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Art and the Heroic Spirit in the 1880s

By DAVID C. HUNTINGTON

Volume III, No. 1-2
Spring, 1980/Fall, 1980

The object of this paper is to explore some hypotheses of the heroic spirit in the art of the 1800s. In those years there is an unmistakable sense of the challenge to the artists of new problems, new circumstances, new alternatives. In contrast with the aesthetic irresolution and disorientation of the 1870s there emerges with the new decade of sense of clarified artistic goals. The architect, the sculptor, the painter each vigorously observes objective law. Rationally rules with stern authority. The force of gravity dominates the expression of structure. The theory of evolution determines the perception of the history of design. The nature of materials dictates the technique of production. The discipline of style regulates form. The artist looks for objective principles as he grapples with the realities of the physical world. A sense of common purposes and monumental tasks to be performed linked the architect, the sculptor and the painter to one another. For perhaps the first time in a generation greatness was in the air.

No such atmosphere had been known in the years immediately following the Civil War, years hardly distinguished for noble aspiration. While there had prior to 1865 been a prevailing sensibility which was capable of embodying the heroic spirit in plastic form, that sensibility was one premised on values and beliefs destined to vanish with surprising rapidly after Appomattox. The art of the pre-Civil War generation was well-adapted to the stress on individual identity and subjective experience, for it was attuned to the manifold concerns of the spirit, both personal and public, that characterized the romantic period. But the art which answered so well the need of mid-century. America was quite unsuited to the radically altered spiritual climate of the American that was emerging around the year 1880. The marked emphasis upon the spiritual, exemplified in the romantic works of the painters Cole and Bingham, the sculptor Greenough and the architect Richard Upjohn was to be succeeded in the eighties by a commensurate emphasis upon the material. The heroic spirit of this decade typifies itself in the painters of Homer and Eakins, the sculptures of Gaudens, the architecture of Richardson. In the work of these later artists, each, it would appear, dealing in his own way with a similar perception of reality, we recognize a shared impulse to embody the objective rather than the subjective, the common rather than the unusual. The orientation is this-worldly and practical, rather than other-worldly and symbolic.

If there is any one key to the distinction between the artist’s approach to form of pre-Civil War and post-Civil War America, I would suggest that that key has respectively to do with the implicit conception of the relationship between form and gravity. In the earlier period the illusion is that psychology governs gravity. A spire seemingly may break free of the restraints of matter. A prophet of doom may appear to be dragged down to the nether region of the earth by the very burden of his oppressive melancholy. Movement in romantic art is conceived in terms metaphorical rather than in terms operational; the potential to exercise absolute power is held in abeyance by the spirit of self-denial; the prophet of Manifest Destiny advances resolutely into the interior of the continent; cyclonic energy erupts to effect the destruction of a wicked civilization. The poetry of romantic art is not bound to the reality of physical forces.

Quite the opposite is the poetry of post-romantic art, at least in its heroic manifestations. The laws of the material world now govern the poetry of form. Reference to “expression” in the earlier period had conventionally denoted the subjective response of the spectator. In the later period “expression,” more often than not, is identified with the artist’s means: that is, with the technical and structural means of creating the statue, the painting or building. At the same time the individuality o the artist itself becomes an integral part of the creative process. His or her temperament, as it were, is revealed in the substance and the subject of the work of art, at last in the case of the sculptor or painter. “Expression” hence comes to have more to do with the artist’s personality than with the spectator’s feelings. In the case of architecture “expression” characteristically will refer to the poetry of engineering. In the secularized world of the 1800’s “expression” becomes objectified.

Gravity in post-romantic heroic at reveals itself as absolute and inexorable law. In the art of the heroic, whether in architecture, sculpture or painting, gravity-in contrast to its illusory relatively in romantic art-becomes constant. A parallel to the physical law of gravity is the law of relationship in design that determines all relationships according to cause and effect. There is a logic to every feature. Intellect rather than feeling, dictates form. The impulse is to regulate and objectify. As the laws of gravity and rationality are constant, constant also is the sensed imperative to arrive at a uniformity in style. I use the word in the sense of the artist’s creating not in a style but with style. Style in this sense denotes a standard of integrity of design and execution, the adoption of appropriate means to given ends. Style is the proof of discipline, that discipline which is the express goal of training.

In painting Paris might teach proficiency in form, Munich, proficiency is technique. And in both centers style becomes normative as it is style that provides an external by which standards are maintained. Through indoctrination in style the student painting, of sculpture, of architecture is protected again amateurism and incompetence. Whereas in Europe its controlling influence might thwart true genius, style as a normative for Americans entering the world of art might at once restore mediocrity from failure and assist genius to success. Style was to supply the underlying discipline that would liberate our artists from their provincial isolation and draw then into the larger community of Western civilization. Ultimately, style might cosmopolitanize our painting, sculpture and architecture, and thus place u on a cultural par with Europe, preparing us in due time to equal, and perhaps even surpass, France.

In painting the exemplars of style were characteristically the leading academicians in Paris, the great teachers in Munich, and such adulated heroes of the past as the two great masters of the seventeenth century to have been resuscitated in the later nineteenth century, Velazquez and Hals. Or, to step outside the Western tradition, one might emulate such master of the Japanese print as Hokusai and Hiroshige.

In sculpture Frances clearly led, for it was there, with the restoration of naturalism in statuary, that the break from Neo-Classicism had been effected. Saint Gauden’s heroic monuments of the 1880s are ultimately indebted to developments in French sculpture which took place twenty years before, as well as to the example of the Italian sculptors of the fifteenth century whose naturalism provided a needed antidote to the artificialities of the moribund Neo-Classical that was the legacy of Canova. As were, say Velasquez and Hals to his compatriots in painting, so were Donatello and his Quattrocento contemporaries to Saint Gaudens. And, ever-present as well in the mind of his American sculptor was his informing admiration of Greek sculpture. For Saint Gaudens the reliefs of the Parthenon, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, were inexhaustible resources. At rare moments, in fact, this American genius can surprise by a fusion of unpredictable as the Michelangelesque with the Buddhist.

In architecture two alternatives in style emerge as principal models to be emulated in America. One originated in the medievalism of the nineteenth century (Viollet-le-Duc and Ruskin come to mind) Romanesque. The other alternative, one perennial in France, was the Classical embraced by the Beaux-Arts Academy. While, in the course of the 1890s the latter would come to dominate, in the 1880s it was the Romanesque that would appear ordained as the point of departure for modern American architecture.

Though of little direct bearing on painting and sculpture, another “law” does appear to have been determinative in architectural thinking, the law implicit in the theory of evolution. Historical styles with the assimilation of Darwin’s ideas, came to be viewed in the light of the story of their own development. The two styles most readily associated with the model of nature’s organisms and processes were the Romanesque and the Gothic. Both styles were studied now with regard, not to their historical association (as would have been the case in the romantic period) but with regard to their ruling design principles. Each had much to offer as exemplar, but in America circumstances would conspire to favor the Romanesque over the Gothic. The latter, for one thing, was believed to have achieved its own perfection as a style and then gone on into decline. In effect the potentials of its development had been exhausted. Though it might offer suggestions to the solution of specific contemporary problems in design, there was little, if anything, to be gained by further pursuit of it as a style system.

As a point of departure for a modern architecture the Gothic-so reasoned the late nineteenth-century mind-promised far less than did the Romanesque. This earlier style had never been allowed to run its full course. As its development had been at an early stage intercepted by the Gothic the latent potentials of the Romanesque had not been duly worked out.

Especially congenial to the impulses of the 1870s and 1880s was the semicircular arch, the ubiquitous signature of the Romanesque style. To appreciate this one must recall how the elasticity of the pointed arch of the Gothic affected the emotions of the spectator. “Expression” had run rampant over the surfaces of Richard Upjohn’s Trinity Church in New York. Richardson’s oft-quoted remark “I want QUIET!” might well have been prompted just by the very thought of that noted landmark of the romantic 1840s. In this own Trinity Church, erected in Boston in the 1870s, the semi-circular arch reigns absolute. The pointed arch in nowhere to be seen. Stable, uniform, rational and subject exactly to the expression of one times the force of gravity, the semi-circular arch is the quintessence of equilibrium. The anthropomorphic gesturing, the emotional rhetoric, of the Gothic arch have been banished, silenced. The edifice no longer assumes the form of metaphor; it assumes the form of matter. No wonder Richardson adopted the Romanesque at his prototype, and in so doing heralded an era in the history of American building.

For the post-romantic mind, nurtured in science and faith in material progress, and committed to the creation of modern American idiom the appeal of the Romanesque was, it would seem, irresistible. For a while I augured the basic of national style, a style that would be adequate to all needs: for houses, churches, libraries, railroad stations, country-clubs—even warehouses. The style promised to wed the new sense of physicality to strong communal aspirations for unity, dignity and permanence. The Romanesque answered cogently and authoritatively to a whole gamut of social imperatives. Yet, in the course of the eighties this style which swept the country from coast to coast was to be challenged by an alternative which by the century’s close would win the field: the Beaux-Arts Classical.

Actually the two competing styles had much in common, each bore the stamp of materialistic rationality and objectivity. But the medieval alternative had not enjoyed unqualified sanction in that what some admired as its “brutality” (Richardson’s own enthusiastic characterization) others deemed as “unrefined”. And what some relished as the “vitality” of the Richardsonian mode, other deplored as “eccentricity.” The Romanesque must have been too robust and hearty—too personal—ideally to suit the urban cosmopolitanism of the nineties. (The designs of Sullivan, to name the decade’s principal discipline of the great Richardson, were too unusual, too frank to escape snubbing by Academic reserve.) Suave, elegant and impersonal, the Classic was to win out over the Romanesque. The very regimen of the Beaux-Arts—sponsored style militated against eccentricity. The Classical was premised on discipline, rule, order. This, the style of regulation, was the very prescription for a society concerned with chaotic growth and the threat of anarchy. The less stabilized, less time-proven Romanesque, still in the process of development, could not come compete with a style that had been tested and refined for two and a half millennia. The Classical offered a ready disguise for mediocrity and failure it was safe. Yet the architect of genius, if willing to work within its bounds, could find due opportunity to express himself. Furthermore, the Classical exemplified “good taste.” Traditional and conservative, impersonal, objective and social in its nature, taste was an aesthetic means of exercising control over the community.

Also, the Classical, so its proponents reasoned, had been proved capable of serving the needs of widely different peoples in widely different times and places. Hence the suitability of the style to answer to the complex as each, and indeed every, past civilization. As the universally cosmopolitan style, the Classical enjoyed still further advantages over the Romanesque. While the scientifically inclined recognized the organic nature of the medieval style, the politically inclined recognized the symbolic value to an imperial United States of the style of ancient Greece and Rome, of Renaissance Italy and Baroque France, and indeed the style of the original American Republic. As dreams of Manifest Destiny reached out beyond the shores of a once virgin continent, it was the national rather than the natural that inspired out vision. This was the unmistakable message proclaimed in Chicago’s famous “White City” of 1893: the precise moment that signaled the imminent triumph of the Classical over the Romanesque.

Still another argument in behalf of the Classical, one related to its peculiar claim on “good taste, call for comment. Even from the movement’s first stirrings in Whistler’s London during the 1860s and 1870s adherents of the “art for art’s sake” dogma had been drawn to the Classical. It was not for its historical association, but for its inherent beauty that Antiquity had appealed to the rarefied sensibilities of aesthetes. By the eighties the shibboleth “art for art’s sake” was invoked by a steadily growing community of English and American critics and artists on both sides of the Atlantic. That secularist philosophy was in no small measure informed by the, to some, inescapable implications of Darwinism. As the theory of evolution raised doubts about the immortality of the soul and the promise of reward in an afterlife some means of compensation was required to help spiritually to tide the human species over the loss of certainty about its divine origin and destiny. The aesthetic sensibility was elevated as testimony to man’s distinctiveness from the beasts. Whatever the ultimate fate of the individual soul, whether in heaven, hell or oblivion, the creature in the flesh was in this earthly life undeniably endowed with an eye for beauty.

The Classical, in Antiquity more it its organic Greek than in its decorative Roman guise, and in the Renaissance, more in its Christian-imbued fifteenth century than its pagan-imbued sixteenth century guise, embodied enduring ideals of human beauty. And the standards of that beauty were rational in their basis as they represented the result of universal consensus. Hence as the rarefied aestheticism born in the London of the 1860s became vernacularized in the America of the 1880s, the Classical gained on the Romanesque. Yet this is not to say that aspects of medieval design did not appeal to those of the arts for art’s sake persuasion. The abstract design of the medieval did indeed appeal, as, of course, did the abstract design of oriental art—especially that of Japan. The abstract aspect of Romanesque design in fact exerted a double appeal: on the one hand because it was perceived as rational and organic and on the other, because it was perceived as formal and non-anthropomorphic. But the Classical, too, as it was founded on underlying mathematical relationships, would be recognized for its abstract qualities. And, here, the identity of abstract qualities with the inherent beauty of the human form was doubly compelling, for it proclaimed the uniqueness of the species.

The “humanism” of the mid-nineteenth century had had manifested itself through the habit of anthropomorphizing all things animate and inanimate. Form for the romantic eye had been instinct with human expressiveness. But the “humanism” of the later nineteenth century was formal rather than psychological in its nature, and thus was equated with the Classical whose origins resided in the mathematical analysis of the proportions of the archetypal male and female body. Objective standards, therefore, governed Classical form. Beaux-Arts Classicism at once embodied aesthetic virtues that corresponded to man’s desire to assert his spiritual nature in a materialistic world and exemplified the discipline of constant mathematical relationships authorized by universal laws.

In the more individualistic and expansive eighties analogies with organic structure and development had favored the Romanesque style. Now in the more conventional and conservative nineties this style, still in the process of evolving, labored at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the Classical. It lacked the psychic requisites of the new decade a historically certified identity—with the beauty of the human form—with rationally of the human mind. On these requisites the Classical held an exclusive claim. And to hold exclusive claim on these was to hold sway. Thus with the turn of the century the Romanesque itself had had its turn. The style of the eighties was passing into history. Yet it had served it moment historically.