Studio Club, 138, 156 Early American Art, 124 E. L. Henry, 124, 131 support for women artists, 127–28 Wilkerson, Isabel, 185 Williams, Hermann Warner, 151–52 Williams, Raymond, 13 Wilson, Ivy G., 145 Wireman, Katharine, 50, 102 Whistler, James McNeill, 36 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 30 Wolff, Janet, 127–28 Wood, Grant, 125, 138, 143 Wood, Thomas Waterman, 13, 95 Wood, T. Martin, 36–37 Woodson, Carter G., 184 Woodstock art colony, 123, 127 Woodville, Richard Caton, 136, 148 Politics in an Oysterhouse, 100, 166, 186 Old ’76 and Young ’48, 100 War News from Mexico, 145, 147, 156–57, 166, 186–87 workscape, 174–77 World’s Fair, 1893, 23 World’s Fair, 1939, 164, 202 Wright, Willard Huntington, 38 Wright, Richard, “Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” 149 Native Son, 194 Uncle Tom’s Children, 4, 114 Wyeth, N. C., 94 Yeats, John Butler, 57, 62–65, 74–75, 202 YMCA, 135th Street Presenting Jacob Lawrence in an Exhibition of Painting, 179 Young, Art, 64, 71 Zorach, Marguerite, 128 Zurier, Rebecca, 61