Wendy Jean Katz's Books

Humbug!

The Politics of Art Criticism in New York City's Penny Press

By: Wendy Jean Katz

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Humbug!

The Politics of Art Criticism in New York City's Penny Press

By: Wendy Jean Katz

One of Hyperallergic's Top Ten Art Books for 2021 Approximately 300 daily and weekly newspapers flourished in New York before the Civil War. A majority of these newspapers, even those that proclaimed independence of party, were motivated by political conviction and often local conflicts. Their editors and writers jockeyed for government office and influence. Political infighting and their related maneuvers dominated the popular press, and these political and economic agendas led in turn to exploitation of art and art exhibitions. Humbug traces the relationships, class animosities, gender biases, and racial projections that drove the terms of art criticism, from the emergence of the penny press to the Civil War. The inexpensive “penny” papers that appeared in the 1830s relied on advertising to survive. Sensational stories, satire, and breaking news were the key to selling papers on the streets. Coverage of local politicians, markets, crime, and personalities, including artists and art exhibitions, became the penny papers’ lifeblood. These cheap papers, though unquestionably part of the period’s expanding capitalist economy, offered socialists, working-class men, bohemians, and utopianists a forum in which they could propose new models for American art and society and tear down existing ones. Arguing that the politics of the antebellum press affected the meaning of American art in ways that have gone unrecognized, Humbug covers the changing politics and rhetoric of this criticism. Author Wendy Katz demonstrates how the penny press’s drive for a more egalitarian society affected the taste and values that shaped art, and how the politics of their art criticism changed under pressure from nativists, abolitionists, and expansionists. Chapters explore James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald and its attack on aristocratic monopolies on art; the penny press’s attack on the American Art-Union, an influential corporation whose Board purchased artworks from living artists, exhibited them in a free gallery, and then distributed them in an annual five-dollar lottery; exposés of the fraudulent trade in Old Masters works; and the efforts of socialists, freethinkers, and bohemians to reject the authority of the past.

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337

Publisher

Fordham Univ Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0823285405

ISBN 13

9780823285402

A True American

William Walcutt, Nativism, and Nineteenth-Century Art

By: Wendy Jean Katz

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A True American

William Walcutt, Nativism, and Nineteenth-Century Art

By: Wendy Jean Katz

This book argues that nativism, the hostility especially to Catholic immigrants that led to the organization of political parties like the Know-Nothings, affected the meaning of nineteenthcentury American art in ways that have gone unrecognized. In an era of industrialization, nativism’s erection of barriers to immigration appealed to artisans, a category that included most male artists at some stage in their careers. But as importantly, its patriotic message about the nature of the American republic also overlapped with widely shared convictions about the necessity of democratic reform. Movements directed toward improving the human condition, including anti-slavery and temperance, often consigned Catholicism, along with monarchies and slavery, to a repressive past, not the republican American future. To demonstrate the impact of this political effort by humanitarian reformers and nativists to define a Protestant character for the country, this book tracks the work and practice of artist William Walcutt. Though he is little known today, in his own time his efforts as a painter, illustrator and sculptor were acclaimed as masterly, and his art is worth reconsidering in its own right. But this book examines him as a case study of an artist whose economic and personal ties to artisanal print culture and cultural nationalists ensured that he was surrounded by and contributed to anti-Catholic publications and organizations. Walcutt was not anti immigrant himself, nor a member of a nativist party, but his kin, friends, and patrons publicly expressed warnings about Catholic and foreign political influence. And that has implications for better-known nineteenth-century historical and narrative art. Precisely because Walcutt’s profile and milieu were so typical for artists in this period, this book is able to demonstrate how central this supposedly fringe movement was to viewers and makers of American art.

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178

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Fordham University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0823298582

ISBN 13

9780823298587

Humbug!

The Politics of Art Criticism in New York City's Penny Press

By: Wendy Jean Katz

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Humbug!

The Politics of Art Criticism in New York City's Penny Press

By: Wendy Jean Katz

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Page Count

337

Publisher

Fordham Univ Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0823285405

ISBN 13

9780823285402

Regionalism and Reform

Art and Class Formation in Antebellum Cincinnati

By: Wendy Jean Katz

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Regionalism and Reform

Art and Class Formation in Antebellum Cincinnati

By: Wendy Jean Katz

Before the Civil War, Cincinnati, Ohio, was considered the most important art center of what was then regarded as the U.S. West. In this book, Wendy Jean Katz explores the role of artists and art associations in moral and social reform in antebellum Cincinnati. Its leaders claimed for it the status of the future geographic and economic center of the nation, and supported art as part of their effort to forge a regional vision of morals and manners attractive enough to persuade their adoption nationally."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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292

Publisher

Ohio State University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0814209068

ISBN 13

9780814209066

Citizen Spectator

Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America

By: Wendy Bellion

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Citizen Spectator

Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America

By: Wendy Bellion

In this richly illustrated study, the first book-length exploration of illusionistic art in the early United States, Wendy Bellion investigates Americans' experiences with material forms of visual deception and argues that encounters with illusory art shaped their understanding of knowledge, representation, and subjectivity between 1790 and 1825. Focusing on the work of the well-known Peale family and their Philadelphia Museum, as well as other Philadelphians, Bellion explores the range of illusions encountered in public spaces, from trompe l'oeil paintings and drawings at art exhibitions to ephemeral displays of phantasmagoria, "Invisible Ladies," and other spectacles of deception. Bellion reconstructs the elite and vernacular sites where such art and objects appeared and argues that early national exhibitions doubled as spaces of citizen formation. Within a post-Revolutionary culture troubled by the social and political consequences of deception, keen perception signified able citizenship. Setting illusions into dialogue with Enlightenment cultures of science, print, politics, and the senses, Citizen Spectator demonstrates that pictorial and optical illusions functioned to cultivate but also to confound discernment. Bellion reveals the equivocal nature of illusion during the early republic, mapping its changing forms and functions, and uncovers surprising links between early American art, culture, and citizenship.

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Page Count

384

Publisher

UNC Press Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

080783890X

ISBN 13

9780807838907

Birnbaum's Walt Disney World for Kids by Kids

By: Wendy Lefkon

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Birnbaum's Walt Disney World for Kids by Kids

By: Wendy Lefkon

Children eight to fourteen evaluate the attractions at Walt Disney World.

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Page Count

160

Publisher

Hyperion Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0786880414

ISBN 13

9780786880416

Regionalism and Reform

Art and Class Formation in Antebellum Cincinnati

By: Wendy Jean Katz

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Regionalism and Reform

Art and Class Formation in Antebellum Cincinnati

By: Wendy Jean Katz

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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Page Count

292

Publisher

Ohio State University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0814209068

ISBN 13

9780814209066

A True American

William Walcutt, Nativism, and Nineteenth-Century Art

By: Wendy Jean Katz

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A True American

William Walcutt, Nativism, and Nineteenth-Century Art

By: Wendy Jean Katz

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

178

Publisher

Fordham University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0823298582

ISBN 13

9780823298587

Book's by Wendy Jean Katz

Humbug!

Humbug!

A True American

A True American

Humbug!

Humbug!

Regionalism and Reform

Regionalism and Reform

Citizen Spectator

Citizen Spectator

Birnbaum's Walt Disney World for Kids by Kids

Birnbaum's Walt Disney World for Kids by Kids

Regionalism and Reform

Regionalism and Reform

A True American

A True American

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