The Met and the Masses in Postwar America: A Study of the Museum and Popular Art Education 9781350277274, 9781350277304, 9781350277281

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The Met and the Masses in Postwar America

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The Met and the Masses in Postwar America A Study of the Museum and Popular Art Education Mitchell B. Frank

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Mitchell B. Frank, 2023 Mitchell B. Frank has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xiv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Tjasa Krivec Cover images: Photograph from Metropolitan Seminars in Art promotional brochure. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY / Art Resource. Façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, c. 1945, gelatin sliver print, 11.1 × 14.9 cm. Copyright National Museum of American History. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-3502-7727-4 978-1-3502-7728-1 978-1-3502-7729-8

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For Laura, Charlotte, and Saul

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Contents List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments Introduction

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures: Culture and Commerce

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The Metropolitan Seminars: Middlebrow Culture

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The Met and Art Education in Postwar America

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Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer: Reproductions and Quality

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The Met, Popular Art Education, and the Problem of Abstract Art

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Appendices Notes Bibliography Index

157 167 217 235

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Illustrations Plates 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures, albums and stamps, 1955. Metropolitan Seminars in Art, 1958. The Metropolitan Miniatures Art Gallery, Series 1, 1947. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Album Art Stamps, 1941. Adventures in Art, 1941. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures. Peter Blume, The Eternal City, 1934–7 (dated 1937 on the painting). Ben Shahn, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, 1931–2. Pierre Cot, The Storm, 1880. Oscar Kokoschka, The Tempest or The Bride of the Wind [Windsbraut], 1913. Honoré Daumier, The Soup, c. 1862–5. Honoré Daumier, The Print Collector, c. 1860. Metropolitan Seminars in Art promotional envelopes. Metropolitan Seminars in Art promotional brochure. Photograph from Metropolitan Seminars in Art promotional brochure. 1950s Family Watching Television. “Color Proofs in Progression,” from Julian Soubiran, The Art and Technique of Photo-Engraving. New York: Horan Engraving Co., 1952, p. 45. Arnold Böcklin, Island of the Dead, 1880. Rembrandt, Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, 1653. Otis Kaye, Heart of the Matter, 1963. Promotional envelope for the BOMC Print of Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, 1962. Promotional brochure (recto and verso) for the BOMC Print of Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, 1962. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, 1871.

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24 Altered version of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, Metropolitan Seminars in Art Slide Program (1965). 25 David Alfaro Siqueiros, From the Dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz to the Revolution—The People in Arms, 1957. 26 William Sidney Mount, The Raffle (Raffling for the Goose), 1837.

Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6

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New York World-Telegram, January 11, 1941, p. 11. Promotional photograph for The Metropolitan Miniatures, 1947–8. Promotional Photograph for The Metropolitan Miniatures, 1947–8. Promotional brochure for The Metropolitan Miniatures, 1947. Photo from “Stamps on Kromekote,” Stet: The House Magazine for House Editors (March, 1948), no. 90, p.4. The Metropolitan Miniatures portfolios. Promotional photograph for The Metropolitan Miniatures. Promotional photograph for The Metropolitan Miniatures. John Canaday, 1965. Metropolitan Seminars in Art. Metropolitan Seminars in Art: Great Periods in Painting. Supplementary Material included with the Metropolitan Seminars in Art. John Canaday, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Art. “The Aesthetic Cop” [Theodore L. Shaw], “How the Metropolitan Museum Misteaches Art,” a leaflet published by Stuart Publications, Boston, n.d. [c. 1961]. Junior Museum plan, from Francis Henry Taylor, “Report of the Director on the Reorganization and Consolidation of the Museum’s Educational and Extension Services,” pp. 4–5. Suzuki Harunobu, Mother and Child with Bird or Poem by Fujiwara no Motozane (c. 860) from the Series Thirty-Six Poets, c. 1768.

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Preface A few years ago, my friends Zoe and Patric and their kids moved from one house to another in our neighborhood. Before they moved, Zoe was emptying her basement and trying to get rid of all that she could. She asked me if I wanted a box of her father’s old art history books. “You’re an art historian,” she told me. “I’m sure you’ll want them.” Thinking “no more old art history books,” I politely declined the offer. But behind this thought was, perhaps, also the assumption: “What value could they hold for me?” A few weeks later, I walked by Zoe and Patric’s new place. Zoe was standing on her porch surrounded by boxes and holding one out to me. “Please,” she pleaded. This time I gave in. When I got home, I discovered that the box included mostly books on Canadian art history, but I also found two Metropolitan Seminars in Art. These large-format volumes felt familiar to me with their cloth covers, glossy paper, and high-quality color reproductions of famous paintings in sleeves on the inside covers marked “TO PROTECT YOUR COLOR PRINTS—KEEP THEM IN THIS ENVELOPE.” My immediate attraction to the Seminars was sentimental. Their tactile qualities and the smell of the print took me back to my first art-history survey textbook, the second edition of H. W. Janson’s History of Art. Similar to the Seminars, Janson’s book included black-and-white illustrations in the text and separate sections of color reproductions. I also noticed that the Seminars were distributed by the Book-of-the-Month Club (BOMC). I was reminded of their colorful advertisements in Sunday newspapers with special offers to new members for multi-volume sets like Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization at unbelievably low prices. I also recognized the name of the author of the Seminars, John Canaday, who wrote Mainstreams of Modern Art, the textbook used in a course on nineteenth-century European painting I had taken as an undergraduate at McGill University. My interest in the Seminars went beyond a sentimental journey after I read the first two sentences of the text: “With this portfolio the Metropolitan Museum presents the first lesson in a systematic course of art study. The plan of the course is original.” Were these books really the first case of distance learning in the history of art? Why would the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met), an institution of high culture, collaborate with the BOMC, which catered to middlebrow taste? x

Preface

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Did these seminars, as the introduction to the first volume claimed, really “explain the explainable and leave the reader in a position to reach the ultimate conclusions on his own terms”? This chance discovery seemed an opportunity worth pursuing further. As a mid-career art historian who works mostly on German nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art and historiography, I was thinking at the time about the relevance of my work, both my teaching and research. And I began reflecting on my first reaction to Zoe’s offer: your books, my values. The Seminars posed a series of questions about middlebrow culture, taste, and self-determination that addressed some of the same matters I had been rehearsing about the work I do, about how I had come to be where I was, about the decisions I had made (or had been made for me). I began to see links between the expectations I had put on my younger self to be knowledgeable, cultured, and clever, and the way the Seminars promoted similar types of values, if in a different way. As I argue in the pages of this book, it would be easy to dismiss the Seminars as a symptom of postwar middlebrow culture, as ideological tools, as “baby food,” to use Theodor Adorno’s phrase. They certainly can be described in this way, but one thing I have discovered in researching the Seminars and two other Met/BOMC collaborative projects is that cultural artifacts, whether books, color reproductions, collectible items, works of art or museums, serve a variety of intended and unintended purposes: educational and entertaining, productive and non-productive, selfdetermining and self-regulating, imaginative and social. The chance discovery of the Seminars through the kind act of a neighbour piqued my curiosity and led me in a variety of unexpected directions.

Acknowledgments This book began with a gift from Zoe and Patric Langevin, to whom I’m especially grateful. It then continued with research at the Met. Without Met archivist Melissa Bowling, who found an abundance of material for me, this book would never have been written. Nancy Duff, supervisor of the Audio-Visual Resource Centre at Carleton University, helped me locate and photograph materials in the AVRC’s collection. Since everyone needs a place to stay when away from home, I would like to thank Jacob Wisse and Rebecca Lieberman for their warm hospitality in New York and their kind friendship. Throughout the research and writing process, I gained insights from the students at Carleton University in my seminars on museums and art education. My colleagues at Carleton and beyond often provided astute feedback. I would especially like to thank Aubrey Anable, Erin Campbell, Erika Dolphin, Ann Dymond, Chris Faulkner, Brian Foss, Birgit Hopfener, Randi Klebanoff, Barbara Leckie, Franny Nudelman, Carol Payne, Mark Phillips, Ruth Phillips, Ming Tiampo, Olivier Vallerand, and Michael Windover. A. Joan Saab, who reviewed the manuscript for Bloomsbury, made me rethink notions around visual literacy. I would also like to thank the second reviewer, Jonathan Conlin, who is completing his own book on the Met, for his collegiality and valuable observations on my manuscript. Laura Taler read the entire manuscript closely and kindly provided sensible and insightful comments. At Bloomsbury, Frances Arnold, April Peake, Yvonne Thouroude, Charlotte Askew, and, especially, Ross Fraser-Smith gracefully ushered me through the publication process. Pauline Rankin, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Carleton University, kindly provided financial support for the purchase of photos and rights. Clifton Knight helped secure copyright for Bookof-the-Month Club material. On a personal note, I could never have completed the work without the strong support of Laura Taler and the rest of my family, Bill and Angie Frank, Kim Frank, Charlotte Frank, and Saul Taler.

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Introduction

In 1948, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) went into business with the Book-of-the-Month Club (BOMC). Together, they produced The Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures (1948–57), a series of stamps and albums (Color Plate 1), and the Metropolitan Seminars in Art (1958–60), two twelve-part courses in art appreciation and art history (Color Plate 2). They also collaborated in 1962 on the distribution of a print after Rembrandt’s painting Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, which the museum had purchased a year earlier for a record price. The Met had dedicated itself to public art education since its founding in 1870, but the collaborations with the BOMC were new types of ventures for the museum. As compared to traditional work of museum education, such as the display of collections, special exhibitions, lectures, guided tours and catalogues, the Miniatures and Seminars were mail-order publications that went directly into the homes of subscribers. The “revolutionary idea” behind the Miniatures, according to its advertising brochure, was for the museum “to cease being a Mountain and become a Mahomet; to carry itself—by modern technological means now available—right into the homes of those millions of people who— because of where they live or because of lack of time—can rarely come within its portals.”1 Created with up-to-date technology for a modern audience, the Miniatures and the Seminars went well beyond introducing the public to the Met’s collections. The “simple wise idea” behind the Miniatures was to produce in the viewer “the love of great art,” while the goal of the more systematic Seminars was to provide the layperson “with enough background to evaluate paintings of all kinds with the kind of satisfying appreciation that comes with trained understanding.”2 As the promotional material suggests, the Miniatures and Seminars, with their photoengraved reproductions of works of art and accompanying texts, were intended for a growing middle class with the means to collect and the desire to be part of a greater collective. As commercial enterprises, these initiatives were hugely successful. The Miniatures reached over 120,000 homes and earned in the early 1950s over $100,000 annually for the museum. 1

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The Met and the Masses in Postwar America

The Seminars were distributed to no fewer than 350,000 families, according to BOMC founder and Chairman of the Board Harry Scherman, and had total sales in their first four years of more than $10 million.3 As forms of assisted self-education for a mass audience through distance learning, the Miniatures and Seminars raise questions museum officials continue to ask today about the social role of museums, especially in terms of their accessibility to ever more diverse audiences. What services can museums offer that are meaningful to their publics in a complex and ever-changing world? To whom is the museum making its collections accessible? How do distancelearning programs that offer ways to study and appreciate works of art avoid being rule-governed or prescriptive? How does a cultural institution reconcile for-profit ventures with not-for-profit educational goals? I became interested in the Miniatures and Seminars because they made me reflect upon these presentday concerns.4 At the same time, they told me something about cultural capital in postwar America and about tensions that could arise between an institution of high art, like the Metropolitan Museum, and a commercial enterprise, like the Book-of-the-Month Club. The Miniatures and Seminars speak to issues that continue to have currency today, but they also have markers of a particular era. In their gendered language, in their use of a specific photoengraving technology, in their traditional approach to understanding art, and in their address to an undifferentiated general public, which is assumed to be unified in values and tastes, the Miniatures and Seminars seem relics of the past, dated to a particular postwar moment of middle-class optimism with its faith in the importance of leisure activity for self-improvement and self-enrichment. They are the types of books that could have been on the fictional June Cleaver’s (or Betty Draper’s) bookshelf. They suit well the 1950s ideal of the white American family with its expectations of upward mobility in economic and social terms: living in the suburbs in a newly constructed home with a television, the latest appliances, a swing in the backyard, Dad at the BBQ, and a station wagon in the driveway. Of course, the conventional American family, with its promise of personal and emotional fulfillment for all its members, was more ideal than reality. It did not reflect the diversity of 1950s American society with its inequalities and diversity in wealth, gender, and race.“ ‘Traditional’ family life with roots deep in the past,” as historian Elaine Tyler May has convincingly demonstrated, was a creation of postwar America, a time and place when and where notions of public consensus were still relatively strong, that is, before identity politics took hold in public discourse and market segmentation became an advertiser’s dream.5 As historian George Marsden has recently

Introduction

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observed, “white male journalists and public intellectuals who commanded considerable middlebrow readership” tried to create an American “consensus” in the 1950s around the faith that America could be united on the basis of evolving shared ideals.6 These ideals, with their gendered and racial preconceptions, affected not only members of the middle classes, who promoted these values, but also those who were on the margins, who were disadvantaged by these cultural standards. As May points out: “During the postwar years, there were no groups in the United States for whom these [white middle-class] norms were irrelevant.”7 The Miniatures and Seminars reflected and contributed to these norms through means of popular art education, which was at the very core of the Met’s mandate from its founding in 1870. Unlike the more elitist Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Met positioned itself from its beginnings as a populist institution, one in which art belonged “to the people,” as “their best resource and most efficient educator.”8 In the 1940s and 1950s, the Met under director Francis Henry Taylor developed a variety of tools, not just the Miniatures and Seminars, but also radio and television programs as well as a new junior museum for children, to make the museum experience more accessible to middle-class Americans. The goal of such endeavors, as sociologist Vera Zolberg has suggested, was for all citizens to become more enlightened and “civilized,” and in turn for society as a whole to profit from “a reinforced cultural consensus particularly important in modern heterogeneous systems.”9 In studying the Met’s postwar initiatives in popular art education, I have come to see an interrelation of concerns, which cross the disciplinary boundaries of museum studies, art education, and cultural history. One important aim of this book is to bring together through case studies of the Met/BOMC collaborative projects a series of familiar topics that are not usually connected: the social role of the museum; the relation of culture to commerce; the importance of the home as a space for self-education; the role of art reproductions as civilizing agents; and the place of visual literacy in postwar American culture. The Miniatures and Seminars speak to these wide-ranging concerns, because, like other middlebrow projects, they implicate the individual in the social. According to the Met’s educational credo, articulated in 1918 and still relevant in the postwar period, “eyes that know how to see beauty and a mind that can appreciate its spirit” are “genuine assets” to the individual and “through the individual to the community, the state, and the nation.”10 In other words, what connects the varied topics I explore in this book is the belief that educated citizens contribute to the improvement of society-at-large. As Diane Ravitch wrote in her study of American educational reform in the first half of the twentieth century: “Probably

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The Met and the Masses in Postwar America

no other idea has seemed more typically American than the belief that schooling could cure society’s ills.”11 The Met, by means of the Miniatures and more so the Seminars, went about educating the public by teaching a type of visual literacy grounded in a humanist conception of art as a form of communication that functions through formal means. These projects in popular art education taught members of the public to recognize and articulate stylistic and formal properties of works of art in order to situate these works in particular contexts, whether they be the artist’s biography, socio-political frameworks, or religious perspectives. Visual literacy, in these terms, was a dual project that involved perceptual practice and verbal articulation, that is, the abilities to see formal qualities of works of art and to translate them into words. The externalization of an internal process was important, because the stated aim of the Seminars, according to the Met and BOMC, was to give the layperson “self-confidence” to understand the complexity of artistic expression and to have the strength of opinion to make informed judgments.12 By providing the general public with a common language to discuss works of art, even if individuals’ opinions differed, the Met was attempting to make art more accessible and visits to the museum more fulfilling. With this type of visual literacy, members of the general public, the Met believed, would not only visit museums more often, but also contribute more fully to democratic life. As Andrew McClellan has argued, after the Second World War, American art museums “supplemented the rhetoric of universal humanism by promoting art as the embodiment of freedom and creativity.”13 The link between art education and American values was often repeated in the postwar period, as we will see in Chapter 3, not only by museum officials and art educators, but also by champions of general education, a growing movement that not only promoted the cultivation of “the whole man,” with its gendered and racial assumptions, but also promised improved citizens, who would contribute to their local communities and to the greater society. The Met developed the Miniatures and Seminars with the intention of producing an educational service for a middle-class audience undereducated in art. Met Director Francis Taylor criticized those curators who exemplified the highbrow, “a person educated beyond his intelligence who looks down . . . upon the common man,” because these museum officials lacked “any real sense of public service.”14 He believed that experts in matters of art could indeed communicate to a broad audience in a language that was “articulate without being intentionally obscure.”15 The Miniatures and Seminars lined up well with Taylor’s view of the museum as an institution of public service. They exemplify

Introduction

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what Pierre Bourdieu called “legitimate, i.e., scholastic, popularization,” a form of education, which openly declares its pedagogical objectives and reveals “the means it uses to lower the transmission level.”16 Joan Shelley Rubin, in her rigorous treatment of the making of middlebrow culture, has eloquently articulated, in the context of literature, the task at hand in studying such projects: “to bring an awareness of the provisional nature of cultural authority, the impact of material conditions, the mediations of institutions and individuals, and the response of readers to the entire range of literary production.”17 My study of the Met’s collaborative ventures with the BOMC aligns with Rubin’s approach, but studying the visual arts differs from examining print (or musical) culture in important ways, especially in terms of the types of mediations involved. Paintings and sculptures are singular in nature (what philosopher Nelson Goodman called “autographic”) as compared to the reproducible (“allographic”) quality of books.18 Because of their nature as autographic commodities, paintings have market value (and, in certain cases, high prices), which also plays an important mediating role in their reception. Moreover, an encyclopedic art museum like the Met is a different type of mediator than middlebrow institutions like the BOMC or the Great Books Foundation for various reasons, including its administrative structure, its collecting practices, and its dedication to issues of quality and high art. The recontextualization of works of art within its walls tends to prioritize aesthetic qualities, formalist readings, and chronological and geographical categorizations, which affected the approach taken in the Miniatures and Seminars.19 Finally, works of art are often studied through reproductions, which, as discussed in Chapter 4, play an important mediating function in art appreciation and interpretation. Although the nature of the visual arts and their institutions necessarily differentiates my study of the Miniatures and Seminars from other considerations of middlebrow activities, my book also highlights “an old story in American culture,” as Rubin puts it, “the tension between autonomy and deference, individualism and community, self-expression and conformity.”20 With the Met/BOMC collaborations in popular art education, these tensions played out in questions of social capital related to visual literacy in postwar America, the world’s largest growing capitalist economy. Postwar America is often described as the golden age of capitalism: between 1945 and 1965, there was virtually no inflation, unemployment remained between 4 and 5 percent, the GNP increased by 55 percent and per capita income by 120 percent.21 Such phenomenal economic growth was, however, not experienced equally by all Americans. “Segregation, by race legally and by gender

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The Met and the Masses in Postwar America

socially was the norm,” as Robert Putnam writes, “and intolerance, though declining, was still disturbingly high.”22 As importantly, many contemporary social critics saw what was often hailed in positive terms—economic growth, corporate expansion, the enlargement of the middle classes—as factors that were contributing to an era of anxiety and insecurity. In his 1951 book White Collar: The American Middle Classes, C. Wright Mills characterized the new middle classes by their social alienation.23 William Whyte, in his contemporaneous The Organization Man, lamented the loss of individual agency in the new corporate world: “Once people liked to think, at least, that they were in control of their destinies,” but now most young people “see themselves as objects more acted upon than acting—and their future, therefore, determined as much by the system as by themselves.”24 And David Riesman, in his 1950 sociological best seller The Lonely Crowd, identified other-directedness as a chief characteristic of middleclass Americans. The other-directed person is more concerned with “being loved than esteemed,” is more interested in conformity than individuality, uses mass media in an everyday life of consumption, and spends money on education in order to display taste more directly than wealth.25 The only way for otherdirected people to become more alert to their own feelings and aspirations is for them to discover “how much needless work they do” and “that their own thoughts and their own lives are quite as interesting as other people’s.” Riesman, however, was rather pessimistic about this possibility: other-directed people can “no more assuage their loneliness in a crowd of peers than one can assuage one’s thirst by drinking sea water.”26 These social commentators were all concerned with the blind acceptance of consumer capitalism and with the corporatization not just of the economy but of every aspect of life, including culture. In 1953, journalist and social critic Dwight Macdonald famously claimed that “there seems to be a Gresham’s Law in cultural as well as monetary circulation: bad stuff drives out the good, since it is more easily understood and enjoyed.”27 For Macdonald and others, mass culture in the form of radio, film, and (especially) television, was, in Marsden’s words, “numbing the nation’s collective moral sensibilities.”28 For Hannah Arendt, in a “mass society,” such as postwar America, culture was often “consumed like consumer goods” and used “up like objects.”29 Historian and public intellectual Jacques Barzun criticized “the manipulator, like the propagandist, advertiser, or middleman,” who catered culture to the masses. Barzun’s complaint about education did not lie in American commercialism as much as in democracy itself, which produced a culture of conformity, “the abdication of judgment where judgment is called for.”30 As an example of such abdication, he later cited

Introduction

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the Metropolitan Seminars, which, like other forms of “propaganda for art” in the postwar period, had been “mobilized by technology.” You do not have to go to it; it comes to you—by the action of the mass media in print and in radio waves, by means of the long-playing disc, the film, and the inexpensive color reproduction. In addition, there is the push of the educational systems, which means not only schools, but museums, libraries, and so-called art centers. No longer static, these establishments are relentlessly active in propaganda for art. Regularly every two months I receive from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York a thick illustrated invitation to partake of their “Art Seminars in the Home.”31

While some public intellectuals took a “High Humanist” stance in the age of mass media, others embraced the possibilities of using modern means for the diffusion of knowledge about art and culture.32 Francis Taylor, the Met director from 1940 to 1955 when “the masses arrived,” as Calvin Tomkins put it in his history of the Met, was at the forefront of efforts to make the museum more accessible to the general public.33 Unlike his scholarly predecessor Herbert Eustis Winlock, an archaeologist who made his reputation as field director of Met excavations in Egypt, Taylor was a populist.34 He believed in the museum’s democratic mission to educate the nation. And he was certainly successful in opening the Met’s doors. During his tenure as director, annual attendance doubled (from 1.3 to 2.5 million), membership tripled, the museum’s endowment and its collections grew significantly, the building expanded with gallery space substantially enlarged, and a new auditorium with television broadcasting capabilities was constructed for lectures and musical concerts.35 To promote its collections and to disseminate ideas about art appreciation, the Met under Taylor developed the Miniatures and Seminars. It also looked to popular technologies, such as radio and television, to promote its collections. In 1945, when there were only approximately 10,000 televisions in American homes (the number would soar to six million by 1950), Taylor convinced the Met trustees to commission a study on how the museum could use television in its educational and extension services. Written by Lydia Bond Powel, who was a research associate in the Institute of Educational Research in Columbia University’s Teachers College and would later become the keeper of the Met’s American Wing, the report is extremely instructive for understanding the museum’s concerns about its status as an institution of high culture in popular art educational endeavors like the Miniatures and Seminars. Powel declared that the era of museums “as vast uncharted storage warehouses for works of art” is over. Today museums, as “the

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The Met and the Masses in Postwar America

guardians of the great documents of civilization,” should speak “to the many as well as to the initiated few.” (Powel was here repeating claims that had been made earlier by Taylor and others, as we will see in Chapter 3.) Television, Powel believed, could be used to correct “false impressions” of the museum developed during “incomprehensible exhausting museum tours of childhood” and to demonstrate to “the public what a great art museum really represents and how its rich resources may be used.”36 The Met could accomplish through television what it would attempt to do through the Miniatures and Seminars: to turn those bored with art into interested museum goers. And this goal was an important task, because (and here Powel again sounds like Taylor) the museum is “the keeper of visual and tangible records that illustrate the endurance of spiritual values,” which are also American values. Museums, according to Powel, must take their place alongside schools, libraries, universities, and book and magazine publishers to document and interpret “the ideals of humanism and democracy on which our country was founded.” Given this goal, the Met needed to make its collections accessible to “the largest possible number of people in the greatest possible number of ways.”37 For Powel, television was the technology to perform this task, but the Miniatures and Seminars, as we will see, functioned similarly in bringing art education conveniently into middle-class homes. Powel also made the important point, which we will see often repeated in the Met’s dealings with the BOMC, that the Met should carefully consider its status as an institute of high culture in all its dealings with the public: “The Museum has a standard of quality to uphold in its services of education and extension. Its books, periodicals, reproductions, slides and loans must represent the best of their kind.”38 When Taylor retired in 1955, the Met Board of Trustees praised his populist initiatives in similar terms of accessibility and quality. Taylor’s “unremitting efforts to bring the Museum to the people,” specifically through television and the Miniatures, never “compromised with scholarship and dignity.”39 In making museum collections accessible in the home, the Miniatures and Seminars brought together two ideological spaces, in which class, race, and gender, as reciprocating categories in identity construction, often amplify one another. In my study of the Met/BOMC collaborative projects, class, race and, especially, gender are always operative even if they are not always foregrounded. In postwar America, women were the principal daytime occupants of the home, and they were, as we will see, the majority of subscribers to the Miniatures and Seminars. Middlebrow culture, Janice Radway persuasively argues, was often associated with the feminine and effeminate in the way it was positioned as “anathema to the cause of art and to the fate of the deliberative individual.”40

Introduction

9

Stamp collecting practices, like the Miniatures, were moreover often gendered: feminine for decorative purposes and masculine for philatelic study.41 As for the museum-going public, women outnumbered men.42 The Met staff, however, was dominated by men, who were for the most part responsible for the production of the Miniatures and Seminars. Such distinctions were reinforced recently in archival photos reproduced in the catalogue for the Making the Met, 1870–2020 retrospective exhibition. In these photographs, most of the museum workers are men and most of the museum visitors are women.43 With the Met/BOMC collaborative projects, there was a similar gender divide between male producers of knowledge and female consumers. Such statements, however, are not absolute: women wrote approximately one-third of the Miniatures albums, and many of the subscribers to both the Miniatures and Seminars were men. But the statistics cannot be ignored, and they evidence a world of expert men instructing amateur women. My archival research also demonstrates this divide: most of the key players in the production of the Miniatures and Seminars were white men, whose archives have been preserved, and most of the readers were women, about whom there is demographic data and some anecdotal evidence, but little detailed information. The success of the Miniatures and Seminars was due in part to how they appealed to the gendered, white, middle-class world, which prized scholarship and dignity, education and quality—key concepts, as Powel and the Met Trustees made clear, in the Met’s attempt to extend its influence over a wide audience in postwar America. Met Editor of Publications Marshall Davidson, who oversaw the two projects from 1949 to 1961, recounted later in life that BOMC Founder and President Harry Scherman “once told me that in terms of their investment, they never had a more profitable operation” than the Miniatures and Seminars.44 This financial success was due as much to their familiarity as their modernity. While the Met and BOMC emphasized the innovative features of their home art education series, these projects in visual literacy certainly had precedents in long-distance learning and in activities developed by art unions. Originating in Europe to support contemporary art, art unions became popular in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century.45 Art unions collected an annual fee from subscribers, who received in return an annual report (an illustrated magazine in the case of the American Art Union) as well as a specially commissioned engraving by a contemporary artist. Appropriating from European art unions the concept of the fine arts “as a civilizing force,” American art unions took on the “ambitious task of cultivating taste in America” through a commercial enterprise.46 In a comparable way, the Miniatures and

10

The Met and the Masses in Postwar America

Seminars mixed commerce and culture. They similarly used a subscriptionbased system and distributed art reproductions throughout the nation in order to nurture interest in art and promote democratic values. The success of the Miniatures and Seminars was also due to the public’s familiarity and comfort with distance learning, which originated in mid nineteenth-century industrializing Europe.47 Distance learning in art education in the United States can be traced back to correspondence courses in commercial art offered by the Federal School in Minneapolis in the first quarter of the twentieth century.48 By the 1950s, colleges were offering correspondence courses in art history and art appreciation to members of the United States armed forces.49 Radio also functioned as an important medium for distance learning. From the late 1920s, radio schools of the air, which were operated by commercial broadcast networks, state universities, state departments of education, and local school boards, offered a broad range of subjects from art appreciation to science to rhythmic movement.50 NBC’s Music Appreciation Hour (1928–42), hosted by Walter Damrosch, became the most popular radio program in the United States.51 The Miniatures and Seminars were not correspondence courses per se, but they fit in well with a longer tradition of distance learning in the home. The Met’s interest in public art education in the postwar period can also be considered an important chapter in the continuing history of the social role of the museum. In recent debates, these discussions are often framed as a turn from the belief that the purpose of the museum is to disseminate knowledge about works of art to the idea that the museum should engage its communities. In the words of museum administrator Stephen Weil, the change has been “from being about something to being for somebody.” Since the early 1970s, Weil argues, museums have undergone a fundamental shift from understanding their prime responsibility as keepers of highly prized collections to the conviction that museums “exist in order to serve the public.”52 Other champions of the “reinvented” museum describe this development in terms of principles of communication: from a more traditional design, in which “the institution provides content for visitors to consume,” to a participatory model, in which “the institution supports multidirectional content experiences.”53 In these debates, the term “education” is often replaced with “experience” or “engagement.” In discussions of the reinvented museum, the traditional museum is often described as a “voice of authority” and a place of “enforced directive.” New models, meanwhile, provide “multiple viewpoints” and “interactive voices.”54 Defenders of the reinvented museum, like Weil, see the “museum as an instrument, not a cause.”55 Champions of the traditional model, like Philippe de

Introduction

11

Montebello, who served as Met Director from 1977 to 2008, tend to argue that the museum has no instrumental value whatsoever; it should not engage in social activism. For Montebello, the rhetoric around the museum as providing an educational service or helping to produce a more pluralistic society and a better global citizenry “cannot serve to strengthen public trust in museums.” Montebello unabashedly argues in the tradition of enlightenment thought that “confidence in the museum’s authority” allows the visitor “the luxury of surrendering totally to the work of art, unconcerned that political, commercial, or other such considerations will have inflected the curator’s judgments.”56 In the postwar period, when the Miniatures and Seminars were produced, museums were working under different educational and social assumptions from those of today. Many museum professionals, including postwar Met Director Taylor, saw no contradiction in understanding the museum as both a place of aesthetic contemplation and a social instrument. Both played key roles in the Met’s drive to make the museum more accessible to a broad public. This broad public, however, was to a great extent limited in the postwar period to the growing white middle classes. While accessibility today is often connected with equity, diversity, and inclusion, in the postwar period, museum populists like Taylor, as we will see in Chapter 5, stressed sameness over diversity. Building consensus based on humanist values was at the core of the Met’s projects in popular art education. Met officials, like Taylor, assumed that the concept “all” applied to everyone. But, as Elaine Heumann Gurian has recently written in the context of museums and racial equity, “all” is often used as “a cover for restating our own norms with the expectation that our standards are universal. They are not!”57 Ideological and political concerns were thus at play in how the Met under Taylor’s direction fostered the idea that its business was not simply in art as a highbrow pursuit, but in popular education as well. There was, however, no easy way out of what Met officials and members of the public alike felt to be inconsistent positions: claiming the authority of the museum, but also promoting individual agency of the visitor; separating culture from the everyday, but also introducing it into the home; keeping the museum pure of commercial concerns, but also gaining financial returns from a collaborative venture with a business partner, the BOMC, whose eye was always firmly fixed on the bottom line. The Met’s collaborations with the BOMC began, as we will see in the first chapter, only after the Met had already initiated the Miniatures and needed a partner to shore up the commercial side of the business. The Met and BOMC worked together from 1948 until the early 1970s on three projects, not just the Miniatures and Seminars, but also a widely distributed reproduction of

12

The Met and the Masses in Postwar America

Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. The three projects, marketed as ways to educate the masses, even if in fact they extended only to the middle classes, were fraught with interrelated concerns about the educational mission of the Met, its reputation, and the relation of culture to commerce. One of the guiding objectives of this book is to examine the value and the problems of these three projects, and how they promoted a specific type of aesthetic experience for a large middle-class audience. The first chapter is devoted to a history of the Metropolitan Miniatures as seen through a variety of lenses, including the relation of culture to commerce. Right from the outset, the Miniatures were described as a money-making venture, but one that had to be produced in a dignified manner. The stamps and albums were intended to be both collectible items and educational material that would uplift the viewer and in turn improve the taste of the nation. After a few years of Miniatures production, Met Director Taylor felt that they were not fulfilling their pedagogical function due to the commercial aspects of the enterprise. Taylor struggled with the balance between commerce and culture in his argument that the Miniatures needed to be replaced by a more methodical approach to art appreciation that prioritized education over profit. The next chapter traces the history and reception of the Metropolitan Seminars in Art, which replaced the Miniatures and took a more systematic approach to art appreciation. The Seminars, written by art educator and critic John Canaday, were endorsed by the Met and well advertised by the BOMC. They were introduced at a time of growth in the field of art education, which was often associated by its champions with good citizenship and improved democracy. In this Cold War context, educational commodities, like the Seminars, reflected and produced a “consumer’s republic,” to use Lizabeth Cohen’s term, in which consumption could be a form of good citizenship in the sense that a strong economy formed the backbone of a healthy nation to fight communist forces. Moreover, as a course of self-assisted learning designed and promoted as a product specifically for the home, the Seminars appealed to the growing middle classes, for whom the home was becoming a center of commodifiable culture. As a commercial and cultural product, the Seminars functioned well in the context of the middlebrow. The kind of visual literacy the Met taught through the Seminars was in part a consequence of the growth of a middle-class audience with its own pre-existing desires and demands for cultivation and upward social mobility. In the third chapter, I reflect on the Met’s collaborative ventures with the BOMC by examining the Met’s history as an educational institution in the context of developments in art education in postwar America. Beginning with

Introduction

13

the Met’s popular educational mandate, which Taylor fully promoted, the chapter explores how museums and art education were being rethought at the time in terms of general education and democratic living. We will see how the Met, in its collaborative ventures with the BOMC, found itself in a double bind: the museum positioned itself as an institution that prized high culture and that maintained a social hierarchy, but, at the same time, tried to dissolve such social boundaries through projects that used commercial, high-volume, standardized vehicles to deliver such culture to the masses. This double bind was constantly brought to light in the Miniatures and Seminars, in the relation of culture to commerce, in the opposition of high art to middlebrow taste, and in the public’s responses to the projects. In both the Miniatures and Seminars projects, art reproductions play an important role, whether in terms of the stamps, the larger scale reproductions for the Seminars, or the promotional material. In the fourth chapter, I discuss the issue of art reproduction through a third Met/BOMC collaboration, a commercial print of Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. Members of the Met staff maintained a clear distinction between the aura of an original work of art and the pedagogical use of reproductions, but they also believed that notions of quality played an important role in both original and copy. Indeed, the Met felt its reputation was on the line when it came to the quality of reproductions it endorsed, never more so than with the Rembrandt print. The issues surrounding high-quality prints reproduce many of the central concerns in the Miniatures and Seminars projects. In all three, notions of culture, commerce, quality, and discrimination trouble the Met’s position as an institution of high art in an age of mass culture. The book’s concluding chapter examines the reception of abstract painting in the context of the Miniatures and Seminars. Questions about modern painting, its significance or irrelevance to modern life, appear and recur in the Miniatures and Seminars as well as in the writings of Met Director Taylor, Seminars’ author John Canaday, and many contemporary art educators. Indeed, the years of production of the Miniatures and Seminars coincided with the period when Abstract Expressionism became the leading avant-garde art movement in the United States and beyond. While abstract painting was not the primary concern of the Met’s ventures with the BOMC into popular art education, it continually makes appearances. Indeed, abstract art not only questioned the fundamental way in which the Met framed its popular approach to visual analysis and artistic judgment, but also problematized the role of the Met as mediator between the layperson’s understanding of art and art’s growing complexity.

14

1

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures: Culture and Commerce

On October 20, 1947, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced the Metropolitan Miniatures Art Gallery (Color Plate 3), a “new series of color reproductions of masterpieces to bring museum treasures to the nation.” According to the news release, the museum mailed out 100,000 perforated sheets of twenty-four stamps, each c. 2 × 2.5 inches in size, which were “as faithful a reproduction in color as modern techniques of color photography and plate making processes can provide.” Members of the public were asked either to pay the $1 subscription for the stamps and for a stamp album with information about the reproduced works of art, which would arrive later in the mail, or to return the stamps to the museum. According to the Met’s Vice-Director Horace Jayne, “The Metropolitan Miniatures give us the opportunity to make our collections known to many thousands of Americans who have never visited the museum.”1 The 1947 news release, like all promotional material, tells only part of the story. The Miniatures’ project had begun six years earlier and would continue (from 1948 onwards as a collaboration with the Book-of-the-Month Club) until late 1957, just a few months before the introduction of the Metropolitan Seminars in Art. The Miniatures were both an initiative in public art education and a large commercial enterprise, two activities that are not always mutually compatible. The story of the Miniatures began on January 11, 1941, when businessman Herman Jaffe wrote a letter to Met Director Francis Henry Taylor about a project to produce poster stamps, that is, stamps not designated for revenue and often used for promoting companies and special events. Jaffe had read a piece about Taylor in that day’s New York World-Telegram and had picked up on the director’s comment in the article that with less municipal funding for the museum, “the problem of money for bread and butter and operations is increasing.” In his short letter, Jaffe describes “a dignified and educational method” to “raise not less than a Hundred Thousand Dollars a year.”2 Taylor replied promptly to Jaffe and ten days later, on January 21, 1941, Jaffe met with Horace Jayne.3 15

16

The Met and the Masses in Postwar America

Jaffe approached the museum at an opportune time, soon after the appointment of Francis Taylor, in whose mind public education outweighed scholarly interests as the museum’s prime concern. The article in the New York World-Telegram, “New Director of Metropolitan Museum Believes in Selling art to the Masses” (Figure 1.1), emphasized the museum’s more populist direction under Taylor, “a husky, powerful man, impressive physically even in the caverns of the Met, . . . a thinking man, who ruminates in the language of the masses, not of the mystics.”4 Before arriving at the Met in 1940, Taylor had been a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and then Director of the Worcester Museum, located outside of Boston. His successes at Worcester included increasing attendance threefold (from approximately 47,000 to 147,000), expanding art classes for children, setting up traveling shows for boarding schools in the area, and engaging orchestras travelling between Boston and New York “for cut-rate Sunday

Figure 1.1 New York World-Telegram, January 11, 1941, p. 11.

The Metropolitan Miniatures: Culture and Commerce

17

concerts.”5 He also enlarged and modernized the museum, increased its permanent collection, and held “dramatic exhibitions,” which made Worcester “an important art center.”6 Taylor’s efforts in Worcester reflected his desire to build bridges between scholarly knowledge and public education, an approach that brought him to the attention of the Met’s Trustees. When Taylor arrived at the Met in 1940, during the middle of the Second World War, the museum was in dire need of rejuvenation. It had not undertaken any new additions in close to twenty years, and the building, as the Met President and Met Secretary would later put it, was in “a somewhat dingy condition.”7 Attendance and membership were decreasing and the museum was receiving less funding from the city, while operating costs, including those for the recently opened Cloisters, continued to rise.8 Taylor’s need to remedy the Met’s financial situation did not conflict with his conviction that the museum should be made more accessible to a broader section of the American public.

The Miniatures Project Herman Jaffe, who was experienced in the poster stamp business when he wrote to Taylor in 1941, was well aware of the challenges facing a high cultural institution like the Met when it engaged in commercial programs. While he described his project as “a money raising vehicle for the Metropolitan Museum,” he was also “keeping in mind the importance of the educational value and the need for a dignified effort.”9 Jaffe, a salesman sensitive to the needs of his clients, had as impressive a physical presence as Taylor’s. When Jaffe “shakes your hand,” an article in a 1962 Yiddish newspaper reported, “you have felt its impact, when he sits down the chair groans under him, when he starts speaking you can hear him in a third room.”10 For Jaffe, the goals of financial success and patriotism or dignity were not mutually exclusive. And he was offering such a program to the Met through his self-described sales method: “find a creative idea that is useful for everyone, for me, for the buyer, and for the buyer’s customers. Often an idea such as this can help the community as a whole and the entire Nation.”11 Jaffe worked with Horace Jayne, the Met’s Vice-Director, who was put in charge of the stamp project. Jayne came from a prominent Philadelphia family and was an expert in Chinese art.12 He joined the Met in 1940 as Vice-Director after having worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as the first curator of Oriental art and later Chief of the Division of Eastern art. From 1929 to 1940, he also served as Director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology

18

The Met and the Masses in Postwar America

and Anthropology. According to Calvin Tomkins’s history of the Met, Jayne and Taylor were in 1939 the final two candidates considered for the position of Met Director, and, because of a misunderstanding amongst the trustees, both were offered the job. In the end Taylor and Jayne, who were close friends (they had been colleagues at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and ushers at each other’s weddings), were appointed Director and Vice-Director, respectively.13 In September 1941, Jayne received two mock-ups of stamps and albums prepared by Jaffe and Rudolf Modley of the firm Pictograph Corporation.14 One was simply called Album Art Stamps (Color Plate 4), and the other Adventures in Art (Color Plate 5). Modley had consulted with “leading educators,” including Dr. Lili Heimers of the Visual and Teaching Service of the New Jersey State Teacher’s College, who commented on the value of such a project for eight- to twelve-year-old children, an age group “very susceptible to this type of teaching.” The poster stamps, Heimers believed, would “lead to properly grounded field trips to the Metropolitan Museum itself, not only for New York City children, but for those in Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. . .”15 The stamp and album project, in its attractiveness to youth, complemented Taylor’s plan for a junior museum for children and a more systematic approach to children’s cultural education, which he detailed in a report he had completed earlier in 1941 for the Met trustees on the museum’s educational and extension services.16 In February 1942, Jaffe and Modley delivered a detailed proposal and budget for the project. The plan was not simply to distribute stamp-sized reproductions of the Met’s masterpieces and “attractive and dignified” albums, but to sell “a new class of membership,” one that “is designed to attract large groups of children and adults who are interested in art, who are civic minded, and should support the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” If issued annually, these stamps, Jaffe and Modley repeated, would bring into the museum more than $100,000 per year.17 After much delay, the Met in the end decided not to pursue the project. The timing was not right. The U.S. government had just introduced war stamps, and, as Jayne explained to Modley: “I could not bring myself to the point of feeling we could go forward with a plan that might seem indeed to be counter to the War Stamps or at least dangerously paralleling them.”18 The Miniatures project stayed in abeyance until after the war. In March 1947, Hugh Latham, Supervisor of the Museum Development Fund, prepared a lengthy memo for Jayne about how a poster-stamp project would relate to the larger fundraising efforts of the museum. Latham, who worked at the Met only for one year as a fundraiser, was not trained in art history or museums; he had majored in modern languages at Princeton (he would later translate Mother Goose from

The Metropolitan Miniatures: Culture and Commerce

19

the French) before attending the Yale Divinity School.19 But he clearly had some training in advertising. As with Modley and Jaffe’s earlier proposal, Latham’s memo emphasizes equally education, commerce, and public life: Naturally, all of this publicity activity will play the dual role of being educative and fund-raising. Therefore in proportionately delicate and diplomatic ways every part of it should carry the innuendo of: “This is what the Museum is doing for you. Are you interested enough to do something in return? The opportunity presents itself in many ways—seasonally in contributions through the poster stamp solicitation, and regularly through the activities of the various committees.”

In the memo, Latham mentions other types of fund-raising activities, which would “tap the visiting public after lectures and general tours.” He suggested installing a system of lights in the model of the museum, which had been set up in the Met’s Great Hall: “these would light up briefly upon insertion of a coin or bill in that particular division of the future Metropolitan Museum of Art.”20 Latham, who was working with Hermann Jaffe on the stamps project, was tasked with developing a mail-order business: how to create mailing lists for likely subscribers; how to produce the stamps and albums; how to advertise the project through mailings; and whether to use in-house printing with newly purchased equipment or to hire outside printing firms. One important factor for the mailing lists was the target audience. In another memo to Jayne, Latham writes: “It would seem to me that the dollar solicitation might be just as usefully directed to a broader and more middle income public [rather than only to wealthy families], and that both for this reason and from the duplication and cross-checking point of view, lists such as Life, Newsweek, or the Book-of-theMonth would offer a better all-round proving ground.”21 Latham’s suggestion that the stamp project be targeted towards a middle-class audience likely had to do with the popularity of the medium at this time and the demographics of those who used them. Stamp collecting had been a practice in America ever since the U.S. Postal service introduced commemorative stamps in the nineteenth century. As Shiela Brennan has demonstrated, stamp collecting has had a broad and varied appeal to those interested in their aesthetic qualities, subject matter, potential value, methods of production, or the thrill of the hunt.22 Stamp-collecting practices were also clearly gendered: decorating household objects, like tables, with stamps and arranging a collection were often associated with women and their “natural artistic tastes,” while the scientific model of philately, with its geographical and historical classifications, was deemed a masculine pursuit. As Brennan writes, “women definitely collected stamps, but

20

The Met and the Masses in Postwar America

often did not identify as philatelists.”23 During the first half of the twentieth century, philatelists often promoted the pedagogical functions of stamp collecting in terms of intensified powers of observation, broadened perspectives, and increased knowledge of history, art, and languages. Stamp collecting thus took part in a middlebrow culture of self-improvement, as Brennan remarks, like visiting museums or joining the BOMC.24 Poster stamps, sometimes called “Cinderellas,” resemble postal stamps (they are gummed and perforated), but they are not denominated for revenue. Poster stamps have a long history going back to nineteenth-century Europe, but they became especially popular in Germany and other parts of Europe in the first decade of the twentieth century. Giving opportunities to both the graphic designer and the sharp businessperson, poster stamps were attractive commodities for promoting companies and events due to their bright colors, simplicity, and modern designs.25 They also attracted the eye of the consumer in comparison to black-and-white magazine and newspaper advertisements. Like commemorative postal stamps, poster stamps could be used decoratively, attached to invoices, envelopes, and correspondence, or collected in albums. According to H. Thomas Steele, they “brought high art to the masses on a level that could never have been achieved otherwise. Poster stamps were the common man’s art gallery.”26 While attracting business was their prime purpose, they also became a collectable, because stamp collecting had a long history and postage stamps had a secondary value beyond their original price. Middle-class Americans after the Second World War would have also been accustomed to collecting other types of stamps, like trading stamps, the origin of today’s customer loyalty rewards programs. The most popular such stamps in the postwar period were Green Stamps put out by Sperry and Hutchinson (S&H), founded in 1896. Grocery stores, gas stations, and other companies would buy differently dominated stamps from S&H and then give them away to customers, who would paste them into albums. Complete books of S&H Green Stamps could then be redeemed for goods, such as dishtowels, ash trays, fishing poles, appliances, or a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, at local Green Stamps stores or via mail from the S&H catalogue.27 Postwar Americans thus had familiarity with the value and collectability of stamps, whether they be postal, poster, or trading. The attractiveness of stamps did not go unnoticed by the Met in the early twentieth century. In 1913, Le Roy C. Hartford of The Munro & Harford Company Lithographers and Color Printers, NY, approached Henry W. Kent, the Met Secretary at the time, about producing stamps of works of art in the Met’s

The Metropolitan Miniatures: Culture and Commerce

21

collections and distributing them across the United States. “In certain European countries,” Hartford wrote, “the most popular fad at the present time is the collection of advertising stamps. These stamps are the reproduction in miniature of posters, trademark designs and illustrations in one or more colors and the work is most beautifully done.” Although this plan was favorably received by the Met, the project was not undertaken because engravers said they could not do their best work in the museum and paintings were not permitted to be sent out to engravers’ shops.28 By the 1940s, the poster stamp business was still booming. Its scope is clearly indicated by the range of projects that Hermann Jaffe had worked on. A thick folder Jaffe sent to the Met in 1947 includes fifty-seven poster stamp projects that he had helped develop for firms like the American Oil Company and Arrowhead Studios. Most of the projects were for businesses and industries, others for clubs and private organizations and others for government and public institutions. About half the projects aimed for and achieved financial success, while others were for goodwill. Some projects used ten stamps or less, while one used 325, with quantities of stamps sold up to 20 million. The subject matter of the stamps ranged from corporate products and cartoons to geographic, historical, biblical and patriotic subjects.29 With Jaffe as an advisor, the Met thought it was in good hands. By May 1947, an agreement was struck with the Davis, Delanay Inc., a commercial printing company with whom Jaffe was working, to print the stamps and albums.30 By July, Latham was working on the mailing campaign. His memos to Jayne at this time indicate the depths of the Met’s involvement in the commercial side of the enterprise. Latham outlined advertising methods, such factors as the color of the paper for advertising letters, the type of envelope and reply card, and the timing of the mailings, which would be most effective, which would “pull best.” For example, he wrote to Jayne: “The use of color helps greatly and pink has been found to pull very well despite personal preferences or distastes on the part of direct mail executives.” The letter that goes out to possible subscribers, Latham continued, should “appeal to emotions,” “talk directly to person and establish direct personal relationship,” “put romance and narrative in copy especially in headline,” be sent “under Director’s signature (someone high up yet directly concerned),” and “appeal to vanity and promise to deliver benefits.” With his emphasis on emotion and romance, Latham emphasized that “many recipients are women.” Latham also reveals the gendered nature of the project, when he tells Jayne that the circular should emphasize the decorative use of the stamps on “lamp shades, trays, cigarette boxes, stationary and private mailing

22

The Met and the Masses in Postwar America

Figure 1.2 Promotional photograph for The Metropolitan Miniatures, 1947–8. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY / Art Resource.

cards,” in albums for school children, in picture frames, and on paper weights.”31 These uses were not only mentioned in the advertising campaign, but also indicated in publicity photographs produced by the Met sometime in 1947 or 1948 (Figures 1.2 and 1.3). (In a similar vein, the September 1950 issue of Seventeen magazine illustrated a folding room divider decorated with Miniatures stamps in an article “Dress up a Screen.”)32 Latham’s memo furthermore notes: “Tasteless as it may be, a slogan on the letterhead and also a design or a gadget often keeps people from throwing a letter away.” In a further memo to Jayne, Latham indicated that in the advertising campaign it should be remembered that people are self-interested, dislike change, forget fast, fight against things, desire not to differ from the crowd, like to be superior, glorify the past and discount the future, and must be followed up and reminded.33 When the Met mailed out 100,000 sets of twenty-four miniature stamps in October 1947, the mailing also included a brochure (Figure 1.4) and a letter from Met Director Taylor, which clearly outlined the project and its aims. As in

The Metropolitan Miniatures: Culture and Commerce

23

Figure 1.3 Promotional Photograph for The Metropolitan Miniatures, 1947–8. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY / Art Resource.

Modley and Jaffe’s earlier plan of 1942, the project was promoted as uplifting and patriotic. In “owning these miniatures,” the brochure claims, “you will become associated with the Metropolitan Museum of Art—participating directly in its effort to make of nation-wide significance the great cultural heritage of the past centuries.”34 Taylor’s letter indicates how the program worked: When you send in your $1.00 for the enclosed Miniatures, you will receive free an Album describing the historical background and artistic significance of each of the subjects, with a space reserved for each Miniature and a list of books in case you wish to read further. If you do not wish to keep the Miniatures, please return them to us in the enclosed envelope because our supply is limited.35

The initial album included a foreword, which further explained that the museum’s administration “has felt increasingly the duty and desire” to circulate reproductions of works in its collection “until it can fulfill the critically needed function of a free, informal liberal arts college of this and coming generations.”

24

The Met and the Masses in Postwar America

Figure 1.4 Promotional brochure for The Metropolitan Miniatures, 1947. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY / Art Resource.

This first series of stamps was just the beginning of “an important national program of art education,” which would, through further collections of miniature reproductions, extend the Met’s galleries “throughout the nation and the world.”36 The Met also targeted school and college teachers, to whom were sent form letters that offered a special bulk rate for students.37 To advertise the project, Jayne sent out a letter about the Miniatures to magazine editors.38 The Miniatures were sold by mail order, but were also available at the Met bookstore and at department stores, like Marshall Field’s of Chicago, which announced in its advertisement: “Be the first to start this new type art collection.”39 The initial mailing went extremely well. Latham reported to Met President Roland Redmond that advance orders numbered over 3,000, with an average of 200 per day. The Met “found it necessary to set up a special Miniatures Desk in the Great Hall to handle the over-the-counter sales.” He concluded the memo: “The public seems delighted with our dollar item!”40 The Miniatures were also

The Metropolitan Miniatures: Culture and Commerce

25

Figure 1.5 Photo from “Stamps on Kromekote,” Stet: The House Magazine for House Editors (March, 1948), no. 90, p.4. A press sheet of the Met Miniatures is examined by (from left to right) Samuel Faber, Horace H. F. Jayne and Hugh Latham of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Harold Davis, President of Davis Delaney, Inc., and Herman Jaffe.

“arousing a great deal of active interest in official school circles” in and around New York City.41 Walter Wolczek of the National Poster Stamp Society hoped that the Miniatures would be distributed through his society. He wanted to know more about “the story of this promotion.”42 Moreover, an article on the Miniatures appeared in the March issue of Stet, a magazine for editors (Figure 1.5).43 And in that same month, the Jack Felton Advertising firm requested unsuccessfully from Met President Redmond the rights to develop miniature plaques decorated with stamps from the Miniatures.44 The success of the project, however, brought its own set of problems. Because of the great demand for the Miniatures, the Met was running behind on completing and shipping requests. They needed to hire a new employee “to clear out the backlog of orders.”45 And Herman Jaffe turned out to be not as reliable a partner as the Met had thought. Latham reported that Jaffe made mistakes in ordering; the printing shop he employed also “committed such a number of extremely serious errors which risk the entire future of the direct mail campaign”; and he was unclear in his financial statements.46 In December 1947, Latham,

26

The Met and the Masses in Postwar America

who was becoming more and more irritated with Jaffe, informed him: “the Treasurer’s office would like a complete accounting of all materials that has been prepared in conjunction with the Miniatures program, and the distribution of same.”47

The Book-of-the Month Club Enters the Scene By the beginning of 1948, the Met was looking to partner with a larger firm, and on May 28, 1948, it signed an agreement with the BOMC for a Miniatures test mailing of a minimum of 100,000 pieces with a tabulation of the results by July 1, 1949 at the latest.48 By late 1948, however, the collaboration between the Met and the BOMC was made official. The Herald Tribune announced on November 10, 1948: “Metropolitan Reproduces Art For Mass Sale: Book-of-the Month Club Is Distributing First Sheet of 24 Miniatures at $1.”49 There is no archival documentation that clarifies why the Met chose the BOMC as its business partner, but it is not difficult to infer why. The Met was clearly not coping well with establishing a mail-order business and the BOMC, “a fixture of American publishing” at the time, as Joan Shelley Rubin writes, had great expertise in the field of book distribution with a membership in 1946 of just under 900,000.50 The BOMC had not invented the mail-order book business, but since its founding by Harry Scherman, Maxwell Sackheim, and Robert K. Haas in 1926, it had established itself as a leader in the field. Unlike other book clubs, the BOMC did not manufacture books; it was, rather, only a book distributor.51 The BOMC’s success was in part due to its use of direct-mail promotional material and the advertising skills of Scherman and Sackheim, who also operated an advertising agency together. At first, BOMC subscribers were required to buy one book per month, chosen by a select committee of literary experts, at regular price plus postage. (The BOMC made profit by acquiring books from publishers at discount prices.) Subscribers also received a monthly newsletter Book-of-the-Month Club News with comments about the selections from the committee judges and announcements of books soon to be published. This newsletter, as Rubin remarks, “gave subscribers both a sense of being an insider and a sure way to secure the social advantages of appearing au courant.”52 Soon after, the club modified its policy and required subscribers to buy a minimum of four books per year. It also introduced “the negative option,” the opportunity for subscribers to substitute the monthly selection with a book from a list of alternatives. The BOMC’s great success was due to two important

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innovations: a monthly distribution of books (thus repeat business) that imposed order on a huge book market, which could overwhelm book buyers; and a group of expert judges who identified worthwhile titles and “assured readers that they need not worry about purchasing an inferior product.”53 Similar methods were used for the Miniatures and Seminars. Subscribers would get two albums and sets of stamps every second month, or one book monthly in the case of the Seminars, prepared under the supervision of experts in the field. The Met approached the BOMC at an opportune moment for both institutions. The Met needed a business partner, and the BOMC was looking for new business opportunities because of a decline in its general membership in 1948 due to a recession in the American economy. At this time, the BOMC purchased the Non-Fiction Book Club from Henry Holt & Co. and began a new (if short-lived) service, the Travelers Book Club.54 The BOMC had offered art reproductions to its membership since 1943, but the Miniatures announced “the company’s major entrance into the field of mass education in art,” as Charles Lee put it in his history of the BOMC.55 The BOMC was clearly on the Met’s radar. Latham indicated in his memos that the BOMC mailing list would be a good resource for the Miniatures. And earlier, in September 1946, Taylor and Scherman had corresponded about a competition to stimulate public interest in contemporary American art by awarding annual prizes for the outstanding paintings of the year. The BOMC was to provide the funds, and the Met was to “set up and supervise the machinery for selecting the prize-winning paintings and for arranging exhibits, subject to the approval of the Club.” The project was never realized due to opposition by some members of the Met Board of Trustees, but the correspondence between Taylor and Scherman was certainly amicable.56 The Met clearly saw the Miniatures, from its initiation in the winter of 1947, both as a way to promote its collections to the nation and as a revenue-producing enterprise. But it quickly realized that it needed a partner to manage the administrative side of the business. As for the financial arrangements, the BOMC paid for printing, distributing and advertising the Miniatures, and the Met was responsible for expenses related to the writing and editing of the texts and the photoengraved reproductions. “The relationship between the Museum and the Book of the Month Club,” Taylor later explained in a letter to an academic colleague, “is the relationship that exists between publisher and author. In order to preserve our tax exemption we have not gone into business with them, we merely receive a royalty of ten cents a sheet on every sheet distributed and sold.”57 In addition to the 10 percent royalty on sales, the Met also received copyright

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fees for the works reproduced from their collections. The aggregate net income for the Met from the Miniatures from 1949 to 30 September 1955 was $660,000, not far from the $100,000 a year that Jaffe had predicted.58 The exact financial returns for the Miniatures were, however, always difficult to establish, because while some expenditures, such as direct charges for authors’ fees and payments to the engraver to prepare plates, were straightforward, others, such as when a Met staff member worked on the Miniatures, were more difficult to assess. In January 1951, Met Editor of Publications Marshall Davidson estimated that the museum spent $37,300 per year to produce the series. The annual revenue to the museum from the Miniatures, according to Davidson, could be as high as $180,000, if the number of subscribers rose to 150,000 as the BOMC estimated it would after its “forthcoming promotion campaign.”59 But it was likely somewhat lower given that the numbers of subscribers only reached 120,000 in 1952.60 In any event, the Miniatures, from a financial perspective, were certainly worth the effort for the Met, at least in the early 1950s when the subscription rate was high. The BOMC and Met also made other arrangements. On the topic of subscription lists, the Met provided the BOMC with a record of purchasers of the first series and those who have shown interest. The BOMC requested that all complaints and inquiries be “referred promptly” to them. The BOMC told the Met that the museum would not have to keep records on such matters and that the Club handled complaints “promptly and always conceding that the customer is right (except in very unreasonable cases).” On inquiries dealing with museum materials, the Met emphasized that “the Museum was most anxious to have such inquiries forwarded promptly” and the BOMC assured the Met that this would be done.61

The Miniatures Albums Over its nine years of production, from 1948 to 1957, the Met and the BOMC collaborated on ninety-six sets of Miniatures. The basic concept remained the same as before the BOMC came on board: each set included twentyfour gummed stamps and an album, in which the subscriber could fasten the stamp in the proper place. But the albums were now produced with more attractive color covers (Color Plate 6). And the BOMC introduced a new element: after every six purchases, the subscriber would receive a free “handsome portfolio” to store albums, a box resembling a book that could be kept on a bookshelf (Figure 1.6).

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Figure 1.6 The Metropolitan Miniatures portfolios. Courtesy of the Audio-Visual Resource Centre, School for Studies in Art and Culture, Carleton University. Photo: Nancy Duff.

The BOMC also produced a much more elaborate brochure to be mailed to prospective subscribers. The brochure, as well as advertisements in Life magazine, indicated that the Miniatures were intended as both educational products and collectable items. The Life advertisements compared the Miniatures to “a guided visit through the Museum under the instruction of an expert” and to “a comprehensive university course, carried on by the staff of the Museum.” Moreover, “the Museum’s objective is to enable collectors, in time, to have a ‘complete Museum of Art in miniature in the home.’ ”62 In the earlier Miniatures albums, a catalogue format was used: each stamp would be placed directly above a discussion of the work or art reproduced, not unlike an extended museum label. Over time, this presentation changed to a monographic format, a continuous text with references to the works illustrated. The initial idea of showcasing works from the Met gave way to a much broader program, which included reproductions of artworks from other museums on topics that can be divided roughly into four categories: artists, periods, highlights from museum collections, and themes (see Appendix I).63 Of the ninety-six sets, only thirteen were based on themes, which ranged from depictions of early America to the Christmas story, and only nine highlighted works from other museum collections. The great majority of Miniatures explored lives of artists and artistic periods. As we will see, a shift in emphasis from periods to artists occurred after the BOMC conducted a reader survey in April 1951.

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Because different authors wrote the albums for the Miniatures, the texts are not uniform in style. The first twenty-eight albums were published anonymously; afterwards, the authors and usually their affiliations were indicated on the title page.64 Only a few authors wrote more than one album, such as Edith A. Standen (Associate Curator at the Met and former Monuments Woman–she worked at the Central Collecting Point in Wiesbaden),65 Margaretta Salinger (Senior Research Fellow in the Met’s Department of Paintings and future Met Curator), and John Canaday (Chief of the Division of Education at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and future author of the Seminars). All the texts apart from the one on Leonardo da Vinci, discussed below, have some consistency in tone and level of language, due to the fact that Marshall Davidson, the Met’s Editor of Publications, edited them in consultation with members of the curatorial staff. As for subject matter, there were a few forays into non-Western art, such as the arts of China, Japanese prints, and Persian painting, and there was an album from 1956 dedicated to women artists. But those were the exceptions. For the most part, the Miniatures focussed on the male, Western tradition in its large geographical and temporal scope from the art of ancient Greece to twentiethcentury American painting. The albums were written for a reader who had some general knowledge of world history and aspired to understand art in the way it was discussed by those more educated in such matters. They are more informative than critical or theoretical; they did not speak down to the reader, but they certainly did not rock the boat of traditional art history. They developed in the reader a way to access works of art through established means, such as formal analysis, artists’ biographies, iconography, and social context. Lives of artists were often connected to social and political developments. According to an early album from 1949: “Watteau, in his short life, expressed perfectly the ideals and dreams of this period of change [from the pompous formality of the age of Louis XIV to the lighter and more entertaining period of Louis XV].”66 Formal elements were also emphasized, for example, in a discussion of Manet’s The Railroad with its “clean, bright colors placed side by side without transitional half tones.” Manet’s “flattening of form was not, of course, original,” because he was influenced by Japanese prints, which had made “their way to Europe in the 1850s (as packing material for porcelain!).”67 Links between formal elements and past traditions were similarly highlighted in a discussion of Cézanne’s landscape, Mont SainteVictoire with Viaduct: “The whole composition is structurally compact and balanced like a Greek temple, a quality which Cézanne derived from his study of such classic masters as Poussin.”68 These types of connections were made in

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album narratives, which tended to be structured chronologically, like a walk through the Met’s galleries. Miniatures on single artists were for the most part organized according to the artist’s biography with a linear accounting of lives and works. Thematic issues, like the ones devoted to Children in Art, Great European Portraits, Persian Painting, or Women Artists, were also organized chronologically. They tracked the theme of the volume through the canonical periods of art history. The topics of the Miniatures may have been diverse, but the content was rather consistent in tone and in providing the reader a context and vocabulary for understanding and discussing works of art. They certainly were more detailed in their analyses than a museum guide like Met Curator of Paintings Theodore Rousseau, Jr.’s 1954 A Guide to the Picture Galleries. This publication, which came out on the occasion of the opening of the Met’s new galleries after a major reconstruction and remodeling of the museum, contains a short seven-page essay followed by reproductions of works of art in the Met’s collection of European paintings.69 Rousseau leads the visitor though the galleries with little in-depth analysis of individual works, because, he believed, they should speak for themselves in their fresh setting: “The new arrangement and decoration of the paintings galleries should clarify those distinctions of style and reflections of civilization which are the major preoccupations of the history of art.”70 The Miniatures albums articulated such “major preoccupations” in language that was “articulate without being intentionally obscure,” a goal set by Met Director Francis Taylor.71 As such, they offered the reader a foundational or rudimentary level of “artistic competence,” to borrow Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel’s term, that is, the ability to decode works of art based on a system of classification.72 The Miniatures albums, in addressing art in terms of artists’ biographies, formal means, earlier traditions, and historical periods, developed in the reader a form of visual literacy, a way to look at art and a means to discuss it.

Miniatures Production Just how seriously the Met took the Miniatures is evident in the production process, which required a significant outlay of resources, as outlined in a 1951 memo by Marshall Davidson, who took over supervision of the project after Horace Jayne left the Met in 1949. Davidson, who had been Assistant Curator of the American Wing before he became Editor of Publications, had a life-long connection to the museum. His father had worked at the Met in different

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positions, including registrar. Taylor once told Davidson, “The trouble with you, Marshall, is you were born in this place.”73 Davidson’s work on the Miniatures was all-encompassing. “I had a hell of a job keeping that program going,” he later recalled. I had international correspondence, among other things, and getting authors. Francis [Taylor] would blow hot and blow cold. First thing you know, he’d say, “Why don’t you take some money, go out and buy yourself the best authors you can get?” The next minute, said, “No, no, we don’t want to build up an overhead on this sort of thing, so let’s just keep it quiet, and do the best you can from month to month.”74

According to Davidson’s memo “Conference on the Miniatures,” the concept for a set of Miniatures was “hammered out” by the author and Davidson. The author was then commissioned to write the text, which usually took six to eight weeks to complete. Layouts for the album would at that point be started, and photographs were supplied to the Beck Engraving Company in Philadelphia, which made the engravings and printed the reproductions. Beck first made “Photostats (in black and white) to scale for each sheet of miniatures” and then returned them to the Met for approval. At this time, Kodachromes or color transparencies were made to exact scale. A “man from Beck” and the museum supervisor would then make color notations for the engraver. “For instance, sometimes because of varnish layers a picture will come out much too yellow and the engraver, if forewarned, can start with yellow filters to effect correction.” The transparencies and notes were used by the engraver to make “a blueprint,” which was sent to the Met for corrections regarding position and cropping. Captions were then prepared for the album. After that, the color was corrected by comparing the photoengraving with the original work of art. This step could be time consuming “particularly when a painting needed for a set is in the jungle-jim and manpower is scarce to get it out into clear light where corrections could be accurately done.” After the reproductions were approved, Met staff would travel to Philadelphia to supervise production in Beck’s offices. By this point, the text was completed and submitted to Davidson for criticism and edits. “It means frequently a considerable degree of rewriting.”75 As is plainly evident, the production of one set of Miniatures was a large undertaking for the Met, and Davidson requested and hired an office managercoordinator for the project.76 The Met clearly felt that its reputation was on the line with the Miniatures, and it threw a great deal of resources behind this undertaking.

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The Culture/Commerce Divide Before partnering with the BOMC, the Met, as we have seen, was heavily involved in the marketing of the Miniatures. After the BOMC came on board, the Met could distinguish its responsibilities on the side of cultural content from the BOMC’s commercial concerns, a division clearly stated on the promotional material: “The selection of subjects and the preparation of the color prints remain wholly under the supervision of the museum. All matters having to do with subscriptions are handled by the Book-of-the-Month Club.”77 That the Met could stake a claim to higher ground in the culture/commerce hierarchy was beneficial for the museum, in its attempt to maintain its reputation as an institution of high culture. It was also useful for the BOMC, which banked on the Met’s expertise in marketing the Miniatures. While the divide between culture and commerce functioned as a way for the institutions to distinguish their responsibilities, it was a line that was often crossed. In 1951, when the price of the Miniatures was about to increase from $1 to $1.25, Taylor felt an obligation to inform BOMC Chairman of the Board Harry Scherman of his concerns about “the psychological factor of the dollar package being lost with the increase in price.” Yet he also acknowledged his position in the culture/commerce divide: I do not want you to feel that I am trying to interfere in an area of the operation that is strictly your own business and I am ready to abide by your judgment and decision in the matter. I do feel, however, that you are entitled to know what is lurking in the back of my mind as we are in this thing together.78

Taylor’s letter had little impact on Scherman, as the price did indeed increase. Although the BOMC took over advertising responsibility for the Miniatures, the Met continued to be involved in their promotion. In 1951, Met Manager of Public Relations Floyd Rodgers recommended to the Met Director and Secretary the idea of publishing a promotional article on the Miniatures in one of the national magazines. Rodgers believed that the “the overwhelming success” of the project could serve as the background for a story, “ART FOR THE MILLIONS,” which could be published in Reader’s Digest. “It’s the kind of all-American private enterprise success story in which they specialize.”79 At around the same time, Met Secretary Easby wrote to BOMC President Meredith Wood about developing slide series and film strips “based upon kodachromes of earlier series of Miniatures.”80 The Met, moreover, took advantage of its partnership with the BOMC to use their subscription lists to solicit new memberships and to use

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plates from the Miniatures for the sale of postcards.81 The BOMC asked for and was given permission by the Met to reuse returned sets of the Miniatures on small pottery tiles for sale in stores. The Met, always wary of blemishes to its reputation, stipulated that the reproductions be of good quality, that they not be sold to the public as Metropolitan Miniatures, and that the name of the Metropolitan Museum of Art not be used in promotions or advertisements. However, it would be “permissible to mention that the original of this reproduction is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”82 The Met was also kept apprised of the BOMC’s use of the National Association of Publishers (NAP), a collection agency. In April 1952, Meredith Wood of the BOMC wanted to get Met clearance for the reclamation of “approximately $100,000 of unpaid accounts” for the Miniatures, “since the museum “may be involved in replying to letters of complaint addressed to it.”83 One example from 1953 gives a good sense of relations between the BOMC and the Met on such matters and between the Met and the public. In the case of Ms. A. A. Currier, the NAP threatened her over a bill of $10.30 with “court action,” which “will undoubtedly mean adding interest and court costs to the above amount.” The letter also warned her: “Don’t let the size of this balance mislead you. Regardless of the amount involved we intend to collect it.” Currier, in her reply to the NAP, claimed that she, “a woman whose credit record is above reproach,” had cancelled her subscription. The Miniatures kept arriving and so she returned them by post. The same day that Currier wrote her letter, the NAP sent her a second, more aggressive notice: “Now just what do you intend to do about this account? Our plan is definite. . . . Unless payment is made immediately, we shall turn the matter over to our attorney . . . This can be expensive and unpleasant, but from your silence, it seems you prefer such handling.” Currier then sent copies of the NAP letters and hers to the Met with a note, which concluded: “This is a strange way to make friends and influence people, as I am sure you will agree.” In his sympathetic reply, Met Secretary Dudley Easby informed Currier that he would take up the matter with the BOMC. He also stated: “While the mailing and distribution of the Metropolitan Miniatures is a matter confided to the Book-ofthe-Month Club, we nevertheless have a real interest in the program from a public relations as well as an educational standpoint.” Easby wrote to BOMC vice-president and treasurer Axel Rosin, who canceled “any remaining debit balance” on Currier’s account. He also informed Easby, “I don’t think we handled it wrong,” but “let’s give Miss Currier the benefit of the doubt and assume that the [mail] gremlins went to work on this one.” He also stated that he feels “quite good about the fact that after starting to send the old deadbeat accounts to the

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collection agency in February and March of this year, we have had only two repercussions,” which he assured Easby was quite a good record.84 While the Met kept abreast of financial matters, the BOMC, for its part, kept its eye on the content of the texts. The BOMC recognized that the financial success of the enterprise depended as much upon the accessibility of the albums as upon advertising and merchandising. And it made its opinion heard in the case of the Leonardo da Vinci Miniatures by George Sarton, Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Harvard. When the album was about to be printed, the BOMC wrote to the Met about the unsuitability of Sarton’s text, which discussed Leonardo’s scientific notebooks and made little reference to the paintings and drawings reproduced in miniature. Replying to the BOMC, Taylor complained about the BOMC’s desire to have the manuscript be substituted with simple descriptions of the paintings. He explained that since there has been much written on Leonardo that is “nonsense,” the Met felt it more important to have a text, which was written by “the greatest authority living on the progress of science and the history of ideas, particularly in the Renaissance” and was focused on Leonardo’s scientific approach as evidenced by his own writings and notebooks. After making his point, Taylor addressed the commerce/culture hierarchy: “I should further like to point out that according to the terms of the understanding between the Museum and the Book of the Month Club, whereas we are prepared to follow, and invariably do so, all recommendations in regard to merchandising and manufacture, matters of artistic selection and editorial judgment are the concerns of the Metropolitan Museum.”85 BOMC VicePresident (and Art Director) Oscar Ogg’s reply acknowledged the divide, but in this case, he wrote: “we felt the text not to be especially well suited to its purpose. It will undoubtedly leave the young readers up in the air in several instances (two Virgin of the Rocks, for example, without an explanation of them).”86 Harry Scherman then joined the conversation and emphasized the BOMC’s position: “The question raised . . . was simply the practical wisdom of using such a piece, excellent and readable as it was—by itself,” because “a large proportion of the subscribers—particularly the many who have subscribed for children—look for at least some informative comment on the paintings reproduced.” Subscribers, Scherman continued, “are surely going to notice” this “manifest editorial blunder” and criticize “the Museum much more than us.” Scherman pointed out “that it would be wise” to include “the briefest informatory notes about each painting.” This is “hardly editorial interference,” he maintained, “but purely sensible and practical cooperation on a matter of mutual concern.” Scherman, however, also pointed out a financial implication: “You should be informed, I think, of the

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seriousness of this matter, on its practical side. We were prepared (if tests we had planned worked out) to spend as high as $250,000 advertising this single set, to keep the [subscription] list up. We now are obliged to do far less and to wait— nobody can figure how long—to see what the effect of this mistake is on the subscribers.” In other words, the educational and commercial sides of the project, as Scherman made clear, could not be kept separate. He would be surprised “if we don’t get plenty of kicks from parents; and, of course, they’ll be directed at the Museum. You are really involved more than we.” In a postscript to the letter, Scherman, ever the diplomat, informed Taylor that “it is not too late to carry out the suggestion above; namely, to add two separate pages of notes, and without altering Dr. Sarton’s piece by a word.”87 Scherman’s compromise was in the end taken up: two pages with descriptions of the paintings were included in the album before Sarton’s text. Tensions between the two institutions had also arisen in late 1950, when the BOMC complained about Met delays in the production schedule that could cost the Club a great deal of money. Taylor replied apologetically to Scherman but explained that the Met was adhering to the schedule that the Met and the BOMC had agreed upon in August of that year. He continued: “My purpose in writing you this letter is not to try to create difficulties or to place responsibilities. On the other hand, the complaint is one which I take so seriously that I think we should have an early meeting to work out the details of operation and develop methods whereby delays can be prevented.”88 Scherman then defused the tension by telling Taylor that he thought it was only important “for you to realize how delays in the schedule affect the total business, and that was the reason why I immediately called you up, to apprise you of it. It was far more precaution for the future than complaint about the past.”89

“Can’t they be a bit larger?” At around this time, in early 1951, the BOMC became concerned about the fact that while the overall number of Miniatures subscriptions was increasing, the number of cancellations was also rising. And by May 1951, the number of subscriptions began to decrease.90 To help remedy the situation, the BOMC commissioned Audience Research Inc. to provide information that would direct the production and distribution of the Miniatures. Their report, completed in April 1951 and shared with the Met, included two surveys. The first, completed by interview, examined the attractiveness of the Miniatures to non-subscribers.

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Its goal was “to measure the appeal of various artists, schools, and types of art; to determine the relative interest in specific artists as compared with interest in schools and types of art, and to find out the extent to which these people would be interested in subscribing to the Miniatures and why.” The second survey was a mail questionnaire sent to a random sample of current subscribers in order to obtain facts about their characteristics. It also included “questions to measure their interest in various artists, schools, and types of art, and to discover whether their interest in the Miniatures was for their own benefit, for children or for some other purpose.”91 According to the results of the report, the characteristics of the subscribers, the “cultivated people” of the Miniatures advertisements, showed a very close parallel to those of the general membership of the BOMC: 65 percent were women, 60 percent were between 20 and 40 years of age, 81 percent had attended college; 89 percent were white-collar workers, housewives, professionals, teachers, or professors; 64 percent were married; and 53 percent had children.92 (As we’ll see in the next chapter, these demographics paralleled those of the subscribers of the Metropolitan Seminars.) In other words, the Miniatures were purchased and read by a mostly female, educated, likely white, middle-class audience. As for interest in art, the report found that “names of specific artists have substantially more appeal than periods or types of art” for both subscribers and non-subscribers.93 With the non-subscribers, for example, only 18 percent found High Renaissance art “especially interesting,” but the numbers jumped to 66 percent for Michelangelo, Raphael, or Titian. Subscribers were asked for written comments, half of which indicated “a high degree of enthusiasm for the idea of the Miniatures, for the reproductions themselves or for their educational value.” Subscribers also indicated a preference for a more systematic approach: some suggested that albums be grouped by artist or theme and others recommended including an index for the whole series. As we’ll see, this concern for a more methodical treatment of art appreciation and history, which was shared by Met Director Taylor, ultimately led to the demise of the Miniatures and their replacement with the Seminars. The most frequently voiced complaint, however, was that the miniature stamps were simply too small. As one subscriber put it, “I know they are miniatures, but can’t they be a bit larger?” The Met and BOMC took the recommendations of the Audience Research survey seriously. Beginning in late 1951 with the Rembrandt set in the new L series, the stamps increased in size from approximately 2 × 2½ inches to 4 × 3½ inches. From then until the end of production, the number of artist-based Miniatures increased from 4 to 54 percent, while the percentage of period-based

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Miniatures decreased from 58 to 21 percent (see Appendix I). 94 And the idea of mixed sets of works from the Met was abandoned altogether. The year before the survey, Davidson and Taylor had developed a list of topics for the Miniatures, which included views of French cathedrals and Spanish monuments to the history of art and daily life in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome.95 This plan was abandoned in favor of the recommendations from the Audience Research report. Even before the survey, Davidson realized that the Miniatures would need to include reproductions from works of art outside the Met’s collections: “If it were possible to explore the files of Life Magazine for material of this nature,” he wrote to Taylor, “it would enable us to plan our course more intelligently.”96 After the Audience Report survey was completed, Davidson had a lunchtime meeting with Harry Scherman and other “Book-of-the-Month Club men.” According to a memo from Davidson to Met Secretary Easby about the meeting, the BOMC emphasized “that the Miniature program depended for its continued success on the frequent inclusion of sets devoted to the works of a single prominent artist or a single important school of art.” Davidson countered with the concern that this approach would necessitate including reproductions of artworks not in the Met, a concern that the BOMC men had already considered. Scherman felt that they should “lose no time in going outside” the Met’s collections. In his memo to Easby, Davidson mentioned the Audience Research report and its rating of the popularity of artists: “This may serve as some sort of a guide for scheduling these Big Name features in our program.” Davidson also pointed out that in using reproductions of works of art from outside the Met collections, “our own income will be proportionately reduced and our own expenses in all probability some what increased.”97 In other words, the museum would incur an increase in organizational and photographic expenses and a decrease in copyright income. One museum to get involved with the Miniatures project was the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery in San Marino, CA, whose “masterpieces” of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English painting were featured in a 1952 album. Theodore Heinrich, curator of the collection, was excited about such a venture: “You need have no doubt about my enthusiasm for the suggestion that we join in your Miniatures program,” he wrote to Taylor in September 1951. From its inception, the Miniatures, like “the somewhat similar art albums put out just before the War by one of the German tobacco companies, have struck me as providing the most nearly ideal vehicle for bringing serious art to the attention of all the vast numbers of people the museums can’t serve directly, and for whom $10 and $15 volumes are hopelessly out of reach.” Yet he also warns Taylor: “How my Trustees may react to this proposal is not easily predictable, as they have not

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previously exhibited any enthusiasm for either color reproductions or for publications outside their direct control.” Heinrich was clearly persuasive in his dealings with the trustees. Within in a month, they authorized him “to go ahead with the matter.”98 When the Rembrandt set with the larger stamps was launched in 1951, the BOMC intended to solicit 50,000 former subscribers who had canceled their subscriptions, a plan that Taylor vehemently opposed at first. He was concerned that such a solicitation would be insufficient “to offset the very great irritation that will be provoked among those who have already notified us that they do not wish to continue and have been, in fact, most vociferous in the matter.” He also felt uncomfortable with his signature on the letter of solicitation.99 In his reply, Scherman explained to Taylor that “former subscribers are much the best lists . . . that we can use. This is true of all book clubs; it is true of all magazines seeking subscriptions. Consequently, we can’t possibly agree not to circularize them.” Furthermore, “if your personal signature on these letters is troublesome to you— you might have some generally unknown person sign the letter as ‘Director of the Metropolitan Miniature Series,’ or some such title.”100 Scherman’s arguments persuaded Taylor, who thanked him for clearing up the misunderstanding. “I now see that it is people who have in one way or another subscribed at some time and I quite agree that it is an important list to use.”101 The four-page letter sent out to former subscribers did indeed include Taylor’s signature. Unlike earlier promotional material, which had emphasized subscribers’ participation in a nation-wide program of art education, this letter took a more personal approach. “When you cancelled your subscription recently, I need hardly tell you, it was a real worry to us,” the letter states. “It was deeply encouraging when—with your early subscription—you helped us launch this significant cultural venture, and it will mean a great deal to us, I am frank to say, to have your support again. We do hope, consequently, you will let us send you the REMBRANDT SET with its Album, for examination. I shall await your reply with deep interest.” The letter also mentions improvements to the program: the new large-sized stamps with their “much truer” colors and “sharper” details and the expansion of the album from twenty to thirty-two pages in order to “point out important things which were often not apparent in the smaller Miniatures.” The “extremely heavy added expenses” due to these improvements have necessitated a “slight” increase in price from $1.00 to $1.25. The complaints that Taylor foresaw with this solicitation did not materialize: there were twentyfive in total, which the BOMC considered neither “high nor serious.” And there was a large increase in new subscriptions, between 3,500 and 4,000.102

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The Miniature Art Gallery When the Miniatures were initiated, the Met assumed that the stamp and album format would appeal to young people. Taylor characterized the project as “designed primarily to reach an audience at the Grade School, Junior High and High School level.”103 But over time, and especially after the Audience Research report of 1951, the Met and the BOMC realized that adults were enjoying the sets as much as children. According to a later promotional brochure, the album format was part of a deliberate plan “to intensify interest and attention—and it works, amazingly; not only with young people, but with adults.” The brochure also clarifies that the Miniatures, whether enjoyed by children or adults, were intended to be an ersatz museum experience in the home. The heart of the Met’s “cultural invention,” the brochure explains, was to provide “something closely comparable” to a guided visit of the museum: namely, to see not the paintings themselves, but full color reproductions of them; to accompany these with printed, instead of spoken instruction; to see them in groups or series, as an understanding expert would show them in the Museum; and to see them at intervals of time—just like spaced personal guided visits!

The ultimate goal of the Miniatures was for the subscriber to build up, for constant reference and edification, “a complete museum of art in miniature for the home.”104 By 1953, the Met and BOMC were reflecting on whether the album format was the best way to realize this goal. “An Important Announcement from the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” a 1954 letter sent out under Taylor’s signature to 10,000 subscribers, states: The separate Albums, in which the Miniatures could be affixed, was our first step in at-home education; and a good step. This first plan turned out, however, to have a manifest weakness educationally. Once the Miniatures were affixed in the Albums, particularly by young subscribers, the tendency was to file them away, and rarely look at them thereafter. Out of sight, out of mind.

The BOMC and Met thus came up with a new format for the stamps: the “Miniatures Art Gallery.” The plan was to send subscribers with each series of stamps not only the album, but also a foldable art gallery with spaces to fasten the stamps. The scheme, which involved an increase in price from $1.25 to $1.40 and a decrease in the number of stamps per set from twenty-four to sixteen, did not proceed beyond the test mailings, but it demonstrates an important aspect of

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self-cultivation that was promoted by the Met and the BOMC from the very beginning of the Miniatures project. “Certainly the best way to gain a broader understanding and deeper appreciation of the world’s art treasures,” according to Taylor’s letter, “is to live on intimate terms with them, by having them before your eyes as often as possible.” The aim of the Miniatures Art Galley was to create “a valid illusion of reality” in the sense that “you are not looking at pictures, as in a book, but at paintings as they might appear hanging in art galleries.” Like the collection of great music of the world, which “most cultivated homes” now possess “through phonograph records,” the Miniatures Art Gallery would allow subscribers to possess “a vast and rich Art Museum, disposed gallery by gallery, in which hundreds of the priceless masterpieces of the world will be included, and in which many of the great painters, all schools of paintings, are adequately represented.”105 The Miniatures Art Gallery never went beyond the planning stage, but it reveals much about the pedagogical intentions of the Met, specifically the idea that the Miniatures were an ersatz museum experience. That these miniature galleries could represent the entire history of art also reflected Taylor’s idea, as we will see in Chapter 3, that the museum should be thought of as “a visual reference collection of cultural history” that sharpens individuals’ visual perceptions and develops their qualities of taste in order to improve the citizenry and to sustain a democratic nation.106 One aspect of self-cultivation that the “table-top” art gallery exploits is a sense of personal agency. Taylor’s letter explains: “You can keep them ON EXHIBITION for a period, as in a Museum, for enjoyment and study by your family and friends. Then you can change the exhibit, as the Museum itself might do.” This ability to modify personally the miniature gallery was determined to a certain degree by a sense of control one has over the manipulation of something that is miniature. Susan Stewart has argued persuasively in the context of literary texts that we experience miniature objects as things we can possess and over which we have control (as compared to the feeling of being possessed by things gigantic). In a section on miniature time, Stewart suggests that the sense of control involved with the Metropolitan Miniatures had to do with the fact that the tiny reproductions are removed in “at least three degrees” from everyday life: the work of art is distanced from what it signifies; it is taken out of its original context when put in the museum; and it is removed from the “physical setting” of the museum when it is reproduced in the form of a stamp.107 The Miniatures’ triple decontextualization, Stewart suggests, offered the subscriber the power to control the situation through “an almost infinite set of possible arrangements and recontextualizations.” The result was a

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potential experience outside of everyday life, “in a time particular to its own boundaries.” In other words, the value of the Miniatures, like other miniature objects, was in how they could transform quotidian life “into the infinite time of reverie.”108 The possibilities for recontextualizations of the Miniatures stamps were, perhaps, not as infinite as Stewart suggests, especially when they were fastened in an album, as part of a strict narrative about the artist’s life, an historical period, or a museum’s collection. But when one considers a child or adult manipulating poster stamps and sticking them into the albums or using them to decorate a lamp or a desk or a greeting card, one can appreciate Stewart’s analysis. The Miniatures allowed for an entry into a world of cultural play under the individual’s control. And this sense of control would have been stronger had subscribers been given the opportunity to display the stamps in an arrangement of their own choice in a miniature art gallery. Such an experience would have been like that of a dollhouse, a type of structure that, as Stewart explains, is a physical embodiment of an imagined world for use in the home. The dollhouse (or the Miniatures Art Gallery) lends itself “to fantasy and privacy in a way that the abstract space, the playground [or the museum], of social play does not.”109 Personal agency and removal from everyday life, two features of the Miniatures project Stewart highlights, were central to notions of aesthetic self-cultivation at the heart of the Met’s ventures in popular art education.

The End of the Miniatures The announcement for the Miniatures Art Gallery confirms the interconnected relations that were present from the very beginnings of the Miniatures project between use value (aesthetic and educational), exchange value (increase in price), and social value (self-cultivation). These three aspects played a role in both the Miniatures’ success and eventual demise. For the BOMC, cultural and commercial concerns were good bedfellows. Harry Scherman wrote that the achievement of book clubs was due to an “economic invention—that is, recognition of an obvious economic need and the discovery of a practical means of effectually meeting that need.” Like suburban shopping centers and chain stores, book clubs had one main objective: “making consumer goods more easily obtainable.” By improving the book-distribution system, Scherman argued, the BOMC helped to change values held by a certain segment of the population through the shifting of its reading patterns from magazines and newspapers

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(“transitory publications”) to books (“important reading”), which have not only “an aura of preciousness” but also an impact and influence on “our life and thought.” Scherman did not hide the fact that BOMC members have certain characteristics: they tend to be between twenty and forty years of age, to have attended college, and to earn a middle to high income. In other words, to a great degree BOMC members came from the white middle classes. For these “highly educated” and “serious minded” individuals, Scherman explained, reading is not “sheer entertainment.” People were drawn to the BOMC not to keep up “with the Joneses” but rather to keep up “with one’s own high purposes in life, with one’s own private and often sacred cultural aspirations.”110 The ease with which Scherman moves from economic to cultural activity suggests a type of marketing strategy itself. Through its innovative bookdistribution system, the BOMC provided a service to satisfy middle-class desire for self-cultivation. In their advertisements for their monthly book selections, the BOMC, as Joan Shelley Rubin explains, often used a “symptom and cure” method that played on anxieties about the self, social interactions, and self-cultivation. Their first advertisement from 1926 stated: “What a deprivation it is to miss reading an important new book at a time everyone else is reading and discussing it.” Rubin insightfully points out that the BOMC’s success was founded on a reassessment of what it meant to be cultured. One no longer needed to have “a grasp of aesthetic principles, which in turn required disciplined study by readers dedicated to self-reliance and high moral character.”111 Instead, being cultured was equated with a convenient and simple acquisition of information. The Miniatures were similarly advertised as a cure for the symptom of having “only the barest smattering of information about the great art of the world,” which afflicted many persons “cultivated in every other direction—literature, music, affairs.”112 Met Director Taylor acknowledged the importance of ease and convenience in another context of public art education, guided tours of the Met for the uninitiated: “To insure their return, however, we try to make these tours as simple, painless, and concise as possible so that they can leave the building at the end of an hour before their feet begin to hurt and mental indigestion sets in.”113 The Met under Taylor’s direction shared with the BOMC an engagement with the new mass consumer society and the promotion of older values, such as character, taste, and self-reliance. Yet there were certainly differences of perspective between the two institutions that led, as we have seen, to conflicts and tensions. At the beginning of the Miniatures project, the Met understood that there were at least two different types of audiences for art appreciation, the initiated and uninitiated (or the interested and bored, as they are described in advertisements

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for the Seminars, as we will see in the next chapter). The Miniatures, Taylor explained, were intended for students up to the high school level, but offered “nothing new to the experienced connoisseur.”114 Such a view of the Miniatures is also apparent in Marshall Davidson’s recollection of a joke made by Al Gardner, a fellow Met staff member: “He said, ‘You know, I don’t know very much about art, but I know what I lick.’”115 Before the BOMC came on board, the advertisements for the Miniatures stamps included, as discussed above, suggestions for their possible uses, as decorations on lampshades, cigarette boxes, and stationary. Clearly the Met thought of the Miniatures as both an educational tool and a novelty item for the uninitiated. After the partnership with the BOMC, however, these other uses were no longer highlighted in the advertisements: the emphasis was put squarely on the stamps as collectible items to be placed in albums. In fact, the first promotional letter from the BOMC is addressed “Dear Collector,” and the BOMC brochure for the Miniatures, unlike the earlier one put out by the Met, specifies that the audience is “cultivated people everywhere.” In promotional photographs made after the BOMC became involved in the project, the white hands, female and male, of the serious collector are emphasized (Figures 1.7 and 1.8).

Figure 1.7 Promotional photograph for the Metropolitan Miniatures. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY / Art Resource.

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Figure 1.8 Promotional photograph for the Metropolitan Miniatures. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY / Art Resource.

White middle-class pretentions are suggested in these photographs by the objects paired with the Miniatures: the mahogany desk, the horse statuette, the leather writing blotter, the expensive pen in its marble holder, and the brass lamp with its seascape-decorated shade. The camera’s perspective, which puts the viewer almost in the body of the sitter, promotes a desire for values at the heart of middlebrow culture. As Rubin has argued persuasively, the BOMC geared itself towards one intended audience, members of the white middle classes, who wanted both to set themselves apart and to be banded “together in a world grown uncomfortably anonymous and diverse.”116 In marketing the Miniatures to this audience, Scherman saw commerce and culture as mutually reenforcing one another. The challenge the Met faced with the Miniatures was that its take on the relation of mass culture to individual cultivation was more nuanced than the BOMC’s. For the Met, individual cultivation could be achieved through mass distribution, but there was a need to uphold fundamental social categories, such as those between culture and commerce, between the world of the museum and everyday life, and between the uninitiated and initiated. As César Graña

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remarked in 1971: “In a monetary society freedom from the taint of gain is, curiously, a mark of virtue, and museums as ‘non-profit’ organizations are, like churches and educational establishments, part of the preserve of ‘pure’ values within the social order.”117 In engaging in a mass art education project for profit, the Met, as we have seen, attempted somewhat to protect its purity: it did not become a partner with the BOMC, but received a royalty from sales in order to safeguard its tax-exempt status. At one point early on Taylor justified the profits in terms of greater public art education. He hoped that the revenue produced from the Miniatures would make possible the distribution of “larger color reproductions in greater quantity and variety.”118 In its partnership with the BOMC, the Met tried, as we have seen, to separate its cultural contribution from the BOMC’s commercial concerns, even if that divide was often crossed. While the Miniatures project continued in production until 1957, as early as January 1952 Taylor was already showing signs of serious frustration with it. He wrote to Scherman about a letter he received from a Miniatures subscriber that “has hit the nail right on the thumb where it hurts most.” The subscriber pointed out that the Miniatures were not living up to their advertised claim to be the equivalent of “a complete university course.” Taylor agreed with this assessment and laid the blame squarely on the BOMC for having “thrown every obstacle in the Museum’s path whenever there has been any attempt at a pedagogical program.” The attention, Taylor continued in his letter to Scherman, “has been so focused upon popularity and testing that we have been in a mad scramble to provide the thing that would sell the best and given very little thought to the content and educational usefulness of the project.” Doubting that the Miniatures were fulfilling their intended aim, Taylor wondered “whether the time hasn’t come when we have to fish or cut bait. Either we must be content to be popular and opportunist or give serious attention to a long-range educational program.” Taylor suggested that either “the advertising should be corrected and be more restrained,” or “we should do more to live up to our intellectual pretensions.” Taylor offered this concern to Scherman “as a very serious matter for consideration since it involves inherently the principles upon which the Museum is established.”119 Five days later, Taylor received a reply from Scherman, who wrote that the description of the Miniatures as being comparable to a university course “strikes me as being an honest and not too extravagant estimate of what you, as well as we, intended the project to accomplish. If now it seems extravagant, as the enterprise has developed, certainly we have no objection to changing it or anything else we write that you think is questionable.” Scherman, however, was

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disturbed by Taylor’s suggestion that the BOMC has impeded the educational goals of the Miniatures. Scherman recalled “no organized prepared pedagogical program whatever, but—from the beginning—a succession of unrelated, uncoordinated, miscellaneous subjects.” The only time the BOMC was concerned with the content was when the enterprise “was on the way to near wreckage, having developed a 75% cancellation rate.” The project had been salvaged, Scherman argued, by the increase in stamp size and by “a somewhat better considered choice of subjects, which together we have all made,” and which “would interest people with normal curiosity in art.” He agreed that the matter was serious and “that it’s time to fish or cut bait about it. We’ll be glad to sit down for hours, whenever you wish, and formulate an editorial and educational policy for as much of the hereafter as we can all figure.”120 The Met and the BOMC did sit down to discuss the matter, and the result, as we’ll see in the next chapter, was the replacement of the Miniatures with the more systematic Metropolitan Seminars in Art.

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The Metropolitan Seminars in Art: Middlebrow Culture

On November 12, 1954, high-ranking members of the Met and the BOMC, including Met Director Francis Taylor and BOMC Chairman of the Board Harry Scherman, gathered at the museum to discuss “a new course in the appreciation and enjoyment of paintings,” what would later become the Metropolitan Seminars in Art. At this first official meeting about the project, it was clarified that “this new course would replace the ‘Miniatures’ program” by substituting “the somewhat unrelated subjects treated heretofore in Miniatures” with “a planned introduction to the understanding and enjoyment of pictures.” A standardized format was determined: each text would be 6,000 words in length and include twelve large colour reproductions. The educational and psychological goal of the course was also defined: the program was intended “to establish familiarity with really excellent art and artists. Familiarity would destroy any feeling of inadequacy and would give the student self confidence.”1 The Miniatures continued to be produced and circulated until late 1957, just a few months before the Seminars began to be distributed in the first half of 1958. Taylor, who retired from the Met in 1955 and died after kidney surgery in November 1957, never had the opportunity to see the culmination of a museum project based on his belief “that education is no longer the prerogative of an initiated few, but the vital concern of the community at large.”2 Indeed when the Seminars were eventually released, James Rorimer, who was appointed Met Director after Taylor’s retirement, explained to Miniatures subscribers that the Seminars, an “outgrowth” of the stamp project, was “probably the most ambitious venture in the field of art education ever undertaken.”3 The Seminars, like the Miniatures, were a form of art education that was delivered to subscribers’ homes in regular installments, but they made up for the Miniatures’s lack of a “pedagogical program,” as Taylor had put it, through a clearly outlined narrative structure that was written and organized by a single

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author. For the meeting in November 1954, Met Senior Research Fellow Margaretta Salinger had prepared an outline of twelve titles for the series, which included topics on iconography, painting genres, artists’ means, and composition. Although Salinger certainly had the ability and knowledge to write the Seminars, she was not chosen in the end for the project.4 In a late 1970s interview, Marshall Davidson, who was the Met Editor of Publications when the Seminars were produced, reported that “we had a couple of runarounds with curatorial staffs” at the Seminars, but “for my money, it just didn’t work at all. . . . Harry Scherman, bless his late heart, quite agreed, and he said, ‘No, this is crap. We can’t use it.’ ”5 By March 1955, Met Secretary Dudley Easby, Jr. had secured another outline, which was written by John Canaday, who was at the time Head of Education at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Canaday sketched an art appreciation series that would appear in monthly installments. It would include twenty-one sections in two parts: nine on art appreciation (“the artist’s use of his means of expression”) and twelve, more historical, on the “double life” of paintings, that “which is apparent to us today” and that “which is concealed by time.” Canaday was quite certain that he could “maintain consecutive integration while making each issue a satisfactory readable unit in its own right.” Canaday was eventually chosen to write two twelve-part series of Seminars, one on art appreciation and another on the history of Western art.6 Before taking the position at the Philadelphia museum, Canaday (Figure 2.1) had a varied career.7 During his days as an undergraduate student at the University of Texas in San Antonio, he contributed to its literary magazine and also pursued his interest in drawing by completing “cartoons for the humorous mag, the Texas Ranger. Sometimes I’d draw the whole issue under various names.”8 After graduating in 1929 with an undergraduate degree in French and English literature, he went to Yale to study art and art history. Following the completion of his M.A. in 1933, he taught at a variety of universities before enlisting in the army. Between 1943 and 1945, he served in different capacities and locations, including the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). After the war, he returned to teaching at the University of Virginia and Newcomb College, the woman’s college of Tulane University, before he moved on to the Philadelphia Museum in 1953. He stayed in the education department of the museum until September 1959, when he moved to New York to become the art critic for the New York Times. Before his war service, Canaday realized that he was more passionate about writing than painting: “One day [in 1942] I looked at what I was painting and wondered who cared, including myself, whether I finished it. The answer, no in

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Figure 2.1 John Canaday, 1965. John Canaday Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries.

both cases, concluded my efforts to paint.”9 From then on, he replaced painting with writing: “I have wanted to write ever since I can remember,” he told a high school student, who had inquired in 1961 about the author’s life experience.10 After the war, he completed seven detective novels under the pseudonym Matthew Head. Four of the novels included the missionary doctor Mary Finney and three of these were set in the Congo, where Canaday had been stationed during the war. As we will see below, Canaday’s approach to art appreciation, as a puzzle to be solved, is not unrelated to his sideline as a detective novelist. It was the Matthew Head mysteries that brought Canaday to the attention of Met Director Francis Taylor. “I got into all this art business, where people asked me to write for them,” Canaday later explained, when Taylor came to Tulane University, sometime between 1950 and 1952, to give a lecture. Canaday, who was teaching there at the time, drove Taylor around New Orleans. The Met director kept telling Canaday “I know you,” even though they had never met before. It turned out that Taylor had seen Canaday’s picture on the back cover of one of his detective novels.11 In 1955, when the Miniatures were in a “diminishing

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phase,” as Marshall Davidson later explained, he went to Taylor to discuss how to proceed. “So damned few people can write about art,” Taylor told Davidson, but “there’s a guy down in Philadelphia who writes the most wonderful mystery stories.”12 Davidson approached Canaday, who completed four Miniatures albums on far-ranging topics from thirteenth-century Sienese painting to modern art.13 At this time, the Met was looking for an author for the Seminars, and Canaday was giving a series of public lectures at the Philadelphia museum on art appreciation and art history. (These lectures were the basis for his Seminars outline, discussed above.) The Met hired Canaday almost immediately. “From there on,” Davidson maintained, “it was a honeymoon. They’re awfully good. He was the best of authors, outspoken about Raphael, Rembrandt. I’ve never in my life met a more cooperative, friendly [writer] . . . . willing to rewrite.”14 In April 1955, Davidson informed Van Cartmell of the BOMC that Canaday was the right choice to author the Seminars and that he should be paid $750 per volume.15 By June 1955, Canaday had already completed the first two books and the third by July 1955, when he began to be paid. At this point, the BOMC and the Met planned to produce one series of twelve books on art appreciation (Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2 Metropolitan Seminars in Art. Courtesy of the Audio-Visual Resource Centre, School for Studies in Art and Culture, Carleton University. Photo: Nancy Duff.

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Canaday’s original outline of nine volumes on the subject had to be expanded to twelve, each approximately twenty-six pages (19,0000 words) in length. Canaday was responsible for the preparation of the text and the selection of the illustrations, both the black-and-white images that would be included in the text and the twelve separate colour plates. The correspondence between Davidson and Cartmell indicates that both the Met and BOMC were involved in editing the series. Cartmell suggested not only that a “series of questions covering the material in each chapter might be appended as a sort of self quiz in review,” but also that “each chapter should be broken up with subordinate subject headings. I think Marshall [Davidson] mentioned this and we believe it’s a good idea.”16 As part of the editorial process, the Seminars were also vetted by Theodore Rousseau, Jr., curator in the Met Department of Painting, whose comments reveal a tension between Canaday’s (and Taylor’s) populist approach and a more traditional understanding of museum work as a scholarly enterprise. The son of a wealthy French banker, Rousseau studied at the Sorbonne and Harvard (he was a graduate of Paul J. Sachs’s museum course) before working as an assistant curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. He enlisted in the US Navy, where he served in different capacities, before being assigned to the Art Looting Investigation Unit in the Office of Strategic Service. As one of the “Monuments Men,” Rousseau “interrogated numerous Nazis, including Hermann Göring,” which “resulted in seminal reports outlining the Nazis’ comprehensive looting operations.”17 After his discharge from the Navy, Rousseau began his thirty-year career at the Met, where he served as Curator and later Chairman of the Department of European Paintings, Vice Director, and Curator-in-Chief. According to his obituary in The New York Times, Rousseau, “the Golden Boy,” was remembered by museum colleagues “as a suave socialite and an elegant dresser who was, in one former employee’s words, ‘standoffish’ with fellow workers.”18 In his report on the Seminars, Rousseau showed some of these elitist qualities. He praised the Seminars for their “clarity and simplicity with which certain of the more complex aspects of painting are explained,” but he also noted that for “more informed people, who follow everything that the Museum does,” and for “critics and scholars who are always interested in and judge us by the standard of our publications,” the Seminars should be amended in four areas. The first is “outright mistakes,” which demonstrate that Canaday is “unfamiliar with the present state of knowledge on the subject that he is treating.” Rousseau was also concerned with Canaday’s denigration of certain artists, like Velázquez and Raphael, who “have been acclaimed through the centuries.” Thirdly, Canaday’s

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treatment of certain styles or individual works is “insufficiently considered,” for example, his account of the figures in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment as “helpless by the weight of their own flesh” or his description of Simone Martini’s Annunciation as “lacking in spirituality.” Canaday is “entitled to his own ideas,” Rousseau wrote, but they need not be endorsed by the Met. Finally, Rousseau believed that in order to make his points, Canaday at times uses inappropriate examples, which are “unsuitable for publication by this museum”: Pieter Blum’s The Eternal City (Color Plate 7) with its “decaying figure of Christ” can be “interpreted as an attack upon the Church”; many people “important to this Museum” will consider unjust Ben Shahn’s caricature of Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell in The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (Color Plate 8); and the description of French Rococo painting as “boudoir painting” is “inappropriate, misleading, and a little vulgar.” On a final note, Rousseau commented on the term “seminars,” which is “inaccurate and unsuitable” for the series.19 In his review of Canaday’s texts, Rousseau’s tone is certainly that of the curator/scholar, who wants to maintain the dignity of art and the Met’s high reputation. He was concerned that Canaday, a museum educator, was using a colloquial, non-professorial tone that might offend members of elite circles, whether they be informed readers, critics or scholars. His comment that it is misleading to call them seminars in the sense of university-level scholarship demonstrates how he found Canaday’s opinions and views lacking in deep reflection and consideration. (A friend of Met Director James Rorimer similarly regarded the Seminars as “the product of a person, not a profound scholar, . . . who, relies on . . . his own personality for analyzing works of art, rather than on a carefully reasoned system of philosophy or theories.”)20 Canaday’s texts and Rousseau’s comments are a classic example of what Vera Zolberg has described as “the hierarchy of museum functions,” which distinguishes between “objectoriented” curators and “people-oriented” museum educators, who are often considered popularizers.21 What Zolberg makes clear is how the highbrow/ middlebrow distinction was part of a museum’s institutional structure. Rousseau’s comments were certainly considered by the editorial staff at the museum. Mistakes in the Seminars were corrected, but very few other criticisms were addressed. The editorial staff at the Met thought that Canaday’s texts were excellent, and his biggest supporter, Marshall Davidson, defended Canaday’s views on many occasions. In a 1962 interview with Geoffrey Hellman for an Art in America profile of Canaday, Davidson described the then New York Times art critic as a “sensitive person, but willing to stick [his] neck out (unlike [Theodore] Rousseau).” Canaday was “completely his own man. And he knows the history of

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art.” Davidson also mentioned that Canaday had a practical understanding of art techniques, and on one occasion “when the curators objected to his copy [a text for the Miniatures] . . . I backed him up and [Met President Roland] Redmond backed me up.”22 For Davidson, Canaday’s independence of opinion and practical knowledge marked his competence as a writer and museum representative for the Seminars’ intended middle-class audience. Before making the Seminars available to the general public, the BOMC wanted to test them. In October 1955, the basic costs for the trial were determined: the BOMC would pay $198,000 for the preparation of 10,000 copies of six volumes (plates, paper, printing, binding, and promotion). The Met would pay $7,200 for author’s fees and reproduction costs.23 By November, a contract for the trial had been ratified by the Met Board of Trustees, according to which the BOMC was to report back to the Met about the results by the end of 1956, but the BOMC was unable to meet that deadline.24 On August 23, 1956, BOMC President Meredith Wood apologized to Met Director Rorimer for delays in testing the Canaday series, which would now only take place “during the first three months of 1957.” Wood explained to Rorimer: “If the tests are successful we shall then be able to engage in substantial promotion in the fall of 1957.” Wood realized that the Met trustees were likely becoming impatient, but he wanted Rorimer to reassure them of the BOMC’s commitment to the Met: the book club “has expended in excess of $2,000,000 since 1954 in promoting the Metropolitan Miniature project.” And Wood also explained to Rorimer that the Miniatures needed to be continued during this transitional period in order “to convert its membership into subscribers to the Canaday project.” Through advertising and promotional material, the BOMC hoped to maintain the approximately 30,000 Miniatures subscribers until the Seminars appeared. “There of course would be no point in our making these additional expenditures,” Wood wrote, “if the membership list is to die in June of next year.”25 As Wood indicated, the number of subscribers to the Miniatures in 1956 was approximately 30,000, a substantial decrease from over 100,000 in 1952. In the early 1950s, the Met could justify the effort it put into and the expenses it incurred from the Miniatures by their broad reach, their educational value and, of course, their financial returns. But by 1955, when the Met started to devote attention to the Seminars, when there was a serious decline in the number of Miniatures subscriptions, and when, as Davidson later recalled, “practically everything had been covered” and he was at “wit’s end” to come up with new topics, it became more difficult for the Met to sustain the project.26 In February 1956, the BOMC agreed to cover many of the Met’s expenses ($3,400 a month)

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on the Miniatures in order to convert its membership, as Wood explained, into Seminars subscribers.27 At this time, the BOMC’s Harry Scherman even wanted to continue the Miniatures program indefinitely after the release of the Seminars as a “juvenile educational program” for teenagers, “what might called a Junior Canaday course.”28 He justified such a series in terms of financial returns. He told Davidson that the BOMC “must get as much salvage as possible out of their heavy investment in color plates.”29 Davidson, however, explained to Scherman that the Met was “not seriously interested in continuing the Miniatures program” unless they “had solid assurance that it would be rewarding to us as the Miniatures themselves were in the earlier days.”30 In fact, Davidson was of the opinion that if the Seminars trials succeeded, it might be best to “abandon any further efforts with the Miniatures,” and even if it “proves a flop,” the Met “should seriously consider the immediate termination of the Miniatures and redirection of our efforts towards normal Museum publishing.”31 In January 1957, Davidson met with the BOMC and then reported to Rorimer that there were further delays in testing the Seminars. Promotional material was not yet ready. Given that it had missed its deadline of December 31, 1956 to complete its research, the BOMC agreed to do some limited testing in order to give the Met a definitive answer by June 30, 1957 about whether the project would go ahead. Due to these further delays, Davidson requested an increase to $4,800 per month from the BOMC for Miniatures expenses, because the Met “is carrying a load of work which it is only partially recompensed under present arrangements—work which is in addition a distraction from more strictly Museum business.” With all these delays and continuing negotiations, Davidson was becoming more and more irritated with the Club. “I am losing interest in the B.O.M.C. as a partner of the museum,” he wrote to Met Director Rorimer and President Redmond.32 Rorimer, who was meticulous in handling Met affairs, was likely also keeping a close eye on the development of the Seminars. Compared to his predecessor, Rorimer was more of a details person. According to Davidson, he knew things about the Met “in ways that Francis [Taylor] never knew. James [Rorimer] knew where every iron beam in the building was. He knew where all the nails were loose. He knew where the wiring needed fixing. Down to that level, you know.”33 Rorimer joined the Met in 1927 after having completed his undergraduate training at Harvard, where he took the museums course with Paul J. Sachs. He moved up the ranks to Curator of Medieval Art in 1934. He was closely involved in the planning and building of the Cloisters (completed in 1938), during which time he developed a close relationship with John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the Cloisters’

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principal benefactor. He served in the military from 1943 as a Monuments Man, an episode of his life he described in his book Survival: The Salvage and Protection of Art in War (1950). After the war, he returned to the Met as Director of the Cloisters and Curator of Medieval Art until he replaced Taylor as Director in 1955.34 It seems unlikely that Rorimer, given his scholarly predilections, would have initiated a project like the Seminars, but with his eye for detail he most certainly would have recognized its potential financial benefits for the museum. The testing turned out to be successful and at the end of December 1957, Davidson met with the BOMC and updated the Met upper administration on the progress of the Seminars. The series of 12 portfolios was now in production. (Copies of the first volume would go out in May 1958.) The BOMC was planning on a promotional mailing in February to 750,000 potential subscribers and they had decided on an initial printing of “not much more than 15,000 . . . but hope for a much larger return.” Davidson also mentioned that the BOMC was thinking about extending the Seminars from one to two years, from twelve to twenty-four volumes. Davidson reminded them that this “was not a thing to be lightly undertaken, and that it would have to be started at once if there were to be any continuity to the program.”35 The BOMC, clearly believing it had a moneymaking project on its hands, decided to expand the project anyway. In July 1958, Canaday signed a contract for the second series of twelve volumes, each following the same format as the first: twenty-six pages of text with black-and-white images and twelve separate colour plates. Canaday received a signing bonus of $1,000 for the second series in addition to the $750 a volume, and a royalty of 1% on complete sets sold in excess of the first 25,000.36 At this time, Canaday’s agent also negotiated retroactively the same royalty for the first series.37 Canaday later recalled that the “BOMC volunteered a diminutive royalty which keeps me in an expensive apartment,” which was “very decent of them,” because at the time he “was not known at all.” But “the Met never gave me a penny”: Rorimer and his Met colleagues, Canaday claimed, were “very tough.”38 Canaday produced the second series, The Metropolitan Seminars in Art: Great Periods of Paintings (Figure 2.3), with great speed, in less than one year. Given that the second series follows closely Canaday’s 1955 outline, it is likely that he had prepared much of this material for lectures presented at the Philadelphia Museum. And it was important that Canaday worked quickly as the BOMC wanted to maintain, as Davidson explained to Rorimer, “an uninterrupted publishing schedule following the conclusion of the distribution of the first twelve Seminars.”39 For delivery of the second series by March 1959, BOMC President Meredith Wood told Canaday that the text and selection of images for

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Figure 2.3 Metropolitan Seminars in Art: Great Periods in Painting. Courtesy of the Audio-Visual Resource Centre, School for Studies in Art and Culture, Carleton University. Photo: Nancy Duff.

the first three seminars needed to be submitted to the BOMC by December 1958 in order for there to be no interruptions after the publication of the first series. Such an interruption “will inevitably cause cancellations.”40 Canaday was confident that he could make the deadline. Unless “a catastrophe occurs,” he wrote to Wood, he thought he would be able to deliver the texts on time. His only concern was with the quality of the texts: “I would hold the program up before I would let one go through that I wasn’t satisfied with, just to save time.”41 In the end, the second series followed the first without delay. As with the Miniatures, the agreement between the BOMC and the Met for the Seminars was one of author and publisher. The BOMC paid for the production and advertising costs, and the Met paid author and photographic fees, some of which were reimbursed by the BOMC. The BOMC took in all the revenue from sales and the Met received a 7.5 percent royalty. In the first fifteen months (June 1958 to September 1959), over 950,000 portfolios were sold, which brought in over $3.5 million in total sales and just over $200,000 to the Met.42 By the mid 1960s, “no fewer than 350,000 families, probably at least a million individuals,” Harry Scherman reported, “have made use of this educational service.”43 From a financial perspective, the Seminars were a big success for the

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Met. Unlike the Miniatures, which were in continuous production, the Seminars did not cost the Met any resources on the production side after they were completed. The museum did need to allocate some human resources to replying to letters of inquiry or complaint and to meeting with the BOMC on various marketing strategies. The BOMC advertised and sold the Seminars well into the 1970s and the Met received its monthly royalties—estimated at $30,000 in September 1959, although it surely decreased over time.44

The Seminars Readership BOMC Chairman of the Board Harry Scherman described the Seminars as an “educational service,” which he linked to “the phenomenal rise in book reading” and the growth “of the cultural curiosities in recent years of the American public.”45 But who was this “American public” that Scherman spoke of? Who read the Seminars? A 1967 Gallup survey of the subscribers (past and present) conducted for the BOMC gives us some answers. Two of every three subscribers were women; a substantial majority were between the ages of twenty and forty; 80 percent had attended college; and 60 percent had annual family incomes in excess of $10,000. In other words, the Seminars subscribers were for the most part educated, likely white, women of the upper middle class, the same demographic as the general membership of the BOMC and the subscribers to the Miniatures. The survey also indicates that more than half of the subscribers learned about the Seminars through BOMC promotional mailings (discussed below); almost one-third pursued their interest in art in a way that they probably would not have without the Seminars; and one-quarter had visited the Met since subscribing to the series. The most common reasons given by those who cancelled their subscriptions were that the books were too expensive and that they did not have enough time to read them. Over 80 percent indicated that they were satisfied or completely satisfied with the Seminars and over 90 percent claimed that they still owned their copies. It should also be noted that 17 percent of respondents reported that no one in the home had actually read them.46 The Gallup survey indicates that the Seminars certainly increased middle-class interest in art. It also reveals the value of the volumes as status symbols (books on shelves) and the gap between the goals of the Seminars to educate the masses and its actual middle-class audience. The Seminars thus bear out Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel’s claim: “As with religious preaching, cultural preaching only has any chance of success when addressed to the converted.”47

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The Books When the Metropolitan Seminars in Art were released, they were priced at $3.75 each or $45 for the first set of twelve plus mailing costs. (The price increased to $4.25 a volume in 1959, but then returned to $3.75 in the 1960s.) Given that in 1960, the average weekly wage was $45 per week, the Seminars were geared to middle-class wage earners. Signs of middle-class taste are also apparent in the books’ material qualities. Each large-format volume was protected by an onionskin jacket and included twelve colour, photoengraved prints located inside the pocket of the front cover. Each portfolio also included supplementary material: an advertisement for the next volume; a list of review questions, which had the clearly stated purpose (written at the top of the page) “to fix in your mind the major points covered in this portfolio”; and a pronunciation guide (Figure 2.4). The self-educational aspect of the Metropolitan Seminars was thus tied to an optical and tactile experience produced through an attractive commercial commodity. The first series is dedicated to the fundamentals of art appreciation: an introductory volume What is a Painting? is followed by three portfolios on general principles (Realism, Expressionism, and Abstraction), three on aspects of composition (as pattern, structure, and expression), three on different media

Figure 2.4 Supplementary Material included with the Metropolitan Seminars in Art. Audio-Visual Resource Centre, School for Studies in Art and Culture, Carleton University. Photo: Nancy Duff.

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(fresco, oil painting, and the graphic arts), and two on the artist (as social critic and visionary). The second series is a relatively straightforward history of mostly Western art with an emphasis on painting from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century. (See Appendix II for a complete list of titles in both series.) In the texts themselves, Canaday’s tone is more colloquial than scholarly. In fact, in a discussion of promotional material for the second series, Davidson told the BOMC that “Canaday should not be called ‘Professor’ since he’s not one and it’s the last thing in the world he acts or writes like.”48 Indeed, Canaday used straightforward language devoid of scholarly jargon to address an educated audience with interest in, but no specific knowledge of art. He often employed binary oppositions (such as romantic vs. classical or expressionism vs. abstraction) in order to offer readers straightforward categories that could be extended to works beyond those he discussed. He did not set out specific terms found in art appreciation manuals, like light, color, or texture, although he certainly referred to these concepts in the Seminars. Rather he proposed a way to approach painting through three key concepts. The experience of art, he argued in the first series, can be simplified into the activities of seeing, feeling, and thinking, which give rise respectively to realism, expressionism, and abstraction. Canaday emphasized formal readings of paintings, which he assumed were objective and universal. Yet the texts are not limited only to stylistic analysis. Rather, Canaday often employed the “thought-cliché,” to use Jacques Barzun’s term, that is, the simple connection of styles or techniques to larger cultural concerns.49 With gender and racial assumptions common in his day, Canaday explained to his readers that pastels are appropriate to the feminine rococo period; fresco is a masculine medium; and the crudeness of a Gauguin woodcut is fitting to the primitivism of its subject matter. Canaday’s method of teaching art appreciation in the Seminars involved using specific works of art to illustrate general formal principles, which the reader could then apply to other, similar works. For Canaday, art appreciation ultimately came down to two abilities, visual literacy and judgment. He considered visual literacy, the capacity to describe in words formal elements of works of art, an “objective” enterprise. On the other hand, offering opinions, “as has been done again and again in these discussions, of course,” has no “pretensions to infallibility.”50 For Canaday, art appreciation thus involved the translation of pictorial form into verbal descriptions (often through sets of binaries) and a value judgment (on which side of the binary do you stand?). Canaday’s method was thus entirely in line with the Met’s initial impulse for the Seminars, as stated at the first meeting in November 1954, to create familiarity with great works of

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art, which would “destroy any feeling of inadequacy and would give the student self confidence.”51 For Canaday, members of the public, who were visually literate in his understanding of the concept, would be more familiar with works of art and more self-confident in their judgments. And the Seminars were marketed this way, for example in New York Times advertisements: the Seminars “concentrate first on clarifying basic principles, so that the layman can form his own informed opinion of every work of art he may see.”52 This type of pedagogical method for self-improvement was in line not only with principles promoted by art educators during the postwar era, but also with claims made by supporters of general education, as we will see in the next chapter. It should come as no surprise that in Canaday’s texts objective formal analysis and subjective opinions are not always kept separate. In fact, formal analysis and judgment are often intricately intertwined in his texts, especially when he substantiates his subjective opinions with claims to objective formal qualities. In other words, his judgments often take on the quality of certainty, while his formal analyses frequently seem idiosyncratic in nature. For example, in the section “Good Art, Bad Art, Modern Art,” in the first book in the series, Canaday used his formal comparative method to demonstrate how two paintings with similar subject matter illustrate values of good and bad art. Pierre Cot’s 1880 The Storm (Color Plate 9), a French academic painting, suffers from specificity of detail “in such a way that it becomes an illustration.” Oscar Kokoschka’s 1914 The Tempest (Color Plate 10), in comparison, has a “generalized and abstracted” quality, which makes it a “universal image.” In contrast to “the strength of the Kokoschka,” Canaday informed his reader, “Cot’s picture seems today a flossy bit of picturemaking concerned with second rate values.”53 As he often did in his texts, Canaday substantiated his opinion through stylistic elements, such as Cot’s detailed representation and Kokoschka’s more abstracted form, as if the analysis necessarily informs the judgment and the judgment comes naturally from the formal analysis. Canaday also advocated a type of hierarchical thinking that privileges the verbal over the visual and the universal formula over the historical detail. In the portfolio The Artist as Social Critic, he stated: “Art is concerned with permanent values, not transient ones. Its ultimate statement is general, not specific, even when it is couched in specific terms.”54 This hierarchy, based on the assumption that great works of art, like great books, addressed important questions related to the human condition, unsurprisingly favors a specific set of values favoured by the enlightenment tradition: the general over the specific, language over perception, reason over the body.55 This bias reveals itself in how Canaday

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preferred paintings like Botticelli’s The Calumny of Apelles, which he claimed have a universal message and about which he could thus generalize, over those like Ben Shahn’s The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, which are “dependent on knowledge of the specific event for full understanding of the picture’s meaning.”56 In The Artist as a Visionary, the final volume of the first series, Canaday clarified his position when he compared two works by Honoré Daumier. In The Soup (Color Plate 11), illustrated in black and white in the text, the central figure is a working-class mother eating while breastfeeding a child. It depicts, in Canaday’s words, “human creatures devouring food with animal intensity.” In contrast, The Print Collector (Color Plate 12), a separate color plate, shows an “ordinary man” not as “a human animal,” but as “a human being who thinks, wonders, and tries to explain.” With this simple gendered opposition between unrefined and cultured, working and middle class, unenlightened and enlightened, Canaday set out the ultimate goal of the Seminars: to help inculcate self-reflection in the individual for whom it is necessary “to explain to himself the existence of the world and to find a reason for his presence in it.”57 Canaday believed that through art one can develop new critical abilities and experience the world in fresh ways. In the first seminar, he explained that art “enlarges our experience, to the extent that it enriches or clarifies our inner world.”58 His notion of experience, however, differs greatly from John Dewey’s well-known understanding of the concept. In his 1934 Art as Experience, Dewey had attempted to break down the boundaries between art and life, to see the aesthetic not in a rarefied realm such as the museum but as part of everyday experience.59 Canaday was uninterested in such boundary breaking. Rather he wanted to open doors, to allow the uninitiated into the realm of art, to increase the number of those who felt they belonged in the museum. This goal depended upon, as the Met understood right from the beginning of the project, increasing the public’s familiarity with works of art in order to give them self-confidence to make informed judgments.60 Self-confidence in the postwar era was not only a matter for the individual, but also a social concern, as Dale Carnegie made clear in How to Develop Self-Confidence and Influence People by Public Speaking. Carnegie asked his readers to think about what self-confidence “may mean and what it ought to mean, in dollars and cents. Think of what it may mean to you socially; of the friends it will bring, of the increase of your personal influence, of the leadership it will give you.”61 In other words, individual accomplishments were in postwar America sometimes articulated in terms of social and economic benefits. And the Seminars, as both a cultural and commercial product, functioned well in this milieu. The kind of visual literacy they taught was in part

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a consequence of the growth of a middle-class audience with its own pre-existing desires and demands for cultivation and upward social mobility. These desires were manifested in other contemporary cultural activities as well. The Great Books Foundation, a non-profit educational corporation established in 1947, attempted to turn towns and cities into places of learning by having “adults regularly attend informal Great Books seminars in their own neighborhoods and communities, join in the great conversation, raise the dialogue at the national level from the trivial to the enduring.”62 Mortimer J. Adler, cofounder of the Great Books Foundation, established a progressive system of rules for reading: from structural (analytic) to interpretative (synthetic) to critical (evaluative) analysis.63 These rules may have been more systematic than the principles put forward in the Seminars, but they similarly attempted to enable the student to make judgments from an understanding of form or structure. For Adler and Canaday, art appreciation was, to a great degree, a problem-solving activity. Adler stated that an author starts out with a problem and tries to find solutions. “A problem is a question. The book ostensibly contains one or more answers to it.”64 Canaday similarly believed that “A painting is an answer to a question.”65 For Canaday and Adler, in their optimistic belief in humanist values, the keys of formal analysis could unlock doors to the worlds of art and literature. The Great Book Club and the Seminars demonstrate how in postwar America, there was a growing literature that attempted to turn what were earlier considered private pastimes, such as reading a book or viewing a work of art, into public concerns. The Seminars do not delve into deep analysis. Their function was to give the beginner an aesthetic vocabulary in order to enjoy, feel at ease with, make meaning of, and appreciate works of art. In other words, they provided a model (Canaday’s perspective) to make sense of and judge “serious” works of art, past and present. As such they are as directive (guiding readers how to act) as they are instructional (giving information and methods of approach). The Seminars thus align well, as we will see in the next chapter, with the goals of many postwar art educators, who, like Canaday, understood art appreciation both as an autonomous activity and as having an instrumental value to produce better citizens.

Selling the Seminars Unlike the Great Books Foundation, a not-for-profit endeavour, the Seminars project was a large, for-profit commercial enterprise. And the BOMC spent a

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great deal of expense on advertising the Seminars, not just in newspapers like The New York Times, but through elaborate mailings to prospective subscribers. The BOMC also developed more innovative ways of promoting the series. They created accompanying educational slides. They offered free books, such as Canaday’s Mainstreams of Modern Art, to subscribers who signed up new members. The series was also promoted through the tele-lecture, “a new Bell Telephone service which brings eminent scholars, or other famous people to your groups” by projecting pictures of speakers on screens and synching their voices to the images through amplified long-distance telephone. James Rorimer and John Canaday participated in one such tele-lecture on “What is a Painting?”, the subject of the first Seminar, in late 1962 at the Municipal University of Omaha.66 The BOMC also distributed to the General Foundation of Women’s Clubs a booklet written by Canaday, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Art (Figure 2.5), which included an attached postcard to request the “syllabus” for more information about the Seminars.67

Figure 2.5 John Canaday, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Art. Author’s Collection.

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The BOMC anxiously wanted to promote the series through film and television. As early as November 1958, BOMC vice-president Axel Rosin inquired about the possibility of producing educational films for classrooms through the Film Associates of California. Met Secretary Dudley Easby’s reply to Rosin showed some hesitation: the idea “sounds attractive, but I can foresee many problems on the actual photography and securing permissions to reproduce the works involved.”68 A year later, a meeting took place between the Met and the BOMC about a thirteen-part television series on the Seminars. Scherman and Wood, clearly in selling mode, told the Met that the BOMC “has never done anything that has been so well received as the Seminars.” At the meeting, Scherman suggested that a television series, paid for by the BOMC, could be used as promotional material to replace print advertising. NBC would produce the series in colour, “programs would be one-half hour in length and be bona fide instruction.” In reply, Met President Roland Redmond stressed the fact that “the educational and commercial aspects of the program were separate and distinct, and that this separation would have to be kept in mind in any consideration of the [television] project by the Trustees of the Museum.”69 Tensions between educational and commercial interests also surfaced in Met correspondence with private television broadcasters at this time. A museum like the Museum of Modern Art in New York sought liaisons with commercial networks, as Lynn Spigel has demonstrated, not simply as a platform for advertisement or education, but as a central component of its efforts to maintain “its own cultural power.”70 Met Director Taylor, on the other hand, directed the attention of the Met trustees “to non-commercial television and to the advent of state-operated stations.”71 When the Met did pursue projects with private broadcasters, it was very concerned with the encroachment of commercial enterprise upon the museum’s status as an institution of high culture. On more than one occasion, the Met stipulated to the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) that it did not want its works of art associated too closely with advertised merchandise: “If the program is sponsored, there is to be no spoken reference to product in discussion of the Museum’s paintings and no visual juxtaposition of the product and the paintings.”72 In the end, the Met’s executive committee of the Board of Trustees declined the offer to participate in the NBC television series based on the Seminars. They felt that in order to maintain the Met’s high reputation it was necessary to keep educational and commercial concerns separate and distinct.73 But the BOMC pressed on, and in September 1961 a film, scripted by Canaday and based on the first portfolio, “What is a Painting?”, was made available to the public. Met

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Secretary Easby acknowledged the BOMC’s desire to promote the Seminars with a short motion picture, but “the ‘content’ of promotional material is subject to the Museum’s approval and since any alteration or revision of a motion picture is vastly different from a change in a newspaper advertisement or a mailing piece, I think we should have a clear understanding of the way in which this particular ‘promotion’ is to be cleared.” The terms of the understanding included the requirement that all promotional material needed to have a statement that the Met owned copyright of the film.74 It is unclear if all the terms included in the contract were followed, but in at least one BOMC advertisement for the film, the copyright statement does not appear.75

For the “Bored” and “Completely Tired Out” Although the BOMC promoted the Seminars in a variety of media, mailings to prospective subscribers, as the Gallup survey indicated, were the most effective way it advertised the series. Delivered in a large envelope (Color Plate 13) decorated with the reproduction of a recognizable work of art (a Rembrandt self-portrait, a Van Gogh landscape, or a Degas ballet scene), each mailing included a signed letter from the Met director, a sample colour reproduction, a sample page from the text, a subscription order form, and a thick colour brochure (Color Plate 14).76 Although the Seminars were owned, produced, and distributed by the BOMC, its name only appears twice in the mailer, in the address of the order form and in a statement on the back of the brochure. (In comparison, the Met’s name appears over ten times and in prominent places such as on the envelope, on the cover of the brochure, and in the letterhead of the director’s letter.) The statement outlines the division of labour between the two institutions and suggests that the Seminars are a Met product with the BOMC only acting “as its national distributor.” The statement assures the potential subscriber that “the texts, the selection and preparation of the illustrations, both those in color and in black and white, and the review questions accompanying each portfolio are wholly under the supervision of the Museum.” The BOMC handles simply “all matters pertaining to subscriptions.” As with advertisements for the Miniatures, those for the Seminars maintained the culture/commerce divide. But as with the Miniatures, the BOMC, as we have seen, did take part in editorial work on the Seminars. BOMC staff vetted all the texts for the series and suggested the inclusion of the review questions. The brochure included in the mailer clearly outlines the goals of the Seminars in the context of the museum-going public. According to the brochure, the staff

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at the Met has recognized that some museum visitors are “eager and excited,” while others are “there from a feeling of self-imposed duty. Actually, they are bored and are soon completely tired out.” The problem of boredom, the brochure goes on to explain, does not lie outside but within the individual: What is wrong? When so many otherwise well-educated people are in this second category, can it be that the art of painting is something of a mystery? No, indeed it is not! Anyone who suffers from such bafflement can find the reason for it in himself. If he reflects upon his life and education, he will realize that he has been totally without guidance as to what to look for in paintings.

Boredom may be observable as an outward characteristic, the brochure suggests, but is more importantly an inner quality; it is caused not by the object of study, but by the unprepared subject. Boredom, “as an all-purpose register of inadequacy,” Patricia Meyer Spacks maintains, emerged in the early nineteenth century as a modern social problem, as an improper, that is, unproductive and unfulfilling, use of leisure time: it “alludes to the emptiness implicit in a life lacking powerful community or effective traditions.”77 In the Seminars brochure, boredom is a symptom of the individual’s unachieved cultural potential that can be remedied through proper education. And the Seminars, of course, provided the cure. The brochure’s division between interested and bored museum-goers also indicates that the Met had realized what Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel would articulate a few years later in their study of French museum visitors, that museums “reinforce for some the feeling of belonging and for others the feeling of exclusion.”78 Like the sociologists, the Met understood that the feeling of not belonging comes from a process of self-exclusion: those who easily get bored and tired, the brochure claims, “realize that they are cut off—have perhaps cut themselves off in some way—from a rare form of pleasure they surely ought to be able to enjoy as much as other people.” As a commercial and educational enterprise, the Seminars do not intentionally highlight, as Bourdieu and Darbel’s study does, the museum’s role in creating and enabling class distinctions based on wealth, family upbringing, education, and taste. Rather, the Met and the BOMC assume, in a very American way, not only that art appreciation and art history, as expressed in the Western tradition, are valuable to all who want to lead a fulfilling life, but also that feelings of exclusion due to boredom can be easily overcome through remedial education. Here they differ significantly from the French sociologists, who thought that popular educational initiatives “merely disguise the cultural inequalities that they cannot in reality reduce.”79 But

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Bourdieu and Darbel do have a soft spot for American museums. In contrast to their French counterparts, museums in the United States have tried, Bourdieu and Darbel concede, to make their collections more accessible to a broad public through educational services and more approachable by including libraries, concert halls, and shops in their architectural designs.80 The Seminars achieve their goal of turning the bored into the interested, the brochure claims, through two features of this “entirely fresh approach to art education”: convenience (you can study at home) and comprehensiveness (they are “thorough enough to achieve real results”). The Seminars are in fact described as better than museum and university courses in that they have no time limit and the large color reproductions have great advantages over those “thrown upon a screen in a lecture hall.” The prints are not only more accurate, but they can also “be looked at not once for a short period but over and over again.”81 The claim to comprehensiveness is in part a way to distinguish the systematic quality of the Seminars from the more arbitrary topics of the Miniatures. It was also a good selling point: with the Seminars, the reader could gain a comprehensive knowledge of art appreciation and art history in a one-stop shop. The Seminars’ comprehensiveness was not their only selling point. The brochure also emphasized convenience: members of a family could take the course simultaneously at home at a time suitable to them. The family photograph in the brochure (Color Plate 15) demonstrates not only the convenience of the Seminars, but also their promotion of white, gendered, middle-class values. In a neatly appointed room, dressed in clothes suitable for the museum, the family members study the Seminars in appropriate ways. The father engages with the son in intellectual pursuits, while the mother admires the Seminars print of an Ingres portrait. Reading the portfolios aloud and examining the reproductions, the brochure proclaims, “is like visiting a museum together, pointing out to one another something to be appreciated and enjoyed.” While the Seminars would be “over the heads” of children in elementary schools, parents will “unconsciously” share their understanding of art with their youngsters. “When they ultimately introduce their children to art museums—which is bound to happen in every cultivated family—they will have something of real fascination to impart that will immensely influence young tastes in the right direction.” Again, the Met had recognized what Bourdieu would articulate later: “the domestic transmission of cultural capital” is “the best hidden and socially most determinant educational investment.”82 The domestic convenience of the Seminars aligned well with white middle-class values of postwar America, when the commodification of the home and its contents

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was a critical experience for this growing class. As Dianne Harris writes: “Little proclaimed whiteness, class stability, and citizenship quite like a house of one’s own in the suburbs.”83 Housing starts in the 1940s increased exponentially from 142,000 in 1942 to over 1 million in 1944 to over 2 million in 1950. The proliferation of inexpensive mass-produced homes in the suburbs was due specifically to federal funding for house purchases for returning soldiers, low interest rates and property tax deductions. Indeed, the number of homeowners increased from 44 percent of the population in 1940 to 62 percent in 1960.84 As a new homeowner put it in 1949, with “a hundred dollars down,” one could buy a house with “venetian blinds, a washing machine, a refrigerator.”85 Elaine Tyler May has argued that to understand the 1950s home as a place of secure containment from the political insecurities of the Cold War, one has to recognize the important role of mass consumption, specifically of appliances and other household furnishings, which provided not only “a reassuring vision of the good life available in the atomic age,” but also a “means for achieving individuality, leisure, and upward mobility.”86 Proper consumption was also a way to achieve good citizenship. As Lizabeth Cohen suggests in her analysis of the postwar “consumers’ republic,” a new ideal emerged of the citizen as purchaser, who, through consumption, satisfied personal desire and at the same time fulfilled social obligations.87 Mass consumption in postwar America was often described not in terms of pleasure or extravagance but as a social responsibility, which, as Life magazine put it, would lead to “full employment and improved living standards for the rest of the nation.”88 The Seminars, as national products for self-improvement, fit well into this postwar American world. May suggests that the postwar home was often conceived in the 1950s as a place of protection from the threats of capitalism and the political dangers of the times. As Jacques Barzun maintained in 1959: the family was “a small fortress against the monsters outside—the huge institutions, the anonymous mass, the agitated world. The self-centered family is not an institution, it is a cocoon.”89 Lynn Spigel, however, has more recently challenged this conception of the home as a place of withdrawal from the public sphere. She asserts that the postwar house, especially in the suburbs, was a “discursive space” that mediated domesticity and public culture.90 Whether it be through purchasing detached homes with architectural features like the window-wall open to the outside or listening to the radio or watching television or reading magazines delivered to the house, young middle-class suburban couples lived in homes that mediated a “separation from and integration into the outside world.”91 And in doing so, the home “participated in the construction of a new community of values” and “became the cultural representatives of the ‘good life.’ ”92

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The Seminars, which were advertised as a course “in which the whole family can participate,” also promoted the good life, as defined by white, middle-class norms, which, as we have seen, embraced cultural and consumer values. In postwar America, broadcast television was the most powerful vehicle in the home to normalize the conservative construct of the nuclear family as the natural basis for social life (Color Plate 16). This construct often appeared on broadcast television, in shows such as “Leave it to Beaver,” which assumed the white nuclear family as “the basis and heart of its audience.”93 As compared to the modernity of television, which, as has often been noted, changed the cultural landscape in the 1950s, the Seminars seem like relics of an earlier time. But there are similarities between the Seminars and television broadcasting that need to be considered. They are both forms of what Raymond Williams called “mobile privatization” in that they moved from a centre of production to the self-sufficient family home.94 Like serial television shows, the Seminars were distributed in regular intervals, replicated the same format, and used narrative structures that organized each instalment and linked one to the next. Like television programs, whose “flow” could be interrupted by commercials or stepping out of the room, the Seminars, with their separate color illustrations, review questions, and texts, were not packaged as books to be read from front to back. They could be read and reread, sections could be skipped, images could be compared one to another, and artworks could be studied without reference to the text. Like television, which requires a “continuous self-referential subjectivity,” to hold “the flow of miscellaneous images together,” the Seminars needed a similar type of reader.95 This requirement may have been stronger in the case of the Miniatures and their diverse subject matter. With the Seminars, the Met introduced John Canaday, a personality who gave a narrative structure to art appreciation and art history, not unlike the television talk-show host or those who took on the mantel of popular educators, like Walter Damrosch, the host from 1928 to 1942 of NBC’s “Music Appreciation Hour,” or Leonard Bernstein, who explained the fundamentals of classical music in the CBS television program “Young People’s Concert” (1958–72).96 The Seminars were intended more for edification than entertainment, and they carried a higher cultural value than television. But they were similarly advertised as creating strong familial bonds and cultural ties between parents and children, older and younger generations. (Compare the clothing, setting, and interactions of the family members in Color Plates 15 and 16.) The Seminars functioned well in the modern world of new technologies at the same time that they harkened back to older values. Such incongruities were characteristic of the

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postwar era. Spigel has argued that to treat as binary opposites such concepts as entertainment and education, domesticity and public culture, femininity and modernism, and television and art is “to misunderstand the cultural logic of late capitalism.”97 Such binaries similarly cannot be opposed in understanding the reception of the Seminars. Their success was due to how modern technology and traditional learning, capitalist efficiency and cultural distinction, the worth of the individual and communal values worked seamlessly together in postwar America. As a type of art education for home consumption, the Seminars reconciled two important middle-class concerns: aesthetic education (visual literacy) as a productive leisure activity for self-development; and proper consumption as an act of good citizenship. To put it another way, consumer culture, as Joan Shelly Rubin has argued, did not have to be opposed to the genteel tradition, as it often was, but could embrace it.98 And the home was, in the case of the Seminars, the site for this embrace.

Problems and Complaints The home, however, was not a place to be overwhelmed by the marketplace. The Seminars mailings may have been intended to promote their educational and social goals, but they also received another, more negative kind of attention. For example, according to “How Many Did You Get?,” a short piece in the November 10, 1958 edition of The Chapel Hill News Leader: The Metropolitan Museum of Art has flooded the mails with expensive advertisements of its home study course in art appreciation. To one home came three—one to the owner as “Mr.,” another the same except to “Dr.,” and a third with the last name misspelled. Another Chapel Hillian found two in his mail box, one with “Mr.” and the other without. Little wonder postmen get flat feet!99

The excessive number of mailings arriving at individual homes reached the attention of the Met Board of Trustees.100 At their request, Met Secretary Dudley Easby immediately contacted BOMC President Meredith Wood and told him that “there have been instances in which a single person has received as many as 12 copies of the brochure,” and that “the situation is adversely effecting our efforts to raise funds for the Museum.”101 The BOMC agreed to include a notice of apology for duplication in all future Seminars mailings.102 Members of the public also complained to the Met that its collaborations with the BOMC tainted the museum’s reputation: the Met was lowering its high

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standards with the Seminars and its advertisements. One member of the public reprimanded Met Director Rorimer for his use of language in the cover letter to promote the series: “Frankly I can’t believe a person in your position would write a letter using a plethora of such words as ‘intrigued’, ‘exciting new’, and ‘amazed.’”103 Others believed that the Met was sullying its reputation due to its affiliation with the “racquet of the Book of the Month Club,”104 or “the no money down and hooked later book shills.”105 Another complained to the Better Business Bureau, because the BOMC “has intimidated me with dunning letters and recently advised that a collection agency would create an ‘extremely unpleasant situation’ for me.”106 Such suspicion about the BOMC’s business practices is evident in other complaints from dissatisfied subscribers about receiving books they had not ordered and about being billed for cancelled subscriptions. Members of the public wrote to the museum, because they assumed, due to the way the Seminars were marketed, that the publications were more a Met than a BOMC product, even though the BOMC owned the rights to the Seminars and paid the Met a royalty on sales.107 For example, one subscriber, who did not receive the twelfth portfolio and wrote to the BOMC with no reply, informed the Met: “I address you because I believe you would want to know of the lax method in which your affairs are handled.”108 The most common complaint concerned the way the BOMC, with the Met’s consent, introduced the second series of Seminars to subscribers of the first. They were sent a free copy of the first volume of the second series and then automatically enrolled in it unless they opted out.109 The practice of sending unsolicited merchandise “has long plagued the consumer,” the Duke Law Journal reported in 1970, and such a scheme was recognized by Seminars subscribers.110 After receiving the first series and paying out approximately $48.00, one subscriber continued to receive portfolios: “I very much resent the way the Book of the Month Club attempted to sneak another $48 out of my pocket.” In his reply, Met Secretary Dudley Easby promised to forward the complaint to the BOMC: “I am sure that they will handle the matter to your satisfaction.”111 One letter to the museum clearly articulated the risk the Met was taking to its reputation in partnering with the BOMC: We couldn’t have a higher regard for any institution than we have for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But this certainly does not apply to the avaricious and mercenary commercial concern you have selected for the distribution of your art Seminars. . . . It seems an unfortunate confession that with all its strength and resources the Museum itself is unable to handle the Seminars but should turn these over to a profit, not a non-profit, commercial enterprise for its own special commercial and pecuniary benefit.112

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The Met staff member in charge of the series, Marshall Davidson, came to the Seminars’ rescue. In his reply to this disgruntled subscriber, he emphasized that the Met retained “full editorial control” of the series and, with the BOMC’s distribution network, has been able “to call the attention of millions of people to the work we have so carefully and thoughtfully prepared.” He also pointed out that the Met has done so “without jeopardizing our own pecuniary structure.” He concluded: “Judging from the letters of appreciation that cross my desk, I would say that we have also done this without jeopardizing our status as a preeminent cultural institution.”113 The letters of complaint to the Met indicate how the museum was imperilling its high status in collaborating with the BOMC. But, as Davidson’s defense suggests, the Met was also proud to promote a series like the Seminars that involved, as Francis Taylor indicated in his first report to the Met trustees, “winning the confidence of that very large body of persons of moderate means to whom it [the Met] can be not only a source of aesthetic pleasure but a useful and even profitable investment.”114 The financial rewards from the Seminars, it should not be forgotten, were also a boon to the museum’s coffers.

“The Nuances of Art without the Hard Work” While members of the general public complained about BOMC business practices and were concerned with the Met’s reputation, writer and cartoonist Theodore L. Shaw, a voice of opposition to established art critics and institutions, argued that the entire Seminars’ project was foolhardy and misguided at its core. In a series of publications (Figure 2.6), which came out in the early 1960s, Shaw claimed that the Met’s Seminars “misteaches art” by treating it as a “factual science” like astronomy, physics, or geology and not as what it really is, a “conjectural science” like meteorology and medicine.115 In the Seminars, Shaw maintained, Canaday attempts to make the reader believe that “his purely personal—and accidental—reactions” to works of art are in fact “the necessary and typical reactions” of the cultured individual. The goal of the Seminars is to get readers “properly educated” so that they will react to works of art in the same way. But, Shaw claims, this system is “just downright humbuggery.” What’s happening is that you are being talked down to (here and, in fact, all through the seminars) in much the patronizing mood of grandpa telling the trustful young child that the way to catch a bird is to put salt on its tail. You are

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the ignoramus, the easy-mark; and Art is so far over your head (supposedly) that being careful and staying within the bounds of reason isn’t worth the bother.116

Shaw’s critique brings out an incompatibility inherent in the museum’s position of authority and its democratic mission. At the same time, his criticisms miss the mark to a certain degree, because he assumes the Seminars employ a one-directional method of teaching and a naïve reader. As discussed above, the Seminars did not set out to tell readers what to think, even if the texts limit the possibilities of explanation. In fact, their intended goal was not to force one particular interpretation of a work of art on readers, but rather to give them specific critical tools, vocabulary, and categories to enable them to appreciate and judge works of art on their own. As Marshall Davidson stated in a reply to a pseudonymous letter Shaw wrote to the Met: “I believe you can afford to take Mr. Canaday seriously and that you can afford to disagree with him. . . . There is

Figure 2.6 “The Aesthetic Cop” [Theodore L. Shaw], “How the Metropolitan Museum Misteaches Art,” a leaflet published by Stuart Publications, Boston, n.d. [c. 1961].

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nothing incompatible about the two notions.”117 In other words, the Seminars’ lessons were meant not to inhibit individual thinking, but to encourage different perspectives. Some subscribers to the Seminars surely understood their intent. One wrote: “I have strengthened opinions and learned to disagree with an art critic in specific areas.” Another, reflecting on the nature and influence of the writer’s work, described art criticism as “a facility of the critic to put words together in a manner which seems to display a special understanding of form and beauty that the layman hasn’t the courage to deny.”118 As we have seen, Canaday himself distinguished between making objective statements about form and offering subjective opinions.119 His views were thus not intended as “necessary and typical,” even though Shaw took them that way. Rather they were intended, in the tradition of middlebrow culture, to make art appreciation easier for the layperson. In Rachel Cusk’s 2018 novel Kudos, one of the characters, a publisher, says of writers, who maintained literary values and whose books sold well: “To experience the nuances of literature without the hard work . . . was for a number of people very pleasurable.”120 With the substitution of “art” for “literature,” this statement could have been the motto for the Metropolitan Seminars. The ability to come to one’s own conclusions, however, was not as simple a task as Davidson made it out to be in the context of the Seminars. The Met was not necessarily teaching people what to think, but they were certainly framing art appreciation in terms of what to think about. The nuances of artworks and their pleasurable aspects were undoubtedly reduced for those Seminars readers who strictly followed the system of art appreciation promoted by the texts. Shaw’s critique brings out a tension between, on the one hand, the Met’s desire to help the layperson understand and judge works of art, and, on the other, the museum’s need to maintain its status as an institution of high culture through its expertise in the field. This expertise comes out in Canaday’s approach, which, as discussed above, employed a type of gendered, formalist method of analysis, which favored certain types of works over others. Following Canaday’s method to the letter, the reader would likely favor avant-garde art over academic, Neoclassical painting over Rococo, and expressionist over non-representational works. Moreover, the terms of the aesthetic field were set in a way that regulated, to a great degree, independent thought. The Seminars set limits to interpretative possibilities (realist, expressionist, and abstract, for example) and reduced judgments to likes and dislikes. If the Seminars helped produce free-thinking individuals, as the Met intended, then this freedom was certainly restricted by the parameters set out in the texts. Janice Radway has suggested that BOMC

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subscribers to the monthly book selections had limited freedom through the BOMC’s “negative option,” that is, the ability of subscribers to accept the book of the month or choose another from a list of secondary options. For Radway, the BOMC transformed “individual choice in the face of mass production and distribution into selection among a range of predetermined options.”121 A similar type of limited freedom was manifest in the Seminars project. Readers were being taught to articulate specific properties of artworks and then to discriminate what they liked and disliked based on a language of visual literacy, restricted in its scope.

Middlebrow Culture Many of the complaints the Met received about the Seminars were a consequence of the conviction that the sphere of high culture was separate from the everyday and unconcerned with the commercial realm. “The scandal of the middlebrow” in the interwar period, as Radway explains, “was a function of its failure to maintain the fences cordoning off culture from commerce, the sacred from the profane, and the low from the high.”122 When the Met/BOMC collaborative projects were produced in the postwar period, the middlebrow was more established and, perhaps, less scandalous, but art museums like the Met continued (and continue today) to occupy a fraught position between serving a cultural elite and appealing to the masses, between pursuing scholarly activities and seeking financial gains. The Miniatures and Seminars, as products of middlebrow culture, are a legacy of a process of social stratification, defined as much by taste as by wealth, which began much earlier in the United States. The hierarchical organization of high and low culture, as is often argued, took shape in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through cultural institutions like the theatre, music hall, and museum. At this time, the sacralization of art and culture, as Paul DiMaggio and Lawrence Levine have demonstrated, “increased the distance between amateur and professional.”123 In the case of American art museums, painting and sculpture were elevated above other art forms; photographs, plaster casts, and other “curiosities” were relegated to storage in favour of what the director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts called “higher things.”124 During the interwar years, as Joan Shelley Rubin maintains, there were many attempts to bridge the gap between the world of high culture and the masses through book clubs, correspondence courses, night schools, public lectures, and women’s study

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clubs.125 Rubin persuasively argues that in order to cultivate the masses, purveyors of middlebrow culture played on notions of the genteel tradition, exemplified in the writings of Matthew Arnold, which connected cultural activity with an individual’s character. Organizations like the BOMC reconstituted an older, anti-materialist model of cultivation associated with inward virtue even when they were using modern means of advertising and mass distribution networks.126 Following Rubin’s line of thought, Radway suggests that BOMC founder and Chairman of the Board Harry Scherman “proved adept at mobilizing the language and symbolism of individuality, choice, and agency while simultaneously taking advantage of the economic benefits offered by the principles of automation.”127 As importantly, the BOMC, by claiming to provide a “service,” could justify its commercial enterprise as one that was socially responsible.128 After the Second World War, such middlebrow pursuits continued in a variety of fields, such as literature and music.129 And the Miniatures and Seminars were certainly in line with these developments. Champions of middlebrow culture, like the Met’s Taylor and the BOMC’s Scherman, believed that it could raise the nation’s cultural standards and give value to individuals’ lives. Critics, on the other hand, believed that such efforts only produced a dull, conformist population. Whether it be Clement Greenberg’s kitsch, Dwight Macdonald’s Midcult, or Theodor Adorno’s culture industry, the middlebrow was understood as a type of simplified, regurgitated culture. Adorno described the products of the culture industry, such as popular music and film or the popularization of high art, as “pre-digested” goods: “It is baby-food: permanent self-reflection based upon the infantile compulsion towards the repetition of needs which it creates in the first place.”130 And Jacques Barzun condemned those middlemen of culture who “ooze ease” through “education without instruction.”131 Such descriptive terminology of popular middlebrow culture as undifferentiated pablum for a mass audience suggests notions of maternal force and infantile regression that threatened, as Radway makes clear, the masculine (and white) American ideal of the autonomous, independent, and intentional subject.132 With the rise of consumer capitalism, it became common among critics of the middlebrow to argue that culture was now often regarded as a commodity and the self as a succession of purchases.133 Hannah Arendt, for example, came down hard on the “cultural philistine,” who seizes upon art “as a currency” to buy “a higher position in society” or acquire “a higher degree of self-esteem.” Such a person, whose purpose in reading the classics is self-perfection, remains “quite unaware of the fact that Shakespeare or Plato might have to tell him more

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important things than how to educate himself.”134 For Arendt, Adorno, Greenberg, and Macdonald, art’s commodification was a central concern in a world that was being defined more and more by standardization in commercial production. They all took a strong stance in distinguishing genuine art’s autonomy from its use to fulfill a need or satisfy a desire, however noble. The Seminars were certainly products of middlebrow culture, as evidenced by the nature of the texts, their advertising, their wide distribution through the BOMC, and the demographics of the readership, which mirrored the BOMC’s. As Dwight Macdonald wrote in 1960: “Midcult is the Book-of-the-Month Club.”135 That the Seminars were a middlebrow commodity is also suggested by the ease with which subscribers understood the type of visual literacy being taught. “I’ve learned about depth, perspective, light—all necessary things for judging a painting,” a subscriber reported in the Gallup survey, while another commented, “I am beginning to gain some familiarity with art periods and types.”136 One can, of course, belittle such an enterprise for its limitations: a strict follower of the Seminars will unlikely venture too far away from traditional art historical approaches (formal, biographical, iconographical, socio-contextual). Adorno described such cultural activity as infantile, as creating a submissive, non-thinking individual, who merely repeats established behavior. There is no doubt that the Seminars could be used for simple interpretations of works of art through repetitive formulas, but it should also be recognized that all interpretations, even the most complex, involve some form of situated knowledge which limits interpretative possibilities.137 As importantly, the iterative process, as Seyla Benhabib has argued, is never a simple repetition of an intended meaning: “rather, every repetition is a form of variation. Every iteration transforms meaning and adds to and enriches it.”138 Such variations on the Seminars’ intended uses are evident in anecdotal material, specifically in letters written by Seminars subscribers. The Seminars were read not only within the context of the family, but also in reading groups, as one subscriber indicated to Canaday: “Each month a group of us get together to study and discuss your Seminars in Art.”139 They were also used in an educational camp for underprivileged boys.140 An English teacher in Buffalo described how students in her classes gave oral presentations based on the Seminars. “What a wealth of interest they engendered! Each year since then I have used them in all of my classes; and each year we have finished the unit with a visit to our Albright Art Gallery.”141 A teacher from Arkansas (who could not afford the Seminars) suggested the reproductions be hung throughout her school.142 Another woman recorded chapters from the Seminars and played

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them back to her three sons at dinnertime. “In this day of rock and roll or Route 66 on TV,” she wrote to Canaday, “I feel this is rather an accomplishment.” In his reply, Canaday commented on the “captive-audience technique of disseminating culture. The old gag about the way to a man’s heart being through his stomach might be shifted around somewhat to describe the situation.”143 A woman from Shreveport wrote to Canaday about how his books were used in art courses for grade 5 and 6 students in public schools “with I.Q.’s of 125 or above.”144 Slides from the Seminars project were shown and discussed in an art appreciation course at the Episcopal Academy in Philadelphia: “it has helped to clear many points for the boys just beginning a study of our art heritage.”145 The comments in the Gallup survey further suggest different types of engagement. Some subscribers claimed that through the Seminars they gained information and selfassurance. One wrote: “It has increased my knowledge and also increased my confidence and ability to communicate with other people and after the course to talk more knowingly with other artists.” Another found that knowledge from the books had benefit in more practical matters: “I am beginning to understand composition. This can even carry over into the arrangement of furniture in our living room—it can affect the whole atmosphere—either restful or exciting.”146 These various uses did not necessarily challenge the Seminars’ ideological underpinnings. In fact, they could be understood as supporting the idea, developed by the Frankfurt School, that such cultural activity is a form of pacification that channels dissatisfaction with the capitalist world not into a revolutionary form of protest, but into an imaginary space for self-improvement, for emotional and intellectual fulfillment, for family connection, and for better citizenry.147 At the same time, it is also important to note that subscribers did seek out different ways to use the books, unintended by the Met, to fulfill personal and social desires. In other words, the Seminars were put to a variety of uses, not necessarily revolutionary, but perhaps somewhat subversive in combatting a sense of loss of agency in the modern world. Writing in 1956, William Whyte found a similar concern in contemporary fiction. “Many of the best novels of the last decade,” he wrote, “have been concerned with the impotence of man against society.”148 The anecdotal evidence from letters and comments in the Gallup survey suggest that the Seminars helped subscribers not only gain a greater sense of individual agency, but also undertake meaningful personal and social experiences. And why should any form of thought or appreciation, simple or complex, be condemned outright if it provides the individual with some sort of insight or pleasure? Perhaps the Seminars can be regarded as both selfdetermining and self-regulating, as part of a world of limited freedom.

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Like many Seminars’ subscribers, I, too, have put them to an unintended use. A chance encounter with books given to me by a neighbour piqued my curiosity and led me to a new area of study. My meanderings are, perhaps, not so different from how visitors interact with museum objects, as described by curator Nicholas Thomas in The Return of Curiosity. He suggests that we need to move beyond the limits of framing museums only by their ideological work. The museum, he argues, “accommodates and sustains a heterogeneity of interest;” it allows visitors “to be idiosyncratic in their responses” and, in doing so, it “fosters empathy.”149 The Seminars are interesting to me, not because they are wrong-headed in spirit, condescending in tone, or naïve at best in their intention to create better citizens through aesthetic education, but due to the way they sustained such a heterogeneity of interest. And these different sorts of interests made art and the museum more accessible to a larger audience. Accessibility in the context of postwar art education, limited to those members of the white middle classes, many in search of cultural capital, is, of course, highly problematical by today’s standards. As we will see in Chapter 5, Taylor and Canaday’s notion of accessibility is based on a humanist conception of subjectivity that assumes a sameness of individuals. Today’s discussions of accessibility, framed in terms of equity and inclusion, rightfully replace sameness with diversity. Museums, however, continue to struggle with claims of exclusivity, while they attempt to cater to the cultural goals of ever more diverse audiences.150

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The history of the Met is often told as a story about the growth of its collections or about its benefactors, founders, and visionaries.1 The museum, however, also has a long history as an educational institution. In the fall of 1918, in a special issue of the museum’s bulletin dedicated to educational work, Winifred Howe published a short piece, “The Museum’s Educational Credo.”2 Howe, who was then a General Assistant at the Met (she would soon become the Editor of Publications), had completed in 1913 the first part of her two-volume history of the museum, which is greatly occupied with the museum’s educational mandate. In the second volume, published in 1946, she repeated a claim made by Met Director Francis Taylor: “Broadly speaking, every activity in a museum is educational.”3 Museum education, which has been described as “a distinctly American idea,” is often linked to public service and to “a politically savvy way of promoting democracy.”4 In the first part of the twentieth century, there were different ways that art museums engaged their publics. Their educational missions, as Steven Conn suggests, were dependent to a great degree upon the institutional attitude towards the objects in their collections, whether the category of art, for example, included or excluded industrial and manufactured objects. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, in the tradition of London’s South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), brought art and science together through industrial design in order to raise the tastes of producers and consumers. In comparison, the Met’s approach, especially after J. Pierpont Morgan became President in 1904, followed more the model of the Louvre with its emphasis on the preciousness of the fine arts.5 The Met’s attitude towards art and the implications for its popular educational mandate were made abundantly clear in Howe’s “The Museum’s Educational Credo” with its emphasis on the “love of beauty,” a phrase repeated three times in the two-page statement. The Met, with its broad and comprehensive collections, Howe wrote, “has an important role to play in the education of this innate love 83

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of beauty in all who come to its galleries or within the range of its influence.” Howe’s nine-point summary of the Met’s educational initiatives included such goals as providing information and interpretation to the public, cultivating good taste in individuals, and offering them opportunities to study the collections to gain inspiration for new designs. But the ultimate goal of museum education, for Howe, was to develop in individuals “eyes that know how to see beauty and a mind that can appreciate its spirit.” As a public service, museum education, according to Howe, benefits society at large as well as individuals. An educated mind and observant eyes are “genuine assets” for the individual “and through the individual to the community, the state, and the nation.” Howe also indicated that the Met was helping individuals realize their potential not only through museum visits, but also through publications, which reached “many places where otherwise there would be little opportunity of cultivating a love of beauty.”6 In the postwar period, the language of visual literacy differed from Howe’s, but with projects like the Miniatures and Seminars, the Met continued its educational mission based on the belief that enlightened citizens in the visual arts improved the state of the nation. These principles were also widespread, as I argue below, in the larger arena of art education, a rapidly growing field in postwar America.

An Educational Corporation Education was at the core of the Met’s mandate from its very inception. In its charter, passed on April 13, 1870, the stated purpose of the museum was to encourage and develop the study of fine arts, to advance “general knowledge of kindred subjects,” and to furnish “popular instruction and recreation.”7 In his speech at the opening of the museum in 1880, Met Trustee Joseph H. Choate proclaimed that art belonged “to the people,” as “their best resource and most efficient educator.” Using an opposition that continues to play a role in museum studies today, Choate distinguished between the museum as a place for the elites and for the masses. He rejected the “old-fashioned” idea, which considered art as “the idle pastime of the favored few,” and instead championed art as “the vital and practical interest of the working millions.” Knowledge of art, Choate maintained in line with Matthew Arnold’s notion of “sweetness and light,” would “rend directly to humanize, to educate, and refine a practical and laborious people.”8 In its first few decades (1880–1904), when the museum was built and then expanded, and collections amassed, the Met allocated a good deal of its resources to establishing educational work as one of its core activities. Before it had

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acquired its wide range of collections, the Met, following European models, invested heavily in plaster casts and other forms of reproductions to facilitate art education.9 In Howe’s history of the museum, she explains how at this time exhibitions were rearranged to make them more logical and instructive, and lectures were planned to inform the public. On May 18, 1891, the museum, after much controversy, decided to open on Sundays in order to be accessible to the laboring classes, who often worked the other six days of the week. Howe considered the opening on Sundays to be a “phase of the Museum’s educational work.” Even without instructors and lecturers on Sunday, the collections “exert a silent influence that is broadly educational to the visitors.”10 After the death in 1904 of Luigi Palma de Cesnola, the Met’s first director, the museum reinforced its efforts towards public education, but in new directions. Calvin Tomkins has described the Met presidency of J. Pierpont Morgan (1904– 13), the banking magnate and collector, as a period when “the concept of the museum underwent a fundamental change” from “the utilitarian and educational ideals of the South Kensington Museum” to an institution that emphasized “great and original masterpieces.”11 This change, however, did not diminish the Met’s commitment to public service. As Morgan and Met Secretary Robert de Forest wrote in their 1905 Report of the Trustees, the aim of the Met, in its present situation as one of “the great storehouses of art in the civilized world,” is to illustrate “the history of art in the broadest sense, to make plain its teaching and to inspire and direct its national development.”12 In the first decades of the century, Morgan and de Forest’s ideas were pursued at local and national levels. A greater cooperation with public and private schools of greater New York led to a resolution, adopted by the Trustees in 1905, to give free admission to teachers and groups of students.13 To advance its educational mission, the museum also published, beginning in 1905, its own Bulletin and issued catalogues of its collections. In 1908, the Met’s charter was amended to reclassify the museum “as an educational corporation.”14 That same year, the Met appointed a museum instructor, and in 1912, it established a committee on educational work, which became a museum department in 1925.15 By 1913, the museum had two classrooms and a 500-seat lecture hall. During the first three decades of the century, the Met’s educational work was furthered by de Forest, who became the museum President in 1913 after Morgan’s death, and Secretary Henry Watson Kent. For Jeffrey Trask, their “progressive museum agenda that linked art and beauty to citizenship,” especially in the development of the American wing (opened in 1924) with its emphases on fine art and industrial design, made the Met a modern efficient educational institution “in service to the people.”16

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Other educational initiatives were advanced at the Met in the first part of the twentieth century. Frances Morris, curator of musical instruments and textiles, and William M. Ivins, Jr., curator of prints and drawings, made their collections more accessible in study rooms, where members of the public could interact closely with works of art.17 As Ivins wrote in 1934, one of the important functions of the museum is to encourage and aid “people to make first-hand and intimate acquaintance with works of art” by “helping them to learn how to see with their own eyes.” Such seeing, for Ivins, was a form of training that discouraged personal prejudice and encouraged sympathy with other cultures. This type of knowledge, he argued, “cannot be learned by rote or understood by recipe,” because its ultimate purpose is self-sufficiency.18 While Morris and Ivins were using study rooms to encourage intimate engagements with works of art, a new group of museum workers (docents, museum instructors, and staff lecturers) were explaining and interpreting the Met’s collections for the public, or as Howe put it, “giving the clue to an understanding and enjoyment of the objects to those who desired such assistance.”19 When the Met and BOMC produced the Miniatures and Seminars in postwar America, the museum was thus acting in line with its mandate to educate a broad audience to see with their own eyes. Francis Taylor was committed to museum accessibility and public education when he was Met Director during this period (1940–55). At the beginning of his tenure, he removed turnstiles at the museum entrance and instituted a free admission policy.20 Within a year of his appointment, he had already merged the Departments of Educational Work and Industrial Relations to create the Department of Education and Extension, whose very name evidences Taylor’s goal for the Met’s educational services to reach beyond its physical spaces. This newly formed department had a large mandate, which included responsibility for radio and television programs as well as material available for loans, such as works of art, lantern slides, photographs, and color prints.21 In his 1941 report to the Met trustees on this reorganization and consolidation of the museum’s educational and extension services, Taylor began with the observation that the Met finds itself in very different territory from thirtyfive years earlier.22 Because universities now regularly offer art history classes, the Met no longer needed to peddle “a streamlined version of the college curriculum with all of the hard words taken out and none of the discipline of scholarship left in.”23 To counter this “hangover” of the nineteenth century, Taylor was reorganizing its educational and extension operations in a variety of ways. Plans were drawn up for a Junior Museum (Figure 3.1) to restructure and strengthen children’s art education, which had been, up to that time, handled haphazardly.

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Figure 3.1 Junior Museum plan, from Francis Henry Taylor, “Report of the Director on the Reorganization and Consolidation of the Museum’s Educational and Extension Services,” pp. 4–5. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY / Art Resource.

For adult education and recreation, general tours were developed to hit the “high spots” of the collection for those who “have never set foot in the building.” Taylor also believed that the museum should “avoid teaching” and replace formal classrooms with study rooms. Like the Reader’s Guide Service in public libraries, the museum study rooms should be places where “visitors may come without embarrassment to learn how to develop their own minds and tastes.”24 Taylor also wanted to use radio and television to educate a mass audience. The museum had employed radio as an educational tool since the 1920s; members of the educational staff had delivered over 80 radio talks in 1931 and 1932 alone.25 Taylor, however, believed that the Met had not “exploited the use of radio as fully as it might have.” He had similar thoughts about television,“the most revolutionary educational instrument the world has ever seen.”26 In fact, under Taylor’s leadership, the Met in 1941 took part in a series of CBS television programs,

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which introduced a mass audience to art appreciation and to the Met’s collections.27 And a few years later, the Met commissioned Linda Bond Powel’s report on the museum’s possible uses of television, discussed above in the introduction. Taylor’s report on the museum’s education and extension services clarifies his vision of the museum as an institution that fosters its role “of education and interpretation” for the public. He wanted to do away with “the divorce which now so stupidly exists between the curatorial and educational functions of the institution.”28 In fact, he wanted to reverse the hierarchy. His report is indicative of the fact that during the Second World War and the years after, museum officials were increasingly reflecting upon what they believed to be the dual role of their institutions’ missions, as gatekeepers of culture and as public educators. It was a struggle, as sociologist Vera Zolberg maintains, between populism and elitism, between those who believed in “the democratization of access to the fine arts for the many” and those who “consider collecting, preserving, and studying art works to be the museum’s central purpose.”29 Taylor’s populist position should have been no surprise to the Met trustees. Prior to becoming the director, he had clearly articulated his point of view in a series of essays, some published in the Atlantic, which were later collected and expanded in his 1945 volume Babel’s Tower: The Dilemma of the Modern Museum. For the Met director, the museum, following Choate’s line of thought, is not “the rich man’s folly,” but “is the great free public institution to which the humblest citizen may turn for spiritual regeneration.” Instead of helping “the man in the street,” Taylor wrote, museums in the past have “deliberately high-hatted him and called it scholarship.”30 Taylor’s arguments come down to one main point: the American museum must devote its resources more to public education than scholarly pursuits. Works of art, he believed, are less elusive objects for intellectual contemplation and more documents of history, “which any man can understand.” It is here that museums, like libraries, have their important role to play in public life: through high quality works of art, museums teach universal truths and develop in the individual “a capacity for improvement” and progress “toward the democratic way of life.”31 Museums are like “gymnasiums” that exercise the “muscles of the mind.”32 They train the viewer to transform “mere curiosities” into explanations of the “social and political progress of mankind.”33 Taylor, in the tradition of the Enlightenment, optimistically believed that the purpose of the museum, citing Thomas Mann, is “to elevate mankind, to teach it to think, to set it free.”34

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“The Midwife of Democracy” Taylor’s conviction that museums were becoming irrelevant to the cultural life of the nation was well in keeping with the times. Before Theodor Adorno’s announcement that the museum was a mausoleum, T. R. Adam, in his 1939 text on the museum and popular culture, had already observed that collections are often “neatly quarantined in decaying buildings guarded by moribund societies.”35 Theodore Low, in his 1942 report The Museum as a Social Instrument, similarly observed how out of touch museum officials were with common people: “The attitude of ‘I’d rather be dead than be seen going into a museum’ is more prevalent than most museum people care to admit, and the blame for it lies squarely on the shoulders of the museums themselves.”36 For these writers, museums needed to be more relevant in the life of individuals, to make art more accessible to a general public, and to communicate in a language that was, as Taylor put it, “articulate without being intentionally obscure.”37 Taylor condemned European, and especially German, art scholarship for its obscurity even though, as Meyer Schapiro rightly claimed, he provided no evidence of its faults. Schapiro also pointed out that museums like the Met continued to be dependent upon such research when, for example, they “purchase an unclassified or problematic work.”38 Taylor, however, even with these inconsistencies, did not waver in his belief that a more democratic approach would help solve the problem of art education in the American museum in a way suitable to an American public.39 Theodore Low similarly saw these issues in nationalist terms in the report he completed for the Committee on Education of the American Association of Museums, which was chaired by Taylor. Low argued that American museums had failed in their commitment to public education, because they followed the European model with scholarship at its core. American museums, he claimed, should not be “little more than isolated segments of European culture set in a hostile environment,” but should, instead, take on a more democratic function.40 Museums needed to meet people “at their own level and with what they want,” not with what the museum wants to give them.41 Museums should not only exhibit art, but should also advertise and use radio, television and publications to extend their reach beyond their walls. To justify his position, Low referred to the views of John Cotton Dana (1856–1929), the founding director of the Newark Museum of Art, who is often cited for his early critique of traditional museums and for his emphasis on the importance of community service. Dana emphasized the need for museums to produce “books, leaflets and journals” in order to “assist and supplement the work of teachers” to “explain and amplify the exhibits which

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art museums will send out.”42 The challenge at the time for museum officials was thus twofold: how to make museums relevant in a new age of mass media and how to use museums as a tool to help democratize the nation. To achieve these goals, museums, according to Taylor, Low, and Adam, needed to create programs that extended their influence beyond their physical spaces. It was within this culture of personal and communal improvement that the Met and the BOMC produced the Miniatures and Seminars, which emphasized the diffusion more than the advancement of knowledge. Met Director Taylor stressed the “expositive and explanatory” functions of museum education, which he thought suitable to twentieth-century America.43 These same ideas about the diffusion of knowledge were echoed in the concurrent Harvard Report on General Education in a Free Society (1945): “Enlargement of the common concern is indeed the distinctive character of the age.”44 In The Museum and Popular Culture, Adam discussed “the extensive method” of education, which requires the museum to simplify its instruction when it reaches out to a broad audience. “A simple lure,” he wrote, “is the most practical one for the fisherman who seeks to catch every variety of fish with a single hook.”45 Taylor, Low, and Adam’s arguments for the democratization of the museum were not made in a vacuum, but in the very charged political context of the Second World War, which was clearly on Low’s mind when he wrote his 1942 report. He believed museums have powers in “any war of ideologies” to combat “subversive inroads” and “keep minds happy and healthy.” Museums have an obligation to fight the propaganda of “falsehoods and half-truths” put out by the Axis alliance.46 Adam similarly wrote of the importance of the diffusion of knowledge for a “free civilization.” In order to escape “modified slavery” in a world where “the tyrant rises to social power,” people needed to be educated in the fundamentals of society, science, and art.47 In a time when totalitarian regimes ruled two of the most “civilized” European nations, Germany and Italy, museums, according to these men, could be used to promote democratic values. Low made this point clearly in the title to his report The Museum as a Social Instrument. Adam also described museums as “modern weapons in the struggle for popular enlightenment.”48 Taylor’s populist argument, his belief in the museum as a social tool for the diffusion of knowledge, was certainly not a novel proposition. As Calvin Tomkins explains, each incoming administration at the Met before Taylor had also dedicated itself “to the cause of ‘popular instruction’ in the fine arts.”49 Yet, there was, of course, something distinctly different in the context of the Second World War, when some European nations were jettisoning humanist values. Taylor

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believed that America must take on the role of upholding Western civilization, if in a different way. As we have seen, he associated erudition in matters of art with European, and specifically German, scholarship, which had caused American museums to betray their core values. “We must stop imitating the Louvre and the Kaiser Friedrich [now Berlin’s Bode Museum],” he demanded in 1939, “and solve this purely American problem in a purely American way.” He went as far as to claim that German and Italian colleagues were not “willing to meet the man in the street half-way” with the result that they are now “reduced to pimping for ideologies that destroy the very civilization whose finest flowerings we are dedicated to preserve.”50 The Miniatures and Seminars were certainly advertised as educational material that fulfilled Taylor’s mandate.51 According to the Miniatures’ promotional brochure, the Met felt obliged “to make the great treasures of the institution” available “to the man in the street” and “to the child at home or at school” in “the simplest and most direct manner.”52 The Seminars were similarly designed for “any intelligent layman” to “formulate his own informed opinion.”53 Such promotion of the individual’s artistic judgment was in step with a lineage of American thinkers, who associated cultural self-development with democratic values. Waldo Emerson and Charles Eliot Norton, for example, had connected culture to self-reliance and individual freedom, which, as historian Joan Shelley Rubin explains, “entailed a commitment to the preservation of democracy.”54 Given this longer history and the political context of the times, one can better understand Taylor’s claim that the museum’s “final and basic justification” is as “the midwife of democracy.”55 But how democratic was Taylor’s vision of the museum? For art historian Meyer Schapiro, if Taylor truly believed in a democratic museum, then the Met would not be run not by “a self-perpetuating group of wealthy men of doubtful taste,” as he described the museum’s trustees, but by representatives of artists, teachers, scholars, museum staff, and members.56 Schapiro also described Taylor’s encyclopedic model of the museum, in which works of art serve to illustrate “the progress of mankind to its present democratic peak,” as a confused instrument for historical insight for many reasons, including the fact that great works of art were created under despotic and authoritarian regimes.57 Schapiro was most uneasy, however, about Taylor’s conception of museum accessibility. Taylor might have believed that if the museum communicated in an accessible language, its teachings could reach all members of the public, but Schapiro saw a disparity between “the inherited ideals of artistic culture and the life condition of the mass of the people, which is so unfavorable to the enjoyment of good art.” For Schapiro, “poverty,

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insecurity, ignorance and the demands of practical life” arrest or deaden any desire for art. Moreover, commercialized culture (movies, magazines, radio, etc.) keeps people from understanding their own world and grasping their situation. Schapiro passionately argued that Taylor does not face these facts; rather, he masks them through “complacent formulas of democracy and progress,” which “flatter the public” and “appeal to its ignorance, and vanity and political naïvete.”58 According to Schapiro, a truly democratic museum would not only be governed by a body more representative of the social diversity of American society, but would also be accessible and meaningful to everyone, including the working classes. Schapiro’s concerns highlight the limitations of Taylor’s notion of the democratic museum. Taylor couched museum accessibility and popular art education in universal terms. Projects like the Miniatures and Seminars, however, only reached the white middle classes, as the subscriber surveys confirmed. In his 1942 report, Low articulated the point bluntly: “the public which the museum should strive to cultivate” is the “intellectual middle class.”59 Blanche Brown, staff lecturer at the Met (and later Professor at New York University), found this statement “shocking.” In a review of Low’s report, she wrote: “Surely when we say ‘the public’ we mean all the members of the community.”60 Low was aware of this problem and, at the same time, blinded by his assumption that art could only be appreciated by those with “intelligence and intellectual curiosity.” He recognized that these prerequisites for art appreciation “are not necessarily dependent on wealth.” But he was firmly convinced that museums should target the educated middle classes, because “unfortunately, money still means opportunity, opportunity usually means education,” and “education should bring intellectual development.”61 Circular reasoning was certainly at play here. Low and Taylor believed that museums should offer a notion of middle-class culture to the public, as later exemplified in the Miniatures and Seminars, and they found not surprisingly that for the most part members of the middle classes were the ones who took up the offer. In a survey of museum visitors, Low discovered that a clear majority came from the “upper circles” and favored “aesthetic appreciation in the way of gallery instruction” over “art and daily living.”62 The Met’s educational credo of 1918 with its emphasis on “the love of beauty” was still clearly relevant in the 1940s.

Postwar Art Education The connection between art and democratic living with its inherent notion of consensus based on middle-class values was a matter of interest not just for

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museum officials, but more generally for those involved in art education, a developing field in the postwar period. There were many reasons for the popularity of the Miniatures and Seminars, including, as we have seen, the BOMC’s advertising campaign, middle-class desire for self-cultivation, and the Met endorsement of the project. Their popularity was also due to the fact that they appeared at a time when art education was a growing concern in the United States. Modern art education in the Western world has roots going back to the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe, and art history programs had been established in some American universities well before the Second World War—Harvard’s was founded in 1874. Only after the war, however, did the majority of American schools begin to offer introductory courses in art appreciation or art history.63 The growth of the field is suggested by the rising number of students in American universities graduating with a major in art history, studio, or a combined program: from 340 in 1940 to 1,322 in 1962, an increase of just under 400 percent, which is an impressive growth rate even in comparison to the overall rise in college and university enrolment in the United States of approximately 240 percent during roughly the same period.64 Increased interest in art at this time is also indicated by the doubling of attendance at American museums from 11 to 22 million between 1952 and 1962.65 What helped grow the field of art education in the United States was the establishment in 1947 of a professional body, the National Art Education Association (NAEA), which promoted art education as part of the curriculum of general education. The 1950s was also a period of improved if, for many, still insufficient, federal funding for the arts. A series of Senate bills increased allocations to arts funding organizations.66 For champions of the arts, this was an urgent matter for the United States, which had moved from its isolationist position before the war to the largest player on the world stage. Summarizing the arguments given by art educators at hearings about new art bills held in New York City in April 1956, a report in Art Education, the journal of the NAEA, stated that the United States is “the only major power which gives no official support to the arts. As a result, our country is frequently at a great disadvantage in not letting other peoples know about our cultural interests and developments.”67 One occasion when American developments in art education were presented to an international audience was at the UNESCO Seminar in Visual Arts in General Education in Bristol in 1951. In his report “The Teaching of Visual Arts in General Education in the United States of America,” art educator Edwin Ziegfeld of Teachers College, Columbia University, remarked that federal government spending on art education was jeopardized by the Cold War predicament that tax dollars

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were earmarked for military expenditures, and it was thus difficult to justify funding for the arts. Ziegfeld also pointed out what he saw as a paradoxical situation: “Even though a predominantly scientific and technological age has the greatest need for the humanizing contributions of the arts, the prestige of technology hampers their widespread acceptance.”68 Art educators emphasized the teaching of art practice in high schools and universities; art history and appreciation were also deemed important elements in this enterprise. Art education was not geared towards creating great artists, although it was thought of as a possible derivative of the enterprise.69 The advocates of art education argued rather that it was a necessary component of general education, “a redirection away from intensive subject-matter specialization and narrow vocational interests in favor of a greater emphasis on human and social values,” as art educator Ernest Ziegfeld (Edwin’s brother) put it in 1953.70 Ziegfeld’s Art in the College Program of General Education fleshed out a kernel of an idea that was recommended in two important reports on higher education, Harvard University’s 1945 General Education in a Free Society and the 1947 presidential commission Higher Education for American Democracy. Both these reports recognized the need for specialized study in a national economy that was “industrialized and more complex” than ever before, but they stressed even more emphatically the need for general education to promote freethinking individuals and to create a more democratic society. As the Harvard report put it, “the aim of education should be to prepare an individual to become an expert both in some particular vocation or art and in the general art of the free man and the citizen.”71 As a type of “nonspecialized and nonvocational training,” general education was concerned, according to the report for the presidential commission, more with “human wholeness and civic conscience” than “competence in an occupation”; it developed “values, attitudes, knowledge, and skills that will equip him to live rightly and well in a free society.”72 And by free society, these reports meant the American experience: general education was distinguished from liberal education by the fact that “its matter and method shifted from its original aristocratic intent to the service of democracy.”73 By providing students with a broad base of knowledge in the arts, literature, social sciences, history, science, and politics, the ultimate goal of general education was to help students “to think effectively, to communicate thought, to make relevant judgments, to discriminate among values.”74 Similar worries about overspecialization in university programs continued to be expressed throughout the postwar period. In 1960, sociologist Edward Shils observed that the United States was suffering from the “dissolution of ‘the educated public’,” because the

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university system was creating the specialist highly invested in a discipline, but “uncultivated outside his own specialty.”75 Both the Harvard and President’s reports emphasized that general education was a means to an end.76 It was an instrument to conserve core American humanist values, that is, “a belief in the inherent worth of the individual, in the dignity and value of human life,” which were being threatened by specialization and the complexity of life, especially in urban settings.77 Throughout the postwar period, education was on the minds not just of specialists in the field, but of cultural critics as well. In The Organization Man (1956), William Whyte observed that “even businessmen seem to have become alarmed” that foundational education in the liberal arts and sciences was giving way to specialized training. Some executives, he reported, have been defending the value of general education “for the corporation’s own good.”78 David Riesman, on the other hand, did not feel that the current trend of general education to cultivate “the ‘whole man’ ” was an effective way of creating a republic of reflective citizens, because such an education, which he considered merely another consumable to make people “more suave,” functioned as a tool for professional and business success, just as a knowledge of the classics was a necessity for “the English politician and high civil servant of the last century.”79 Ziegfeld’s Art in the College Program of General Education picked up on the fact that in both national reports art had its proper place in general education. The Harvard report promoted “aesthetic education,” which will “give a young person standards which he can apply to particular situations,” and the eighth of eleven objectives of general education in the President’s report is “to understand and enjoy literature, art, music, and other cultural activities as expressions of personal and social experience.”80 Ziegfeld, however, believed that art, because it continued to be considered “a thing apart from life,” was being neglected in general education, which focused on other intellectual pursuits.81 Aesthetic experience, Ziegfeld passionately countered, “is related to the entire space of the individual’s experience.” Creative activity is “an indispensable element of full and rounded living.”82 Art education, Ziegfeld concluded, is thus a necessary component of general education, because aesthetic experience is “an integral part of that free and spontaneous living which is the ideal of the democratic faith.”83 The individual’s self-development and its relation to society were also recurring themes in numerous essays published in the postwar years in Art Education, the journal of the NAEA. In article after article, the field was characterized as a corrective to the modern age of machine and technology. Art education, according to its champions, improves the nation: citizens are less conformist, healthier

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mentally, sharper in perception, and more articulate and empathetic; they are better prepared for a democratic life of freedom and capable of cooperating more fully both in American society and on the international front. The lead article in the September/October 1950 issue of Art Education, “The Arts: Promoters of Understanding,” gives a good sense of the issues. Herold Hunt, superintendent of Chicago schools, explained that the arts “should be utilized to the full to develop a common basis on which to build the greater understanding we seek.” Art appreciation “helps to fulfill the objectives of democratic living” and to develop social skills. Art “functions through human relationships, through individual and group expression, and through satisfying living in feeling and knowing. It educates the child for democratic living.”84 Hunt’s association of individual selfdevelopment with social benefits can be traced back to the Harvard and President’s reports on education, but it can also be understood in the context of writings specifically in the area of art education. Herbert Read’s 1943 Education through Art, often cited in the art education literature of this period, is an important source in these debates. For Read, in “a libertarian conception of democracy,” art education concerns itself with individuation and integration: “The purpose of education can then only be to develop, at the same time as the uniqueness, the social consciousness or reciprocity of the individual.”85 Individuation and integration were pressing concerns in the postwar age of political and social anxiety, in an American world defined by technical efficiency, as Manuel Barkan explained in his description of the theme of the 1953 NAEA conference, “Art and Human Values.” Barkan, who was Professor and Head of Art Education at The School of Fine and Applied Arts at Ohio State University and co-organizer of the 1953 conference, argued that the practicality of the arts lies “in the opportunity they afford for an individual to be himself ” in an “age of increasing crisis, tension, anxiety and fear”: crisis growing out of conflicting social and political ideologies; tension and anxiety growing out of a lack of personal inner wellbeing; and fear growing out of resultant basic insecurities. Much anxiety is directly related to pressures toward dehumanization arising from damaging competition, inter-personal conflict and a lack of real self-worth. We have come to measure an individual’s status and position by his titles and his accumulated belongings. In applying such standards of judgment, we have denied to individuals the right to be themselves, to live and to grow to their fullest inner capacities.86

Art education, Barkan believed, helped individuals realize their human potentialities: “Through artistic expression an individual is able to relate himself

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to others in terms of his own deep convictions about himself and his world.”87 As with general education, art education was understood not only in individual, but also in social terms. Barkan would later remark: “experience in the arts can make a unique contribution to creative democratic living.”88 Although art educators made claims for the social function of art, they were also keenly aware of the problems of instrumentalism. President of the Pratt Institute Francis Horn, for example, took issue with linking aesthetic experiences to democratic values. “The threat to our democracy today,” Horn wrote in a response to Ziegfeld’s Art in the College Program of General Education, “tends to make us relate as many of our interests as possible to democracy’s preservation, but art has intrinsic value that does not require such justification.” For Horn, because art “is a good for its own sake,” there is no need to justify art education in other terms. He also pointed out that great art was frequently produced in non-democratic cultures.89 In his reply to Horn, Ziegfeld did not address directly the issue of instrumentalism, but rather argued that “successful democratic living” depends upon “the extent to which each individual is able to realize his own potentialities,” and one way to reach such potentialities is through art and its appreciation. Whether such connections between democratic values and aesthetic experiences, he argued, “are statements of fact” or “articles of faith,” they are “widely subscribed to” and lead “inescapably to the conclusion that experience in the arts is essential to a full realization of the democratic way of life.”90

Autonomy and Instrumentalism Horn and Ziegfeld’s exchange suggests a tenuous link between art and democratic values. How does one reconcile the autonomy of the aesthetic experience with its use-value? Horn believed that there was no necessary connection between the two, while Ziegfeld needed faith to substantiate the idea that aesthetic activity, an end-in-itself, could also serve as a means to an end, as a way to create a more democratic society through combating conformity, unlearning the familiar, and intensifying lived experience. This relation between aesthetic pursuits and better democratic living was also articulated at this time by Irwin Edman, the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, in his keynote address to the 1951 NAEA conference. Speaking to the converted, Edman clarified how art education may be concerned with a Kantian notion of beauty, the autonomous appreciation of abstract shapes and colors, but its true

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importance lies in its instrumental value, in the ability to teach “human beings in a democracy” to care about their physical environments: It may seem a far cry (but it is not) from a sense for beauty of form to a passion for slum clearance, to an insistence upon parks and playing space, to space and light in our homes, to a sense for the need of dignity and beauty in the places where we work and live.91

In other words, the education of the senses, as Edman put it, contributes “to the defense and to the very life of freedom.”92 Given the Cold War context, Edman warns his audience of the dangers of a “standardized or regimented society,” in which the individual is “a cog in a machine, a part of the grand contraption which is the state.” The leaders of despotic societies, which “purge and censor and often exile the arts,” do not dare permit the spontaneous achievement of “artistic creation and artistic enjoyment.”93 For Edman, the art teacher (like the artist) is, as he later put it, “in a profound sense an educator of and in democracy.”94 Postwar art educators, however, had to be wary of the nature of their enterprise, because in a mass society, like the United States, art education could as easily lead to blind following as to critical awareness. Bruno Bettelheim, the well-known psychologist and author, addressed this pressing problem in his 1962 keynote address to the National Committee on Art Education. Bettelheim contrasted authentic art education, in which the educator acts as a “midwife,” with false art education “that tells us how to look at pictures or what to see in them.” Authentic appreciation of art has the ability to free the individual “at least temporarily from the falseness, the pretensions, the trappings of our culture.” In contrast, more simplistic methods make “art merely one more aspect of mass living, instead of a safeguard against it.”95 Art education works against individual freedom, if it is merely a leisure activity for the masses, if it acts as “at best crutches, at worst blinders preventing an aesthetic experience.”96 Authentic teaching of art, however, is a tool that can offer an individual the opportunity “to truly find himself as a unique person; because only here are there no ready-made answers telling him what he ought to see, feel, think or in which way he ought to find his self-realization.”97 Bettelheim was not the first to associate authentic aesthetic experience with self-realization. There is a long history of understanding self-determination as an integral part of cultural activity, whether it be in the aesthetics of Alexander Baumgarten or Immanuel Kant, which sought after a rational account of perceptual activity, or the Victorian genteel tradition, which, in the writings of Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin, pursued moral perfection in art and culture.

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The Seminars had a similar (if distinctly postwar American) take on this tradition. They aimed, in the words of Met Editor of Publications Marshall Davidson, “to provide information that will enable the reader to develop and fortify his own opinions.”98 Since the nineteenth century, such cultural activity has often been explained as a critique of materialist and capitalist forces, as we have seen in Bettelheim’s claim that art can free the individual “from the falseness, the pretensions, the trappings of our culture.” Arnold had earlier described the cultural world of “sweetness and light” as a space separate from the utilitarian instrumentality of a world of machinery in which wealth is the only criterion of success.99 The producers of the Miniatures and Seminars similarly championed the aesthetic realm as apart from the everyday, even if they used mass distribution to service these projects. The Met invested in the Miniatures and Seminars not only because they brought in well-needed funds to the museum, but as importantly, because they positioned the Met as an educational institution that promoted specific values, such as individual self-determination, freedom, and democracy. The Miniatures and Seminars were forms of adult remedial education that were intended to equip the “the man in the street,” as Taylor put it, with knowledge, and that knowledge, the Met believed, would make the museum more approachable. As we have seen, Taylor and some of his colleagues were trying to defuse the commonly held notion that museums, like the Met, were inaccessible to a general public. As Met curator Richard Bach had stated in 1927: “to make [the museum] palatial, pompous or grand is to build up a kind of psychological barrier to its greatest use.”100 Taylor certainly took advantage of his position as Met director to realize his conviction that the aesthetic realm of the museum should serve as an ideological, anti-materialist and anti-totalitarian instrument to educate the public and, in turn, to help democratize the nation. The investment of cultural activity with political concerns is evident in most discussions of the importance of art education in the postwar period. As philosopher Irwin Edman bluntly put it in his 1950 lecture to the National Committee on Art Education, the same organization Bettelheim later addressed: “No reflection on anything these days can responsibly be made without consideration of its consequences for the perils and contingencies of democratic civilization in the Western world.”101 For those on the right, the elite rather than the masses should direct society, while according to Marxist critique, mass culture suppressed and infantilized the people. The Miniatures and Seminars reflect and complicate these concerns: written by scholars and endorsed by the Met, they promoted cultural leadership by the elite for the masses; in their

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standardized formats, mass distribution, and popularization of high art, they at the same time took the form of a commodification of culture, Adorno’s “baby food,” or a series of examples of Jacques Barzun’s “thought cliché,” a simplistic generalization that is “clung to because it sounds familiar and feeds a halfattentive wish for thought.”102 Were the Miniatures and Seminars, in Bettelheim’s terms, one more aspect of mass living or a safeguard against it? Perhaps, they functioned as both. In the postwar period, questions about culture were often asked as either/or propositions, as if there was something essential or pure in the form of a work of art and in its appreciation. For Hannah Arendt, a painting is as misused when it serves the purpose “of self-education or self-perfection” as when it hides “a hole in the wall.” When a work of art is treated by the “cultural philistine” as “a currency” to buy “a higher position in society” or acquire “a higher degree of selfesteem,” it loses, Arendt wrote, the characteristic “originally peculiar to all cultural things, the faculty of arresting our attention and moving us.”103 But does a painting really lose this characteristic, if it, for example, also covers a hole in the wall? Is an artwork either an object with value in itself or an exchangeable commodity? Is art appreciation either some sort of disclosure of truth or leisure turned into mass somnambulism? Works of art in Western culture at least since the Renaissance have possessed different sorts of value (social, exchange, and religious, for example) and that has not necessarily stopped them from arresting the viewer’s attention. And art appreciation can certainly function both for itself and for other purposes, whether it be social climbing, helping others, or self-education. Perhaps the problem here is one of “incompatible categories,” as György Márkus has remarked in the context of Adorno’s writing. While the purity of aesthetic experience is a notion of normative aesthetics related to the immanent characteristics of the work, the culture industry is a sociological concept that is concerned with how particular social functions are fulfilled by objects, independent of immanent values.104 Works of high art or popular culture, and their appreciation or use, can vary depending on the context. The same person could use art appreciation at one time for social climbing, at another for self-improvement, and at another for educating others, just as authentic appreciation of a work of art may give individuals insight into the nature of the world or themselves at one moment and at another allow them to develop their identities through their eloquence. In philosophical debates waged in the 1980s, the distinction between art’s autonomy and its instrumentalism was not, in the words of T. J. Diffey, “so decisive or clear cut as is generally supposed.”105 For Robert Stecker, the aesthetic instrumentalist

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is as dependent upon the disinterestedness of the aesthetic experience as the aesthetic autonomist. The only difference between the two positions is that the autonomist takes for granted that the aesthetic experience is rewarding in itself, while the instrumentalist substantiates the aesthetic experience in other terms.106 The instrumentalist and autonomist’s interests in art are not necessarily incompatible. They differ merely in arguing for different functions of art—for aesthetic value or for some other purpose. But in the postwar period, the opposition between authentic and false art appreciation, as exemplified in Arendt’s writing, seemed like an unbridgeable gap, and the middle, whether it be Russell Lynes’s middlebrow or Dwight Macdonald’s Midcult, was most disconcerting to these authors because of its impurity or, in Janice Radway’s words, its “cultural mixing.”107 For Macdonald, the hybrid miscreant Midcult “has it both ways: it pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them.”108 Macdonald’s proposal to solve the cultural problems of his day is a call for purity: keep High Culture and Mass Culture separate and ignore Midcult. In his own words: “So let the masses have their Masscult, let the few who care about good writing, painting, music, architecture, philosophy, etc. have their High Culture, and don’t fuzz up the distinction with Midcult.”109 The Met was certainly not thinking along these lines when it pursued its middlebrow projects with the BOMC. Rather, the museum was more in line with the arguments of University of Chicago sociologist Edward Shils, who recognized in 1960 that there was no evidence of highbrow culture’s decline or erosion by popularization. This position was not Shils’ alone; there were other scholars, like Gilbert Highet, Jacques Barzun, and Howard Mumford Jones, who, as Joan Shelley Rubin has shown, saw no incompatibility between pursuing academic investigations and conveying general knowledge to popular audiences.110 Shils pointed out that most highbrows also engage in middlebrow culture through mass media; in other words, they were less purists and more “cultural omnivores,” to borrow a term coined later by sociologist Richard Peterson.111 For Shils, “gifted intellectuals” did not “lose their powers” when they wrote for a general audience. Popularization, Shils continued, served an important purpose, to bring better content and more “presentation (and consumption) of genuinely superior cultural work.”112 The Met, in distinguishing between scholarly writing and a language that was “articulate without being intentionally obscure,” to cite Taylor, continued to uphold the distinction between the highbrow and middlebrow without considering the middlebrow as a threat to its position as an institution of high culture. But in doing so, they were

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to a certain degree caught in a double bind, what Shils described as the “troubling juxtaposition of two consciences.” Because professionals of middlebrow culture did not forget the standards of high culture, they continued to express “an awareness of and a concern for high standards, even when they are not observed.”113 As we saw in the chapter on the Seminars, Met curator Theodore Rousseau, Jr.’s internal review of the series revealed clearly this double bind. He praised the Seminars for their clarity and simplicity in their explanation of complex aspects of art, but he was also concerned that the publication might offend those who judge the museums by “the [high] standard of our publications.”114 In many ways, Shils summarized both the intentions of the Miniatures and Seminars projects and their problems. In attempting to popularize art and its appreciation and to make the museum more accessible to a larger middle-class audience, the Met offered a specialized form of visual literacy through a modern and standardized distribution system, which was familiar to subscribers and which put them squarely within consumer culture. At the same time, the Met, in protecting its reputation as an institution of the highest standards, promoted a type of aesthetic experience that removed the individual from that same modern, technological world. In its approach to art education, the Met was following the path already paved by the BOMC. The Club, as Radway argues, “taught its subscribers how to desire a world in which technical, specialized knowledge would reign supreme,” but “it also implicitly attempted to counter some of the social costs and individual losses that would obtain in such a universe.”115 The Met’s double bind was inevitable due to, on the one hand, its position as an institution that maintained a social hierarchy, which prized high culture, and, on the other, its engagement with projects that used commercial, high-volume, standardized vehicles to deliver such culture to the public. In other words, the Miniatures and Seminars bring out a tension between the Met’s desire to help the layperson understand and judge works of art, and the museum’s desire to maintain its status as an institution of high culture through its expertise in the field. As we have seen, this double bind was brought to light in the material qualities of the Miniatures and Seminars, in the relation of culture to commerce, in the opposition of high art to middlebrow taste, and in the public’s response to the projects. It also revealed itself in the Met’s attitude to reproductions of works of art, the subject of the next chapter.

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Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer: Reproductions and Quality

When subscribers received the first volume of the Metropolitan Seminars with twelve photoengraved reproductions of famous works of art in the inside pocket, they must have been impressed by the size and quality of the prints, especially if they had been accustomed to the Miniatures stamps. The Met and BOMC certainly highlighted the reproductions in promoting the Seminars. In The New York Times advertisements, which appeared continuously throughout the 1960s, the reproductions were singled out for their excellence (“beautifully printed reproductions”) and their value (a set of twelve included in the $3.75 portfolio “would sell by itself, in comparable reproductions, for from $6 to $7.50”). Their pedagogical function was also highlighted: “These pictures are provided separately so that they can be compared side by side with one another in order to clarify whatever points the lecture aims to illuminate.”1 In a letter to subscribers included with the first volume of the Seminars, BOMC president Meredith Wood described the photoengraved reproductions as “an indispensable feature of the plan”: these reproductions, with color detail “far superior” to lecture slides, can be kept “in front of you” so that they can be examined unhurriedly and repeatedly, which “will make an immense difference in your enjoyment and understanding” of the Seminars.2 In the Seminars themselves, Canaday was attentive to the fact that his readers were learning about art through reproductions. His text often focuses on the quality and size of the illustrations. Jan van Eyck’s Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata, for example, is “reproduced here at exact size” and a detail is “enlarged eleven times.”3 In reference to reproductions of black-and-white prints, which may look very much like the originals, he told readers to keep in mind “that in reproduction the various print processes lose some of their character.”4 In the case of Harunobu’s color woodcut Mother and Child with Bird (Figure 4.1), he commented on the impossibility of reproducing in color “the noticeable depressions along these hair-thin outlines that add so much to the life and 103

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Figure 4.1 Suzuki Harunobu, Mother and Child with Bird or Poem by Fujiwara no Motozane (c. 860) from the Series Thirty-Six Poets, c. 1768. Gift of Estate of Samuel Isham, 1914. Metropolitan Museum of Art / Open Access.

definition to the original.” Canaday thus included a black-and-white detail of the color image “taken in a raking light,” which revealed the patterns and markings on the paper of the print.5 In the seminar on fresco, Canaday addressed the problem of reproductions directly. He wrote about the drawbacks of studying artworks in reproduction, which often involves a reduction in size from the original and always “a change of technique from oil, water color, or the others, to printer’s ink.” While there is “simply no way around this drawback,” Canaday acknowledged, the Seminars attempt to “alleviate the disadvantages” by reproducing details at the exact size of the original and “in such a way as to give some illusion of the original painting’s surface texture.” The success of these illusions varies, he admitted, according to the medium: oil paintings are well suited for reproduction due to their smooth and glossy surface, but watercolors and frescoes do not fare as well by the same

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process. Canaday nevertheless reassured his readers that “we can at any rate be thankful that modern photographic and printing processes can bring us closer to the actual textures, even of these difficult surfaces, than was thought possible a few years ago.”6 Canaday’s acknowledgment of and sensitivity to the issue of reproduction signal both a rhetoric of sincerity (the recognition that good reproductions are illusions) and a position of authority (an intimacy with the original that confirms his position as expert). These notions of sincerity, quality, technology, and authority play important roles in another BOMC/Met collaboration: a print reproduction after Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer.

The Photoengraving Process With the issue of photoengraved reproductions, Canaday, as he did often in the Seminars, outlined a basic problem without delving into its complexities. While he rightly described the process of reproduction as involving “a change of technique from oil, water color, or the others, to printer’s ink,” he did not mention that it also involved other forms of mediation through the photographic lens, color separation and correction, half-tone screens, printing on plates, retouching of plates, and the printing itself. The color engraving process during the 1950s was much more intricate than Canaday made it out to be. More importantly, it involved not just mechanical means, but also craftsmanship and artistry. In the case of the color prints for the Seminars, a four-color separation process was used. The first step in this process was the preparation of a color photographic transparency (kodachrome) of the work of art, which was then sent to the engraving/printing shop. To create a photoengraving after the color transparency, four separate plates were prepared, each to receive a different color of ink: red, blue, yellow, and black (Color Plate 17).7 Each plate was prepared following the same process. The color transparency was re-photographed through a color filter: a green filter for the red transparency; blue for the yellow; orange for the blue; and yellow for the black. For each color, a continuous toned negative was produced and from that negative, a positive print. Color corrections were made to the positive print either by retouching areas via chemical means where the color was too dense or by treating areas with additional dyes where more color was needed. The corrected print was then re-photographed through a half-tone screen, which transformed the image into a series of tiny dots. The resulting

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screened negative was then printed on a metal plate, etched and finished so that indentations of varying depths of the tiny dots were made on the plate. The four plates were next put in a press with the appropriate colored ink on the plate. As the paper passed through the press, four impressions (red, blue, yellow and black) of the original image were stamped onto the paper. Each half-tone screen, it should be noted, was shifted to a predetermined angle so that the dots from the four plates were not positioned one on top of the other, but next to one another. As a 1950s’ industry film about the process put it, this technique produces “a more blended, crisper color reproduction . . . because almost entirely all of the printing surface of the paper is covered by ink,” which produces in the eyes of the viewer “a continuous toned illusion.” The four-color process is thus not an entirely mechanical process, but “an almost indescribable combination of artistry and color understanding,” for it takes the expertise of the color finisher “to balance the plates so that the final printed proof will be a facsimile reproduction of the original art work.”8 This detailed description of the photoengraving process demonstrates how a photoengraving, owing to the type of human intervention involved, is a coded image more than an indexical reproduction. It requires, as Roland Barthes said of drawing, “a set of rule-governed transpositions,” that is, “a certain division between the significant and insignificant” (in the case of the Seminars photoengravings, the use of only four colors, for example), and an apprenticeship.9 The photoengraving was at times read as a purely mechanical reproduction of an original work of art, and, at other times, as a coded image, whose quality of verisimilitude to the original work of art depended upon its craftsmanship. (Craftsmanship could indicate, as we will see below, whether the reproduction was read as having only commercial appeal or social and pedagogical value.) Canaday, for his part, acknowledged the mediations involved in the photoengraving process and, at the same time, argued that modern technology “can bring us closer” to the original characteristics of the work reproduced, as if through some sort of transparent medium. In the discussions that follow, especially around the Rembrandt print, representatives of the Met recognized that a good reproduction is as much the result of careful craftsmanship and monetary outlay as mechanical means. For the Met, quality played a key role in both the pedagogical function of reproductions and in how they reinforced the museum’s reputation. Specifically, the Met was greatly concerned when a poorly crafted print reflected badly on its status as an institution of high art.

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The Importance of Quality: Miniatures and Seminars The Met was greatly concerned with issues of fidelity to the original and high quality in the reproductions of works of art for both the Miniatures and Seminars projects. The 1947 news release for the Miniatures described the stamps as the most “faithful a reproduction in color as modern techniques of color photography and plate making processes can provide.”10 Indeed, the Met went to great pains to ensure the quality of the Miniatures. They oversaw the production of the color transparencies in New York (when the reproductions were of works of art from their collections), and they sent members of their staff to supervise the plate production and printing process in Philadelphia (at the Beck Engraving Company).11 The quality of the Miniatures did not go unnoticed by members of the public. When they were asked by the Met to provide comments on the project when it was first introduced in 1947, some praised the stamps as “really lovely,” as “beauties,” and as “a treasure to possess.” Others commented on their fidelity to their source material: “the color faithfulness seems to me to be unusually good”; “these color pictures are indeed brilliant and representative of the original works.” Another praised the Miniatures for their “peculiarly lovely and subtle colors—like those of expensive prints,” which “should give a great deal of pleasure to a great many persons.” Another saw them as “an attractive way to familiarize oneself with the works of art contained in the museum.” One member of the public even planned “to frame each picture in gold, attach several pictures with a velvet ribbon and form a desired group of miniatures.”12 A similar concern for high quality reproductions runs through the Seminars project. At the very first meeting about the series in November 1954, a discussion arose about a plan, never realized, to use high-quality plates from Skira, the Italian publishing house, for the publications.13 And as we have seen, the BOMC highlighted the excellence of the color prints in advertisements for the Seminars. As with the Miniatures, members of the public commented on the quality of the reproductions. A teacher from Arkansas, for example, believed the excellent reproductions could be used in schools, auditoriums, and libraries.14 However, others were less impressed. One disappointed Seminars’ subscriber decried the quality of the reproductions, which, she believed, were not on par with those produced by Skira. Harvard Professor Howard M. Jones complained to Met Director James Rorimer: “The replicas you send me look like the glossy varnished genuine hand-painted pichers [sic] you get in the five and ten cent store.” Met

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Editor of Publications Marshall Davidson, in a handwritten comment to Rorimer on Jones’s letter, defended the reproductions: “H.M.J. [Jones] is acting like a garrulous old man. Bocklin’s [sic] Island of the Dead [Color Plate 18] does, in fact, look like a back drop from an opera. His memory that it is otherwise is faulty. . . . In short Jones’ remarks are somewhat gratuitous and seem to indicate that even he cannot make a fair appraisal of color work at a distance of miles, months—or years—from the originals.”15 As we can see, the issue of quality was certainly a concern to the Met and to members of the public alike even if there were disagreements about what constituted a high-quality reproduction. In the Miniatures and Seminars projects, as we have seen, there were points of tension between the Met and the BOMC regarding issues of high culture and middlebrow taste, of art education and commerce. Similar tensions were apparent in the institutions’ differing attitudes towards reproductions. In all the projects with the BOMC, the Met was deeply concerned with the quality of reproductions, which they believed reflected on their status as an institution of high culture. The Met took great pains to produce high-quality reproductions in the Miniatures through their oversight of photography in New York and printing in Philadelphia. The museum had hoped that the supervision of the printing in Philadelphia could be carried out by the BOMC, but their overseeing the print production proved “not satisfactory.”16 The BOMC, for their part, always had in its dealings with the Met an eye turned towards its return on investment. In 1958, when the Miniatures were winding down and the Seminars were in preparation, BOMC Chairman of the Board Harry Scherman suggested that the Met and the BOMC continue the Miniatures project in a form for children, “a Canaday Junior series.” The BOMC, Scherman said, “must get as much salvage as possible out of their heavy investment in color plates.”17 The quality of the color reproductions used in the BOMC promotional material for the Seminars arose as a contentious topic. When a member of the public wrote to Met Director James Rorimer that “the brochure is like a slap in the face, an insult to any art lover,” because of the “substandard” quality of the reproductions, which are “off register and, barbarically, off color,” Rorimer was not prepared to defend the BOMC. “I am sending your letter to them,” he replied, “but I want you to know that the reproductions in the Seminars are greatly superior to those you condemn, in which condemnation I would have to concur.”18 On another occasion, Rorimer himself found a BOMC advertisement in his daughter’s bedroom and complained to the BOMC about “what I have already referred to as dreadful, colored illustrations.” The Met Director was upset specifically because the advertisement appeared to be from the Met and not the

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BOMC: “I think that you will agree that to the ordinary person this mailing appears to be directly from the Museum and gives a very erroneous impression in view of our own way of doing things.”19 A concern with the Met’s reputation was an important issue from the very beginning of the Miniatures project. In the letter that initiated the venture, Herman Jaffe referred to the undertaking as a “dignified and educational method” to raise funds for the museum.20 And it was important for the BOMC to bank on the expertise of the Met in order to sell both the Miniatures and Seminars. In other words, both parties involved had a stake in upholding the Met as an institution of high art in their attempts to bring culture to a large audience. Issues of commodification, cultural capital, and accessibility were similarly at play in the Met/BOMC collaboration to sell a reproduction of Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer.

The Rembrandt Reproduction On November 15, 1961, the Met purchased at auction Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer (Color Plate 19) for a record-setting $2.3 million.21 The painting was part of the collection of the late Alfred W. Erickson, first board chairman of the McCann-Erickson advertising agency, and his widow, whose collection went up for sale at the Parke-Bernet auction house, one of the finest in New York City. Since the price was nearly double the highest price previously paid for a painting at auction, the purchase of the Rembrandt was a headline item. The New York Times illustrated the painting on its front page the day after it was sold and announced: “Museum Gets Rembrandt for 2.3 Million.”22 Letters of congratulations from museum directors, art historians, and members of the public flooded the museum. There were also letters of complaint: some members of the public were outraged that the museum would spend so much money for one painting, when the funds could have gone to other activities. Other letters congratulated Rorimer, and some contained contributions from 25¢ to $100 for the Rembrandt fund. Indeed when Rorimer made the winning bid for the painting, he was still raising money for the painting.23 Some members of the public sent in poems about the Rembrandt, while others requested Rorimer’s signature on the November 24, 1961 edition of Time Magazine, which featured the painting on the cover with the accompanying story, “Art: The SolidGold Muse.”24 The museum even purchased cartoons satirizing the Rembrandt painting.25 Soon after the Met’s purchase, the self-taught trompe l’oeil painter Otis

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Kaye, who had a keen interest in Rembrandt’s work, painted Heart of the Matter (Color Plate 20) an “extended visual rumination,” as Geraldine Banks puts it, on Rembrandt’s painting in relation to commerce and the value of art.26 The great impact of the Met’s purchase of Rembrandt’s Aristotle is, perhaps, best summed up in a letter to Rorimer from Louis C. Jones, Director of the New York State Historical Association: The repercussions of this purchase have gone far beyond the question of one painting or one museum. . . . [W]herever I go I find that this has stirred up an awareness of museums in a most unforeseeable way. I had been afraid originally that the expenditure of so much money would have a backlash for all of us but this has not been the case. Instead, there seems to be a kind of groundswell of unforeseen interest stimulated by the purchase but, more particularly by the public’s response to the purchase.27

The new Rembrandt was a boon for Met business. Close to two million visitors came to see the “acquisition of the wise by the wise,” as architect and scholar Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. described the painting, which was displayed for a time in a special exhibition space in the Met’s Great Hall.28 In January 1962, two months after the Met’s purchase of Rembrandt’s Aristotle, the BOMC began making inquiries into the possibility of distributing a reproduction of the painting. By March, after the exclusive the Met had given The American Weekly lapsed, the BOMC was already advertising the print in The New York Times Book Review section.29 The advertisement, in which the BOMC describes itself as the distributor of the Metropolitan Seminars, makes reference to the Met’s expertise: “This fine print . . . has been approved by the Metropolitan Museum for color fidelity and sharpness of detail. . . .”30 In fact, no such approval had been given by the Met, because a proof of the print had not yet even been produced. As with the Miniatures and the Seminars, the BOMC advertised the Rembrandt reproduction through glossy mailers sent to homes. The gold envelope (Color Plate 21), with the advertising slogans “. . . one of the noblest creations of Western civilization” and “Is there a place for it in your home?”, contained a one-page, fold-out advertisement for the print (Color Plate 22), a letter from BOMC president Axel Rosin, and an order card. As in the Miniatures and Seminars advertising, the BOMC took a back seat to the museum. The BOMC “is distributing for The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York a limited edition in full color of this famous Rembrandt painting.” The large lithographic print (24” x 25”) was available framed or unframed and “returnable

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after examination.” As in the newspaper ad, the mailer assured the reader that it “has been approved by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for color fidelity and sharpness of detail.” It highlighted the high price of the acquisition, but also reassured the reader that this publicity, “almost amounting to notoriety,” is overshadowed by the public’s sincere reaction to one of the great paintings of all time. The brochure then cites Met Curator of European Art Theodore Rousseau, Jr., who commented that “the hushed, almost, reverent attitude with which they gaze at it indicates a profound and personal response to qualities in the work that satisfy man’s inward craving for beauty.” As in so much of the literature from the Met, aesthetic quality is regarded above market value. In the letter included in the mailer, BOMC president Axel Rosin emphasized the limited availability of the print, a point that “deserves, I think, a little amplification . . .” Rosin explained that the BOMC is releasing a limited edition of 15,000. He emphasized the fact that the painting has received “unusual worldwide publicity” and that “it will be quite some time before another edition can be made available.” He encouraged interested members of the public “to return the enclosed order card as quickly as you conveniently can,” because orders “will have to be filled in the sequence received, and you will of course be notified if yours reaches us too late.”31 Although the initial run was 15,000, the BOMC produced in the end over 50,000 copies, many of which were remaindered within a year of production. The advertising campaign worked well. On May 13, 1962, Met Secretary Dudley Easby informed Rorimer about a telephone conversation he had with Warren Lynch of the BOMC, which had already received 350 to 400 orders for Rembrandt prints after only two days’ returns. Lynch said that the BOMC “considered this a good return” and added that “orders were running about three-to-one in favor of the framed print.”32 The distribution of the print, however, did not go as smoothly as planned. Although the BOMC had already advertised the print and was receiving orders, the actual print was not yet ready for delivery. The BOMC was responsible for the production of the print, but the Met, as the advertisements maintained, had to approve it. And the Met was not willing to endorse an inferior quality reproduction. In June 1962, the BOMC showed the museum the print it had prepared, and Gray Williams, who had replaced Marshall Davidson as Met Editor of Publications, reported to Easby on its poor quality. “The prints do not look like the painting,” he wrote. “[T]hey don’t give even a pleasant visual impression of the painting.” He described the print as “heavy, dark, and lifeless, lacking in contrast, and with a washed-out appearance in many areas.” He could see only two alternatives moving forward: the BOMC must either produce a

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print of better quality or cease to use the museum’s name in association with the project. Williams preferred the former, given that advertisements for the print had already been published, but he was still very concerned for the Met’s reputation. “This is just the sort of thing,” he wrote to Easby, “that will give the Museum a big black eye.”33 Met Treasurer Kenneth Loughry put Rousseau and Bradford Kelleher, who was Sales Manager for the Bookshop and Reproductions, in charge of working with the BOMC to ensure the production of a print that would meet the Met’s standards. Both men were sensitive to the complex relation of a reproduction to its source. Kelleher, who had graduated from Yale in Far Eastern Studies after serving in Army intelligence during the war, had been hired by Francis Taylor in 1949 and singlehandedly transformed the gift shop from a “a little cubby hole by the front door . . . run by little ladies,” as Marshall Davidson described it, into a merchandising “empire.”34 Kelleher would later become the Met’s Vice President and Publisher. In a memo to Loughry, Kelleher claimed that a color print “even at its best is only an approximation of the original,” and that a suggestion “of the over-all character of the original is more important than color fidelity in any isolated areas of the print.” He explained that there are different printing methods, each with its advantages and disadvantages in relation to quality and price. The BOMC had used for the Rembrandt print “one of the cheapest methods of mass reproduction,” and even with the limitations of this method, “the present print is exceptionally poor.” The challenge with Rembrandt’s Aristotle, Kelleher acknowledged, is in the photographic part of the process: “Highlights and details which are diminished or totally lost during photography must be brought back by finishing and retouching,” which in the case of the BOMC print is “abominable.” Parts of the image “are practically redrawn,” which destroys the character of the print “far more than any shift in the color values.” In Kelleher’s opinion “nothing can be salvaged from the existing plates,” which, he believed, will certainly not meet Rorimer’s approval.35 Even with the Met showing great doubts about the quality of the print, the BOMC pressed on. In July 1962, a meeting between Met Treasurer Kenneth Loughry and representatives of the BOMC began with the BOMC giving the Met a $35,000 check for Seminar royalties and warning “that unless the Museum’s approval of a print [of Rembrandt’s Aristotle] can be obtained this week, the Club will not be in a position to send out 600,000 solicitations [for the Seminars] in September.” Over the fall (“a good time for mail order solicitations”), the BOMC planned to send out up to 11,000,000 mailings before their rights on mailing lists expired. As Warren Lynch of the BOMC stressed, “the whole

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purpose of the Rembrandt mailing was to revive the Seminar list with resulting substantial royalties to the Museum.”36 In “an effort to let the Museum off the hook,” that is, to allay the Met’s fears for its reputation due to the low quality of the Rembrandt reproduction, the BOMC’s Harry Scherman proposed the following statement to be included with the print: This is to inform you that the reproduction of Rembrandt’s ARISTOTLE CONTEMPLATING THE BUST OF HOMER is going forward to you after many color provings. We feel it proper to tell you that there may be differences of opinion among art reproduction experts about the complete fidelity of the print to the original, as there is in all such cases. That was the reason why, in the original announcement sent to you, it was specified that the reproduction was returnable by any purchaser after seeing it. We promised The Metropolitan Museum of Art to remind you of this privilege, and are happy to do so. Please do not have the slightest hesitation in returning the print for full credit, if you are not completely satisfied.37

Loughry was at this time becoming suspicious of the BOMC’s honesty in its dealings with the Met. He told Rorimer that Scherman had earlier given him the impression that Met curator Rousseau had approved the print, but at the meeting in July 1962, Met Editor of Publications Gray Williams, “who is on vacation, was indicated as the one who had given Walsh [the printer] the green light.”38 Loughry’s distrust of the BOMC obliged him to tell Kelleher and Rousseau that “it is imperative that we keep a correct record of what is transpiring. I believe it would be wise to have two people present at each subsequent interview.” And he wanted them to provide him with reports about developments concerning the print promptly after every meeting with the BOMC or their printer.39 As suggested by the tone of his memos, Loughry was becoming increasingly irritated with the BOMC. He wrote to Rorimer: “Once again we are faced with the customary misunderstandings, jumping the gun on the part of the Club, and critical deadlines.” He then summarized the issues: The questions seem to be (A) Should the Metropolitan compromise its standards of quality in order to benefit from a renewed Seminar mailing list? (B) Can the Book of the Month Club, by a process economically feasible to it, produce a print worthy of the Museum’s endorsement? My answer to the first question is that I would not want to be responsible for sacrificing the Museum’s reputation with a poor print to revive the Seminar list.

Since Loughry had been informed by Kelleher that the BOMC could produce an acceptable print, even by the process it proposed, he concluded to Rorimer:

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“While the timetable may be upset, I am not approving the present print and will give approval only if the Club comes up with a satisfactory reproduction.”40 On August 1, 1962, Loughry officially informed the BOMC that the museum had rejected their submitted Rembrandt print, which,“in our opinion, . . . would cause the Museum irreparable injury.” He also disagreed with the BOMC’s idea to send out Scherman’s proposed statement to get the museum “off the hook.” He wrote: “It is my opinion that in the light of the promotional material which has been circulated and the Museum’s position with respect to the painting, the Museum neither can nor should be disassociated with the print which the Club may distribute.”41 In order to clarify what was wrong with the first print and to move forward with a new version that would satisfy the Met’s requirements, Rousseau, Loughry, and Kelleher from the museum met with Dale and Lynch from the BOMC and their printer Walsh on August 3, 1962. In his notes on the meeting, Kelleher clarified the concerns of both parties. The Met, with its reputation on the line, was sensitive to the quality of the reproduction. Kelleher and Rousseau were of the opinion that “the print would not be an exact facsimile of any original copy, but something new, a combination of photographic color separation and retouching. The retouching would bring back into the separations elements lost in photography as well as reinforce detail and adjust color values.” The BOMC and their printer Walsh, on the other hand, had more practical concerns on their minds. “The Club appears anxious to do whatever is possible to improve the quality of the print without incurring additional costs.” Moreover, they needed to follow the claims of the advertisement: the reproduction needed to be printed “in eight colors on heavy art mat stock to insure the greatest possible fidelity to the original.” Due to these different goals, there was a disagreement about methods. Walsh wanted to use wet printing (colors added on before the print dries) and a large press; the Met representatives suggested dry printing and a smaller press. The Met wanted the printer to use a photographic transparency provided by the museum; the printer wanted to use a dye-transfer print made from the transparency. Both sides agreed on the fact that the retoucher should see the original painting, which apparently had not occurred in the production of the first version of the print. But the printer did not see how, following the Met’s suggestions, “which would mean about 4,000 prints a day,” he could print in a reasonable amount of time “the 50,000 to 100,000 prints mentioned by the Club.”42 The problem of incompatible positions is clear: the BOMC wanted to keep costs down and the Met wanted a reasonably good quality print. In August 1962, the BOMC sent out a letter to those who ordered the print: “Still another delay, I regret to report, in sending you the Rembrandt reproduction

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you ordered some time ago.” Color engravers, the letter explained, have been working for months with the Met to reproduce “with the utmost fidelity” the details of the painting. The first version was “scrapped,” because it did not meet “the properly meticulous standards of the Metropolitan.” The BOMC wanted to assure those who ordered the print that the Met was taking “excessive pains” in order “to insure a superb reproduction” and that the long delay will be completely understandable, “when you finally receive the print.”43 On September 20, 1962, the BOMC submitted a new version of the Rembrandt print. Kelleher wrote to Loughry: “This is the concluding (I hope) memorandum for your file on the subject.” The print “appeared to be of a mediocre quality, quite hard and flat and without subtlety,” but it represents, Kelleher admitted, a “very substantial improvement over any of the proofs from the first set of plates, and it was equal in quality to many run-of-the-mill trade prints now in distribution.” Rorimer, Kelleher informed Loughry, has approved the print. In this memo, Kelleher also indicated that the BOMC requested permission to give away to schools and other institutions the 15,000 copies of the first version. The Met, always careful of its reputation,“refused to grant such permission, on the grounds that no useful purpose would be served by circulating prints of such poor quality.”44 This memo, however, was not the concluding one on the subject, as Kelleher had hoped. In January 1963, the Met agreed to the BOMC request for an early termination of their agreement on the Rembrandt reproduction and did “not elect to exercise its option to purchase any of this material at cost.” The BOMC was thus free to remainder the prints it had not sold, but the Met requested its name be removed from any promotion of the remaindered prints. “What we particularly wish to avoid,” Met secretary Dudley Easby wrote to BOMC president Axel Rosin, “is someone flooding the market with these at reduced prices, with some statement about their having been specially approved by the Museum.”45 The BOMC agreed to this request, but the Met soon became aware of a promotion that defied this agreement. Easby wrote to Rosin that Crown Publishers remaindered the print, advertised it as approved by the Met, and “has gone even further and stated that the print was ‘prepared by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’.” Easby asked Rosin: “How did this happen?” and asked him to “take this up with Crown immediately and request them to stop the unauthorized use of the Museum’s name.”46 In his apologetic reply to Easby, Rosin wrote: I was very embarrassed when I received your letter. . . . Mr. Wartels of Crown got a red face too; here is what happened. . . . . When we told him that we could make

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the deal, provided that they did not mention the Metropolitan Museum of Art, anywhere in their sales literature, they changed it in every place but one—and that is the one you have. Mr. Wartels is sending us the other sales releases he is using, as well as the corrected one to his salesmen. . . . I know Mr. Wartels for many years and believe it is an honest mistake but I am still embarrassed to see how quickly things can go wrong.47

For most of 1963, the BOMC continued to offload its prints, which was causing another problem for the Met. It has “killed our entire wholesale business on the Museum print,” Kelleher explained to Rorimer.48 Indeed the Met was at that point selling its own, higher-quality reproduction of Rembrandt’s painting. In a letter to a member of the public, Kelleher clarified the characteristics of the two Rembrandt prints now on the market: “A full COLLOTYPE print published by the Museum,” which was priced at $12.50 and whose collotype process “is particularly suited to reproduce the full range of subtle qualities in the Rembrandt,” and a “full color OFFSET print published by a trade publisher” [the BOMC print], now available at $2.00 or $9.95 framed and whose offset process “is a standard commercial printing method suitable for mass production.” Kelleher did not mention the BOMC by name, which suggests that by this point in time the Met wanted to distance itself to a certain degree from the Club. At the same time, Kelleher recognized the need of reproductions, even of a lower quality, for democratic purposes, for their accessibility. He justified the Met’s endorsement of the BOMC print in the following way: the Met “gave permission for this publication so that a greater number of people might be able to own copies of the painting, particularly those who could not afford or easily obtain a copy of the Museum’s collotype print.”49

Reproductions and the Democratization of Art The production and distribution of the BOMC print of Rembrandt’s Aristotle highlight a variety of concerns about reproductions of works of art, from their quality to their democratic function to their economic viability. These concerns were not new to the postwar period. In the mid-nineteenth century, American Art Unions, as discussed briefly in the Introduction, promoted the cause of art as a civilizing force in part through the distribution of engravings to their subscribers. In the second half of the nineteenth century, chromolithographic reproductions of works of art were, as Peter Marzio argues, “waved unchallenged as the flag of popular culture” in the United States. These reproductions, which

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were sold in the millions, “marked a faith in fine art, a belief in the power of art to enrich the life of anyone.”50 In 1871, noted biographer and journalist James Parton described how chromolithography “harmonizes well” with the situation of the United States as a developing cultural nation, which needs “not to add to the world’s treasures of art, but to educate the mass of mankind to an intelligent enjoyment of those which we already possess. . . .” Parton believed that chromolithographs, such as Louis Prang’s famous reproductions of works of art, could help “convert” the masses, including emancipated slaves of the South, “into thinking, knowing, skillful, tasteful American citizens.” The feeling for art, he argued, “must precede the production of excellent national works.”51 These same principles, to educate citizens and elevate the nation, were, as Michael Clapper suggests, the grounds for the founding of museums in urban centers like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia in the late nineteenth century. Yet as divisions between lowbrow and highbrow culture hardened at this time, the social standings of chromolithography and the museum changed. The chromolithograph industry, Clapper argues, “included all purchasers in its broad ‘public’,” but “museums were public only in the sense of being freely available to those who had the leisure to visit.”52 By the 1890s, the term “chromo,” as Lawrence Levine explains, “had come to mean ‘ugly’ or ‘offensive.’ ” A sign of the change was the placement of chromolithographs at world’s fairs: at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, they were considered “fine” arts; at the 1893 Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, however, they were only included with other “industrial” or “commercial” products.53 The idea that the mass circulation of reproduced works of art can be part of the educational process that helps democratize a nation did not, however, die in the late nineteenth century. The Met, in particular, continued to use reproductions, photographs, and prints, as part of its pedagogical mission. In 1906, it established a Photograph Department to reproduce all the important objects in the museum’s collections. By 1913, more than 25,000 negatives had been prepared, many for five-cent postcards and larger prints suitable for framing, which were available at the newly established Information Desk (at the Fifth Avenue entrance).54 By 1941, the Photograph Department had 360,000 negatives in its collection, which were often used for lantern slides to make lectures on art more attractive and comprehensible to the public. As early as 1927, the Met started a program of color reproduction, whose aim, as Met historian Winifred Howe wrote in 1946, was “to make available at a reasonable price the most truthful reproductions in color that could be obtained, for the training of the eye and the satisfaction of the color sense.” To achieve this goal, the Met purchased in 1930 a press to make collotypes,

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which were used for prints for Christmas gifts and for picture books. Later in the 1930s, the Met produced larger prints (up to 14” × 18”) for wall decoration.55 Reproductions were also used in the Met’s child education programs. Beginning in 1935, the Met introduced School Notebooks Sheets, “large pages of halftone reproductions accompanied by extensive descriptions under each illustration.” These sheets were meant to be cut up and pasted—not unlike the Miniatures—in notebooks for subjects, such as history, geography, and literature.56 In the postwar period, as we have seen, the Met used art reproductions in the Miniatures and Seminars as an integral part of its programs to reach a broad public. In 1954, Francis Taylor continued these efforts through Fifty Centuries of Art, “the first general survey of art history ever to be published in full color,” mostly from plates prepared for the Miniatures, whose great success, Taylor wrote, “has broadened the Museum’s responsibilities to this large audience.”57 The Met was not the only institution to be heavily engaged in sales of art reproductions in postwar America. Art educator Burton Wasserman explained in 1958 how “a widespread interest in art” emerged after the Second World War as evidenced by the “sales of art materials,” including reproductions “to nonprofessional users.”58 The October 1959 edition of Art Education, the journal of the National Art Education Association, featured an advertisement for Art Appreciation, a quarterly journal for grades 4 to 9, which included “five full-color reproductions of famous paintings” in each issue.59 Art educators emphasized the pedagogical use of art reproductions, but they also had commercial value. In the 1950s, the BOMC offered a portfolio of “100 Prints in Full Color of the World’s Great Paintings” as a gift to those who joined the Club.60 Large retailers, like Sears Roebuck, had art reproduction departments, which sold prints after Rembrandt, Renoir, and Van Gogh. However, the biggest seller, journalist Russell Lynes reported, was the kitschy Fiery Peaks, “a picture of the Cascade Mountains either at sunset or sunrise,” and the most popular artist was Cherry Jeffe Huldah, who, according to a Sears Roebuck executive, “paints pictures of Parisian women with big black eyes and frilly things around their necks and we sell them in very fancy Edwardian frames.”61 Lynes also mentioned in this context the continued interest in old masters: “The Metropolitan Museum, working hand in glove with the Book-of-the-Month Club, sells hundreds of thousands of what they call ‘miniatures,’ little color plates of famous pictures suitable for pasting in an album. ‘When the talk turns to art . . . must you be silent?’ asks an advertisement for the miniatures.”62 And the Miniatures, before the BOMC took over distribution, were indeed sold at Marshall Field’s department store. Lynes also mentioned popular magazines, notably Life, which devoted a great amount of space to reproductions of paintings, including the latest works of avant-garde

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artists, “so that when an exhibition goes to any city or town, however small, though some things may displease, nothing surprises.”63

Reproductions and Social Values Russell Lynes’s voice was an important one during this period for articulating trends in taste and social classes. He clarified the social prestige of art and reproductions in his book The Tastemakers as well as in his famous 1949 essay “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow.” Always tongue-in-cheek, Lynes explained that for the highbrow, “color reproductions, except as casual reminders tucked in the frame of a mirror, are beneath him. The facsimile is no substitute in his mind for the genuine.” The middlebrow, on the other hand, “is not above an occasional color reproduction of a Van Gogh or a Cézanne.”64 The Met showed some discomfort with reproductions of works of art as decorations in homes. While not dissuading readers from hanging the Seminars prints on their walls, the Met was more concerned with their pedagogical function. The promotional brochure for the Seminars states: “These reproductions are all suitable for framing, but it is suggested that this not be done until the course is completed by everybody in the family likely to be interested over a period of time.”65 As we have seen in other contexts, cultural capital in an “embodied state” (cultivation), to use the language of Pierre Bourdieu, took priority for the Met over cultural capital in an “objectified state” (framed picture on the wall).66 Canaday had something similar to say to a subscriber who asked the author about what type of frame is best for the reproductions. “My own feeling,” Canaday replied, “is that a colored reproduction should not be framed, since a frame is likely to throw it out of scale. . . . I think that a piece of wall board, soft enough to take thumb tacks easily . . . and painted white or pale gray is the best background for such prints, without glass.”67 Canaday may have felt this way, but in the case of the BOMC Rembrandt print, the public thought otherwise. As we saw above, there were approximately three times more orders for the print framed behind glass than for the unframed reproduction.

Reproductions and Originals Canaday’s reply to his reader implies a clear distinction between how one should treat a true work of art (framed behind glass) and a reproduction (tacked to a

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piece of wall board). The use of reproductions, however, was a complex issue facing a museum like the Met, which was heavily invested in public education. On the one hand, its principal aims were to make original works of art accessible to the public and to instill in the museum visitor an understanding and respect for its collections. On the other, museums like the Met could use reproductions of works of art to fulfill its pedagogical function just as well. As sociologist César Graña suggested, the great reverence for originals “militates against some of the didactic tasks of art collections.” Books “may show a Franz Hals next to a Vermeer to make a point of difference in style within a national tradition. But the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam does not.”68 More recently, anxiety about the aura of the work of art has led Philippe de Montebello, former director of the Met, to state: “reproductions, no matter how good, cannot and will not ever replace originals.”69 No one at the Met in the postwar period would have disagreed with Montebello, but as we will see, the replica was never intended to supplant the original. In 1956, the Met faced such concerns head on when it held a curious exhibition sponsored by Life magazine. “Illuminations of Fifty Great Paintings” featured full-size color reproductions of famous works of art, including Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes hung on the ceiling of the exhibition space (the only work reproduced not in full but quarter-scale). The reproductions were produced from negatives taken by Life photographers, which were enlarged and printed on fiberglass panels in sections connected by transparent tape. The panels were enhanced with oil paint and illuminated from behind in light boxes.70 As Melissa Renn explains, Life magazine had been bringing art and culture to the masses since 1947 with a ten-part series on Western culture, which included well-photographed reproductions of famous works of art.71 But “Illuminations” was on another scale altogether, in that it moved Life from the magazine to the museum. The reviews of the exhibition were mixed: some criticized the museum for displaying “ersatz art,” while others praised the exhibition for its educational value.72 “Illuminations,” which had an attendance of over 100,000, was not only shown at the Met. Like other large-scale exhibitions of the time, such as MoMA’s “Family of Man,” it traveled throughout the United States (venues included the Seattle Art Museum and the Texas State Fair) and then internationally. “These illuminated transparencies,” as Renn explains, “were not merely reproductions of famous frescoes and oil paintings; they were technologically transformed modern objects remade into new American products that were then exported worldwide.”73 In the brochure for the “Illuminations” exhibition, which included “illustrations shown to scale,” the relation between the aura of an original work

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of art and its reproduction was articulated by Met Director Rorimer in terms of experience and distance: “Standing in the presence of an original painting is an experience which nothing can ever quite duplicate. But these illuminations are the closest yet achieved to that exalted experience.”74 Canaday, we will remember, similarly wrote about how modern technology “can bring us closer” to original works of art. For Rorimer and Canaday, intimacy with the original could be replicated to a certain degree through the experience of a copy, but only through reproductions of high quality, an important concern to the Met as we saw with the BOMC Rembrandt print. The value of high-quality reproductions was also spelled out in pedagogical terms by Met Editor of Publications Marshall Davidson, who was responsible for the quality of the texts and images in both the Miniatures and Seminars. When Harvard Professor Howard Jones complained to Rorimer about the poor quality of the reproductions in the Seminars, Davidson, as discussed above, came to their defense. In his memo to Rorimer about Jones’s letter, Davidson included an essay he had written about the “Illuminations” exhibition for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin. Davidson highlighted for Rorimer’s benefit a section of his text, in which he emphasized that even though works of art change “in character and expressiveness” when reproduced, they nevertheless have come to play an increasingly important role not only in the “modern approach to teaching and learning,” but also in our daily life in various ways.75 He thus defended the “Illuminations” exhibition: reproductions serve an important educational purpose, if they are used properly and are of high quality. Davidson’s essay is less a review of the Life exhibition than a discussion, following the ideas of André Malraux, about the use of photographs in the history and appreciation of art. Malraux’s famous and influential essay “Museum without Walls” (1947) posited the advantages of photographs over the museum as an instrument for the development of a stylistic history of art.76 When Davidson wrote “the history of art has in fact become the history of that which has been photographed,” he repeated (without citation) almost word for word a claim made by Malraux.77 Davidson recognized that photographs are interpretations of works of art; a reproduction can never capture all the qualities of an original. The sophisticated critic, he claimed, will maintain that color, scale, and texture are “inseparable components” of an original piece and that any “composition changes in character and expressiveness as it is reduced or enlarged.”78 Davidson, however, felt that there are pedagogical and practical reasons to use facsimiles. Reproductions are of value due to the way they allow access to works of art in distant places, the way they reveal novel aspects “that

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cannot ordinarily even be seen,” and the way they function as aids to memory.79 As importantly they play an important role in the comparative method. Like Malraux, who argued that photographs can demonstrate how different works of art can be considered of “one and the same family,” Davidson wrote that photographs can “evoke some true idea of the continuous evolution of art” and give “a better and more complete understanding of the vital continuity.”80 Malraux was well aware that the “Museum without Walls” was an artificial construction of an imaginary history of art. As Francis Taylor maintained in his review of Malraux’s The Voices of Silence, which included the essay “Museum without Walls,” photographic reproduction “has created what might be called ‘fictitious’ arts, by systematically falsifying the scale of objects.”81 More recently Georges Didi-Huberman has argued that Malraux created a new form of art book, the art album (unlike the art atlas), which used a montage of photographs with “family resemblance.”82 Malraux’s construction of a stylistic history of works of art from diverse locations and eras based on the notion that they can be seen as part “of the same family” depended to a great degree upon photography’s ability to magnify details and to isolate a work from its physical surroundings. There were, of course, critics to Malraux’s position. Art historian Edgar Wind found it “difficult to conceive” that Malraux “seriously holds” that “supra-personal forces are discovered in art” through “the leveling effect of reproduction.”83 Wind took a materialist stance. Decrying the photographic mechanization of art, he declared in Platonic terms: “the medium of diffusion tends to take precedence over the direct experience of the object . . . We are given the shadow for the thing, and in the end we live among shadows, and not only believe that things are made for the sake of their shadows, but find that this is actually the case.”84 This “shadow for the thing” is the replacement not only of a work of art with a photograph, but also a physical object with its style or its materiality with its form. The result, in Henri Zerner’s terms, was the “avowed intention to wrench objects from their time and place.” Malraux’s particular use of photographs, with their “abstract and irradiated background,” as Zerner describes them, recontextualizes works of art into an abstract realm, even those works that continue to occupy their original setting, like Bernini’s Fountain of Triton in the Piazza Barberini in Rome.85 For his part, Malraux recognized photography as a mediating factor, and he saw the advantages of this mediation. Photography’s removal of objects from their original settings through means such as artificial lighting, camera angle, and abstract background, reveals, like no other medium, a visual argument for the history of style. For Wind, Malraux’s use of photography dehumanizes and

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mechanizes the study of human artistic creation. For Zerner, Malraux’s understanding of art is either one of “profound incoherence” (the belief in photography as a transparent medium) or postmodern avant la lettre.86 For Davidson, Canaday and Rorimer, photographic and photoengraved reproductions of works of art had a more instrumental value: they could be used to develop museums-goers’ aesthetic appreciation of art or, in other words, to increase their enthusiasm for an experience of art, which was, of course, at the basis of the Met popular pedagogical programs. While Malraux thought of the photograph of a work of art as a form of mediation that could be used creatively to construct a global story of art’s stylistic development, the Met staff took a more realist stance when it came to reproductions. They saw them as a means back to an object, which itself has a place in a reified history of art. Davidson, Canaday, and Rorimer all argue that viewers are aware that they are looking at reproductions and, at the same time, can have an ersatz experience of the work of art reproduced. This experience assumes the suspension of disbelief or an act of “conscious self-deception,” as art historian Konrad Lange put it at the turn of the twentieth-century in a discussion of realist art.87 For photographed or photoengraved reproductions to function in this way, as instruments for pedagogical and aesthetic experiences, they needed, according to Davidson, Canaday, and Rorimer, to be of the best quality, an issue that is not highlighted in Malraux’s work in the same way, even though he certainly took great care in the preparation of photographs for his publications. Davidson argued that “valid comparisons between paintings in distant and separate places” can only be made through “good photoreproductions, including, of course, the various types of photoengraving that extend the reach of the camera.” And in order to attain “a better and more complete understanding” of the history of art, “we will always have to call upon the best reproductions that can be made available.”88

Reproductions, Reputation, Instruction Met officials, like Davidson, emphasized the pedagogical purposes of highquality reproductions, but there were other reasons why the Met was greatly concerned with the standards of the facsimiles it endorsed, as the example of the Rembrandt print makes clear. We have seen how the Met positioned itself in the postwar period as an educational institution that served the general public. Francis Taylor went so far as to suggest that the museum’s “final and basic justification” was as “the midwife of democracy.”89 The art museum and

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democracy, however, “make an odd couple,” as sociologist Vera Zolberg maintained. She pointed out in the early 1990s how sociological studies demonstrate that despite all their commitments to public education, museums draw a public “disproportionately from those who have had at least some university education,” a tendency that continues today.90 This was also certainly the case in the postwar period as the surveys of Miniatures and Seminars subscribers confirm. For Zolberg, the difficulty in reconciling art museums and democracy was due to many factors, including museums’ continued claims to elitism and institutional hierarchies, such as the ranking of the curator above the museum educator. During the postwar period, the Met may have claimed that they were reaching out “to the man in the street,” as Taylor put it, but the Met’s interest in educating the masses was, as we have seen, mostly concerned with capturing the white middle classes. In this context, claims to elitism and democracy were not, in the eyes of the Met, opposing principles but were part of its strategy to increase the size of its audience. The Miniatures, Seminars, and Rembrandt print demonstrate that the Met’s claims to cultural distinction were needed and used to convince its intended audience of the quality of the educational material sold. Middle-class expectations and the Met’s standards of high quality were thus not separate, but intimately connected entities. For the Met, the quality of the reproductions related to their effectiveness as both pedagogical tools and signs of its authority in matters of quality. “Authority,” former Met Director Philippe de Montebello wrote in 2004, “is the quality projected by the institution as a result of its acknowledged seriousness of purpose, scholarship, respect for the works of art, and integrity as spokesman for their place, time and creator.”91 Montebello’s more recent conservative perspective harkens back to the postwar period, when seriousness was indicated by among other things the quality of the reproductions of works of art the museum endorsed. High-quality reproductions were coded as serious educational tools in comparison to low-quality commercial prints, which failed to bring the viewer “closer” to the original and thus lost any pedagogical value. And the Met’s intended audience, as we have seen, could certainly tell the difference between a cheap and an expensive print, between commercial advertisements and fine art reproductions. Quality of reproduction and the museum’s reputation were thus mutually reinforcing: the Met’s standing reassured buyers of the verisimilitude of the reproductions and the high-quality reproductions maintained the Met’s status as a prestigious institution of high culture, a status that the Met wanted to signal in all its educational and outreach programs. As Lydia Bond Powel pointed out in her 1945 study on television and

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the Met, discussed above in the introduction, the museum had an obligation to uphold the highest standards in all its educational services: “Its books, periodicals, reproductions, slides and loans must represent the best of their kind.”92 There were thus at least three interrelated reasons for the Met’s concern with high-quality reproductions in the Miniatures, Seminars and Rembrandt print projects. They reflected the Met’s reputation as an institution of high culture distinct from commercial concerns. They had pedagogical value: only highquality reproductions could bring the viewer closer to the original work of art and develop an enthusiasm for art appreciation. Finally, high-quality reproductions convinced the Met’s middle-class audience that they were buying what they desired: serious, educational material. In its popular educational ventures with the BOMC, the Met was concerned as much with knowledge about art as with judgment, that is, the ability to evaluate not just the quality of works of art, but their reproductions as well.

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The Met’s collaborations with the BOMC on the Miniatures, the Seminars, and the Rembrandt reproduction were premised on the idea that the museum should be an institution that is accessible to all. The fact that these pedagogical programs were taken up mostly by a white, middle-class audience suggests that there were limitations on who was included in the Met’s postwar notion of accessibility. These limitations were in great part due to how the Met in the 1940s and 1950s conceptualized the museum as a public sphere, a place open to all. In this imagined space, art was framed as a form of communication, which everyone, not just the elite, could understand. The humanist paradigm, which sustained this understanding of art and the museum, was based on a series of assumptions: a sameness amongst individuals; a dualism of mind and body; an understanding of the self as rational, autonomous, and authentic; and an acceptance of the external world as stable and secure.1 The type of consensus the Met was building through its programs in popular art education was thus less a coming together of diverse subjectivities than a recognition of sameness. This universal model of subjectivity was challenged by non-representational painters, and specifically the Abstract Expressionists, whose works shook the very foundations of the Met’s approach to art appreciation. In this concluding chapter I reflect upon how “the strange art of today,” as it was called in a 1948 Life magazine roundtable on modern art, posed serious challenges to those museum officials, like Francis Henry Taylor and John Canaday, who championed popular art education in postwar America. The period of the Met’s collaborations with the BOMC, from 1948 to 1962, parallels the time when Abstract Expressionism took its place as a leading movement in contemporary art on the domestic and global stages. As we have seen, the goal of the Met/BOMC collaborative projects, with their assumptions about social, gendered and racial hierarchies, was to increase the number of informed and cultivated Americans in order to reinforce cultural consensus and 127

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improve American democratic life. Abstract Expressionism was taken as a challenge to such a program of popular art pedagogy, because it was thought to question the grounds on which such a program rested: the concept that art was a universal language intelligible to all; the belief in the possibility of common human experience; and the idea that the viewer could have trust in the artist’s intention. Taylor, who took part in the 1948 Life roundtable, and Canaday, who later became The New York Times art critic, were strong opponents of Abstract Expressionism. They felt obliged to confront such avant-garde painting, because it not only challenged the foundations of their art pedagogy for the masses, but also put in jeopardy their position as public intellectuals, as Socrates-like mediators between art’s complexity and the layman’s experience. Non-representational art was not a central concern in the Miniatures and Seminars, but it continually surfaces in these ventures in middlebrow pedagogy, for example, in the very first work of art that John Canaday discusses in the Seminars. He begins with Whistler’s famous portrait of his mother (Color Plate 23) to explain how the meaning of a work of art does not reside in its subject matter as much as in its form. Canaday suggests that Whistler’s chosen title for the painting, Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1, with its allusion to the abstract quality of music, gets to the heart of the matter: the “real subject” of the painting is its “mood,” which “is completed by the shapes and colors Whistler chooses to use and the relationship he establishes among them.”2 Canaday’s argument was visualized in an abstracted version of the painting (Color Plate 24) made as a pedagogical slide for The Metropolitan Seminars in Art Slide Program. Understanding Whistler’s work along the lines of abstract painting was not lost on Canaday or art historian H. W. Janson’s team, which wrote the teacher’s guide for the slide program. In fact, it was at the core of the problem.“Let’s see what happens,” the teacher’s guide explains, “when the subject is eliminated entirely and the picture is only an arrangement of gray and black shapes.”3 Canaday, for his part, concluded his discussion of Whistler’s painting with reference to “the abstract school of contemporary painters,” for whom “subject matter is only something that gets in the way.” For Canaday, echoing Clive Bell’s notion of significant form, Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1 derives its “true meaning” not from any “associative emotional values” of its subject matter, but from the relationship between its formal elements. Whistler’s approach to painting, however, is a far cry, for Canaday, from works of the “abstract school,” which reduce the picture “to a few neat rectangles of color and a few neat black lines neatly disposed upon the canvas,” and which represent “nothing at all.”4 As this passage suggests, Canaday recognized the significance of form, but he had little interest in its autonomy.

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Non-representational painting could be at odds with art popularizers’ goal of consensus building, because it could divide people rather than bring them together. As early as 1925, philosopher and essayist José Ortega y Gasset pointed out the problem: “a simple matter of optics” demonstrates how class distinctions could be discerned through different ways of reading a work of art. If a painting is like a garden seen through a window, Gasset maintained, most people only see the garden; they are “incapable of adjusting their attention to the window-pane.” The few with “artistic sensitivity” have the ability to focus on the image that appears on the glass.5 If subject matter is removed altogether—if art is “dehumanized,” as Gasset put it—only one way of seeing remains possible. And if the work of art can only be understood by those with “that peculiar gift of artistic sensitivity,” then art will no longer be for the masses: “it will be an art of caste, not demotic.”6 Non-representational art, Gasset concluded, divides the public into those in-the-know and those not. For many postwar art educators, it was essential that the experience of art, including non-representational painting, be made accessible not just to the highly educated or those with aesthetic sensitivity, but to all middle-class Americans. Such an attitude is well illustrated in Darcy Hayman’s play, “Football, Persimmons, and Modern Art or First Day in the Art Class,” published in 1956 in Art Education, the journal of the National Art Education Association. In the play, a teacher explains that when students approach a realist painting solely in terms of its subject matter, they are thinking not about “the elements of art in that painting,” but about things in the world that please them.7 The teacher then points out that artists throughout the ages have created works that are “highly abstract or stylized” to express important ideas of their cultures. “If you see explosions in the [abstract] paintings of today, perhaps it’s because we live in atom-splitting times.”8 We have come a long way from Gasset’s claim that only the elite can understand art artistically. For Hayman, everyone has the ability to appreciate abstract art in formal terms, if they follow the keys of art education. As the teacher in the play explains: “through education there is understanding and through understanding there is acceptance and appreciation.”9 For those working on the Miniatures and Seminars, two positions on nonrepresentational painting emerged to address its challenging status: either one could deny that it was in fact art or one could find ways to fit it into established categories, such as in Hayman’s use of iconology in the atom-splitting example above. Taylor, for his part, condemned non-representational painting because of his conviction that art was a type of universal communication understandable by all. Abstract paintings were unintelligible to most people, Taylor maintained,

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because their creators communicated through a private language. Canaday, on the other hand, like many of his contemporaries, found older categories through which to explain abstract painting, that is, ways to normalize what was considered the chaos of modern art through established art-historical methods. But evaluation (were Abstract Expressionists serious artists or charlatans?) remained a problem for Canaday since visual literacy and judgment were inextricably linked in his approach to art appreciation.

The Unintelligibility of Abstract Art In its first seven years of production, between 1948 and 1955, the Miniatures included very little content on contemporary art. The Met’s initial approach to the subject was simply to ignore it. During this time, Impressionism and PostImpressionism were often featured, perhaps because the Met had greatly expanded its collections in this area with the Havemeyer bequest of 1929.10 But only one of the first seventy-five Miniatures was dedicated exclusively to contemporary concerns. Twentieth-Century American Paintings, distributed in October 1950, bifurcated the field into American naturalists (or regionalists) and modernists. There was no discussion in this Miniatures album, or in any other published before 1956, of more recent artistic developments even though the work of Jackson Pollock, for example, was becoming well known, especially after the publication seven years earlier of the now famous 1949 Life magazine article “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?”, which included Hans Namuth’s photographs of the artist at work. This neglect of modern art in the Miniatures reflected the institutional attitude of the Met, which, as has recently been noted, “confronted modern art warily in the early twentieth century.”11 During Taylor’s tenure as director, the Met clearly staked out a claim to historical art at the expense of contemporary. Its position was made manifest in the 1947 three-museums agreement between the Whitney Museum, the Met, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which called for cooperation between the museums in exhibition and collecting practices. As the 1947 Met Trustees’ Report explained, the Whitney would be the principal center for American modern painting and sculpture, the MoMA for foreign and domestic modern art, and the Met for “older art.”12 Like the Parisian model of the Musée du Luxembourg and the Louvre, works of art deemed “contemporary” would reside at MoMA and the Whitney until they were “historical,” when they would be transferred to the Met. The agreement, however, quickly came undone.

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The Whitney withdrew a year after the signing due to disagreements with the Met about purchases of contemporary American art and specifically with Taylor, whose contempt for abstract painting was well known. Soon after, the Met decided to hold a competition and exhibition for contemporary American painting, which produced a public controversy. A group of eighteen painters, including Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, and ten sculptors wrote a public letter to the Met, which condemned the exhibition, criticized the choice of conservative jury members, and noted how Taylor “publicly declared his contempt for modern painting.”13 Life magazine published Nina Leen’s famous photograph of the group of painters, nicknamed “the Irascibles,” and reported on the controversy. The Irascibles, Life informed its readers, “distrusted the museum since its director [Taylor] likened them to ‘flat-chested’ pelicans ‘strutting upon the intellectual wastelands.’ ”14 Taylor’s hostility to nonrepresentational painting and MoMA’s championing of it led to the suspension of the three-museum agreement in 1953.15 An outcome of the agreement was “the reification of the [Met’s] identity as a repository of historical art.”16 The Met’s lack of interest in contemporary art in the early Miniatures did not, however, reflect subscriber opinion. In the 1951 Audience Research survey on the Miniatures, Twentieth-Century American Paintings ranked fourth best of sixteen in a question about what periods subscribers found “especially interesting.” It was placed above High Renaissance Paintings, French Impressionists, and French Postimpressionists, even if a female subscriber between the ages of fifty and fifty-nine commented: “I have enjoyed the ‘Miniatures’ except the set dealing with Twentieth Century American Paintings. These are far below the standard of the other sets and if they are America’s best, Heavens help the poor American public.”17 In general, the survey unsurprisingly found that younger people, aged twenty to forty, were more interested in contemporary art. A female subscriber in this age group wrote: “I should like to receive a series on this socalled ‘Modern Art’ with some very good explanation of the pictures. I find most modern art extremely hard to understand, and appear like drawings of a psychotic patient. However, I feel sure my impression is born of ignorance.”18 This subscriber’s interest in and confusion about modern art was a common reaction of laypeople and professionals alike. In the late 1940s, discussions about contemporary art had become a commonplace in popular magazines and newspapers. A major scandal of the period was the 1946 Advancing American Art exhibition, the first postwar attempt by the American government (Department of State) to showcase contemporary American art to international audiences in Europe (Paris and Prague) and the Caribbean (Port-au-Prince and

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Havana). The show, which emphasized modernism over regionalism in its inclusion of works by Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keefe, William Baziotes, and Adolph Gottlieb, was unceremoniously canceled by the government amidst conservative criticism that the works were “un-American,” rooted “in the alien cultures, ideas, philosophies and sickness of Europe.”19 The American Artists Professional League described the show as too “radical.” The February 18, 1947 edition of Look magazine declared a disbelief that “Your Money Bought These Paintings,” and the Hearst New York Journal-America voiced approval for the government’s halting this display “of weird junk that goes by the name of modern art.”20 Advancing American Art was an important test case for the reception of contemporary art in the United States. It was a critical success in the art world (it had good reviews when shown at the Met before it went abroad), but a failure in the court of American popular opinion, because, as Paul Manoguerra maintains, the exhibition became involved in a shift in politics from “cogent discussions about the role of government in economic affairs” to “a new, simplistic dichotomy of freedom versus communism.”21 The leftist politics of many of the artists chosen and their Eastern European backgrounds were easy targets for the likes of William Randolph Hearst or Joseph McCarthy, who condemned leftist and communist points of view. But the tide was swiftly turning. With the support of influential critics like Clement Greenberg and museums like MoMA, the backing of American government agencies like the CIA and its web of connected and influential citizens, and articles like Life magazine’s 1949 exposé on Jackson Pollock, Abstract Expressionism would soon become the darling of the art world on both domestic and international fronts.22 American popular opinion, however, was still out: most letters to the Life editor answered the magazine’s question about Pollock, “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?”, in the negative.23 The new spotlight on contemporary art is also evidenced by the fact that in 1948 Life magazine dedicated a seventeen-page, color-illustrated spread to “the question of modern painting.”24 Moderated by Russell W. Davenport in the penthouse of MoMA, the Life roundtable on modern art, which included fifteen white American and European men, pitted “radicals,” like Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro, against “conservatives,” like the Met’s Francis Taylor and novelist Aldous Huxley. Davenport explained the two most pressing concerns: modern art’s intelligibility and its absence of beauty. The latter was not discussed in depth, but the issue of understanding modern painting, debated in terms of art’s communicability, was at the heart of the roundtable.25 All the discussants at

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MoMA were in agreement that modern art (and art in general) did not concern itself with mimetic representation, but with the communication of ideas through aesthetic experience, described by Huxley as the detached appreciation of “the whole unification and harmonization of elements, including the subject matter, which actually forms values and becomes, in a sense, a kind of apocalypse or revelation of the universe.”26 Such experience, MoMA curator James Sweeney argued, required goodwill on the part of the viewer. In fact, the Life panelists laid the blame for the problem of communication in modern art at the feet of the receiver more than the sender. They even developed a list of guidelines for the layperson, which included the need to “guard against his own natural inclination to condemn a picture just because he is unable to identify its subject matter” and to have an “open-minded attitude,” which “will very much increase the layman’s enjoyment of artistic works, ancient or modern.”27 When it came to the artist’s responsibilities in the communicative process, there was discussion of the private language of non-representational painting, that is, a form of communication not open to all. Taylor condemned the fact that “private pictures are being produced for public exhibition.” Art News editor Alfred Frankfurter similarly stated: “by giving license to every kind of private symbol, every kind of private experience . . . we are setting up a real cult of unintelligibility.”28 Whether or not the roundtable participants concurred on the issue of modern art as a private language, all, conservative and radical, agreed on the importance of artistic freedom and individuality. Meyer Schapiro characterized the attitude of the artist as involving “a freedom of the individual, an openness to experiences” and the present age as involving a “tremendous, individualistic . . . struggle for freedom.” In a discussion of how Hitler and Stalin “ordered the return to representational painting,” art historian H. W. Janson stated that the modern artist fulfills “a very valuable function. He is preserving something that is in great danger—namely, our ability to remain individuals.”29 The framing of artistic freedom and individuality in political terms should come as no surprise given the reception of the Advancing American Art exhibition. And these political terms, as Serge Guilbaut and others have argued, were central in the defense not only of Abstract Expressionism as a viable art form, but also of American leadership in contemporary painting on the international front.30 Davenport, the Life roundtable moderator, however, assessed the situation in less celebratory language, more as a compromise between free speech and its intelligibility: “Maybe obscurity is a high price to pay for freedom, culturally speaking. Yet it has been, and may for some time continue to be, an inescapable cultural byproduct of the great process of freedom which is so critical in our time.”31

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That said, for Met Director Taylor, obscurity was no option when it came to art’s communicative function. In an essay “On Modern Art and the Dignity of Man,” which came out in The Atlantic Monthly a few months after the publication of “A Life Roundtable on Modern Art,” the Met director clearly voiced his dissatisfaction with the MoMA conference, which he described as a meeting of “the elephants of the art world,” who “labored and produced a mouse.” Rather than blaming the problem of understanding modern art on the layperson’s shortcomings, Taylor was more concerned with artists’ accountability. Modern art, he argued, was often a private form of communication,“when it communicates at all.”32 Taylor described art as “the rendering of truth in sensible form” in an expressive language of universal human experience. Modern artists, he claimed, have denied this “essential communicability of art,” a denial that is indicative of a larger spiritual breakdown, the “separation of the soul from the intellect” in Christian civilization.33 Taylor, however, was not interested in merely describing the problem. As a populist educator, he wanted to solve it as well. There was a need, he believed, to find a middle ground between the right, which favored the dry academic tradition, and the “fanatical Academy of the Left,” which has revived “the totalitarian concept” in the present day. While the public must respect the artist’s freedom, Taylor suggested, artists must acknowledge the public’s right to accept or reject their work. Taylor’s language was very much like that of historian and public intellectual Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: “Not Left, Not Right, but a Vital Center.”34 Schlesinger, like Taylor, recognized that the present age was “a time of troubles” and “an age of anxiety,” because “the grounds of our civilization” are “breaking up under our feet,” and “familiar ideas and institutions” are vanishing “like shadows in the falling dusk.”35 Recognizing the modern condition of alienation, Schlesinger called for a “vital center” to restore “the balance between individual and community and thereby reduce one great source of anxiety.”36 Such a position was predicated on a new form of liberalism, an “activist liberalism,” as Serge Guilbaut describes it.37 Taylor’s call for balance, however, was more an attempt to conserve humanist values in the wake of change. The artist, he maintained, must take on the responsibility of citizenship by trying “to communicate his meanings to others in terms of universal human experience.”38 Taylor’s anxiety over the unintelligibility of much contemporary art was not his alone. Philosopher R. G. Collingwood had also taken aim at those who use a private or restricted form of communication in his influential 1938 work, The Principles of Art. In a section entitled “The Curse of the Ivory Tower,” he rebuked artists who “form themselves into a special clique” with the consequence “that

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their work becomes intelligible only to their fellow artists.”39 In Enjoying Modern Art (1955), Sarah Newmeyer pejoratively called abstract artists “the talk-tothemselves boys.”40 Cultural critic Gilbert Seldes felt similarly about modern developments. He believed that democratic values were being destroyed not only by mass media (radio, television, and the movies), which demeaned cultural values through standardization, but also by avant-garde artists, who no longer cared whether or not they were understood, since they are “not trying to communicate anything in the traditional sense of the word.”41 Canaday later wrote in the Seminars that “peculiar to our time” the modern artist often paints “to please himself, to express his inmost feelings and convictions for his own satisfaction rather than for an audience.”42 The challenge of avant-garde art to conventional forms of artistic language was, perhaps, best formulated in Arnold Hauser’s The Social History of Art (1951). The central issue for Hauser, as for Taylor and Collingwood, was how “to make oneself understood,” if one denied and destroyed “all means of communication.”43 Hauser, citing the writings of Jean Paulhan, saw only two possibilities in the age of art after Dada: that of the “terrorists,” who want to eliminate conventional forms from language and take refuge “in pure, virginal, original inspiration”; and that of the “rhetoricians,” who “know perfectly well that commonplaces and clichés are the price of mutual understanding.” For Hauser, the only possible attitude was that of the rhetorician, because, in his words, “the constant administration of the ‘terror’ . . . would mean absolute silence, that is intellectual suicide.”44 Hauser, Collingwood, and Taylor all feared the destruction of the bourgeois public sphere in Habermas’s sense of an inclusive arena in which status is disregarded, where discussions involve issues of “common concern,” and where everyone is welcome to participate.45 Taylor highlighted in the title of his essay, “Modern Art and the Dignity of Man,” his humanist debt to Pico della Mirandola, who maintained in Oration on the Dignity of Man “that nothing could profit” philosophers more “in their search for wisdom than frequent participation in public disputation.”46 While there were many who concurred with Taylor’s feeling that the present “crisis in the arts is nothing more than the crisis of the human race,” there were others who felt less threatened by recent developments.47 Meyer Schapiro, for example, eloquently defended abstract art’s personal symbolism during the Life roundtable. He declared that some paintings’ “authenticity” can be recognized through their “strangeness—precisely because the symbols cannot be readily communicated.” Such obscurity, Schapiro maintained, guarantees the validity of the works, because it relates to experiences in “our own dreams and thoughts,

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unexplained things which surprise us.”48 Another reply to Taylor’s position was to deny the fact that the abstract artist’s language was indeed private. As Herbert Read argued in his 1953–4 Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, nonrepresentational painting “does not depart from the basic principles of art and the normal sensuous response to these principles.”49 Most art educators, who defended non-representational painting in the postwar period, followed this second line of thought. In 1950, Art Education published what can certainly be considered a response to Taylor’s position. Issued by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, MoMA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, “A Statement on Modern Art” defended “the humanistic value” of abstract art, which “contributes to the dignity of man” through expressions of human desires for “freedom and order.” The statement also explained “the so-called ‘unintelligibility’ of some modern art” as an inevitable outcome of exploring new artistic domains.50 For these institutions, abstract art need not be regarded as a break from traditional painting or as divorced from the modern world, as Taylor saw it. Rather, it was as an inevitable development from past efforts and it played an important “spiritual and social role” in its time. As such, advanced art was not by its very nature “socially or politically subversive” and thus “un-American.”51 Here, “A Statement on Modern Art” reversed the opinion of the critics of the Advancing American Art exhibition, which should come as no surprise given the museums that endorsed the statement. Two years earlier, in 1948, MoMA held a forum “The Modern Artist Speaks,” which identified modern art, in the words of Guilbaut, as a symbol of freedom “in harmony with liberal American values.”52

Explaining Abstract Painting Taylor’s position on modern art was certainly losing favor at the Met when he retired as director in 1955. At this time, the museum started to produce more Miniatures that addressed current trends. From mid-1955 until the end of its run in 1957, one-fifth (four of twenty) of the Miniatures focused specifically on contemporary developments.53 Like “A Statement on Modern Art,” all these Miniatures did not see abstract painting as a break from the past, but rather as continuing a pursuit of artistic freedom and expression. In his Miniatures dedicated to paintings from the MoMA, James Thrall Soby emphasized that “modern art time and again has shown an extraordinary capacity for progress.”54 In the case of Whitney curator John Bauer’s miniature album, Contemporary

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American Painting, the patriotic tone was triumphant: the United States is now “one of the principal art centers of the world” and American painting is at “the creative vanguard of Western civilization. This is not chauvinism; it is the simple truth.” For Bauer, individuality is the sign of a developed art (and nation). Jackson Pollock’s paintings are not merely his “personal handwriting”—a private language in Taylor’s terms—but “a spontaneous self-expression on canvas.”55 A. L. Chanin, in his Miniatures on a selection of the MoMA’s paintings, explains that Pollock’s paintings are not meaningless, but have meaning in their compositions, which “however improvised . . . remain consistent in style and development.”56 In emphasizing notions of progress, spontaneous self-expression, and stylistic consistency, these Miniatures authors regarded modernist painting through categories often used to understand older art forms. Canaday, in his Miniatures on twentieth-century painting in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, similarly looked to the past to explain the present. He used the concepts classicism and expressionism to distinguish between, respectively, the geometric abstractions of Cézanne, Picasso, and Mondrian and the coloristic abstractions of Soutine, Kandinsky, and Matisse.57 Chanin used a similar classificatory system: “In the broadest terms there are only two types of abstraction, the geometric style, pioneered by Malevich; and the free-form style, founded by Kandinsky.”58 Even though Chanin declared that modern art “is startingly different from the art of even the recent past,” he treated it in the same way that, for example, Heinrich Wölfflin had treated the distinction between Renaissance and Baroque, and Walter Friedlander that between Neoclassicism and Romanticism.59 The defense of abstract painting in these later Miniatures substantiated contemporary art as developments from the past, not unlike how Alfred Barr charted the flow of modern art movements on the cover of the 1936 exhibition catalogue Cubism and Abstract Art or how Clement Greenberg described modernist painting as continuing “tradition and the themes of tradition, despite all appearances to the contrary.”60 In the Seminars, Canaday similarly referred to older classificatory schemas in his discussions of modern art, although he acknowledged Taylor’s concern for the modern artist’s use of a “kind of private vocabulary,” which leaves “the average observer at a loss” in trying to understand modern painting.61 To make the incomprehensibility of abstract painting intelligible to the general public, Canaday looked to “a broad treatment” of modern works in order to relate them to critical concepts, such as “realism, abstraction, expressionism, social statement, and fantasy,” which he had used in his previous texts to describe earlier forms of artistic expression. He thus developed artistic genealogies: Pollock and De

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Kooning are part of the romantic coloristic tradition of Van Gogh, Monet, Delacroix, and Rubens, just as Mondrian and the Cubists are inheritors of the classical tradition of Poussin, Cézanne, and Seurat.62 Canaday succinctly stated in the Seminars what he saw as the pressing arthistorical problem of contemporary art: “Can we organize this chaotic material into convenient categories?”63 Such a question has a history almost as long as the discussion of modern art itself. In his 1893 History of Modern Painting, Richard Muther had similarly argued that in modern times there is “a chaos of pictures” and it is difficult “to discover the spiritual bond which connects them all.”64 Muther’s primary problem, like Canaday’s, was one of historical distance. “It is a pity,” Muther wrote, “that we cannot see what is too near any more than what is too far away.”65 Or as Canaday put it: “One reason is our lack of perspective at such close range.”66 To solve the problem of nearness, Muther argued that one can gain distance on contemporary artists by studying them “objectively as though they were long dead masters.”67 He thus structured the recent past by imposing older orders on the chaos of newer times. Through distancing techniques, he believed he could turn what was close and unintelligible into what was distant, yet familiar. Canaday and the Miniatures authors, as we have seen, took this same approach.

Art or Con Game If works of Abstract Expressionism, as many art educators argued, could be explained by aligning them with older artistic categories, then they should fit seamlessly into Canaday’s dual approach to art appreciation, that is, from objective formal analysis to subjective judgment. Anyone should be able to understand and articulate how, for example, Pollock’s formal means align with a romantic tradition. Viewers could then judge a Pollock painting according to whether or not they have an affinity for romanticism, in Canaday’s words, “that vast complex of yearning, mysticism, dramatics, reflection, indulgence and revolution against authority.”68 But when it came to judgments about Abstract Expressionism, Canaday still had his doubts: some Abstract Expressionists, he explained in the Seminars, are “sincere and competent artists,” while others are “charlatans at worst and incompetents at best.”69 Canaday’s attention to intentions and competence in his discussion of the Abstract Expressionists is singular in the Seminars; in no other place did he impugn a painter’s motives or talent, even

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if he may have dismissed an artist’s relevance in the history of art. Using a gendered opposition that viewed bodily emotions as private and intellectual ideas as public, Canaday explained that Abstract Expressionism is fundamentally different from representational painting. With a Van Gogh or a Wyeth, he maintained, viewers’ responses are “a mixture” of the artist’s and their “own already established ideas” about the content. Abstract Expressionist paintings, on the other hand, depend solely on the “emotional impact” of color, shape, and line, “without image, to relay the painter’s sensations.” The viewer’s response, Canaday concluded, can only be “entirely that of the artist.”70 The dialogical nature of art— and the possibility of public discussion—has given way in Abstract Expressionism to works that are monologues. We have returned, it seems, to Taylor’s claim that modern art uses a private language. For Canaday, one might be able to slot Abstract Expressionist paintings into established categories, but in the end they still denied the most important aspect of art, the act of communication between inspired artist and interested viewer. Canaday took a different approach to abstract painting in part because he saw his era as fundamentally distinct from earlier ones. When “times get as complex and out of kilter as they have been for the past hundred years,” he wrote in the Seminars, “the relationship between the artist and the observer gets out of kilter too.” We no longer have, Canaday postulated, a unity between artist and public like that of Renaissance Italy, in which people were not confused or scandalized by, but marveled at Giotto’s revolutionary paintings. In the twentieth century, art has “stopped being something the average person could enjoy spontaneously” and has “become, instead, a kind of puzzle to be explained.”71 Canaday’s anxiety about the present age, like Taylor’s, was formulated in terms of the demise of an imagined older world, in which one could have confidence in humanist values— it’s no coincidence that he contrasted the present age with the early Renaissance— and in which art was, in the tradition of Tolstoy, a way to bring people together, to join them “in the same feelings,” and to lead them “toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.”72 As we will see, the threat of Abstract Expressionism to Canaday and Taylor was a threat to their notion of human sameness, that is, the idea that everyone ultimately shares the same values. These values were, of course, not innocent but those of a dominant class. Critics like Canaday were not the only ones feeling at odds with contemporary life and art. On November 26, 1960, sixty-eight-year-old Seminars subscriber Ruth F. Smith wrote to Canaday about her sense of alienation from the modern world and her curiosity about one of its manifestations, modern art:

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I realize now as I look around me that the world for which I was educated I never lived in. I am very much interested in trying to estimate the changes that have come in my lifetime—to try to understand the extraordinary new setting in which I find myself. Modern art has been one of the experiments about which I have felt peculiarly blind. I never had any difficulty with Van Gogh or Cezanne— but Jackson Pollock! His paintings just looked to me like the paintings of a showoff trying to paint something different just for the sake of being different.

Smith, however, wanted very much to understand why an artist like Pollock was important to many in the art world as evidenced, for example, by the Met’s recent purchase of one of his paintings. After having found among her late husband’s papers reviews of the 1913 Armory Show, in which “there were the same things being said about painters I like that I am saying now about Jackson Pollock,” she needed to try “to see Jackson Pollock even through” she “might never like him.” (Smith clearly understood the Seminars’ dual method of developing judgment from visual analysis.) She thanked Canaday for his guidance: “You have shown me things about the art of painting—how a painter uses his paint—which evaluates the picture as a good picture not necessarily good because it belongs to a certain school or even a certain era. And you haven’t tried to make me like any of these strange new abstractions but you have shown me how they came to be.” She still, however, had her doubts about non-representational painting. To her typed letter, she added the following handwritten note: “But how to separate the charlatan from the serious?” In his reply, Canaday, who was then The New York Times’ art critic, agreed with the challenging nature of the question: “‘How to separate the charlatan from the serious’—or in addition the charlatan the misled or the incompetent—is indeed a question, and one that I struggle with every day.”73 Distinguishing the serious from the fraudulent was a problem in postwar America not only for those engaged with contemporary art. Journalist and cultural critic Gilbert Seldes, for example, found it increasingly difficult to tell apart the real from the counterfeit in radio talk shows and newsreels, that is, contexts in which individuals were presented, not as characters in a work of fiction, but as themselves. In an era “of prodigious faking,” Seldes wrote, “who cares whether they say their own words, utter their own thoughts?”74 It is as if Seldes’s world had become that of “the big con,” so well described in 1940 by linguist David Maurer as “a play-world” that cannot be distinguished “from the real world.”75 Sociologist Erving Goffman had similar concerns in his analysis of social interactions as performances. He wrote in 1959 about the difference between sincere and cynical role-playing, about how the cynic “can toy at will with something his audience must take seriously.”76 But in the end, Goffman,

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unlike Canaday and Seldes, was not really concerned with motives. He realized that the intentions of social actors were inaccessible and that all he could rely on to understand social relationships were elements such as fronts, “expressive equipment of a standard kind intentionally or unwittingly employed by the individual during his performance.”77 As literary scholar Gary Lindberg explains, Goffman’s argument is ultimately not about authenticity in role-playing: “what is morally necessary is that one sustain the performance itself.”78 For Lindberg, Goffman’s analysis was an important statement of the 1950s, when “con games turned into group performances and game playing emerged as the official ethic itself.”79 This perspective was certainly evident in the postwar art world with its ever-present use of the language of the con game. In the 1948 Life roundtable on modern art, Taylor complained of “rackets” in art circles.80 In an earlier essay he had referred to “the late P. T. Barnum of circus fame” in the context of the development of the American museum in the nineteenth century. Barnum’s popular dictum, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” Taylor argued, has been “the motto of our profession ever since.”81 Theodore Shaw, in explaining how the Met misteaches art in the Seminars, as we saw in Chapter 2, suggested that the Met treated its reader as “the ignoramus, the easy-mark.”82 Canaday, as he mentioned to Ruth Smith, continued to struggle with separating “the charlatan from the serious” as art critic for The New York Times. His position on Abstract Expressionism did not change from the Seminars, but his tone in his Times articles certainly became more severe, a severity that demonstrates how hard he was trying to conserve his humanist values. In his first piece for the Times, published in September 1959, he repeated his claim that there are some formidable Abstract Expressionists, but “as for the freaks, the charlatans and the misled who surround this handful of serious and talented artists, let us admit at least that the nature of abstract expressionism allows exceptional tolerance for incompetence and deception.” Canaday also asserted that Abstract Expressionism was a form of art that is “pointless except to the recondite” and violates the “esthetic convictions” of a large part of the general public. Moreover, anyone, even Betsy the Ape, “can paint in a kind of abstract expressionist idiom.”83 The layperson was now dependent upon others, notably critics, to evaluate such works, a situation that went against the central aim of the Met popular pedagogical program to help individuals gain confidence in their own judgments. Canaday blamed this situation on the “missionary fervor” of professionals (professors, critics, museum officials), including himself, who “have managed to create the impression that all abstract art per se must be given the breaks on the probability that there is more there than meets the eye.” Instead of

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critical evaluation, “wild unintelligibility” has become the criterion for a successful work of art, especially for the “several generations of college students who have taken the art appreciation course.” Using the language of the con game, Canaday concluded that critics and educators “have been hoist with their own petard, sold down the river. We have been had.”84 Canaday thought of himself as a voice of reason in the wildly unintelligible world of contemporary art. He positioned himself as the art populist in opposition to the elitism of Abstract Expressionist artists and critics, not unlike how Taylor had seen himself as a man of the people in the scholarly world of the museum. But 1960 was not 1940. The feminist movement, the struggle for civil rights, and existentialist thought were dealing severe blows to postwar middle-class ideology. Faith in American consensus-building based on shared values was waning, and challenges to the humanist program of popular art education were evident in two very public feuds, which involved Canaday. “The Ashton Affair,” as Sophy Burnham called it, involved Dore Ashton, who was the first art critic to develop a comprehensive and first-hand account of the history of Abstract Expressionism. Author or editor of more thirty books, including The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (1972), and the recipient of numerous awards, Ashton was appointed professor at Cooper Union in 1969 and was Head of its School of Art from 1972 to 1976. Ashton had begun her career as associate editor of Art Digest in 1952 before joining the The New York Times as art critic in 1955, four years before Canaday arrived at the newspaper as art news editor. In a 1960 memo to Ashton (cited by Burnham), Canaday criticized her writing because he and the other editors thought it was “incomprehensible,” full of “esoteric phraseology,” and gave “the impression of having nothing to say to a newspaper reader.” He also believed her close relations to the art world through her husband (Abstract Expressionist Adja Yunkers) made for possible conflicts of interest in her reporting.85 Detachment from the object of study and accessibility to the reader were, for Canaday, primary tenets of the popular art writer. Ashton replied to Canaday that his attack “sounds like a mad clamor to drown out a critical voice that differs from your own.” Burnham reports that Ashton was “spitting mad” about Canaday’s memo and soon resigned “before having her reputation impugned, her material rewritten.”86 Ashton later brought her case to the Art Critics’ Association, which, as reported in Artnews in 1961, “severely censured” Canaday for treating Ashton in an unbecoming manner, violating her dignity as a critic, and infringing basic principles of freedom of criticism.87 The second public feud was initiated by a letter to the editor of The New York Times, published on February 26, 1961, which denounced Canaday’s columns

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and reviews. Signed by forty-nine prominent artists, critics, art historians, and collectors, including Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Meyer Schapiro, Harold Rosenberg, and Irving Sandler, the letter claimed that Canaday used a “terminology of insults” that ascribed “to living artists en masse, as well as to critics, collectors and scholars of present-day American art, dishonorable motives, those of cheats, greedy lackeys or senseless dupes.” The result was a “polemical campaign under the guise of topical reporting.”88 (Barnett Newman would later claim that Canaday, “by impugning the honesty of everyone’s commitment,” misused “a public and cultural trust.”)89 Over the following few weeks, The New York Times published replies to this letter, most of which supported not necessarily Canaday’s position on contemporary art, but his right to speak his mind and his outspoken individuality. Abstract Expressionist painter Cleve Gray, for example, condemned the letter’s signatories, whom he described as “distinguished” representatives of “liberal thought and tolerant action,” for “campaigning vindictively against a man of integrity and intelligence who dares to express an unfashionable opinion.”90 Columbia University Professor of Art History Millard Meiss, on the other hand, suspected Canaday’s insinuations that “artists are animated primarily by a wish to earn a quick dollar or by a devilish desire to fool the public” were a type of “pandering to the prejudices of the street in the hope of selling more papers.”91 In some ways, The New York Times controversy seems strangely out of date. While there is a long history of adversarial relationships between modern artists and their critics, by 1960 Abstract Expressionism was already an established art movement, and its supporters did not necessarily need to respond to Canaday. That they did suggests, as Keith Miller argues, how they thought of themselves no longer as outsiders, but as part of the establishment with “a sense of entitlement.” And surely they were entitled to be taken seriously by The New York Times, because the newspaper was often the first point of contact between a largely uninitiated audience and the work of the avant-garde.92 What riled Abstract Expressionists and their supporters so much was how Canaday questioned their honesty and motives. He claimed that one could not trust Abstract Expressionist painters, because of their “idiom,” which had no criterion for seriousness (anyone could do it), just as one could not trust a critic like Ashton, because of her esoteric language and her close connections to the art world. Abstract Expressionists and their supporters fired back that Canaday had a hidden agenda. How could one trust Canaday’s objectivity as a critic if his goal, as Millard Meiss suggested, was to pander to the public in order to sell more newspapers? On both sides, trust was at the core of the dispute.

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It is revealing that the issue of trust plays no role in Canaday’s treatment of representational painting in the Seminars even though representational painters, like con artists, engage in a game of illusion. For Canaday, representational artists’ sincerity is proven through their competence and skill, and their ideas are conveyed through the work itself. Following Canaday’s method in the Seminars, viewers could gain understanding through the representational painting’s formal language and content, and they could evaluate its meaningfulness to them through their understanding of themselves and the world around them. In other words, the meaning of the formal elements in a representational painting could be confirmed through external criteria, such as the subject matter or the viewer’s own experiences. While the viewer’s trust in the artist’s sincerity is assumed in this model of artistic communication, trust in the artist’s intention plays no part in analysis and evaluation, because other factors, deemed accessible to all, corroborate the syntax of the formal language and substantiate the meaning of the work. This way of understanding art’s communicative function also assumes the independence of the viewer, who can analyze and assess works of art from a position of detachment. Abstract Expressionism posed a problem for art popularizers like Canaday for two reasons. First, there were no obvious external criteria that could confirm the meaning of the form. Second, Abstract Expressionists, as we will see, advocated for a different type of subjectivity, one that made precarious the humanist position of detachment. As New York Times art critic, Canaday did not change his approach from the Seminars: that is, he continued to assess paintings in terms of how they conveyed ideas from artist to viewer. His analysis of Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros’s murals at the Castle Chapultepec (Color Plate 25) is a good example. Canaday, as Barnett Newman pointed out, defended Siqueiros even if he rejected the artist’s communism, his “rabid political philosophy,” as Canaday called it. The key to understanding Siqueiros’s work, Canaday maintained, is in the formal elements, which could be “sufficient as an end for one kind of painter,” but are used by Siqueiros more appropriately as a means for “the story he is now ready to recount.”93 In Canaday’s view, Siqueiros may convey improper thoughts, but he was doing so in the proper manner. The essay on Siqueiros also importantly illustrates Canaday’s supposed position of impartiality, his belief in keeping apart detached analysis and personal judgment. Even though he believed Siqueiros’s message to be wrong-headed, Canaday nevertheless still had trust in the artist’s sincerity and, consequently, faith in his own judgment. Canaday and Seminars subscriber Ruth Smith believed that trust between artist and public, taken for granted in earlier eras, was now lost: who could tell

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whether the abstract artist’s purpose was pure or intention sincere, whether the artist was genuine or deceitful? What Canaday, or for that matter Taylor, never articulated was that motives were at the core of their understanding of art as a universal language. We can come to a better understanding of what was at stake if we consider R. G. Collingwood’s expressive theory of art, which mirrors in many ways Canaday and Taylor’s views. They all believed that art was an act of communication from artist to viewer. As Collingwood put it, since art is both expressive and imaginative, it “must be a language.”94 In Collingwood’s theory, as was recognized in the postwar period, the work of art is not “the physical artifact,” but “something that exists in the mind of the artist, and can exist again in the minds of those who (by means of the artifact) come to share his [the artist’s] intuitions.”95 For this type of communication to work, the artist and viewer must be alike on some essential level. Collingwood wrote: “The poet is not singular in his having that emotion or in his power of expressing it; he is singular in his ability to take the initiative in expressing what all feel, and all can express.”96 In other words, the spectator’s “total imaginative experience” in front of a work of art is, for Collingwood, “identical with that of the painter.”97 Collingwood was not, as Richard Wollheim demonstrates, unaware of the sceptical argument that one does not have access to another’s mind to verify the identity of experience, but this argument, for Wollheim, ultimately damns Collingwood’s theory: “by making the work of art something inner or mental, the link between the artist and audience has been severed. There is now no object to which both can have access, for only the artist can ever know what he has produced.”98 Of course, this objection to the expressive theory of art can be made of representational painting as easily as abstract works. Canaday and Taylor’s skeptical attitude, however, came up with Abstract Expressionism only because art, like language, was in their system of thought a social or public (as compared to private) act dependent upon sincere motives. Collingwood put it as a matter of honesty: Just as the life of a community depends for its very existence on honest dealing between man and man, the guardianship of this honesty being vested not in any one class or section, but in all and sundry, to the effort towards expression of emotions [as found in art], the effort to overcome corruption of consciousness, is an effort that has to be made not by specialists only but by everyone who uses language, whenever he uses it.99

Canaday and Taylor assumed that such honesty was guaranteed in representational painting. Such a guarantee was understood in terms of a successful work’s unities: a unity between artist’s idea and its representation; a

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unity between formal means and subject matter; and a unity between the artist’s and viewer’s experiences of the same emotion, idea, or intuition. For Canaday and Taylor, there was no way to find such unities in non-representational paintings. Such works thus had no guarantee of an honest motive, which was a necessity for art to function, in their understanding, as a communication of publicly accessible ideas and as a social unifier. Collingwood’s expressive theory, like all other functional definitions of art, were seriously under threat in philosophical circles of the 1950s in part because of Wittgenstein’s skepticism about questions of language and meaning. Morris Weitz, for example, famously used Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance— “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing”—to argue that art is not something that can be defined by “necessary and sufficient properties,” as in understandings of art as a language or a mode of expression; art, rather, has an “open character” that changes over time.100 For Weitz, revisions to the understanding of what constitutes art emerge due to new forms, which “will demand decisions on the part of those interested, usually professional critics, as to whether the concept [of art] should be extended or not.”101 Weitz argued from a philosophical perspective, but his conclusions were likely as much the result of contemporary concerns, when the range of objects described as works of art was greatly expanding.102 Given the situation, a major reconsideration of how to think about art was proposed in 1964 by Arthur Danto, who argued: “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry—an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.”103 While Canaday and Taylor did not engage in aesthetic theory, their views on contemporary art were certainly a result of similar concerns about the nature of art, its value, and the growing power of an artworld, which they considered elitist, to confer status on works of art.104 Specifically it was this elitism that Canaday and Taylor feared because it went against their middlebrow goals. Pedagogy for the masses, in their terms, was predicated on individuals’ abilities to judge what was and what was not valuable to them. As we saw in the chapter on the Seminars, the ultimate goal of art for Canaday was to help develop selfreflective individuals for whom it was necessary to understand the world around them and to explain reasons for their presence in it.105 Such a goal, to promote self-confidence and independent thought in museum-goers, could not occur in a world in which only experts could determine the value of art. What was at stake for art popularizers like Canaday and Taylor was their self-identity as public intellectuals, who claimed that their ultimate aim was to develop in

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individuals the means to distinguish for themselves the invaluable from the valuable, the fraudulent from the sincere. The “threat of fraudulence,” as Stanley Cavell called it in 1969, did not entail that art was necessarily fraudulent, but it did question the basis on which one could make claims about art.106 Like Canaday, Cavell believed that the threat of fraudulence was a problem specific to the modern era. But unlike him, Cavell took the problem to be not about authenticity or sincerity, but about epistemology and meaning. No one before the early nineteenth century, Cavell wrote, would have questioned “whether the thing in front of them was a piece of genuine art or not.”107 But with one of Pollock’s drip paintings, another set of questions emerges: How is this to be seen? What is the painting doing? The problem, one could say, is not one of escaping inspiration, but of determining how a man could be inspired to do this, why he feels this necessary or satisfactory, how he can mean this. Suppose you conclude that he cannot. Then that will mean, I am suggesting, that you conclude that this is not art, and this man is not an artist; that in failing to mean what he’s done, he is fraudulent. But how do you know?108

Cavell, following Wittgenstein’s insights, suggested that there is, perhaps, nothing beyond the practice of language (the “language-game”) to know. As Weitz pointed out, Wittgenstein had convincingly proposed the “rejection of one purportedly necessary criterion for the correct use of mental concepts, namely, the criterion of an inner, private mental state.”109 Without an appeal to such states or to any other external criteria, there were no possible proofs, as Cavell explained, “for the assertion that the art accepted by a public is fraudulent; the artist himself may not know; and the critic may be shown up, not merely as incompetent, nor unjust in accusing the wrong man, but as taking others in (or out); that is, as an imposter.”110 Canaday, however, like Taylor, was too committed to a humanist worldview to give up his beliefs. Inner mental states were at the core of the individual, and they could be shared with others through a variety of means, including language and art. Taylor and Canaday could not, as Wittgenstein put it, “make a radical break with the idea that language [or art] always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: to convey thoughts.”111 They could not accept the fundamental premise, exemplified in Abstract Expressionism, that “the language itself is the vehicle of thought.”112 To put it another way, they believed in and argued for the significance of form, but they could not accept its self-sufficiency.

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Communication, Non-Communication, and Subjectivity In the Miniatures and Seminars, art is treated as a language and paintings as conveyers of messages. Non-representational painting could be thought to challenge this paradigm, because it was, as Meyer Schapiro wrote at the time, “a unique revolutionary change” in the character of painting.113 Formalist art historians and critics, who slotted these works into established categories and treated them as if they were no different from older types of painting, did not necessarily acknowledge this revolutionary change. Taylor and Canaday, however, certainly did. They declared abstract art a mutiny from the tradition of painting as a form of communication open to all. An important alternative in these debates was offered by Schapiro, who recognized the communicative function of contemporary art and, at the same time, accepted its radical difference. Indeed, Taylor and Canaday would likely have agreed with Schapiro’s assessment that “the usual rules of communication do not hold” with Abstract Expressionist paintings, which purposefully thwart communication: “there is no clear code or fixed vocabulary, no certainty of effect in a given time of transmission or exposure.”114 But Schapiro, unlike Taylor and Canaday, believed that Abstract Expressionist paintings still had communicable meanings. They were capable of conveying messages, just not messages “in a perfectly reproducible sense,” not messages that could be translated into words or copied exactly.115 Schapiro saw the revolutionary character of abstract painting not as a private language apart from the quotidian world, but as deeply rooted in the personal challenges of contemporary life. Schapiro recognized that for many people, which would have included Taylor and Canaday, Abstract Expressionist paintings seem to lack the expression of the complete personality of the painter, because the painter leaves out “so much of his interests and experience, his thoughts and feelings.” The question, for Schapiro, was whether such experiences could be adequately translated only by the artist’s painterly means. He acknowledged that doubts about such translations are “latent within modern art itself.”116 These doubts, however, did not shake his faith in the artist’s sincerity. Doubt, Schapiro argued, was not distrust, but an inevitable outcome of the “fragility of the self ” in a modern, industrialized world.117 In their “high degree of non-communication,” Abstract Expressionist paintings, as handmade and personal entities, opposed, in Schapiro’s view, standardized mass communication. Striking a Marxist chord along the lines of the Frankfurt School, he described mass communication as aiming “at a maximum efficiency” through “appropriate reproducible stimuli,” which attract

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everyone’s attention and promote “the acceptance of the message.”118 Abstract Expressionist paintings, on the contrary, demonstrate, through their untranslatable and unreproducible messages, an unwillingness to take part in a modern world defined by “impersonal, calculated and controlled” social relationships. While Taylor and Canaday criticized Abstract Expressionists for their private language, which challenged the possibility of a public sphere of art, Schapiro praised their personal symbolism as a mode of communication that affirmed rather than diminished individuality in the wake of the forces of an impersonal, industrialized society. The Miniatures and Seminars were, of course, the type of mass communication that Schapiro saw as threatening individual freedom. They certainly promoted the acceptance of a message in Schapiro’s sense through “appropriate reproducible stimuli.” The Seminars more than the Miniatures advocated an approach to art through generalizations about specific works that could be extended to others; through visual literacy (the translation of pictorial meaning into words); and through the repetitive application of a somewhat systematic formalism. This system assumed the reader to be an individual that is fundamentally autonomous, rational and whole. For Canaday, this subject was defined by detachment, the proper attitude for painters and critics alike. He outlined his stance on critical writing not only in his memo to Dore Ashton, but also in a later essay, in which he stated his principles: critics should take a position of impartiality; they should not write about artists they know; and they have an obligation to assure their readers what they write “is after-the-fact judgment on what the artist creates.”119 His treatment of Siqueiros’s murals exemplifies his approach. Representational painting, in Canaday’s view, similarly assumed such a position of detachment, whether it was remote (in the case of realism) or near (in the case of expressionism).120 Distance was essential to Canaday and Taylor’s sense of subjectivity, formulated so well in the art-historical context by Erwin Panofsky in Idea: A Concept in Art Theory (1924). A focus of Panofsky’s study was the “subject-object problem,” that is, “the relationships between ‘I’ and the world, spontaneity and receptivity, given material and active forming power.”121 The emergence of this problem in the Renaissance, like the discovery of linear perspective, was, for Panofsky, indicative of a larger concern, the origin of modern subjectivity. The birth of art theory in the Renaissance, he wrote, was accomplished by laying a distance between “subject” and “object” much as in artistic practice perspective placed a distance between the eye and the world of

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things—a distance which at the same time objectivizes the “object” and personalizes the “subject.”122

In calling for a position of balance between objectivity and subjectivity, Panofsky outlined the humanist conception of the detached subject, which Canaday and Taylor were trying so hard to defend. What is important here in the context of postwar popular art education is how detachment relates to accessibility. For Taylor and Canaday, everyone should, from the non-located and disembodied position of detachment, be able both to access the meaning of a work of art and to judge it for themselves. In other words, Taylor and Canaday’s understanding of accessibility was a corollary of the detached subject: meanings of paintings should be accessible to all those willing to learn the language of art. There was a place in this system for different opinions, but not diverse subjectivities. When Canaday wrote that viewers’ responses to an Abstract Expressionist painting can only be “entirely that of the artist,” he suggested that viewers could only experience the work from the artist’s perspective, not from their own.123 He thus recognized, what more recent scholars have contended, that Abstract Expressionism was predicated upon a different type of subjectivity, which challenged the humanist conception. Daniel Belgrad argues that Abstract Expressionists rejected the scientific method with its “objective” mind-set in favor of a different paradigm based on the notion that objectivity and subjectivity, in the words of Donald Kuspit, “inextricably condition one another” in the painting process.124 Abstract Expressionism may have “thematized subjectivity,” as Michael Leja points out, but “the specific model of the human subject it inscribed was profoundly gendered” (and racialized).125 Following Guilbaut, Leja claims that Abstract Expressionism “has come to appear more and more a homogenous white male art, an apt artistic counterpart to the cold war politics of the contemporary white male U. S. political establishment.”126 Leja and Guilbaut’s reading of Abstract Expressionism in conservative terms, like David Craven’s more radical interpretation, focus on those Abstract Expressionists around whom was developed what Anne Eden Gibson called “the Myth of Abstract Expressionism.” According to this well-worn narrative, a rebellious group of white heterosexual men revolutionized painting by struggling “against impressive odds to occupy a central position in the international art world.”127 Gibson has critiqued this myth through a variety of arguments, including the need to take into account race, sexuality and gender, the voices of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Thelma Johnson Streat, and Rose Piper, for example, in order to better understanding not just the politics of Abstract Expressionism, but the

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methods of art history that “address the multiple levels—economic and sociological as well as aesthetic—on which questions of value are determined.”128 Canaday and Taylor also went to great pains to fight against this narrative, but for very different reasons. Abstract Expressionist paintings appeared anathema to conservative individualists, like Canaday and Taylor, who held so dear their idealist, humanist principles, including the notion of the detached, rational and autonomous subject. These paintings, with their qualities of the unconscious, spontaneous and unpredictable, challenged what Canaday and Taylor prized so highly in art, that is, representations of “ideal values or life interests,” as Schapiro put it.129 In other words, Canaday and Taylor recognized (and were anxious about) how Abstract Expressionism threatened not only the notion of art as a communication of what they considered universal human values, but also their humanist worldview that privileged consensus, rationality, progress and clarity. Without this framework, art could no longer function for them as a mode of revelation accessible to all middle-class Americans, because it was too firmly rooted in the artist’s subjectivity. For Taylor and Canaday, Abstract Expressionism denied two important claims of the Met’s projects in popular art education: it did not speak in a common language and it could not, as importantly, function as a social unifier. As such, it did not help develop a middle-class public sphere with its assumptions of a domain open to all, where all can speak on equal terms. In such a public sphere, every person did not have to hold the same opinion, but there needed to be consensus on how meaning was determined. Abstract Expressionists challenged such a possibility for consensus building in their denial of the rational and detached subject. Canaday and Taylor took this denial as a threat of fraudulence. Without external criteria to verify meaning, there was no way to guarantee trust in the artist’s motives and there was no way to separate “the charlatan from the serious.” As Erving Goffman recognized at the time: “The real crime of the confidence man is not that he takes money from his victims but that he robs all of us of the belief that middle-class manners and appearance can be sustained only by middle-class people.” The con artist is thus “in a position to hold the whole ‘legit’ world in this contempt.”130 For Canaday and Taylor, Abstract Expressionism did just that: it held the “legit” art world in contempt; it robbed their middle-class audience of self-confidence; and it challenged their privileged position as art educators who, they believed, were opening up a space to explore art as a clear and detached deciphering of messages. The Met, like many postwar art educators, was trying to make looking and reflecting upon works of art a public concern. The problem with Abstract Expressionism to champions of

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middlebrow culture like Canaday and Taylor was that it was returning art to a private realm.131

Coda In the 1948 Life roundtable on modern art, the “conservative” Francis Taylor and the “radical” Clement Greenberg sparred about the communicability of art. The argument concerned the public response to a recent exhibition at the Met of works by the genre painter William S. Mount (Color Plate 26), a nineteenthcentury contemporary of the Hudson River School.132 The exhibition, Taylor reported, was a great success. It was “visited by bank clerks, salesman, Long Island and Hudson River Yankees,” who came, Taylor suggested, in search of “something with which they themselves were familiar.” This segment of the population, who likely never “set foot in a museum before,” came “in droves— and we haven’t seen them since.” Greenberg forcefully replied that such an audience “showed a reprehensible attitude toward art,” because they were only interested in the familiar locales represented in the paintings. “You can’t cater to that attitude,” Greenberg stated. Taylor then asked: “Says who, Mr. Greenberg, their attitude wasn’t right? Fifty thousand people is a lot of people.” Greenberg countered: “Are we going to judge truth by quantity and sheer mass?” Roundtable moderator Russell Davenport chimed in: “Doesn’t that indicate, Mr. Greenberg, that the public feels a need for symbols and other elements in art that they can identify as having something to do with their lives?” Greenberg then gave the counterexample of symbols in a Chinese painting, which “are unintelligible to the Western spectator, who may enjoy the picture on other grounds and enjoy it adequately.”133 Taylor, as Andrew McClellan suggests, likely knew full well that his populist position amounted to “a rear guard action against the tide of aestheticism,” exemplified in the Greenbergian formalist attitude and the museum as a neutral white cube.134 The argument with Greenberg in the Life roundtable highlights Taylor’s unwillingness to relinquish his conviction that the museum needed to be a socially relevant institution accessible to all interested citizens. The goal of accessibility was in fact the theme of the Time magazine article about Taylor when he appeared on its cover in December 1952. “Taylor’s museum,” as the article described the Met, was a place where all visitors—school children, college students, housewives, tourists, and casual visitors—could “find something worth looking at.” They could be drawn to the “The Weird,” a showcase of Albrecht

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Dürer’s prints and drawings, or to “Art Treasures of the Met,” a non-chronological display of provocative comparisons of works of art from the Met’s collections.135 Taylor claimed that “the greatest challenge we face” is “keeping the adult mind occupied” in a world in which the average work week was decreasing from 48 to 40 hours.136 And Taylor took occupying adult minds as a devout practice: “The museum,” he pontificated, “is one of the few places where the population can escape from the impositions of an age starved for spiritual values.”137 As we have seen, these spiritual values were not innocent, but ideological. Taylor’s attempts to make the museum more accessible targeted the growing white middle classes through a conservation of an older order he thought was being lost. As the Time article states, Taylor “is widely regarded as a conservative, an enemy of modern art.”138 But his conservative outlook, as the article evidences, did not stop him from looking to contemporary technology, such as modern book distribution, to make the museum more welcoming to his desired public: “A pet Taylor project is a monthly set of 24 colour reproductions for $1.25 [the Miniatures]; more than 4,000,000 sets have been sold since 1948.” He was even considering the use of “tiny radio headsets so people can tune in on gallery lectures without disturbing others.”139 By today’s standards, Taylor’s efforts to make the museum more accessible seem, of course, retrograde and limited at best. At least since the publication of the 1992 American Association of Museums’ report Excellence and Equity: Education and the Public Dimension of Museums, which has been reissued multiple times, museum accessibility has become increasingly linked with notions of diversity, equity, and inclusion.140 In its definition of diversity, the American Alliance of Museums’ Working Group on Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion claims: “Even when people appear the same, they are different.”141 Taylor (and Canaday, for that matter) would likely have emphasized the opposite: even when people appear different, they are the same. In other words, the general agreement today that issues of accessibility are firmly rooted in a commitment to diversity sharply contrasts with Taylor’s ideas. For Taylor and other postwar art educators, accessibility was not about human diversity, but rather, in a humanist tradition, about universality, sameness, and consensus. Recognition of commonality, not difference, was what would make art, for Taylor and Canaday, more accessible and inclusive. But, as we have seen, there were clear middle-class limits in this understanding of accessibility. Elaine Heumann Gurian has recently written, in the context of museums’ historical efforts to become more accessible, that “Our rhetoric most often welcomes ‘all’, and in doing so, we are only welcoming more of ourselves.”142 The surveys of the

154

The Met and the Masses in Postwar America

Miniatures and Seminars readership, as we have seen, evidence Gurian’s point. The “cultivated people” of the Miniatures advertisements were for the most part white and middle class. And it is relevant that Taylor and Canaday did not show an awareness of their exclusions. In his now classic study of whiteness, Richard Dyer observed: “white people, unable to see their particularity, cannot take account of other people’s.” In constructing the world in their own image, “white people set standards of humanity by which they are bound to succeed and others bound to fail.”143 Taylor and Canaday’s attempts to open the museum to a larger portion of the population were cloaked in an ideological language of universality. Museum leaders today acknowledge the diversity of their audiences when they stress, for example, that the United States Census is “the most important book any museum director should read.”144 As Laura Lott writes, “we are living through a dizzying shift in who comprises the public that museums are meant to serve.”145 In trying to make museums more accessible by equitably including a more diverse audience, museum officials now tend to use different language in explaining their goals: the general public is replaced with targeted audiences, aesthetic education with varied participatory experiences, and accepted Western values with multicultural inquiry. Taylor’s efforts to open the museum to a larger audience were certainly limited by his humanist assumptions about the social role of the museum. At the same time, his call for museum accessibility and his promotion of new technologies echo the position of many of today’s advocates for the reinvention of the museum as an “audience focused” institution of “accessible information” and “civic engagement.”146 Moreover, his rejection of the Greenbergian attitude and his openness to a variety of museum experiences parallel recent developments in museum studies, such as a focus on the “experience economy.”147 Over the past many decades, museum research has demonstrated, as Lois Silverman argues, that visitors value not only the messages intended by museum educators, but also “the personal or affective meanings they create themselves as they connect what they encounter to their own lives and relationships.”148 On these grounds, Taylor’s intuition about the William Mount exhibition, its nostalgic value for a specific audience, can be defended. According to Silverman, museums have for years not only contributed to maintaining friendship, family and other social bonds, but have also aimed to achieve other goals, including the empowerment of “citizens and communities” and the mobilization of “other forms of social action and social change.”149 While articulating their ideas in very different terms, especially about who constitutes “the public,” many current museum theorists concur with Taylor and other postwar art educators that American

The Met, Art Education, and Abstract Art

155

museums share, as Lott puts it, “a strong tradition and ongoing commitment of service to the public.”150 An important goal of middlebrow projects like the Miniatures and Seminars was to serve the development of a unified public culture, but how could these ventures succeed when the American population was so diverse? How could an order of civility be maintained in a world that included people with such different experiences and expectations? Gurian writes that “in supporting the influential class, museums take on the same goals, aesthetics, enemies, and values as those in authority.”151 In postwar America, projects like the Miniatures and Seminars did just that. These ventures in popular art education were certainly successful enterprises on their own terms; they piqued middle-class interest and curiosity in art and museum-going. The terms of their success, however, also indicate their shortcomings. The Miniatures and Seminars reproduced ideal values held dear by the Met and its middle-class audience. For the likes of Taylor and Canaday, artistic individuality needed to be expressed in ways they deemed accessible to all. In other words, their worldview necessitated the potential translation of individual experiences into words or images that everyone, with the “proper” education, could understand. Accessibility in this context assumed the shared values and experiences of those in authority. Such a worldview denied the very possibility that diversity could eclipse sameness. * * * The belief that self-development improves social well-being was at the core of the Miniatures and Seminars projects. This relation between the individual and society-at-large has also been at the basis of my inquiry. I began this book by revealing how this study started with my reflections on two volumes of the Seminars, which I serendipitously received from a neighbour: your books, my values. I pursued this project because of my curiosity, a desire to reflect on the nostalgia I felt for these books. In situating these personal questions in larger hegemonic structures of power, I have considered values I grew up with in Jewish, upper-middle-class Montreal. Curiosity, however, is not a neutral concept. It may be a positive source for inquiry or a cause for misadventure. Just as importantly, curiosity has played—and continues to play—a critical role in how knowledge is produced, acquired, controlled and circulated.152 Any inquiry into a topic, even if critical, brings attention to that topic. And no publication is void of the politics and structures of power. Curiosity, according to Barbara Benedict, “is seeing your way out of your place. It is looking beyond.”153 My undertaking, both archival and interpretative, has certainly helped me clarify how the type of art history and art appreciation the Met promoted, and that I was taught as an

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The Met and the Masses in Postwar America

undergraduate student, was no simple and unproblematic enterprise, but rather a form of visual literacy dependent upon a variety of mediations—museal, scholarly, social, and commercial. But seeing your way and getting out of your place are not necessarily mutual activities. Self-reflection is no linear path to enlightenment but a personal journey, spiraling and cyclical.

Appendices Appendix I: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures ●

● ●

This list includes all the Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures distributed by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Author affiliations are those indicated in the Miniatures albums. Order of publication is based on the following archival documents: “Metropolitan Miniatures Publication Dates,” June 2, 1951, Box 2, Folder 5, Book of the Month Club, Metropolitan Miniature Accounts from 1948 to 1953, Francis Henry Taylor Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives; “Metropolitan Miniatures Series per Publications Dept.,” February 1958, Metropolitan Miniatures—Production, 1953–, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives.

Order of Album Publication Number

Title

Year

Author

Album Content

1

I

1948

Anonymous

Collection (of the Met)

2

S

1949

Anonymous

Collection (of the Met)

3

F

1949

Anonymous

Collection (of the Met)

4

H

1949

Anonymous

Collection (of the Met)

5

R

1949

Anonymous

Collection (of the Met)

6

M

1949

Anonymous

Theme

7

G

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures The Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures The Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures The Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures The Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures The American Scene The Old Testament in Art

1949

Anonymous

Theme

157

158

Appendices

Order of Album Publication Number

Title

Year

Author

Album Content

8

J

1949

Anonymous

Theme

9

T

1950

Anonymous

Period

10

O

1950

Anonymous

Artist

11

E

1950

Anonymous

Period

12

K

1950

Anonymous

Collection (of the Met)

13

B

1950

Anonymous

Period

14

D

1950

Anonymous

Period

15

W

1950

Anonymous

Period

16

L

1950

Anonymous

Period

17 18

Y N

1950 1950

Anonymous Anonymous

Period Period

19

P

20

U

21 22

A X

23

C

24

V

The New Testament in Art The Life and Civilization of Egypt Twenty-four Paintings by Vincent Van Gogh Twenty-four Pictures Illustrating the Development of 17th-Century Dutch Painting The Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures Italian Paintings of the Early Renaissance Italian Paintings of the High Renaissance Twentieth-Century American Paintings Art in the Middle Ages Arts of China French Art of the Nineteenth Century Arts of Ancient Rome Arts of the Renaissance Art of Flanders Two Centuries of American Painting Painting in England Arts of Ancient Greece

1951

Period

1951

Anonymous

Period

1951 1951

Anonymous Anonymous

Period Period

1951

Anonymous

Period

1951

Anonymous

Period

Appendices

159

Order of Album Publication Number

Title

Year

Author

Album Content

25

LR

1951

Anonymous

Artist

26

LW

1951

Anonymous

Period

27

LS

1951

Anonymous

Period

28

LI

1951

Anonymous

Period

29

LD

1951

Roland McKinney

Artist

30

LX

1951

Virginia Bell

Theme

31

LB

Rembrandts in the Metropolitan Three American Water-Colorists: Homer, Eakins, Sargent Masters of Spanish paintings French Impressionists: Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Boudin Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Degas in the Metropolitan Museum The Christmas Story in art and Legend The World of Pieter Bruegel

1952

32

LP

Masterpieces in the 1952 Philadelphia Museum of Art

33

LF

34

LO

35

LC

Figure painting by 1952 Renoir Great Drawings in 1952 the Metropolitan Paintings by Paul 1952 Cézanne

A. Hyatt Artist Mayor, Curator of Prints, Met E. M. Benson, Collection Chief of the Division of Education, Philadelphia Museum Harry B. Wehle Artist

36

LH

English paintings 1952 in the Huntington Gallery

Louise Theme Burroughs Artist Theodore Rousseau, Jr., Curator of Paintings, Met Theodore Allen Collection Heinrich, Curator of Art Collections, Huntington Gallery

160

Appendices

Order of Album Publication Number

Title

Year

Author

Album Content

37

LJ

Japanese Prints in the Metropolitan

1952

Period

38

LV

Vincent van Gogh 1952 (Re-issue of Album O with a new introduction and bibliography)

39

LL

Leonardo da Vinci 1952

40

LG

41

LT

Paintings from the 1952 Hapsburg Collection in the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna Toulouse-Lautrec 1952

Alan Priest, Curator of Far Eastern Art, Met Margaretta M. Salinger, Senior Research Fellow, Department of Paintings, Met George Sarton, Professor of the History of Science, Harvard Ferdinand Eckhardt

42 43

LA LE

The Story of Christ 1953 Children in art 1953

44

LM

Michelangelo, 1475–1564

45

LK

46

LN

National Gallery of 1953 Art, Washington: Italian Renaissance Painting Six Centuries of 1953 Flower Painting

1953

Emily Genauer, Art Critic NY Herald Tribune Edith R. Abbot Aline B. Louchheim [Saarinen], Art Critic, The New York Times Margaret R. Scherer, Senior Research Fellow, Met Elisabeth Puckett Martin

Artist

Artist

Collection

Artist

Theme Theme

Artist

Collection/ Period

Margaretta M. Theme Salinger, Senior Research Fellow, Department of Paintings, Met

Appendices

161

Order of Album Publication Number

Title

Year

Author

Album Content

47

LQ

Goya

1953

Artist

48

LU

Great European Portraits

1953

49

LY

Raphael: The 1953 Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican, 1508–1511

50

LZ

American Folk Art 1953 in Fenimore House, Cooperstown, NY

51

MP

Persian Painting in 1953 the Metropolitan Museum of Art

52

MG

Paul Gauguin, 1848–1903

53

MR

Peter Paul Rubens, 1953 1577–1640

54

MM

Medieval Vista

A. Hyatt Mayor, Curator of Prints, Met Edith A. Standen, Associate Curator, Met Sydney J. Freedberg, Associate Professor of Art, Wellesley College, MA Louis C. Jones, Director New York State Historical Association, and Marshall B. Davidson, Editor of Publications, Met B. W. Robinson, Assistant Keeper, Victoria and Albert Museum Henri Dorra, Associate Director, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasoto, FL Margaretta Salinger, Senior Research Fellow, Dept of Paintings, Met Laura Hibbard Loomis

1953

1953

Theme

Artist

Collection

Period

Artist

Artist

Period

162

Appendices

Order of Album Publication Number

Title

Year

Author

Album Content

55

MV

Velazquez, 1599–1660

1954

Artist

56

ME

The Eight

1954

57

MS

Self-Portraits

1954

58

MH

59

MT

The Mauritshuis, 1954 the Royal Picture Gallery at the Hague Titian, 1477?–1576 1954

60

MF

F. J. Sánchez Caontón, Sub-Director of the Prado Museum, Madrid Ronald McKinney Edith A. Standen, Associate Curator, Met Margaret R. Scherer, Senior Research Fellow, Met Lionello Venturi, Dean of the Art School, University of Rome John PopeHennessy

61

MD

62 63

ML MB

64

MA

65

MK

66

MC

67

MQ

68

MJ

Piero della Francesca, about 1420–1492 El Greco, 1541– 1614 Great Landscapes Edouard Manet, 1832–1883 Giotto (1266 or 1276–1337): The Frescoes in the Arena Chapel, Padua Jan Vermeer, 1632–1675 Early Flemish Painting Botticelli, 1444 or 1445–1510 The French Tradition

1954

Period Theme

Collection

Artist

Artist

1954

Anonymous

Artist

1954 1954

Anonymous Anonymous

Theme Artist

1954

Anonymous

Artist

1954

Anonymous

Artist

1954

Anonymous

Period

1955

Blanche R. Brown Margaretta Salinger

Artist

1955

Period

Appendices

163

Order of Album Publication Number

Title

Year

Author

69

MN

1955

70

MU

Edith Appleton Artist Standen Theodore Allen Artist Heinrich

71

MW

72

MO

73

MY

74

MI

75

MX

76

MZ

William Hogarth, 1697–1764 Albrecht Dürer, 1471–1528, Water Colors and Drawings Honoré Daumier, 1808–1879 Eugène Delacroix, 1798–1863 English Water Colors Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1780–1867 Fra Angelico, 1387–1455 20th Century Painting in the Philadelphia Museum of Art

77

XP

1955

78

XH

79

XT

Caravaggio, 1573–1610 Gustave Courbet, 1819–1877 Hans Holbein the Younger (1497 or 1498–1543)

80

XC

1956

81

XG

Jean-BaptisteCamille Corot (1796–1875) Women Artists

82

XM

Matisse

1956

1955

Album Content

1955

Anonymous

1955

Beatrice Artist Farwell Theodore Allen Period Heinrich James Parker Artist

1955 1955

1955 1955

1955 1956

1956

Margaretta Salinger John Canaday, Chief of the Division of Education, The Philadelphia Museum of Art Theodore Allen Heinrich Margaretta Salinger Roberta M. Alford, Lecturer in Fine Arts, Indiana University Geoffrey Grigson

Artist

Artist Collection/ Period

Artist Artist Artist

Artist

Edith Appleton Theme Standen Sam Hunter, Artist Lecturer in Fine Arts, Barnard College

164

Appendices

Order of Album Publication Number

Title

Year

Author

83

XE

1956

84

XF

85

XA

1956

James Thomas Artist Flexner Margaretta Artist Salinger A. L. Chanin Collection

86

XD

1956

Harry B. Wehle Period

87

XR

Thomas Eakins, 1844–1916 Watteau and His Age Paintings from the Museum of Modern Art, Series 1: Cubism, Abstraction, Realism Intimate Dutch Paintings Paintings by Rembrandt

1956

88

XW

Winslow Homer, 1836–1910

1956

89

XB

90

XI

Paintings from the 1956 Museum of Modern Art, Series 2: Expressionism, Impressionism, Surrealism Paintings by 1956 Raphael

Julius S. Held, Professor of Fine Arts, Barnard College Lloyd Goodrich, Associate Director, Whitney James Thrall Soby

91

XK

Sienese Painting

1956

1957

Album Content

Artist

Artist

Collection

Artist Creighton Gilbert, Assistant Professor of Fine Arts, Indiana University John Canaday, Period Chief of the Division of Education, The Philadelphia Museum of Art

Appendices

165

Order of Album Publication Number

Title

Year

Author

92

XJ

Jacques-Louis David, 1748–1825

1957

93

XU

Contemporary 1957 American Painting

94

XZ

95

XO

Realism in French 1957 Painting The Original 1957 Paintings of John James Audubon: Original Paintings of Birds of America in the New York Historical Society

John Canaday, Artist Chief of the Division of Education, The Philadelphia Museum of Art John I. H. Baur, Period Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art Harry B. Wehle Period

96

XX

Forgotten Favorites 1957

Album Content

Robert Artist Cushman Murphy, Lamont Curator Emeritus of Birds, The American Museum of Natural History John Canaday, Period Chief of the Division of Education, The Philadelphia Museum of Art

166

Appendices

Appendix II: The Metropolitan Seminars in Art The Metropolitan Seminars in Art by John Canaday

Portfolio Title

Publication Date

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

1958 1958 1958 1958 1958 1958 1958 1958 1958 1958 1959 1959

What is a Painting? Realism: The Painter and the World Around Us Expressionism: The Painter and the World He Creates Abstraction: The Painter and the World We Never See Composition: Pictures as Patterns Composition: Pictures as Structures Composition: Arrangement as Expression Techniques: Fresco Techniques: Tempera and Oil Techniques: Water Color, Pastel, and Prints The Artist: The Artist as a Social Critic The Artist: The Artist as a Visionary

The Metropolitan Seminars in Art: Great Periods in Painting by John Canaday

Portfolio

Title

Publication Date

A B

Glory and Grandeur: The Classical Background Earth, Heaven, and Hell: Man and Mystery in the Middle Ages The World Rediscovered: The Early Renaissance Venus Revisited: Classical Myths in the Renaissance The World of Order: The High Renaissance The World Triumphant: The Baroque The World Dividing: The 18th Century The War of Illusions: Classicism vs. Romanticism The Quick and the Dead: Realism vs. the Salon Summer Idyl: The Flowering of Impressionism Painting Transition: Precursors of Modern Art Actaeon and the Atom: Art in the Contemporary World

1959 1959

C D E F G H I J K L

1959 1959 1959 1959 1959 1959 1960 1960 1960 1960

Notes Introduction 1 Guided Visits Through all the History of Art by Means of Miniature Reproductions in Full Color (Promotional Brochure for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures), c. 1950, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Samples, albums, form letters, clippings, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives, New York. 2 Guided Visits Through all the History of Art; and Art Seminars in the Home (promotional brochure for the Metropolitan Seminars in Art), 1957, Book of the Month Club—Course on Art Education, 1954–7 (File 1 of 3), Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives, New York. 3 Harry Scherman, “The First 40 Years of the Book-of-the-Month Club,” Advertising Supplement in The New York Times, October 23, 1966, 12. 4 Courses in assisted self-education for a mass audience, like the Miniatures and Seminars, continue today in recent efforts in online distance learning. How to Look at and Understand Great Art, a 2011 lecture series produced by the educational corporation The Teaching Company, claims to be able to show the student how to “see the hidden visual language of art and learn how to read it.” See promotional video, How to Look at and Understand Great Art, available online: https://www. thegreatcourses.com/courses/how-to-look-at-and-understand-great-art (accessed April 8, 2021). The course is offered by The Teaching Company as part of its The Great Courses series. 5 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Harper Collins, 1988), 11. 6 George Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief (New York: Basic Books, 2014), xix. 7 May, Homeward Bound, 13. 8 Joseph H. Choate, Address at the Opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 30 March 1880, cited in Winifred E. Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1913), 198. 9 Vera Zolberg, “Tensions of Mission in American Art Museums,” in Nonprofit Enterprise in the Arts: Studies in Mission and Constraint, ed. Paul DiMaggio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 185.

167

168

Notes to pp. 3–6

10 W. E. H. [Winifred E. Howe], “The Museum’s Educational Credo,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 13, no. 9 (1918): 193. 11 Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1983), xii. 12 “Memorandum of the Meeting Held in the Board Room on November 12, 1954, and Attended by Representatives of the Museum and Book-of-the Month Club,” November 17, 1954, Book of the Month Club—Course on Art Education, 1954–63 (File 3 of 3), Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 13 Andrew McClellan, “Art Museums and Commonality: A History of High Ideals,” in Museums and Difference, ed. Daniel J. Sherman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 42. 14 Francis Henry Taylor, Babel’s Tower: The Dilemma of the Modern Museum (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 34. 15 Taylor, Babel’s Tower, 50. 16 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 323. 17 Joan Shelley Rubin, Cultural Considerations: Essays on Readers, Writers, and Musicians in Postwar America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 83. In Cultural Considerations, Rubin also examines middlebrow activities in music. For her examination of middlebrow culture and the BOMC in the interwar years, see Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992). 18 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), 113. 19 The Met, it should be noted, was not and is not a monolithic institution. During the postwar period, members of the staff held competing opinions, whether they be about, for example, the value of a project like the Seminars or attitudes to contemporary painting. 20 Rubin, Cultural Considerations, 153. 21 Arthur S. Link and William A. Link, The Twentieth Century: An American History (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1983), 242. 22 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 17. 23 C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951). 24 William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), 437. 25 David Riesmann, with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New York: Yale University Press, 1969 [1950]). 26 Riesmann, The Lonely Crowd, 307.

Notes to pp. 6–9

169

27 Dwight Macdonald, “A Theory of Mass Culture,” Diogenes 1, no. 3 (1953): 4. 28 Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, 6. 29 Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” Between Past and Present (New York: Penguin, 1961), 209. 30 Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), 48, 50. On Barzun’s complicated position in the 1950s as both academic and public intellectual, see Joan Shelley Rubin, “The Scholar and The World: Academic Humanists and General Readers in Postwar America,” in The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion Since World War II , ed. David Hollinger (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 73–103. 31 Jacques Barzun, The Uses and Abuses of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 8–9. 32 On the term “High Humanist,” see Edward Slingerland, What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 2–3. 33 Calvin Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (London: Longman, 1970), 265–360. 34 For a discussion of Winlock’s contribution to the Met, see Catherine H. Roehrig, “Collecting through Excavation,” in Making the Met, 1870–2020, ed. Andrea Bayer with Laura D. Corey, exh. cat. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 94–107. 35 Marshall Davidson, “Francis Henry Taylor,” The Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement Six, 1956–60, ed. John A. Garraty (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), 621. For attendance figures, see William Church Osborn and Dudley T. Easby, Jr., “Report of the Trustees for the Year 1946,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 6, no. 1 (1946), 7–8; and Roland L. Redmond and Dudley T. Easby, Jr., “Report of the Trustees for the Year 1955–1956,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 15, no. 2 (1956), 31–3. 36 Lydia Bond Powel, “Television and the Metropolitan Museum of Art” (December 1945), 1, in Box 15, Folder 6, Francis Henry Taylor records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 37 Powel, “Television and the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” 2. 38 Powel, “Television and the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” 103. 39 “Retirement of Francis Henry Taylor,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 13, no. 5 (1955), n.p. 40 Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 210. 41 Sheila Brennan, Stamping American Memory: Collectors, Citizens, and the Post (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 14–19. 42 Paul DiMaggio, Michael Useem, and Paula Brown, Audience Studies of the Performing Arts and Museums: A Critical Review, National Endowment for the Arts,

170

43 44

45

46 47

48 49

Notes to pp. 9–10

Research Division Report #9 (November, 1977), available online: https://www.arts. gov/sites/default/files/NEA-Research-Report-9.pdf (accessed April 5, 2021). According to the authors of this study, the belief that “arts audiences are dominated by women” is not always confirmed by statistics (13). They do, however, report that women make up 57 percent of arts museums visitors (15), a statistic likely to have been the same in the postwar period. Making the Met, 1870–2020, iii, 8, 6, 10, 48–9, 56, 70–1. Paul Cummings, Oral History Interview with Marshall B. Davidson, 27 November 1977–10 January 1978, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, n.p. [24], transcript, available online: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-historyinterview-marshall-b-davidson-11911#transcript (accessed January 27, 2021). The American Art Union in New York (1842–51) may have been the most influential in the United States (its membership grew to 18,960 in 1849), but other unions were also founded in many American cities, including Cincinnati, Boston, Chicago, and Louisville. On the history of art unions, see Joy Sperling, “ ‘Art, Cheap and Good:’ The Art Union in England and the United States, 1840–60,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 1, no. 1 (Spring 2002), 98, available online: http://www.19thcartworldwide.org/spring02/196--%20qart-cheap-%20and-goodq-%20the-art-%20 union-in-england-and-%20the-united-%20states-184060 (accessed December 20, 2020); Jane Aldrich Dowling Adams, “A Study of Art Unions in the United States in the Nineteenth Century,” MA Thesis, Carnegie-Mellon University, 1990, available online: https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent. cgi?article=1827&context=etd (accessed January 30, 2021). On the history of the American Art Union, see Maybelle Mann, The American Art-Union (Otisville, NY: ALM Associates, 1977). Sperling, “ ‘Art, Cheap and Good,’ ” 99. Jennifer Sumner, “Serving the System: A Critical History of Distance Education,” Open Learning 15, no. 3 (2000): 273. John Verduin and Thomas A. Clark, Distance Education: The Foundations of Effective Practice (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991), 15. Clayton Funk, “Distance Art Education: The Federal School and Social Engineering in the United States, 1900 to 1925,” Studies in Art Education 50, no. 2 (2009): 124–36. Correspondence Courses Offered by Colleges and Universities through the United States Armed Forces Institute, U.S. Department of Defense brochure, 1957, available online: https://books.google.ca/books?id=YELFBG2K1SQC&pg=PA5&dq=history+of+co rrespondence+learning&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwizruaktJntAhWwGVkFHdK 5C4oQ6AEwBnoECAcQAg#v=onepage&q=history%20of%20correspondence%20 learning&f=false, (accessed November 23, 2020). The universities that offered art history and appreciation courses included Brigham Young University, the University of Georgia, the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), and Penn State University.

Notes to pp. 10–15

171

50 William Bianchi, Schools of the Air: A History of Instructional Programs on the Radio in the United States (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2008), 1. 51 Bianchi, Schools of the Air, 35–53; Sondra Wieland Howe, “The NBC Music Appreciation Hour: Radio Broadcasts of Walter Damrosch, 1928–1942,” Research in Music Education 51, no. 1 (2003): 64–77. 52 Stephen E. Weil, “From Being about Something to Being for Somebody: The Ongoing Transformation of the American Museum” (1999), in Making Museums Matter (Washington: Smithsonian Institute, 2002), 30–1. 53 Nina Simon, “Principles of Participation,” in Reinventing the Museum the Evolving Conversation on the Paradigm Shift, ed. Gail Anderson, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2012), 331. 54 See the “Reinventing the Museum Tool” in Gail Anderson, “A Framework: Reinventing the Museum,” Reinventing the Museum, 3–4. 55 Weil, “From Being about Something to Being for Somebody,” 49. 56 Philippe de Montebello, “Art Museums, Inspiring Public Trust,” in Whose Muse: Art Museums and the Public Trust, ed. James Cuno (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 155–6. 57 Elaine Heumann Gurian, “Maybe This Time: A Personal Journey toward Racial Equity in Museums,” in Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion in Museums, ed. Johnnetta Betsch Cole and Laura L. Lott (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 110.

1 The Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures: Culture and Commerce 1 “Metropolitan Miniatures, New Series of Color Reproductions of Masterpieces, To Bring Museum Treasures to the Nation,” News Release from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 20–1, 1947, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Samples, albums, form letters, clippings, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives, New York. 2 Letter from Hermann Jaffe to Francis Taylor, January 11, 1941, Metropolitan Miniatures—Production, 1941–50, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives, New York. 3 Letter from Francis Taylor to Hermann Jaffe, January 13, 1941, Metropolitan Miniatures—Production, 1941–50, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives, New York. Calvin Tomkins and Marshall Davidson inaccurately attribute the idea behind the Miniatures to Jayne. See Calvin Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (London: Longman, 1970), 317; Oral History Interview with Marshall B. Davidson [by Paul Cummings], November 27, 1977–January 10, 1978, Smithsonian Archives of

172

4 5 6

7 8 9

10

11 12

13

14

Notes to pp. 16–18

American Art, n.p. (27), available online: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/ interviews/oral-history-interview-marshall-b-davidson-11911#transcript (accessed January 27, 2021) Peter Kihss, “New Director of Metropolitan Museum Believes in Selling Art to the Masses,” New York World-Telegram, January 11, 1941, 11. “Custodian of the Attic,” Time, December 29, 1952, 48. This cover article was a feature on Taylor. Roland L. Redmond, “Francis Henry Taylor” (Obituary), Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 16, no. 5 (January, 1958), 145. For biographical information on Taylor, see also Marshall Davidson, “Francis Henry Taylor,” The Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 6, 1956–60, ed. John A. Garraty (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), 620–2; and Calvin Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, 265–74. William Church Osborn and Dudley T. Easby, Jr., “Report of the Trustees for the Year 1946,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 6, no. 1 (1946), 7. Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, 265. Letter from Herman Jaffe to Horace Jayne, January 25, 1941, Metropolitan Miniatures—Production, 1941–50, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Shelomo ben-Israel, “How a Jewish Printer Spread American Patriotism,” The Jewish Daily Forward, February 3, 1962, as reproduced in “A Tribute to a Modern Benjamin Franklin, Extension of Remarks of Hon. Seymour Halpern of New York, In the House of Representatives, Monday, May 7, 1962,” in Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 87th Congress, Second Session, Volume 108, part 25, Appendix, A4204, available online: https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/GPOCRECB-1962-pt25/GPO-CRECB-1962-pt25-1 (accessed January 27, 2021). ben-Israel, “How a Jewish Printer Spread American Patriotism.” His grandfather was the Shakespearean scholar Horace Howard Furness, his father, Horace F. H. Jayne, a professor of zoology at the University of Pennsylvania, and his mother, Caroline Furness Jayne, an ethnologoist. Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, 273–4. During the war, Jayne, like Taylor, served as a member of the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas. He left the Met in 1949 and headed the China desk of the Voice of America until 1953, when he returned to the Philadelphia Museum of Art as Acting Chief of Eastern Art and later Vice-Director. For biographical information on Jayne, see “Horace Jayne, 77, Art Curator, Dies,” The New York Times, 2 August 1975, 24; Philadelphia Museum of Art Archives, Far Eastern Art Departmental Records: Historical Note, available online: https://www. philamuseum.org/pma_archives/ead.php?c=FAR&p=hn (accessed January 27, 2021). Born in Vienna in 1906, Modley was a student in the 1920s of Otto Neurath, who had invented the Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education).

Notes to pp. 18–19

15

16

17

18

19

20

173

In 1933, Modley settled in New York City and founded the Pictograph Corporation. He continued his teacher’s work and is best known for the development of the Telefact or Pictograph, a diagram that communicates statistical data through pictorial forms. On Modley, see Charles R. Crawley, “From Charts to Glyphs: Rudolf Modley’s Contribution to Visual Communication,” Technical Communication, 41, no. 1 (1994): 20–5; Jason Forrest, “The Telefacts of Life: Rudolf Modley’s Isotypes in American Newspapers 1938–1945,” available online: https://medium.com/ nightingale/the-telefacts-of-life-rudolf-modleys-isotypes-in-american-newspapers1938-1945-d5478faa5647 (accessed February 8, 2021). Letter from Rudolf Modley to Horace Jayne, 10 October 1941, Metropolitan Miniatures—Production, 1941–50, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Francis Taylor, “Report of the Director on the Reorganization and Consolidation of the Museum’s Educational and Extension Services,” pp. 2–5, June 1941, Box 2, Folder 13, Francis Henry Taylor records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. This report is discussed in chapter three. Letter from Rudolf Modley to Horace Jayne, 12 February 1942, Metropolitan Miniatures—Production, 1941–50, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Letter from Horace Jayne to Rudolf Modley, August 13, 1942, Metropolitan Miniatures—Production, 1941–50, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Conditions causes by the Second World War affected the Met in a variety of ways. In 1942, the Met put into storage in the country about 15,000 works of art, which were only returned to the museum two years later. On their return to the museum, Taylor commented with his usual flair on the continued interest in art at this time. “During the violent dislocation of the galleries, the show went on and the year 1943 closed with the largest attendance record in the museum’s history, more than 1,300,000 visitors.” See Francis Henry Taylor, “What Makes a Painting Great,” The New York Times, May 28, 1944, 18. Latham had a peripatetic career. He was employed at Time, Inc., the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Telephone, J. Walter Thompson, South America, the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs, the William J. Kerby Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution. He also worked as an information consultant for the federal government in various departments. See “Hugh Leroy Latham ’40,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, available online: https://paw.princeton.edu/memorial/hugh-leroy-latham%E2%80%9940 (accessed January 28, 2021). Hugh Latham, memo to Horace Jayne, “Sugject (sic): Metropolitan Museum of Art Development Fund,” 16, 14 January 1947, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.— Material from Latham file, 1947 (Jan.–Aug.), Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives.

174

Notes to pp. 19–23

21 Hugh Latham, memo to Horace Jayne, “Lists for Poster Stamp Project,” April 14, 1947, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Material from Latham file, 1947 (Jan.– Aug.), Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 22 Shiela A. Brennan, Stamping American Memory: Collectors, Citizens, and the Post (Minneapolis: The University of Michigan Press, 2018), 4. 23 Brennan, Stamping American Memory, 41. 24 Brennan, Stamping American Memory, 47–9, 62–5. 25 For a history of poster stamps, see H. Thomas Steele, Lick’em, Stick’em: The Lost Art of Poster Stamps (New York: Abbeville, 1989). 26 Steele, Lick’em, Stick’em, 14. 27 For a brief discussion of S&H Green Stamps, see Nicolas Hoffmann, Schemes in Retailing: A Comparison of Stand-Alone and Multi-Partner Programs (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013), 55–6. 28 Letter from Le Roy C. Hartford to H. W. Kent, September 15, 1913. See Memo (with Hartford’s letter) from Al Gardner to Taylor, November 20, 1951, Metropolitan Miniatures-General & Misc. Correspondence, 1946–, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Albert Teneyck Gardner was Taylor’s assistant and later archivist and assistant curator at the Met. 29 Hermann Jaffe, “Poster Stamp Case Histories,” c. 1947, Metropolitan Miniatures— Misc.—Material from Latham file, 1940–2, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Latham provided a detailed summary of Jaffe’s case histories in a memo to Horace Jayne, May 27, 1947, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Material from Latham file, 1947 (Jan.–Aug.), Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 30 Agreement between the Met and Davis Delaney for Printing of Miniatures, May/ June 1947, Metropolitan Miniatures—Production, 1941–50, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 31 Hugh Latham, memo to Horace Jayne, “Re: Metropolitan Miniatures,” July 15, 1947, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Material from Latham file, 1947 (Jan.–Aug.), Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 32 Mimi Sheraton, “Dress up a Screen,” Seventeen, September 1950, 161. 33 Hugh Latham, memo to Horace Jayne, “Re: Points for consideration in direct mailing of Metropolitan Miniatures,” July 15, 1947, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.— Material from Latham file, 1947 (Jan.–Aug.), Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 34 “The Metropolitan Museum Presents Metropolitan Miniatures,” advertising brochure, 1947, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Samples, albums, form letters, clippings, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives.

Notes to pp. 23–25

175

35 “An Art Gallery in Miniature,” letter signed by Francis Henry Taylor, n.d. [1947], Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Samples, albums, form letters, clippings, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 36 Metropolitan Miniatures, Series 1, 1947, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Samples, albums, form letters, clippings, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 37 Hugh Latham, Teacher and Student Order Form Letter, n.d. [1947], Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Material from Latham file, 1947–8 (Sept.–Dec. and Jan.–May) Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 38 Horace Jayne, Form Letter to Editors, October 20, 1947, Metropolitan Miniatures— Misc.—Samples, albums, form letters, clippings, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 39 Marshall Field Advertisement for the Metropolitan Miniatures, 1947 or 1948, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Material from Latham file, 1947–8 (Sept.–Dec. and Jan.–May), Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 40 Letter from Hugh Latham to Roland Redmond, December 4, 1947, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Material from Latham file, 1947–8 (Sept.–Dec. and Jan.–May), Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 41 Letter from F. H. Anspacher to Horace Jayne, October 27, 1947, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Material from Latham file, 1947–8 (Sept.–Dec. and Jan.–May), Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 42 Letter from Walter Wolczek to Horace Jayne, December 4, 1947, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Material from Latham file, 1947–8 (Sept.–Dec. and Jan.–May), Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 43 “Stamps on Kromekote,” Stet: The House Magazine for House Editors 90, no. 4 (March, 1948), Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Material from Latham file, 1947–8 (Sept.–Dec. and Jan.–May), Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 44 Letter from Jack Felton to Roland Redmond, December 10, 1947, and letter from Roland Redmond to Jack Felton, February 5, 1948, Metropolitan Miniatures— Production, 1941–50, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 45 Letter from Kenneth Loughery to Horace Jayne, December 15, 1947, Metropolitan Miniatures—Production, 1941–50, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 46 Letter from Hugh Latham to Hermann Jaffe, December 10, 1947, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Material from Latham file, 1947–8 (Sept.–Dec. and Jan.–May), Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives.

176

Notes to pp. 26–27

47 Letter from Hugh Latham to Hermann Jaffe, December 16, 1947, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Material from Latham file, 1947–8 (Sept.–Dec. and Jan.–May), Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 48 Letter from Dudley Easby, Secretary, Met to Meredith Wood, Vice-President, BOMC, June 18, 1948, Metropolitan Miniatures—Production, 1941–50, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 49 “Metropolitan Reproduces Art for Mass Sale,” Herald Tribune, November 10, 1948, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Samples, albums, form letters, clippings, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 50 Joan Shelley Rubin, “1926: ‘Good taste does pay off ’: Book-of-the-Month Club,” in A New Literary History of America, eds. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 606. For membership numbers, see Charles Lee, The Hidden Public: The Story of the Book-of-the-Month Club (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1958), 30–1. 51 On the history of the BOMC, see Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 81–118; Rubin, “1926: ‘Good taste does pay off ’: Book-of-the-Month Club,” 602–07; Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books,: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997); William Zinsser, A Family of Readers: An informal portrait of The Book-of-the-Month Club and its members on the occasion of its 60th anniversary (New York: Book-ofthe-Month Club, 1986); and Lee, The Hidden Public. 52 Rubin, “1926: ‘Good taste does pay off ’: Book-of-the-Month Club,” 604. 53 Rubin, “1926: ‘Good taste does pay off ’: Book-of-the-Month Club,” 604. Rubin includes a third factor in the BOMC’s success: the reduction of culture to information, which is discussed below in this chapter. 54 Lee, The Hidden Public, 86–7. 55 Lee, The Hidden Public, 86. 56 Letter from Harry Scherman to Francis Taylor, September 24, 1946, and letter from Francis Taylor to Harry Scherman, October 16, 1946, Box 2, Folder 5, Francis Henry Taylor records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. It is unclear why the project failed. While many trustees, Taylor explained to Scherman, “are in sympathy with the idea behind the proposal and would like very much to see it realized,” there was also “opposition from a certain quarter, which if not properly met, might prove more embarrassing to you from a business point of view than otherwise.” Taylor and Scherman agreed to pursue the project at a later date when “the difficulties can be overcome.” It is possible that some Met trustees did not want the Met associated with a project on contemporary art or with the BOMC. On the antipathy to contemporary art on the part of some trustees during Taylor’s directorship, see Michael Gross, Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the

Notes to pp. 27–31

57 58 59 60

61

62

63

64 65

66 67 68 69

70 71

177

Money that Made the Metropolitan Museum (New York: Broadway Books, 2009), 219–27. Letter from Francis Taylor to Roger Loomis, November 24, 1953, Box 2, Folder 5, Francis Henry Taylor records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Memo from F. H. Brown to Meredith Wood, October 28, 1955, Box 24, Folder 4, James J. Rorimer records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Memo from Marshall Davidson to Francis Taylor, January 6, 1951, Box 2, Folder 5, Francis Henry Taylor records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Letter from Floyd Rodgers to journalist P. K. Thomajan, April 2, 1952, Metropolitan Miniatures—Production, 1951–2, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. These arrangements were made between Kenneth Loughery, Met treasurer, and Frank Magel of the BOMC. See memo from Loughry to Dudley Easby et al., “Re: Metropolitan Miniatures Being Distributed by the BOMC,” December 21, 1948, Metropolitan Miniatures—Mailing, 1948–, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Advertisement for the 20th-Century American Painting album of the Metropolitan Miniatures, Life, January 29, 1951, 7; for the Rembrandt album, Life, 21 January 1952, 5; for the Van Gogh album, Life, November 10, 1952, 3. There is some overlap in these categories: for example, 20th-century painting in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (period and museum highlights) or Watteau and his Age (artist and period). Six anonymous Miniatures were also published in 1954. For a discussion of Standen’s work as a Monuments Woman, see Christine E. Brennan and Yelena Rakic, “Fragmented Histories,” in Making the Met, 1870–2020, ed. Andrea Bayer with Laura D. Corey, exh. cat. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 182. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures, Album S (New York: The Book-of-theMonth Club, 1949), n.p. [2]. Manet, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures, Album MB (New York: The Book-of-the-Month Club, 1954), n.p. [22, 16]. Theodore Rousseau, Jr., Paintings of Paul Cézanne, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures, Album LC (New York: The Book-of-the-Month Club, 1952), n.p. [15]. Theodore Rousseau, Jr., A Guide to the Picture Galleries (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1954). On the opening of the new galleries, see Francis Henry Taylor, “The Inauguration of the New Galleries: A Report by the Director,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 12, no. 5, part 1 (1954): 106–20. Rousseau, Jr., A Guide to the Picture Galleries, 7. Francis Henry Taylor, Babel’s Tower: The Dilemma of the Modern Museum (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 50.

178

Notes to pp. 31–35

72 Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, with Dominique Schnapper, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their Public, trans. Caroline Beattie and Nick Merriman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 39–44. 73 Cummings, Oral History Interview with Marshall B. Davidson, n. p. [16]. 74 Cummings, Oral History Interview with Marshall B. Davidson, n. p. [23]. 75 “Conference on Miniatures Program,” Minutes of a meeting with Mr. Taylor, Mr. Remington, Mr. Loughry and Mr. Davidson, 16 July 1951, Metropolitan Miniatures—Production, 1951–2, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 76 Letter from Francis Taylor to Marshall Davidson, July 11, 1951, Metropolitan Miniatures—Production, 1951–2, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 77 Guided Visits Through all the History of Art by Means of Miniature Reproductions in Full Color (Promotional Brochure for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures), c. 1950, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Samples, albums, form letters, clippings, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. A similar statement appears in Life magazine advertisements. 78 Letter from Francis Taylor to Harry Scherman, February 13, 1951, Box 2, Folder 5, Francis Henry Taylor Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 79 Memo from Floyd Rodgers to Francis Taylor and Dudley Easby, February 7, 1951, Metropolitan Miniatures-General & Misc. Correspondence, 1946–, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 80 Letter from Dudley Easby to Meredith Wood, February 2, 1951, Box 2, Folder 5, Francis Henry Taylor Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 81 On membership solicitation, see letters from Floyd Rodgers to Dudley Easby, March 10, 1949; from Dudley Easby to Axel Rosin, September 4, 1952; from Dudley Easby to Roland Redmond, September 4, 1952; and from Floyd Rodgers to Van Cartmell, February 23, 1954, Metropolitan Miniatures—Mailing, 1948–, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. On the use of plates for postcards, see memo from Dina Baer to Meredith Wood, December 26, 1951; letter from Dudley Easby to Meredith Wood, February 1, 1952, Metropolitan Miniatures—Production, 1951–2, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives; 82 Letter from Harry Abrams to Kenneth Loughry, March 7, 1949, Metropolitan Miniatures—Production, 1941–50, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 83 Dudley Easby, “Memorandum of a Telephone Conversation [with Meredith Wood]”, April 10, 1952, Metropolitan Miniatures—Production, 1951–2, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 84 See letters from National Association of Publishers (NAP) to A. A. Currier, May 20, 1953; from Currier to Mr. Fitzsimmons, NAP, May 27, 1953; from Currier to Met,

Notes to pp. 35–38

85

86

87 88 89 90

91

92 93 94

95 96 97

179

May 27, 1953; from NAP to Currier May 27, 1953; from Currier to Met, May 28, 1953; from Easby to Currier, June 3, 1953; from Rosin to Currier, June 25, 1953; from Rosin to Easby, June 25, 1953; and from Easby to Rosin, June 30, 1953, Metropolitan Miniatures—General and misc. correspondence, 1946–, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Letter from Francis Taylor to Oscar Ogg, July 18, 1952, Metropolitan Miniatures— Production, 1951–2, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Letter from Oscar Ogg to Francis Taylor, July 21, 1952, Metropolitan Miniatures— Production, 1951—2, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Letter from Harry Scherman to Francis Taylor, July 28, 1952, Box 2, Folder 5, Francis Henry Taylor records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Letter from Francis Taylor to Harry Scherman, November 30, 1950, Box 2, Folder 5, Francis Henry Taylor records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Letter from Harry Scherman to Francis Taylor, December 1, 1950, Box 2, Folder 5, Francis Henry Taylor records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. BOMC memo, re: Metropolitan Miniatures Cancellations, from Frank M. Magel to Meredith Wood, June 12, 1951, Box 2, Folder 5, Francis Henry Taylor records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. “Audience Research Report: The Metropolitan Miniatures,” 1, 1951, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Audience research report, 1951, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. A note from Dudley Easby, Met secretary, to Roland Redmond, Met president, dated May 18, 1951, and stapled to the report, indicates that Marshall Davidson, Redmond and Easby received copies of the the report. For statistics about the BOMC membership in the 1950s, see Charles Lee, The Hidden Public, 148–9. “Audience Research Report: The Metropolitan Miniatures,” 4. It should be noted that as early as 1949, Harry Abrams, who worked for the BOMC before he established his own publishing house, was already suggesting topics for the Miniatures to Marshall Davidson, head of publications at the Met. In September 1949, Davidson wrote to Abrams that “the programs which you suggest for the future Miniature series is perfectly agreeable to us, and work on the Dutch School and the two Italian Art sets is underway.” Memo from Davidson to Taylor, December 13, 1950, Box 2, Folder 5, Francis Henry Taylor Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Memo from Davidson to Taylor, December 13, 1950, Box 2, Folder 5, Francis Henry Taylor Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Memo from Davidson to Easby, May 14, 1951, Box 2, Folder 5, Francis Henry Taylor Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives.

180

Notes to pp. 39–42

98 Letters from Theodore Heinrich to Francis Taylor, September 9, 1951, and October 10, 1951, Metropolitan Miniatures—Production, 1951–2, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 99 Letter from Taylor to Warren Lynch, BOMC, July 17, 1951, Box 2, Folder 5, Francis Henry Taylor Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 100 Letter from Scherman to Taylor, July 18, 1951, Box 2, Folder 5, Francis Henry Taylor Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 101 Letter from Taylor to Scherman, July 19, 1951, Box 2, Folder 5, Francis Henry Taylor Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 102 Francis Taylor’s letter to possible subscribers is included with a memo Floyd Rodgers sent to Francis Taylor, “Subject: Complaints regarding BOMC letter to former Miniatures subscribers,” September 10, 1951, Metropolitan Miniatures— Mailing, 1948–, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Rodger’s memo indicates the increase in subscriptions. 103 The quotation is from a form letter signed by Taylor written to members of the public who showed an interest in the Miniatures. The letter is included in a memo from Floyd Rodgers to Francis Taylor, February 21, 1949, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Samples, albums, form letters, clippings, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. The letter also quotes Reverend Donald E. Hicks, Minister of the Cambria Heights Community Church in Saint Albans, New York: “The limitations of the medium are evident, but within those limitations the product is excellent! I have always wondered why this sort of thing could be run on a commercial scale only by the news-sheets. I believe that you have done something in a popular way that will go far not only for the Museum, but in the opening up of public interest in the sort of things that promotes adequacy in the way most public facilities are too thin to do. Thanks for putting the Metropolitan, in this fashion, into the homes of the people.” 104 “Guided Visits Through All the History of Art by Means of Miniature Reproductions in Full Color,” c. 1951, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Samples, albums, form letters, clippings, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 105 “An Important Announcement from the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” draft of a form letter signed by Francis Taylor, February 26, 1954, Box 2, Folder 5, Francis Henry Taylor Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 106 Taylor, Babel’s Tower, 26. 107 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collecton (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 65–6. For discussions of scale in art history, see the special issue “To Scale,” edited by Joan Kee and Emanuele Lugli, Art History 38, no. 2 (2015). 108 Stewart, On Longing, 65–6.

Notes to pp. 42–49

181

109 Stewart, On Longing, 56. 110 Harry Scherman, “A Billion Books in the Homes of America Through an Economic Invention,” Abridgement of a talk before the Library of Congress, 1960, reprinted in “The First 40 Years of the Book-of-the-Month Club,” a sixteen-page advertising supplement in The New York Times, October 23, 1966, 2, 12. 111 Rubin, “1926: ‘Good taste does pay off ’,” 604. See also Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture, 98–100. 112 “Guided Visits Through All the History of Art By Means of Miniature Reproductions in Full Color.” 113 Taylor, “Report of the Director on the Reorganization and Consolidation of the Museum’s Educational and Extension Services,” 7. 114 Form letter from Taylor, included in a memo from Floyd Rodgers to Francis Taylor, February 21, 1949, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Samples, albums, form letters, clippings, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 115 Cummings, Oral History Interview with Marshall B. Davidson, n.p. [23]. Taylor hired Albert Gardner in 1951 to write a history of the American museum. He would later become Assistant Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture. See Gardner’s obituary “Albert Gardner, Art Curator, Dies,” The New York Times, July 13, 1967, 37, available online: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/ timesmachine/1967/07/13/90372849.html?pageNumber=37 (accessed February 9, 2021). 116 Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture, 109. 117 César Graña, “The Private Lives of Public Museums: Can Art be Democratic?” in Fact and Symbol: Essays in the Sociology of Art and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 95. 118 Form letter from Taylor, included in a memo from Floyd Rodgers to Francis Taylor, February 21, 1949, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Samples, albums, form letters, clippings, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 119 Letter from Francis Taylor to Harry Scherman, January 23, 1952, Box 2, Folder 5, Francis Henry Taylor records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 120 Letter from Harry Scherman to Francis Taylor, January 25, 1952, Box 2, Folder 5, Francis Henry Taylor records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives.

2 The Metropolitan Seminars in Art: Middlebrow Culture 1 “Memorandum of the Meeting Held in the Board Room on November 12, 1954, and Attended by Representatives of the Museum and Book-of-the Month Club,” 17

182

2 3

4

5

6

7

Notes to pp. 49–50

November 1954, Book of the Month Club—Course on Art Education, 1954–63 (File 3 of 3), Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. The Met representatives were: Director Francis Taylor, Secretary Dudley Easby, Head of Education Sterling Callisen, Head of Publications Marshall Davidson, Treasurer Kenneth Loughry, and Senior Research Fellow Margaretta Salinger. The BOMC representatives were: Chairman of the Board Harry Scherman, President Meredith Wood, and Vice-Presidents Van Cartmell, Oscar Ogg, and Warren Lynch. There were surely earlier discussions of the project between early 1952, when Taylor voiced dissatisfaction with the Miniatures (see Chapter 2), and late 1954, when this meeting took place. Francis Henry Taylor, Babel’s Tower: The Dilemma of the Modern Museum (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 53. Sample letter from James Rorimer to Mr. Griffin, n. d., in “From the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Presenting A New Idea to Americans Interested in Art,” Promotional Mailing with Rembrandt Self-Portrait on the Envelope, 1957, Book of the Month Club—Course on Art Education, 1954–7 (File 1 of 3), Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College, Salinger joined the Met in the 1930s and worked as a Research Fellow and then Senior Researcher in the Department of Paintings before being appointed Associate Curator and then in 1970 Curator of the Department of European Paintings. She certainly had the ability to write for a general audience as evidenced by her six Miniatures albums, which ranged in topics from Fra Angelico and Peter Paul Rubens to Vincent van Gogh and French nineteenth-century painting. She may not have been chosen to be the author of the Seminars due to sexist attitudes at the Met. For example, when a woman, whom Davidson had hired to manage the Miniatures, fell ill, Taylor wrote to him: “As you know, I had very grave doubts as to the wisdom of putting so much of the managerial responsibility in the hands of a young married woman with children.” Letter from Francis Taylor to Marshall Davidson, July 11, 1951, Metropolitan Miniatures—Production, 1951–2, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Paul Cummings, Oral History Interview with Marshall B. Davidson, November 27, 1977–January 10, 1978, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, n.p. [24], transcript, available online: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-historyinterview-marshall-b-davidson-11911#transcript (accessed January 27, 2021). Canaday’s outline, likely written in the first part of 1955, is included with a memo from Dudley Easby and Marshall Davidson to Callison, Mayor, and Rousseau, March 16, 1955, Book of the Month Club—Course on Art Education, 1954–63 (File 3 of 3), Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. For biographical and autobiographical information on Canaday, see Geoffrey Hellman, “The Keys to Canaday,” Art in America 50, no. 3 (1962): 68–73; Geoffrey

Notes to pp. 50–54

8 9

10 11 12

13

14 15

16

17

18 19

20

183

Hellman, Typewritten notes (Canaday interview), 1962, and letter from John Canaday to Geoffrey Hellman, 1962, Box 45, Folder 4 (Art in America John Canaday Profile 1962–4), Geoffrey T. Hellman Papers, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University, New York; and John Canaday, Biographical data, etc., Box 1, Folder: Biographical Material, John Canaday Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries, Syracuse. Geoffrey Hellman, Typewritten notes (Canaday interview). Letter from John Canaday to Tim F. Casper of the Putney School, May 3, 1961, Box 1, Folder: Biographical Material, John Canaday Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries. Letter from John Canaday to Tim F. Casper. Geoffrey Hellman, Typewritten notes (Canaday interview). Geoffrey Hellman, Typewritten notes (Davidson interview). Davidson also recounts this story in Cummings, Oral History Interview with Marshall B. Davidson, n.p. [23–4]. Canaday’s four Miniatures albums were: The Arensberg Collection of TwentiethCentury Painting in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Sienese Painting, Jacques Louis David, and Forgotten Favorites (about nineteenth-century salon painting). Geoffrey Hellman, Typewritten notes (Davidson interview). Letter from Marshall Davidson to Van Cartmell, April 7, 1955, Book of the Month Club—Course on Art Education, 1954–63 (File 3 of 3), Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Letter from Van Cartmell to John Canaday, July 26, 1955, Book of the Month Club—Course on Art Education, 1954–63 (File 3 of 3), Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Christine E. Brennan and Yelena Rakic, “Fragmented Histories,” in Making the Met, 175. For Rousseau’s work as a Monuments Man, see also James S. Plaut, “Art-Confiscation Agencies,” in The Spoils of War: World War II and its Aftermath: The Loss, Reappearance, and Recovery of Cultural Property, ed. Elizabeth Simpson (New York: Abrams, 1997), 124–5; Lynn Nicholas, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 378–82. Grace Lichtenstein, “Theodore Rousseau Dies at 61; Vice Director of the Met Museum,” The New York Times, January 2, 1974, 40. “Re: The twelve portfolios on the Appreciation of Art, prepared by John Canaday for publication by the Book-of-the-Month Club under the sponsorship of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” memo from Theodore Rousseau, Jr., to James Rorimer and Marshall Davidson, September 13, 1957, Box 24, Folder 4, James J. Rorimer Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Letter from GSH to James Rorimer, February 29, 1960, Box 24, Folder 4, James J. Rorimer Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives.

184

Notes to pp. 54–56

21 Vera Zolberg, “Tensions of Mission in American Art Museums,” in Nonprofit Enterprise in the Arts: Studies in Mission and Constraint, ed. Paul DiMaggio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 190–2. 22 Geoffrey Hellman, Typewritten notes (Davidson interview). 23 “Re: Metropolitan Museum Art Course,” memo from F. H. Brown to Harry Scherman and Meredith Wood, October 26, 1955, Box 24, Folder 4, James J. Rorimer Records, Files, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 24 At a meeting on October 31, 1955 between the Met and the BOMC, the basic principles of the contract for the trial were set out. See “Notes on Conference October 31, 1955 Between Representatives of the Metropolitan Museum and the Book-of-the-Month Club,” n.d., Book of the Month Club—Course on Art Education, 1954–63 (File 3 of 3), Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. In November, Scherman asked Met President Roland Redmond to have the Met executive board ratify the agreement as soon as possible. See letter from Harry Scherman to Roland Redmond, November 14, 1955, Book of the Month Club—Course on Art Education, 1954–63 (File 3 of 3), Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 25 Letter from Meredith Wood to James Rorimer, August 23, 1956, Box 24, Folder 4, James J. Rorimer Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 26 Geoffrey Hellman, Typewritten notes (Davidson interview). 27 A letter-contract lays out the Miniatures expenses (photography, authors’ fees, etc.) the BOMC is supposed to cover. See letter-contract from Roland Redmond to Harry Scherman, February 21, 1956, Book of the Month Club—Course on Art Education, 1954–63 (File 3 of 3), Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. In a memo from August 1956, Davidson explicitly states that the BOMC is paying the Met $3,400 a month. Davidson wanted the amount increased to $4,800. See memo from Davidson to Loughery, August 31, 1956, Box 24, Folder 4, James J. Rorimer Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 28 Memo from Marshall Davidson to James Rorimer, August 9, 1956, Box 24, Folder 4, James J. Rorimer Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 29 Memo from Marshall Davidson to James Rorimer, April 4, 1958, Box 24, Folder 4, James J. Rorimer Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 30 Memo from Marshall Davidson to James Rorimer, August 9, 1956. 31 Memo from Marshall Davidson to Kenneth Loughery, August 31, 1956, Box 24, Folder 4, James J. Rorimer Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 32 Memo from Marshall Davidson to Roland Redmond and James Rorimer, January 17, 1957, Box 24, Folder 4, James J. Rorimer Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 33 Cummings, Oral History Interview with Marshall B. Davidson, n.p. [42].

Notes to pp. 57–59

185

34 For biographical information on Rorimer, see Frederick S. Voss, “James J. Rorimer,” in Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 8, eds. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1988), 544–5; Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, 326–33. 35 Memo from Marshall Davidson to James Rorimer, Dudley Easby, and Kenneth Loughery, December 24, 1957, Metropolitan Miniatures - General and misc. correspondence, 1946–, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 36 Letter-contract from Dudley Easby to John Canaday for the second series of Metropolitan Seminars , July 28, 1958, Book of the Month Club--Course in Art Education—Canaday Seminars—Agreements 1958–66 (File 4 of 4), Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 37 Canaday and his agent Ivan Auw had complained to the BOMC and Met that $750 per volume was not sufficient compensation for Canaday’s work. See letter from Harry Scherman to Roland Redmond, April 25, 1958, Box 24, Folder 4, James J. Rorimer Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. In comparison, journalist Geoffrey Hellman received $225 for a short two-page piece in The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town,” January 4, 1964. entitled “The Canaday Affair,” which revealed that Matthew Head was Canaday’s pseudonym. See Geoffrey Hellman’s receipt from The New Yorker, December 21, 1963, Geoffrey T. Hellman Papers, Box 45, Folder 4 (Art in America John Canaday Profile 1962–4), Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University, New York. 38 Geoffrey Hellman, Typewritten notes (Canaday interview). 39 Memo from Marshall Davidson to James Rorimer, July 11, 1958, Box 24, Folder 4, James J. Rorimer Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 40 Letter from Meredith Wood to John Canaday, July 18, 1958, Book of the Month Club—Canaday Seminars—Agreements, 1958–66 (File 4 of 4), Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 41 Letter from John Canaday to Meredith Wood, July 21, 1958, Book of the Month Club—Canaday Seminars—Agreements, 1958–66 (File 4 of 4), Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 42 Sales and Royalty Payments: Book of the Month Club: Seminars in Art, November 19, 1959, Box 24, Folder 4, James J. Rorimer Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 43 Harry Scherman, “A Billion Books in the Homes of America Through an Economic Invention,” Abridgement of a talk before the Library of Congress, 1960, reprinted in “The First 40 Years of the Book-of-the-Month Club,” a sixteen-page advertising supplement in The New York Times, October 23, 1966, 12. 44 Sales and Royalty Payments: Book of the Month Club: Seminars in Art, November 19, 1959, Box 24, Folder 4, James J. Rorimer Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives.

186

Notes to pp. 59–63

45 Scherman, “A Billion Books in the Homes of America Through an Economic Invention,” 12. 46 Gallup Organization, “Metropolitan Seminars in Art, A Survey of Subscribers and former Subscribers,” November 1967, Book of the Month Club—Survey of subscribers to Met Seminars in Art, 1967, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 47 Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, with Dominique Schnapper, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public, trans. Caroline Beatte and Nick Merriman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 91. 48 Letter from Marshall Davidson to Oscar Ogg, February 5, 1959, Box 24, Folder 4, James J. Rorimer Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 49 Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 51. 50 John Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art: Great Periods in Paintng, vol. L: Actaeon and the Atom (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1960), 28. 51 “Memorandum of the Meeting Held in the Board Room on November 12, 1954, and Attended by Representatives of the Museum and Book-of-the Month Club.” 52 Metropolitan Seminars in Art advertisement, New York Times, Februray 11, 1962, 228. The same or similar statements appear in New York Times advertisements for the Seminars throughout the 1960s. 53 John Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art, Vol. 1: What is a Painting? (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1958), 25. 54 John Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art, Vol. 11: The Artist, The Artist as a Social Critic (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1959), 5. 55 For the association of enlightenment values with whiteness, see Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997). David MacKinnon Ebitz writes: “Canaday seems most responsive to the pleasures of thinking.” See David MacKinnon Ebitz, review of John Canaday, What is Art? An Introduction to Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), Journal of Aesthetic Education 15, no. 3 (1981): 124. Canaday’s What is Art? (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1980) is a revised and enlarged version of the first series of Metropolitan Seminars in Art. Joan Shelley Rubin discusses similar ideas in relation to the “Great Books” movement. See Joan Shelley Rubin, Cultural Considerations: Essays on Readers, Writers, and Musicians in Postwar America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 150. 56 John Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art, Vol. 11: The Artist, The Artist as a Social Critic (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1959), 12. 57 Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art, vol. 12: The Artist as a Visionary (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1958), 26. 58 John Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art, Vol. 1: What is a Painting?, 8. 59 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1958 [1934]), 3–19.

Notes to pp. 63–66

187

60 “Memorandum of the Meeting Held in the Board Room on November 12, 1954.” 61 Dale Carnegie, How to Develop Self-Confidence and Influence People by Public Speaking, ed. Dorothy Carnegie (New York: Pocket Books [Simon and Schuster], 1956), 7–8. Carnegie’s text is a revised version of Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business, originally published in 1926. 62 “The Great Books Foundation: A Note of Explanation,” The Great Books: First Year Course, vol. 9: A Great Books Primer, ed. Robert Hemenway (Chicago: The Great Books Foundation, 1955), n.p. 63 Mortimer Adler, “Rules for Reading,” The Great Books: First Year Course, vol. 9: A Great Books Primer. On Adler and the Great Books Foundation, see Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 186–96. 64 Adler, “Rules for Reading,” 79. 65 John Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art, vol. 12: The Artist as a Visionary, 25. 66 Letter from Axel Rosin (BOMC) to Michel Beilis (Director of Conferences, University of Omaha), September 21, 1962, Book of the Month Club—Course in Art Education—Canaday Seminars—Promotion, use in other media, etc., 1958–66 (File 3 of 3), Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 67 For the slides program, see documents in Book of the Month Club—Course in Art Education—Finished Copy—Slide Show series (n. d.), Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. For the free copy of Canaday’s Mainstreams of Modern Art, see promotional material in Book of the Month Club— Course on Art Education—Canaday Seminars—Promotion, use in other media, etc. 1958–66 (File 3 of 3), Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives; for the tele-lecture, see documents in Book of the Month Club—Course on Art Education—Canaday Seminars—Promotion, use in other media, etc. 1958–66 (File 3 of 3), Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. John Canaday, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Art: An essay designed to point out the basic things one should look for in order to appraise intelligently and fully appreciate whatever paintings one may see, prepared for distribution to the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (New York: Book-of-the-Month Club Inc., 1959). 68 Letter from Dudley Easby to Axel Rosin, November 10, 1958, Book of the Month Club—Course on Art Education—Canaday Seminars—Promotion, use in other media, etc. 1958–66 (File 3 of 3), Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 69 “Re.: Meeting with Representatives of the Book-of-the-Month Club to discuss 13-week Television Program,” Memo of November 24, 1959, Book of the Month Club—Course on Art Education—Canaday Seminars—Promotion, use in other media, etc., 1958–66 (File 3 of 3), Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives.

188

Notes to pp. 66–69

70 Lynn Spigel, TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 148. See also Maurice Berger, The Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television, exh. cat. The Jewish Museum, New York (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). 71 Francis Henry Taylor, “A Report to the Trustees of The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Television,” 5, September 15, 1952, Box 15, Folder 14, The Francis Henry Taylor Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 72 Letter from H. D. Allen (associate curator in charge of loans, Met) to Fred Rickey (executive producer, CBS), June 20, 1951, Box 2, Folder 18, The Francis Henry Taylor Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. In another letter to CBS, Taylor writes that the Met is “perfectly willing to grant permission and to cooperate in this matter provided we are assured that the material will be properly and reverently treated.” Letter from Francis Henry Taylor to Frank Stanton, Box 2, Folder 18, April 6, 1954, The Francis Henry Taylor Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 73 Letter from Dudley Easby to Harry Scherman, 9 December 1959, Book of the Month Club—Course in Art Education—Canaday Seminars—Promotion, use in other media, etc., 1958–66 (File 2 of 3), Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 74 Letter-contract from Dudley Easby to Axel Rosin, March 27, 1961, Book of the Month Club—Course in Art Education—Canaday Seminars—Promotion, use in other media, etc., 1958–66 (File 2 of 3), Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 75 “A New Free-Loan Film, ‘What is a Painting?’,” Advertisement, received by the Met July 21, 1961, Book of the Month Club—Course in Art Education--Canaday Seminars--Promotion, use in other media, etc. 1958–66 (File 2 of 3), Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 76 “From the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Presenting A New Idea to Americans Interested in Art,” Promotional Mailing with Rembrandt Self-Portrait on the Envelope, 1957, Book of the Month Club—Course on Art Education, 1954–7 (File 1 of 3), Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 77 Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 23, 219. 78 Bourdieu and Darbel, The Love of Art, 112. 79 Bourdieu and Darbel, The Love of Art, 102. 80 Bourdieu and Darbel, The Love of Art, 95: : “Why not add to the educational services (which in the USA are almost always more extensive than the curatorial services), and provide museums with libraries, concert halls, and shops selling reproductions, jewelry and folk objects? Why not make museums more welcoming by fitting them out with bars, lounges or restaurants which would allow visitors to spend the whole

Notes to pp. 69–72

81 82

83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94 95 96

97 98 99

189

day at the museum? Why not provide art teachers with the facilities to hold their classes in the museum galleries, as is often seen in the USA?” For a discussion of the high-quality of the images, see Chapter 4. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” trans. Richard Nice, in Handbook of Theory of Research for the Sociology of Education , ed. J. Richardson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 244. Dianne Harris, Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 21. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 122. Cited in Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic, 197. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), 17, 18. Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic, 119. As quoted in Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic, 113. Barzun, The House of Intellect, 84. Lynn Spigel, “The Suburban Home Companion: Television and Neighborhood Ideal in Postwar America,” in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 186. Spigel, “The Suburban Home Companion,” 186–7. Spigel, “The Suburban Home Companion,” 186. John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routlege, 1982), 113. Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Fontana, 1974), 26. Margaret Morse, “Talk, talk, talk,” Screen 26, no. 2 (1985): 5. Sondra Wieland Howe, “The NBC Music Appreciation Hour: Radio Broadcasts of Walter Damrosch, 1928–1942,” Research in Music Education 51, no. 1 (2003): 64–77. According to a 1941 New York Times article on Met Director Taylor’s early efforts to use television as a pedagogical tool: “If some commentator on art can do for painting and sculpture what Mr. Walter Damrosch has done for music in his popular discussions of Beethoven and Wagner, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will become an institution fully as important to Wichita, Kans., as it is to New York City, and priceless masterpieces will become the visual possession of a nation. . . .” See “Televising Art,” The New York Times, June 1, 1941, 8E, cited in Harry Grier, “The Museum’s Television Program,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 36, no. 7 (1941), 150. Spigel, TV by Design, 177. Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture, 2–15. “How Many Did You Get?,” Chapel Hills News Leader, November 10, 1958, Book of the Month Club—Seminars—Complaints and duplicate mailings 1958–66, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives.

190

Notes to pp. 72–73

100 Extract from the Minutes of the meeting [of the Board of Trustees and the Executive Committee], held November 18, 1958, Book of the Month Club— Seminars—Complaints and duplicate mailings 1958–66, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 101 Letter from Dudley Easby to Meredith Wood, November 20, 1958, Book of the Month Club—Seminars—Complaints and duplicate mailings 1958–66, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 102 The notice of apology began: “If you have previously received one of these announcements . . . please forgive us for sending another.” The BOMC explained that in mail campaigns it uses several lists and it is impossible to check all the lists “in order to eliminate duplicated names.” The note also recommends giving a duplicated announcement to “some friend who may be interested.” A copy of the note was included in a letter from Meredith Wood to Dudley Easby, December 4, 1958, Book of the Month Club—Seminars—Complaints and duplicate mailings 1958–66, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. The BOMC had sent out a similar note about duplicate mailings for the Miniatures in the early 1950s. See “If you have received a previous mailing on the Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures. . .,” Metropolitan Miniatures— Production, 1951–2, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 103 Letter from Robert Hosford to James Rorimer, March 18, 1959, Box 24, Folder 3, James J. Rorimer Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Marshall Davidson replied to Hosford and defended the Seminars, which he believed “do in fact represent an extraordinary essay in art education . . . The texts are sophisticated, lucid, persuasive, and accurate; the illustrations are well selected and reproduced with care.” Letter from Marshall Davidson to Robert Hosford, March 20, 1959, Box 24, Folder 3, James J. Rorimer Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 104 Letter from Betty MacDonald to the Met, 10 January 1961, Book of the Month Club—Seminars—Complaints and duplicate mailings 1958–66, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 105 John G. Getz, note written on BOMC subscription form, to the Met, February, 1963, Book of the Month Club—Seminars—Complaints and duplicate mailings 1958–66, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. E. Brinker of Dyess Air Force Base in Texas wrote to the Met after being billed for books he hadn’t ordered: “I am startled that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York would wittingly, or perhaps unwittingly lend its name to what appears such an odious gulling scheme.” Letter from Edwin Brinker to the Met, 9 May 1960, Book of the Month Club—Seminars—Complaints and duplicate mailings 1958–66, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives.

Notes to pp. 73–74

191

106 H. Klein, Report to the Better Business Bureau, November 30, 1961, Book of the Month Club—Seminars—Complaints and duplicate mailings 1958–66, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 107 In the promotional brochure for the first series, it states, for example: “The Metropolitan Museum of Art is prepared to send the first portfolio to anyone interested, for two weeks’ thorough examination.” 108 Letter from Mrs. A. Tager to the Met, May 11, 1964, Book of the Month Club— Seminars—Complaints and duplicate mailings 1958–66, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 109 This practice was clearly indicated in the form letter signed by Met Director Rorimer to subscribers of the first series: “if you do not want to proceed with the instruction, you will be completely free to stop the succeeding lessons from coming to you by notifying the Book-of-the-Month Club to that effect within thirty days.” Letter from James Rorimer to “Mrs. Smith,” n. d., included with the letter from James Rorimer to Harry Scherman, December 16, 1959, Box 24, Folder 4, James J. Rorimer Records, Files, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 110 “Unsolicited Merchandise: State and Federal Remedies for a Consumer Problem,” The Duke Law Journal 5 (October, 1970): 991. 111 Letter from Dudley Easby to Dermott Breen, July 18, 1960, Book of the Month Club—Seminars—Complaints and duplicate mailings 1958–66, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. In another case, Easby was more explicit about the distribution of duties: “While the Museum is responsible for editorial work on the Seminars, all distribution is handled by the Book-of-the-Month Club and we have no control over it. However, I am writing to the Book-of-the-Month Club, . . . and requesting that they make some adjustment satisfactory to you.” Letter from Dudley Easby to Rowena W. Kelly, 18 January 1961, Book of the Month Club—Seminars—Complaints and duplicate mailings 1958–66, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 112 Letter from Sydney Redecker to James Rorimer, April 18, 1959, Box 24, Folder 3, James J. Rorimer Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 113 Letter from Marshall Davidson to Sydney Redecker, April 21, 1959, Box 24, Folder 3, James J. Rorimer Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 114 Francis Taylor, “Report of the Director on the Reorganization and Consolidation of the Museum’s Educational and Extension Services,” June 23, 1941, Box 2, Folder 13, Francis Henry Taylor Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 115 Theodore L. Shaw, Hypocrisy about art: and what you don’t gain by it (Boston: Stuart Publications, 1962), 31. See also Shaw (under the pseudonym “The Aesthetics Cop”), “How the Metropolitan Museum Misteaches Art,” booklet published by Stuart Publications, Boston, n.d.; and Shaw (anonymously published), “Four Examples of what the Metropolitan Museum calls Art Education,” Critical: A Review of Art and

192

Notes to pp. 75–78

Criticism, no. 6 (n.d. [c. 1961]), 5–8. Copies of the last two items are in Box 24, Folder 3, James J. Rorimer Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 116 Shaw, Hypocrisy about art, 32. 117 Letter from Marshall Davidson, November 2, 1959, reproduced in Shaw, Hypocrisy about art, 133. Shaw also published his pseudonymous letter to the Met in this book. 118 Gallup Organization survey, “Metropolitan Seminars in Art.” 119 John Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art: Great Periods in Paintng, vol. L: Actaeon and the Atom (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1960), 28. 120 Rachel Cusk, Kudos (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), 39. 121 Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 196–7. 122 Radway, A Feeling for Books, 152. 123 Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 139; Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America,” Media, Culture, and Society 4, no. 1 (1982), 33–50; and DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in NineteenthCentury Boston, Part II: The Classification and Framing of American,” Media, Culture, and Society 4, no. 4 (1982), 303–22. 124 Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 149, 152. The sacralization of art is no more evident than in the struggle in early twentieth-century America between competing visions of the art museum. As Steven Conn has demonstrated, the model of the Louvre, with its emphasis on the auratic nature of the art object, won out over the model of the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), whose champions envisioned an educational institution that brought together art and science, chiefly through matters of industrial design. See Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), 192–232. 125 Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture, xii. 126 Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture, 2–15. 127 Radway, A Feeling for Books, 192. 128 Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture, 108. 129 See Rubin, Cultural Considerations. 130 Theodore Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routlege, 1991), 67. Macdonald cites Greenberg’s description of the work of the Russian academic painter Ilya Repin as kitsch: he “predigests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him with a short cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art.”

Notes to pp. 78–80

193

Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” The Partisan Review 6, no. 5 (1939): 44, cited in Dwight Macdonald, “A Theory of Mass Culture,” Diogenes 1, no. 3 (1953): 4, and Macdonald “Masscult and Midcult” (1960), Against the American Grain (New York: De Capo, 1983), 29. 131 Barzun, The House of Intellect, 50. 132 Radway, A Feeling for Books, 212. 133 Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture, 25. 134 Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1961), 203. 135 Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” 39. 136 Gallup Organization, “Metropolitan Seminars in Art.” 137 For a discussion of situated knowledge and readings of texts in the context of postwar America and middlebrow culture, see Joanne P. Sharp, Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and American Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 45. 138 Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 47. 139 Letter from Mrs. D. Marshall to John Canaday, March 19, 1962, Box 8, Folder: “Metropolitan Seminars and ‘Mainstreams’,” John Canaday Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries. 140 Letter from Donald Shank to Bradford Kelleher, March 28, 1966, Box 24, Folder 4, James J. Rorimer Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 141 Letter from Minnie L. Jack to John Canaday, February 10, 1962, Box 8, Folder: “Metropolitan Seminars and ‘Mainstreams’,” John Canaday Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries. 142 Letter from Mrs. H.A. Hiwasse to the Met, February 4, 1967, Book of the Month Club—Comments, suggestions and requests, 1967–, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 143 Letter from Sigrid Saal to John Canaday, February 1962, and Canaday’s undated reply, Box 8, Folder: “Metropolitan Seminars and ‘Mainstreams’,” John Canaday Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries. 144 Letter from Mrs. Ilgenfritz to John Canaday, November 25, 1959, Box 8, Folder: “Metropolitan Seminars and ‘Mainstreams’,” John Canaday Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries. 145 Letter from Harry Harris to James Rorimer, October 10, 1965, Box 24, Folder 3, James J. Rorimer Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 146 Gallup Organization, “Metropolitan Seminars in Art.” 147 For a classic statement of this position, see Herbert Marcuse “The Affirmative Character of Culture” (1937), in Negations, trans. Jeremy J. Schapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 88–133.

194

Notes to pp. 80–84

148 William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), 283. 149 Nicholas Thomas, The Return of Curiosity: What Museums are Good For in the 21st Century (Bristol: Reaktion Books, 2016), 60. 150 For a discussion of these issues, see Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusiveness in Museums, ed. Johnetta Betsch Cole and Laura L. Lott (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).

3 The Met and Art Education in Postwar America 1 Calvin Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (London: Longman, 1970); Making the Met, 1870–2020, ed. Andrea Bayer with Laura D. Corey. Exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). 2 W. E. H. [Winifred E. Howe], “The Museum’s Educational Credo,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 13, no. 9 (1918): 192–3. 3 Winifred E. Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1946), vol. 2, 198. Taylor had written: “Properly considered, every activity of an art gallery is essentially educational.” See Francis Henry Taylor, Babel’s Tower: The Dilemma of the Modern Museum (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 36. William M. Ivins, Jr, the Met Print Curator, similarly wrote that all museum work “is distinctly and inevitably educational.” See Ivins, “Of Education in the Museum,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 29, no. 9 (1934): 149. 4 Lisa C. Roberts, From Knowledge to Narrative: Educators and the Changing Museum (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 4. 5 Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 193. It should be noted that these two models are not necessarily exclusive in one institution. Jeffrey Trask has argued that the development of the Met’s American Wing followed more the model of the South Kensington Museum. See Jeffrey Trask, Things American: Art Museums and Civic Culture in the Progressive Era (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 6 Howe, “The Museum’s Educational Credo,” 192–3. 7 Charter of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and laws relating to it: constitution, by-laws, lease, 1900, section 1, available online: https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/ digital/collection/p15324coll10/id/157963 (accessed November 15, 2020). 8 Joseph H. Choate’s address on the Met’s opening day, March 30, 1880, reproduced in Winifred E. Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1913), vol. 1, 198. For a discussion of Choate’s position on the museum, see also Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, 17.

Notes to pp. 85–88

195

9 In 1889, the Department of Casts was established, and by 1908 its collection had grown to over 1,500 pieces. See Katharine Baetjer and Joan R. Mertens, “The Founding Decades” in Making the Met, 45–6. 10 Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 1, 247. 11 Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, 9. 12 J. Pierpont Morgan and Robert W. de Forest, “The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Thirty-Fifth Annual Report of the Trustees. 1905,” in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Thirty-Fifth Annual Report of the Trustees, 1905, 11, available online: https:// www.jstor.org/stable/i40012306 (accessed January 26, 2021). 13 Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 2, 164. 14 Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 2, xii. 15 Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 2, 165. 16 Trask, Things American: Art Museums and Civic Culture in the Progressive Era, 1. On the development of the American wing, see also Amelia Peck and Thayer Tolles, “Creating a National Narrative,” Making the Met, 110–27. 17 For a discussion of Morris and Ivins’ work, see Amelia Peck and Freyda Spira, “Art for All,” in Making the Met, 50–69. 18 Ivins, Jr. “Of Education in the Museum,” 149–50. 19 Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 2, 163. 20 Taylor biographical note in the Met finding aid to his papers. Available online: https://www.libmma.org/digital_files/archives/Francis_Henry_Taylor_Collection_ b18556760.pdf (accessed November 10, 2020). 21 Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 2, 69. 22 Francis Henry Taylor, “Report of the Director on the Reorganization and Consolidation of the Museum’s Educational and Extension Services,” 1, 23 June 1941, Box 2, Folder 13, Francis Henry Taylor records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. For a summary of this report, see Francis Henry Taylor, “Education and Museum Extension,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 36, no. 9 (1941): 179–81. 23 Taylor, “Report of the Director on the Reorganization and Consolidation of the Museum’s Educational and Extension Services,” 1. Taylors writes that there are “some hundred courses” in art history given at Columbia, N.Y.U, and City College. 24 Taylor, “Report of the Director on the Reorganization and Consolidation of the Museum’s Educational and Extension Services,” 7, 13–14. 25 Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 2, 179. 26 Taylor, “Report of the Director on the Reorganization and Consolidation of the Museum’s Educational and Extension Services,” 8, 12. 27 H. D. M. Grier, “Television Experiments in American Art Museums,” Museum 2, no. 4 (1949): 247–52; H. D. M. Grier, “The Museum’s Television Program,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 36, No. 7 (1941): 147–51.

196

Notes to pp. 88–90

28 Taylor, “Report of the Director on the Reorganization and Consolidation of the Museum’s Educational and Extension Services,” 13. 29 Vera Zolberg, “Tensions of Mission in American Art Museums,” in Nonprofit Enterprise in the Arts: Studies in Mission and Constraint, ed. Paul Dimaggio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 184. For a discussion of museums’ missions after the Second World War, see also Andrew McClellan, “A Brief History of the Art Museum Public,” in Art and its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium, ed. Andrew McClellan (London: Blackwell, 2002), 28–33 30 Taylor, Babel’s Tower, 41, 22. 31 Taylor, Babel’s Tower, 26, 31. 32 Taylor is here indebted in his humanist line of thinking to Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man: “Just as the powers of the body are made stronger through gymnastic, the powers of the mind grow in strength and vigor in this arena [philosophy] of learning.” See Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, trans. A. Robert Caponigri (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1956), 39. As we’ll see in the conclusion, Taylor referenced this text in his 1948 essay “Modern Art and the Dignity of Man.” 33 Taylor, Babel’s Tower, 30–1. 34 Taylor, Babel’s Tower, 52. 35 T. R. Adam, The Museum and Popular Culture (New York: American Organization for Adult Education, 1939), 9. For Adorno, see “Valery Proust Museum” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Neville Spearmen, 1967), 175. 36 Theodore L. Low, The Museum as a Social Instrument (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art for the American Association of Museums, 1942), 33. For a discussion of Low and Taylor’s views, see Andrew McClellan, “A Brief History of the Art Museum Public,” 23–4. 37 Taylor, Babel’s Tower, 50. 38 Meyer Schapiro, Review of Francis Henry Taylor, Babel’s Tower: The Dilemma of the Modern Museum (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), in The Art Bulletin 27, no. 4 (1945): 273. 39 Taylor, “Museums in a Changing World,” 790; Taylor, Babel’s Tower, 23. 40 Low, The Museum as a Social Instrument, 9. 41 Low, The Museum as a Social Instrument, 46. 42 John Cotton Dana, “The Gloom of the Museum” (1917), in Reinventing the Museum: The Evolving Conversation on the Paradigm Shift, ed. Gail Anderson, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2012), 30; cited in Low, The Museum as a Social Instrument, 12. 43 Taylor, Babel’s Tower, 38. 44 General Education in a Free Society: Report of the Harvard Committee, chaired by Paul H. Buck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 267.

Notes to pp. 90–93 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52

53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63 64

197

Adam, The Museum and Popular Culture, 55. Low, The Museum as a Social Instrument, 15. Adam, The Museum and Popular Culture, 14. Adam, The Museum and Popular Culture, 15. Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, 266. Taylor, “Museums in a Changing World,” 790, 792. The Miniatures followed the earlier Met’s “Masterpieces in the Subway” (1943–5), reproductions of works in their collections displayed in New York subway stations. On this campaign, see Lynn Spigel, TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 149. “The Metropolitan Museum of Art Presents Art Miniatures” (promotional brochure for the Miniatures), c. 1948, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Samples, albums, form letters, clippings, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives, New York. “Art Seminars in the Home” (promotional brochure for the Seminars), c. 1957, Book of the Month Club—Course on Art Education, 1954–7 (File 1 of 3), Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives, New York. Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 14. Taylor, Babel’s Tower, 52. Schapiro, Review of Taylor, Babel’s Tower 275. Schapiro, Review of Taylor, Babel’s Tower, 273–4. Schapiro, Review of Taylor, Babel’s Tower 274. Low, The Museum as a Social Instrument, 32. Blanche R. Brown, Review of Theodore Low, The Museum as a Social Instrument (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art for the American Association of Museums, 1942), The College Art Journal 2, no. 4, part 1 (1943): 132. Like Schapiro’s critique of Taylor, Brown also insisted on the need for scholarship in museums: “Expert curatorial activity, lectures by the best available scholars, become more important than ever. A broader public brings, if anything, an increased obligation to maintain high standards, and the museum must join with the schools in maintaining them.” Low, The Museum as a Social Instrument, 32–3. Low, The Museum as a Social Instrument, 24–30; on Low, see McClellan, “A Brief History of the Art Museum Public,” 28–9. G. James Daichendt, Artist Scholar: Reflections on Writing and Research (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), 34. The statistics for art enrolments are from Andrew Ritchie, The Visual Arts in Higher Education (New Haven: The College Art Association, 1966). The statistics for general education are from 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait, ed. Thomas D. Snyder (Washington: Center for Education Statistics, 1993).

198

Notes to pp. 93–95

65 A Statistical Survey of Museums in the United States and Canada (American Association of Museums, 1965), 16. 66 Such funding bodies included the Commission of Fine Arts and the President’s Emergency Fund to subsidize international cultural exchanges and trade fairs. For a discussion of the U.S. federal government’s initiatives at this time to fund the arts, see Arne Randall, “Federal Government and the Arts,” Art Education 9, no. 2 (1956): 3–5, 16. 67 “Senate Hearing on Art Bills,” Art Education 9, no. 5 (1956): 16. As compared to most Western nations, the United States has funded the arts less through the federal government and more through state and local governments and private philanthropy. See “How the United States funds the Arts,” a report from the National Endowment for the Arts (October, 2004), available online: https://www. americansforthearts.org/sites/default/files/how_0.pdf (accessed April 20, 2021). 68 Edwin Ziegfeld, “The Teaching of Visual Arts in General Education in the United States of America,” Report to the Seminar on the Visual Arts in General Education, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Bristol, UK, July 7–27, 1951, available online: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000127168?p osInSet=16&queryId=N-EXPLORE-b2efbdac-245f-4d0e-995e-3d98d675417b (accessed March 23, 2021). 69 Discussing teaching art in museum classrooms, John E. Brown, Curator of Education at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, explained: “This all may result in a Leonardo or two, but perhaps more important to the larger functions of education, it will inevitably develop a citizenry that is at once more observant, more sensitive, more independent in its ability to assess and determine the highest qualities of excellence in all things.” See Brown, “The Museum as Educator,” Art Education 6, no. 7 (1953): 6. 70 Ernest Ziegfeld, Art in the College Program of General Education (New York: Teacher’s College, Columbia University, 1953), 5. 71 General Education in a Free Society, 54. 72 Higher Education for American Democracy: A Report of the President’s Commission on Higher Education, chaired by George F. Cook, vol. 1: Establishing the Goals (Washington: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1947), 48–9. 73 Higher Education for American Democracy, 49. 74 General Education in a Free Society, 65. 75 Edward Shils, “Mass Society and its Culture,” Daedalus 89, no. 2 (1960): 310. 76 According to the President’s report, knowledge and understanding gained through general education “are not to be regarded as ends in themselves. They are means to a more abundant personal life and a stronger, freer social order.” See Higher Education for American Democracy, 49. As Harvard President James Bryan Conant put it in the introduction to the Harvard report, general education is “a great instrument of American democracy [that] can both shape the future and secure the foundations of our free society.” See General Education in a Free Society, x.

Notes to pp. 95–100

199

77 Higher Education for American Democracy, 11. In the Harvard report, the words “complex” and “specialism” are often used to describe the modern urban experience. See, for example, “the complexity of the city” (16) and “the inherent specialism of modern and particularly of city life” (33). 78 William H. Whyte, Jr. The Organization Man (New York, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956). 86. 79 David Riesman, with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969 [1950]), 143. 80 General Education in a Free Society, 132; Higher Education for American Democracy, 54. 81 Ziegfeld, Art in the College Program of General Education, 138–9. 82 Ziegfeld, Art in the College Program of General Education, 147. 83 Ziegfeld, Art in the College Program of General Education, 221. 84 Herold Hunt, “The Arts: Promoters of Understanding,” Art Education 3, no. 4 (1950): 2–5. 85 Herbert Read, Education through Art (London:Faber and Faber, 1943), 5. 86 Manuel Barkan, “Art and Human Values,” Art Education 6, no. 3 (1953): 1–2 87 Barkan, “Art and Human Values,” 2. 88 Manuel Barkan, A Foundation for Art Education (New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1955), 4. 89 Francis H. Horn, “Art and General Education,” Art Education 7, no. 8 (1954): 7–8. 90 Ernest Ziegfeld, “A Reply to Dr. Horn,” Art Education 8, no. 1 (1955), 5. 91 Irwin Edman, “Art as Education in Freedom,” Art Education 4, no. 2 (1951): 4. 92 Edman, “Art as Education in Freedom,” 2. 93 Edman, “Art as Education in Freedom,” 4. 94 Irwin Edman, “Art as Education,” in Art as the Measure of Man (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), 40. 95 Bruno Bettelheim, “Art: A Personal Vision,” in Art as the Measure of Man (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), 62, 55. 96 Bettelheim, “Art: A Personal Vision,” 61 97 Bettelheim, “Art: A Personal Vision,” 62 98 Marshall Davidson, “Introduction,” in John Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art, vol. I: What is a Painting? (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, n.d. [1957]), 5. 99 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 100 As cited in Andrew McClellan, “A Brief History of the Art Museum Public,” 21. 101 Irwin Edman, “Art as Education,” 40. 102 Barzun, The House of Intellect (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 51. 103 Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1961), 203–04.

200

Notes to pp. 100–103

104 György Márkus “Adorno and Mass Culture: Autonomous Art Against the Culture Industry,” Thesis Eleven 86 (2006) 67–89. 105 T. J. Diffey, “Aesthetic Instrumentalism,” British Journal of Aesthetics 22, no. 4 (1982): 337. 106 Robert Stecker, “Aesthetic Instrumentalism and Aesthetic Autonomy,” British Journal of Aesthetics 24, no. 2 (1984): 163. 107 Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 152. 108 Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult” (1960), Against the American Grain (New York: De Capo, 1983), 37. 109 Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” 73. 110 Joan Shelley Rubin, Cultural Considerations: Essays on Readers, Writers, and Musicians in Postwar America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 29–58. 111 Richard A. Peterson, “Understanding Audience Segmentation: From Elite and Popular to Omnivore and Univore,”Poetics 21 (1992): 243–58. 112 Shils, “Mass Society and its Culture,” 306. 113 Shils, “Mass Society and its Culture,” 301. 114 “Re: The twelve portfolios on the Appreciation of Art, prepared by John Canaday for publication by the Book-of-the-Month Club under the sponsorship of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Met Internal Memo from Theodore Rousseau to James Rorimer and Marshall Davidson, September 13, 1957, Box 24, Folder 4 (BOMC Art Seminars in the Home Correspondence, 1955–66), James J. Rorimer records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. [EN 19] 115 Radway, A Feeling for Books, 150.

4 Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer: Reproductions and Quality 1 The New York Times Book Review, April 9, 1967, 24–5. The Metropolitan Seminars were advertised regularly in the The New York Times magazine and book review throughout the 1960s. 2 Letter from Meredith Wood to Subscriber, n.d. [1958], found in the first volume of the Metropolitian Seminars in Art in the collection of the Art and Visual Resource Centre, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. 3 John Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art, vol. 2: Realism (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1958), 9–10. 4 John Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art, vol. 10: Techniques: Water Color, Pastel, and Prints (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1958), 19.

Notes to pp. 104–108

201

5 Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art, vol. 10: Techniques: Water Color, Pastel, and Prints, 14. 6 John Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art, vol. 8: Techniques: Fresco (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1958), 5–6. 7 According to the industry film, The Art and Technique of Photoengravings, “Although there is no black in nature’s spectrum, photomechanical interpretation needs a neutral color for technical density and modeling reasons.” See The Art and Technique of Photoengraving, a film by the Horan Engraving Company, c. 1955, digitized in 2015, available online: https://vimeo.com/134626010 (accessed October 6, 2020). For a contemporaneous discussion of the photoengraving process, see Julian Soubiran, The Art and Technique of Photo-Engraving (New York: Horan Engraving Co., 1952). 8 The Art and Technique of Photoengraving (film). 9 Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 195, 199–200. 10 “Metropolitan Miniatures, New Series of Color Reproductions of Masterpieces, To Bring Museum Treasures to the Nation,” News Release from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 20–1, 1947, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Samples, albums, form letters, clippings, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives, New York. 11 “Conference on Miniatures Program,” Minutes of a meeting with Mr. Taylor, Mr. Remington, Mr. Loughry and Mr. Davidson, July 16, 1951, Metropolitan Miniatures—Production, 1951–2, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 12 “Metropolitan Miniatures: Quotations from Letters,” October 31, 1947, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Material from Latham file, 1947–8 (Sept.–Dec. and Jan.–May), Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 13 Before this meeting, Meredith Wood of the BOMC had contacted a friend working in Switzerland to acquire information about buying plates from the Swiss publishing house founded by Albert Skira, who, it seems, was having financial difficulties at the time and had recently entered a deal with Imprimeries Réunies in Paris. See letters from Alfred Tree to Gilbert Perkins, October 28, 1954, from Meredith Wood to Francis Taylor, November 4, 1954, and from Gilbert Perkins to Meredith Wood, November 26, 1954, Francis Henry Taylor records, Box 2, Folder 5, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 14 Letter from Mrs. H.A. Hiwasse to the Met, February 4, 1967, Book of the Month Club—Comments, suggestions and requests, 1967–, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 15 Letter from Freyda Nacque Adler to James Rorimer, January 23, 1963, Box 24, Folder 4, James J. Rorimer Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Letter from Howard M. Jones to James Rorimer, 24 April 1959, Box 24, Folder 4, James J. Rorimer Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Davidson’s handwritten note (attached to Jones’s letter) is addressed to Rorimer.

202

Notes to pp. 108–10

16 “Conference on Miniatures Program,” Minutes of a meeting with Mr. Taylor, Mr. Remington, Mr. Loughry and Mr. Davidson, July 16, 1951, Metropolitan Miniatures—Production, 1951–2, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 17 Letter from Marshall Davidson to James Rorimer summarizing a meeting on April 1958 between Davidson and Scherman, April 4, 1958, Box 24, Folder 4, James J. Rorimer Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 18 Letter from Lincoln Mott to James Rorimer, January 7, 1963, and letter from James Rorimer to Lincoln Mott, January 10, 1963, Box 24, Folder 3, James J. Rorimer Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 19 Letter from James Rorimer to Axel Rosin, January 23, 1963, Box 24, Folder 4, James J. Rorimer Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 20 Letter from Hermann Jaffe to Francis Taylor, November 1, 1941, Metropolitan Miniatures—Production, 1941–50, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 21 For a discussion of the Met’s purchase of the painting, see Calvin Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (London: Longman, 1970), 335–9. 22 “Museum Gets Rembrandt for 2.3 Million,” The New York Times, November 1, 1961, 1. 23 “A Costly Rembrandt Goes to Metropolitan,” New York Herald Tribune, November 16, 1961, 1, clipping in Box 270, Folder 2, The Metropolitan Museum of Art historical clippings and ephemera files, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 24 Letters of congratulations and complaint about the purchase, poems about the painting and requests for Rorimer’s signature are included in Box 5, Folder 14; Box 5, Folder 15; Box 5 Folder 18, James J. Rorimer Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 25 Paul Gardner, “Museum Acquiring Cartoons Satirizing Its New Rembrandt,” New York Times, May 7, 1962, 33, clipping in Box 270, Folder 2, The Metropolitan Museum of Art historical clippings and ephemera files, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 26 James M. Bradburne and Geraldine Banks, Otis Kay; Money, Mystery, and Mastery, exh. cat. The New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2014), 120–1. 27 Rembrandt Reactions (quotations from letters about the purchase of Rembrandt’s Aristotle), Box 5, Folder 18, James J. Rorimer Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 28 Rembrandt Reactions (quotations from letters about the purchase of Rembrandt’s Aristotle), Box 5, Folder 18, James J. Rorimer Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 29 Memo from Bradford Kelleher to James Rorimer, 19 January 1962, Book of the Month Club—Rembrandt Reproductions, 1962–, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives.

Notes to pp. 110–14

203

30 Mock-up advertisement, dated March 13, 1962, for the BOMC Rembrandt reproduction for the New York Times book review section, before March 13, 1962, Book of the Month Club—Rembrandt Reproductions, 1962–, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 31 Mailer for the BOMC Reproduction of Rembrandt’s Aristotle, 1962, Book of the Month Club—Rembrandt Reproductions, 1962–, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 32 Re: Returns from B.M.C. Advertisement in New York Times on Sunday, May 13, 1962, memo from Dudley Easby to James Rorimer, Book of the Month Club— Rembrandt Reproductions, 1962–, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 33 Book-of-the-Month Club Reproduction of the Rembrandt, memo from Gray Williams to Dudley Easby, June 29, 1962, Book of the Month Club—Rembrandt Reproductions, 1962–, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 34 Paul Cummings, Oral History Interview with Marshall B. Davidson, November 27, 1977–January 10, 1978, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, n.p. [41], available online: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interviewmarshall-b-davidson-11911#transcript, (accessed January 27, 2021). 35 Memo from Bradford Kelleher to Kenneth Loughry, July 26, 1962, Book of the Month Club—Rembrandt Reproductions, 1962–, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 36 Memo from Kenneth Loughry to James Rorimer, July 31, 1962, Book of the Month Club—Rembrandt Reproductions, 1962–, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 37 Scherman’s statement is attached to a Letter from Kenneth Loughry to Warren Lynch, August 1, 1962, Book of the Month Club—Rembrandt Reproductions, 1962–, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 38 Memo from Kenneth Loughry to James Rorimer, July 31, 1962, Book of the Month Club—Rembrandt Reproductions, 1962–, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 39 Memo from Kenneth Loughry to Bradford Kelleher and Theordore Rousseau, Jr., August 9, 1962, Book of the Month Club—Rembrandt Reproductions, 1962–, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 40 Memo from Kenneth Loughry to James Rorimer, July 31, 1962, Book of the Month Club—Rembrandt Reproductions, 1962–, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 41 Letter from Kenneth Loughry to Warren Lynch, August 1, 1962, Book of the Month Club—Rembrandt Reproductions, 1962–, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives.

204

Notes to pp. 114–17

42 Memo from Bradford Kelleher to Kenneth Loughry, August 6, 1962, Book of the Month Club—Rembrandt Reproductions, 1962–, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 43 Draft with corrections of a letter to those who have ordered the Rembrandt print from Axel Rosin to “Mrs. Blank,” attached to a letter (“Re.: Rembrandt Print”) from Kenneth Loughry to Warren Lynch, August 14, 1962, Book of the Month Club— Rembrandt Reproductions, 1962–, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 44 Memo from Bradford Kelleher to Kenneth Loughry, September 9, 1962, Book of the Month Club—Rembrandt Reproductions, 1962–, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 45 See the two letters from Dudley Easby to Axel Rosin, both dated January 1, 1963, Book of the Month Club—Rembrandt Reproductions, 1962–, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 46 Letter from Dudley Easby to Axel Rosin, February 14, 1963, Book of the Month Club—Rembrandt Reproductions, 1962–, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 47 Letter from Axel Rosin to Dudley Easby, February 19, 1963, Book of the Month Club—Rembrandt Reproductions, 1962–, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 48 Memo from Bradford Kelleher to James Rorimer, December 6, 1963, Book of the Month Club—Rembrandt Reproductions, 1962–, Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 49 Letter from Bradford Kelleher to Hallie C. Lane, December 26, 1963, Box 5, Folder 17, James J. Rorimer Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 50 Peter C. Marzio, The Democratic Art: Pictures for a 19th-Century America, Chromolithography 1840–1900 (Boston: D. R. Godine, 1979), xi 51 James Parton, “Popularizing Art,” The Atlantic Monthly 33, no. 137 (March 1869): 354. This passage is discussed in Marzio, The Democratic Art, 96; James Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 150; and Naomi Z. Sofer, Making the “America of Art” Cultural Nationalism and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2005), 127. For a discussion of Prang’s lithography, see Marzio, The Democratic Art, 94–106. 52 Michael Clapper, “The Chromo and the Art Museum: Popular and Elite Art Institutions in Late Nineteenth-Century America,” in Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, ed. Christopher Reed (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 42. 53 Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 160.

Notes to pp. 117–20

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54 Winifred Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1913), vol. 1, 301. 55 Winifred E. Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1946), vol. 2, 159–60. 56 Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 2, 155. 57 Francis Henry Taylor, Fifty Centuries of Art (New York: Harper Brothers for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1954), vii. 58 Burton Wasserman, “The Role of Art Education in Public School Programs for Adult Learning,” Art Education 11, no. 5 (1958): 10. 59 Art Education 12, no. 7 (1959): 21. 60 See BOMC advertisement in The Atlantic Monthly 182, no. 6 (December 1948), n.p. [3]. 61 Russell Lynes, The Taste-Makers (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), 282. 62 Lynes, The Taste-Makers, 283. 63 Lynes, The Taste-Makers, 283. 64 Lynes, “Highbrow, Middlebrow Lowbrow,” Harper’s Magazine, 198, no. 1185 (February, 1949): 22, 26. The essay was reproduced in an abridged form in Life, April 11, 1949, 99–102. 65 “Art Seminars in the Home,” promotional brochure included in the BOMC mailer for the Metropolitan Seminars, 1957, Book of the Month Club—Course on Art Education, 1954–7 (File 1 of 3), Office of the Secretary Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 66 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” trans. Richard Nice, in Handbook of Theory of Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. Richardson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 243. 67 Letter from Ludwig Grunewald to John Canaday, which includes Canaday’s reply on the back, September 9, 1959, Box 8, Folder: Metropolitan Seminars and “Mainstreams,” John Canaday Papers, Special Collections Research Centre, Syracuse University Libraries. The exchange between Grunewald and Canaday is an excellent example of what Elaine Tyler May calls the postwar “faith in expertise” in an “era of the expert.” See May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), 26. 68 César Graña, “The Private Lives of Public Museums: Can Art be Democratic?,” Fact and Symbol: Essays in the Sociology of Art and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 104–06. 69 Philippe de Montebello, “Art Museums, Inspiring Public Trust,” in Whose Muse: Art Museums and the Public Trust, ed. James Cuno (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 153. 70 Melissa Renn, “Within Their Walls: LIFE Magazine’s ‘Illuminations’,” Archives of American Art Journal 53, no. 1/2 (2014): 45. It should be noted that Life publisher Henry R. Luce was a Met Trustee at this time.

206 71 72 73 74 75

76

77

78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

86 87

88 89

Notes to pp. 120–23

Renn, “Within Their Walls,” 37 Renn, “Within Their Walls,” 46. Renn, “Within Their Walls,” 48. As cited in Andrew Heiskell, Illuminations of Fifty Great Paintings and the Sistine Chapel Ceiling (Time, Inc, 1956), n.p. Heiskell was the publisher of Time magazine. Letter from Howard M. Jones to James Rorimer, April 24, 1959, Box 24, Folder 4, James J. Rorimer Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Davidson’s note to Rorimer is attached to the letter, as is his essay “Illuminated by Life,” in which he has put a red line next to the top two paragraphs on p. 71. Marshall Davidson, “Illuminated by Life,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 15, no. 3 (1956): 71. “Le Musée imaginaire” (translated as “Museum without Walls”) was originally published as an independent essay in 1947 and then in 1951 as the first part of Malraux’s Les Voix du silence. A revised version of the essay was published in book form in French in 1965 and appeared in English as Museum Without Walls, trans. Stuart Gilbert and Francis Price (London: Secker & Warburg, 1967). Renn connects the “Illuminations” exhibition with Malraux’s ideas. See Renn, “Within Their Walls,” 40–5. Davidson, “Illuminated by Life,” 69. Malraux had written: “For the past hundred years . . ., the history of art has been the history of that which can be photographed.” See Malraux, Museum Without Walls, 111. Davidson, “Illuminated by Life,” 70–1. Davidson, “Illuminated by Life,” 70. André Malraux, The Voices of Silence, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1953), 44; Davidson, “Illuminated by Life,” 71. Malraux, The Voices of Silence, 24. Georges Didi-Huberman, “The Album of Images According to André Malraux,” trans. Elise Woodard and Robert Harvey, Journal of Visual Culture 1, no.1 (2015): 13. Edgar Wind, “The Mechanization of Art,” Art and Anarchy (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1963), 137 n131. Wind, “The Mechanization of Art,” 71. Henri Zerner, “Malraux and the Power of Photography,” in Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension, ed. Geraldine Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 124. Zerner, “Malraux and the Power of Photography,” 126–8. Konrad Lange, Das Wesen der Kunst: Grundzuge einer realistischen Kunstlehre, 2 vols. (Berlin: G. Grote’sche Verlangsbuchhandlung, 1901), vol. 1, 204–32. Chapter 8 is titled: “Die Illusion als bewusste Selbsttäuschung.” Davidson, “Illuminated by Life,” 70, 71. Francis Henry Taylor, Babel’s Tower: The Dilemma of the Modern Museum (New York: Columbia University Press), 52.

Notes to pp. 124–30

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90 Vera Zolberg, “Barrier or leveler? The Case of the Art Museum,” in Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality, ed. Michèle Lamont and Marcel Fournier (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 205, 188. On this continuing trend, Betty Farrell and Maria Medvedeva write: “Education and income, which relate in complicated ways to race and ethnicity, will almost certainly continue to structure museum visitorship in the future.” See their report Demographic Transformation and the Future of Museums, Centre for the Future of Museums Project (Washington: American Association of Museums, 2010), available online: https://www.aam-us.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Demographic-Change-andthe-Future-of-Museums.pdf (accessed January 6, 2021). 91 Montebello, “Art Museums, Inspiring Public Trust,” 154. 92 Lydia Bond Powel, “Television and the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” December 1945, Box 15, Folder 6, Francis Henry Taylor Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives.

5 The Met, Popular Art Education, and the Problem of Abstract Art 1 Roy Porter, Introduction, Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1996), 1–14 2 John Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art, vol. 1: What is a Painting? (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1958), 7. 3 Typed copy of the Teacher’s Guide of the Metropolitan Art Seminars Slide Series, 6, Office of the Secretary Records, Met Archives, New York. The slides were produced in 1965. They include reproductions of works of art illustrated in the Seminars as well as pedagogical slides. 4 John Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art, vol. 1: What is a Painting?, 8. 5 José Ortega y Gasset, “The Dehumanization of Art” (1925), in Velázquez, Goya and the Dehumanization of Art, trans. Alexis Brown (London: Studio Vista, 1972), 68. 6 Gasset, “The Dehumanization of Art,” 69. 7 Darcy Hayman, “Football, Persimmons, and Modern Art or First Day in the Art Class,” Art Education 9, no. 3 (1956): 6. In most other publications, the author goes by d’Arcy or D’Arcy Hayman. From 1960 to 1980, Hayman served as the International Arts Program director for UNESCO. 8 Hayman, “Football, Persimmons, and Modern Art,” 9. 9 Hayman, “Football, Persimmons, and Modern Art,” 9. 10 On the Havemeyer bequest, see Laura D. Corey and Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, “Visions of Collecting,” in Making the Met, 1870–2020, ed. Andrea Bayer with Laura D. Corey, exh. cat. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 130–49.

208

Notes to pp. 130–32

11 Douglas Eklund, Marilyn F. Friedman, and Randall R. Griffey, “Reckoning with Modernism,” in Making the Met, 152. For a discussion of the Met’s antipathy towards contemporary art, see also Michael Gross, Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money that Made the Metropolitan Museum (New York: Broadway Books, 2009), 219–27. 12 Roland L. Redmond and Dudley T. Easby, Jr., “Report of the Trustees for the Year 1947,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 7, No. 1 (1948): 7. Earlier, in 1934, a joint committee of members of the Met and MoMA Boards of Trustees was established “for greater understanding and cooperation between the two institutions in the future which must inure to the benefit of the public.” See H. W. Kent and George Blumenthal, “Report of the Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the Year 1934,” Annual Report of the Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 65 (1934): 7, available online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40303658 (accessed January 26, 2021). 13 On the Irascibles, see The Irascibles: Painters Against the Museum, New York, 1950, ed. Bradford Collins, exh. cat. Fundacion Juan March, Madrid (New York: Artbook, 2020). 14 “The Metropolitan and Modern Art: Amid Brickbats and Bouquets the Museum Holds its First U.S. Painting Competition,” Life (January 15, 1951), 34. 15 For a discussion of the agreement and its failure, see Eklund, Friedman, and Griffey, “Reckoning with Modernism,” 164–7; Gross, Rogues’ Gallery, 214–17; and Calvin Tomkins Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (London: Longman, 1980), 304–07. The Met’s antipathy towards modern art was well-known at the time. Gross discusses a 1948 public dispute that took place when James N. Rosenberg, a retired lawyer, artist and a life member of the Met, wrote a series of open letters to Met President Roland Redmond about the Met’s lack of interest in collecting modern art. The dispute was reported in The New York Times: Sanka Knox, “Museum Attacked for its Policy on Art,” The New York Times, January 13, 1949, 25. 16 Eklund, Friedman, and Griffey, “Reckoning with Modernism,” 165. 17 “Audience Research Report: The Metropolitan Miniatures,” 28, 1951, Metropolitan Miniatures—Misc.—Audience research report, 1951, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 18 “Audience Research Report,” 26. 19 Paul Manoguerra, “Weird Junk: What Ended Advancing American Art?,” in Art Interrupted: Advancing American Art and the Politics of Cultural Diplomacy, ed. Dennis Harper (Athens, GA: Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, 2012), 50. For discussions of the “Advancing American Art” exhibition, see also Margaret Lynne Ausfeld and Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Advancing American Art: Politics and Aesthetics in the State Department Exhibition, 1946–1948 (Montgomery, AL: Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, 1984); Taylor Littleton and Maltby Sykes,

Notes to pp. 132–34

20

21 22

23 24

25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32

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Advancing American Art: Painting, Politics, and Cultural Confrontation in MidCentury (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1989); and Greg Barnhisel, “ ‘Advancing American Art’,” in Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature and American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 55–92. For the reception of the exhibition, see Margaret Lynne Ausfeld, “Circus Girl Arrested: A History of the Advancing American Art Collection, 1946–1948,” in Ausfeld and Mecklenburg, Advancing American Art: Politics and Aesthetics in the State Department Exhibition, 1946–1948, 11–19; Manoguerra, “Weird Junk,” 46–53; Barnhisel, “ ‘Advancing American Art’,” 60–1. Manoguerra, “Weird Junk,” 46. For discussion of and debates about Abstract Expressionism in the Cold War, see Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and The Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983); Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999); David Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent During the McCarthy Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature and American Cultural Diplomacy. “Letters to the Editor,” Life, August 29, 1949, 9. “A Life Roundtable on Modern Art,” Life, October 11, 1948, 56–79. David and Cecile Shapiro, who briefly discuss this meeting, comment: “The willingness of these top-level art people to devote time to a public consideration of Abstract Expressionism suggests that the movement was taken seriously in high places.” See David and Cecile Schapiro, “Abstract Expressionism: The Politics of Apolitical Painting,” in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2000), 187. In art educational circles of the time, communication was understood as involving, in the words of Irving Lorge, “the reciprocal interactions of sending and receiving signals, of composing and understanding messages, and of sharing and enjoying ideas.” See Irving Lorge, “How the Psychologist Views Communication,” Teachers College Record (November, 1955), as cited in Sarah Joyner, “Communication,” Art Education 9, no. 2 (1956): 2. “A Life Roundtable on Modern Art,” 65. “A Life Roundtable on Modern Art,” 68. “A Life Roundtable on Modern Art,” 75–6. “A Life Roundtable on Modern Art,” 79. Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. “A Life Roundtable on Modern Art,” 79. Francis Henry Taylor, “Modern Art and the Dignity of Man,” The Atlantic Monthly 182, no. 4 (1948): 30–1.

210

Notes to pp. 134–36

33 Taylor, “Modern Art and the Dignity of Man,” 35. As evidence of this spiritual breakdown, Taylor cites Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, but he could as easily have referred to Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. 34 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. “Not Left, Not Right, but a Vital Center,” The New York Times Magazine, April 4, 1948, 7, 44–7, as cited in Guilbaut, How New York Stole the idea of Modern Art, 192, fig. 21. 35 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962), 1. 36 Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center, 256. Guilbaut connects Schlesinger’s notion of the vital center to the position of the Abstract Expressionists. David Craven, however, distinguishes between Schlesinger’s and the artists’ positions. See Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 189–92; and Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique, 43–4. 37 Guilbaut, How New York Stole the idea of Modern Art, 192. 38 Taylor, “Modern Art and the Dignity of Man,” 36. 39 R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, (London: Oxford University Press, 1958 [1938]), 119. 40 Sarah Newmeyer, Enjoying Modern Art (New York: Mentor Books, 1955), 222. For Newmeyer, abstract art “is merely self-communion no matter how its creator may protest that it is only the crass ignorance of the viewer that prevents his response.” A feature article was published on Newmeyer, who was MoMA’s publicity director from 1933 to 1951, in 1947. See Roger Butterfield, “The Museum and the Redhead,” The Saturday Evening Post, April 5, 1947, 20–1, 108–12. 41 Gilbert Seldes, The Great Audience (New York: The Viking Press, 1950), 257. 42 John Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art, Great Periods in Painting, vol. L: Actaeon and the Atom (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1960), 7. 43 Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, Vol. 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age (New York: Vintage Books, [1951] 1958), 231. 44 Hauser, The Social History of Art, 232. 45 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 36–7. For a critique, see Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56–80. 46 Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, trans. A. Robert Caponigri (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1956), 39. Taylor cites philosopher C. E. M. Joad’s description of the present as “an age which does not believe in the dignity of man.” Taylor, “Art and the Dignity of Man,” 30. 47 Taylor, “Art and the Dignity of Man,” 36. 48 “A Life Roundtable on Modern Art,” 76. 49 Herbert Read, Icon and Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), 132.

Notes to pp. 136–38

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50 “A Statement on Modern Art by The Institute of Contemporary Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art,” Art Education 3, no. 3 (1950), 6. 51 “A Statement on Modern Art,” 6. 52 Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 181. 53 This increase of attention to contemporary art was not appreciated by all Miniatures subscribers. One wrote to the BOMC and Met that he was not impressed with seeing so many works by artists like Picasso, Kokoschka, and Beckman: “I entered my subscription and expressed my desire to receive the reproductions of art in miniature form. Please note: Art, not Junk.” Letter from Eugene V. Nay to Frank M. Magel of the BOMC (cc’d to Director, Met), January 30, 1957, James Rorimer Records, Box 24, Folder 4, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. 54 James Thrall Soby, The Metropolitan Miniatures: Paintings from the Museum of Modern Art. Series 2: Expressionism, Impressionism, Surrealism (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1956). A MoMA trustee, Soby served in various roles at the museum. He was the Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture (1943–5) and then the department’s Chairman (1947–57). 55 John I. H. Baur, The Metropolitan Miniatures: Contemporary American Painting, (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1957), n.p. 56 A. L. Chanin, The Metropolitan Miniatures: Paintings from the Museum of Modern Art. Series 1: Cubism, Abstraction, Realism (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1956), n.p. 57 John Canaday, The Metropolitan Miniatures: 20th Century Painting in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1957), n.p. 58 Chanin, The Metropolitan Miniatures: Paintings from the Museum of Modern Art, n.p. 59 Heinrich Wölfflin, The Principles of Art History, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover Publications, 1950); Walter Friedlaender, From David to Delacroix, trans. Robert Goldwater (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952). 60 Alfred H. Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1936); Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” (1961), Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, ed. Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 7. 61 Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art, vol. L: Actaeon and the Atom, 7. 62 Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art, vol. L: Actaeon and the Atom, 13. 63 Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art, vol. L: Actaeon and the Atom, 7. 64 Richard Muther, The History of Modern Painting, trans. Ernest Dowson et al., 3 vols. (London: Henry and Co., 1895), vol. 1, 3. Muther’s book was originally published as Geschichte der Malerei im XIX. Jahrhundert, 3 vols. (Munich: G. Hirth, 1893–4). 65 Muther, The History of Modern Painting, vol. 1, 2. For an inquiry into historical distance, see Mark Salber Phillips, On Historical Distance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

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Notes to pp. 138–42

66 Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art, vol. L: Actaeon and the Atom, 5. 67 Muther, The History of Modern Painting, vol. 1, 7. 68 John Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art, Great Periods in Painting, Portfolio H: The War of Illusion (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1959), 11. 69 Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art, vol. L: Actaeon and the Atom, 12. Taylor had earlier written: “The problem with modern art is not merely that of distinguishing between genius and charlatan.” See Taylor, Babel’s Tower: The Dilemma of the Modern Museum (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 46. 70 Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art, vol. L: Actaeon and the Atom, 12. 71 John Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art, Great Periods in Painting, vol. A: Glory and Grandeur (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1959), 5. 72 Leo Tolstoy, What is Art, trans. Aylmer Maude (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1960), 51–2. 73 Letter from Ruth Fairbank Smith to John Canaday, November 26, 1960, Box 8, Folder: “Metropolitan Seminars and ‘Mainstreams’,” John Canaday Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries. A typed copy of Canaday’s reply appears on the back of Smith’s letter. 74 Seldes, The Great Audience, 203–04. 75 David W. Maurer, The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man (New York: First Anchor Books, 1999 [1940]), 101. 76 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), 18. 77 Goffman, The Presentation of Self, 22. 78 Gary Lindberg, The Confidence Man in American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 234. 79 Lindberg, The Confidence Man, 233. 80 “A Life Roundtable on Modern Art,” 68. 81 Taylor, “Museums in a Changing World,” The Atlantic Monthly 144, no. 6 (December 1939): 789. 82 Theodore Shaw, Hypocrisy About Art: And What You Don’t Gain By It (Boston: Stuart Publications, 1962), 31. 83 John Canaday, “Happy New Year: Thoughts on Critics and Certain Painters as the Season Opens,” The New York Times, September 6, 1959, X16, reprinted in Canaday, Embattled Critic: Views on Modern Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company 1962), 31–2. Betsy the Ape was a chimpanzee in the Baltimore zoo, whose abstract paintings were put on display at the Baltimore art museum in the 1950s. 84 Canaday, “Happy New Year,” in Embattled Critic, 32–3. 85 Sophy Burnham, The Art Crowd (New York: David McKay, 1973), 111. 86 Burnham, The Art Crowd, 114.

Notes to pp. 142–46

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87 “The N.Y. Times and Controversy,” ARTnews 60, no. 2 (April 1961): 8, 59. Canaday was censured for “having treated a fellow critic in a manner unbecoming to the profession of criticism, violating her dignity as a critic, and infringing basic principles of freedom of criticism by his accusation, demands and threats, aimed at forcing compliance with his own views and methods in matters of judgment.” 88 “A Letter to the New York Times Editor,” The New York Times, February 26, 1961, X19. Canaday republished the letter to the editor the following year in Embattled Critic, 219–23. This book also includes a selection of the replies to the letter and a series of Canaday’s Times essays 89 Barnett Newman, “Embattled Lamb” (review of John Canaday, Embattled Critic) ARTnews 61, no. 5 (1962): 35. 90 As quoted in Canaday, Embattled Critic, 225–6. 91 As quoted in Canaday, Embattled Critic, 236. 92 Keith Miller, “Journalistic Criticism: Popular Entertainment or Populist Critique?,” Art Criticism 15, no.2 (1999): 47. 93 John Canaday, “Siqueiros: His Unfinished Mural is a Powerful Work of Art and Propaganda,” The New York Times, September 24, 1961, X 20. On Newman’s comments, see Newman “Embattled Lamb,” 57–8. 94 Collingwood, The Principles of Art, 273. 95 John Hospers, “The Croce-Collingwood Theory of Art,” Philosophy 31, no. 119 (1956): 293. 96 Collingwood, The Principles of Art, 119. 97 Collingwood, The Principles of Art, 308. 98 Richard Wollheim, Art and its Objects: An Introduction to Aesthetics (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 34. 99 Collingwood, The Principles of Art, 285. 100 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), 32 (§66). Morris Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15, no.1 (1956): 30–1. 101 Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” 32. 102 Stephen Davies writes of Weitz’s work: “When it looks as if anything at all might become (or be declared) art, the idea that something is an artwork because it shares with others of its kind a common essence looks to be implausible.” See Stephen Davies, Definitions of Art (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1991), 5. 103 Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” The Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (1964): 580. On the institutional definition of art, see Davies, Definitions of Art, 78–114. 104 While some champions of the institutional definition of art claim the theory is democratic, there have been others who have critiqued it as necessarily elitist. See Davies, Definitions of Art, 80–1. 105 Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars, vol. 12: The Artist as a Visionary, 26.

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Notes to pp. 147–50

106 Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1969] 1976), 176. 107 Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 176. 108 Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 203. 109 Morris Weitz, “Wittgenstein’s Aesthetics” (1973), in Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, ed. George Dickie and Richard J. Sclafani (New York: St. Martin’s, 1977), 479. 110 Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 190. 111 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 102 (§304). 112 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 107 (§329). 113 Meyer Schapiro, “Recent Abstract Painting,” in Modern Art, 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1978), 214. This essay was originally published as “The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art,” ARTnews (Summer, 1957), 36–42. For an insightful analysis of this essay, see David Craven, “Abstract Expressionism, Automatism, and the Age of Automation,” Art History 13, no. 1 (1990): 72–103. 114 Schapiro, “Recent Abstract Painting,” 223. 115 Schapiro, “Recent Abstract Painting,” 224. 116 Schapiro, “Recent Abstract Painting,” 225. 117 Schapiro, “Recent Abstract Painting,” 222. 118 Schapiro, “Recent Abstract Painting,” 223. 119 Canaday, “Artist and Critic: Dangers of the Critical Graph,” The New York Times, June 25, 1961, reprinted in Embattled Critic, 5. 120 Aldous Huxley similarly stated in the MoMA roundtable that “a certain detachment” was required in aesthetic experience. See “A Life Roundtable on Modern Art,” 65. 121 Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, trans. Joseph J. S. Peake (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 51 122 Panofsky, Idea, 50–1. For a critique of Panofsky’s position, see, for example, Stephen Melville and Margaret Iverson, Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 123 Canaday, Metropolitan Seminars in Art, vol. L: Actaeon and the Atom, 12. 124 Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 114. Michael Leja has similarly argued that Abstract Expressionists, with their concerns of “Modern Man discourse,” rejected and emphasized the primitive, the irrational, and the unconscious. See Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 204, 329. 125 Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, 257–8. 126 Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, 256. 127 Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), xix. Gibson’s interests in gender, sexuality, and race have

Notes to pp. 151–54

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been developed in more recent work on Abstract Expressionism. See, for example, Joan Marter (ed.), Women of Abstract Expressionism, exh. cat., Denver Art Museum (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). 128 Gibson, Abstract Expressionism, xxxvii. 129 Schapiro, “Recent Abstract Painting,” 214, 217. 130 Goffman, The Presentation of Self, 18 n1. 131 As Belgrad put it, middlebrows rebeled against the culture of spontaneity “in the name of democracy against the authority of the ivory-tower elites to define public taste.” See Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity, 223. 132 The exhibition, “William Sidney Mount and his circle: an exhibition of paintings and drawings by William Sidney Mount, with a group of works by his friends and contemporaries,” took place at the Met in1945. 133 “A Life Roundtable on Modern Art,” 75. 134 Andrew McClellan, “A Brief History of the Art Museum Public,” in ed. Andrew McClellan, Art and its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 24, 28. 135 “Custodian of the Attic,” Time, December 29, 1952, 42. 136 According to a 1958 study by the Center for the Study of Leisure at the University of Chicago, “the most dangerous threat hanging over American society is the threat of leisure.” See Putnam, Bowling Alone, 16. 137 “Custodian of the Attic,” 50. 138 “Custodian of the Attic,” 47. 139 “Custodian of the Attic,” 47, 50. 140 Excellence and Equity: Education and the Public Dimension of Museums, a report from the American Association of Museums (1992), available online: http://ww2. aam-us.org/docs/default-source/resource-library/excellence-and-equity.pdf (accessed November 23, 2020). 141 American Alliance of Museums, Facing Change: Insights from the American Alliance of Museum’s Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion Working Group, 2018, 8, available online: https://www.aam-us.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/AAMDEAI-Working-Group-Full-Report-2018.pdf (accessed November 23, 2020). 142 Elaine Heumann Gurian, “Maybe This Time: A Personal Journey toward Racial Equity in Museums,” in Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion in Museums, ed. Johnnetta Betsch Cole and Laura L. Lott (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 110. 143 Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997), 9. 144 This statement is attributed to Arnold Lehman, former director of the Brooklyn Museum. See Johnnetta Betsch Cole, “Museums, Diversity, and Social Value,” Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion in Museums, 15; and Laura L. Lott, “The Leadership Imperative: Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion as Strategy,” in Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion in Museums, 33.

216

Notes to pp. 154–55

145 Lott, “The Leadership Imperative,” 33. 146 See Gail Anderson’s “Reinventing the Museum Tool” in Anderson, “A Framework: Reinventing the Museum,” in Reinventing the Museum: The Evolving Conversation on the Paradigm Shift, ed. Gail Anderson, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2012), 3. 147 Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, “The Experience Economy” (1999), reprinted in Reinventing the Museum, 163–9. The “experience economy” is at the basis of some discussions of diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion in museums. See, for example, Natanya Khashan, “Catalyzing Inclusion: Steps toward Sustainability in Museums,” in Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion in Museums, 61–8. 148 Lois H Silverman, The Social Work of Museums (London: Taylor & Francis, 2010), 16. John Falk similarly suggests that museum visitors have varied experiences and that they use the museum experience and its memory to satisfy their preconceived expectations. See John Falk, “The Museum Visitor Experience: Who Visits, Why and to What Effect?” (2010), in Reinventing the Museum, 326. 149 Silverman, The Social Work of Museums, 13. 150 Lott, “The Leadership Imperative,” 34. 151 Gurian, “Maybe This Time,” 111. 152 Neil Kenney, The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 2. 153 Barbara Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 2.

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Index A Guide to the Picture Galleries (Rousseau Jr.) 31 “A Life Roundtable on Modern Art” (1948) 127–128, 132–135, 141, 152 “A Statement on Modern Art” 136 Abstract Expressionism (art movement) 13, 127–128, 133, 138–139, 141–143, 145, 147–151 Adam, T. R. 89–90 Adler, Mortimer J. 64 Adorno, Theodor 78, 79, 89, 100, 192– 193n.130 Advancing American Art (exhibition) 131–133, 136 Adventures in Art (mock-up) 18 Albright-Knox Art Gallery 79 Album Art Stamps (mock-up) 18 American Art Union 9, 170n.45 American Artists Professional League 132 Annunciation (Martini) 54 Arendt, Hannah 6, 78–79, 100–101 Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer (Rembrandt) 109–110 Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer (Rembrandt), BOMC/Met print of 1, 12–13, 105, 109–116, 119, 121, 123–125 Armory Show (1913) 140 Arnold, Matthew 78, 84, 98–99 Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1 (Whistler) 128 Art in the College Program of General Education (Ziegfeld) 94–95, 97 Art Critics’ Association 142 art education autonomy and instrumentalism 97–102 introduction 83–84 the Met as an educational corporation 84–88 midwife of democracy 89–92 postwar 92–97, 198nn.66-7, 76

Art Education (journal) 93, 95–96, 129, 136 Art as Experience (Dewey) 63 “Art and Human Values” (NAEA conference) 96 Art Looting Investigation Unit 53 art reproductions democratization of art 116–119 introduction 103–105, 127 originals 119–123, 206nn.75-6 photoengraving process 105–106, 200n.7 quality 107–109 reputation 123–125 social values 119, 205n.67 “Art Treasures of the Met” (display) 153 art unions 9, 170n.45 The Artist as Social Critic (Canaday) 62 The Artist as a Visionary (Canaday) 63 ARTnews 142 “The Ashton Affair” 142 Ashton, Dore 142, 149 The Atlantic Monthly 134 Babel’s Tower: The Dilemma of the Modern Museum (Taylor) 88 Bach, Richard 99 Barkan, Manuel 96–97 Barnum, P. T. 141 Barzun, Jacques 6–7, 61, 70, 78, 100–101, 169n.30 Bauer, John 136–137 Baumgarten, Alexander 98 Beck Engraving Company 32 Belgrad, Daniel 150 Bell, Clive 128 Benedict, Barbara 155 Benhabib, Seyla 79 Bernstein, Leonard 71 Bettelheim, Bruno 98–100 Better Business Bureau 73 Blum, Pieter 54 Bode-Museum 91

235

236

Index

Book-of-the-Month Club (BOMC) art reproductions 107, 108, 118, 119 collaboration with the Met 1–3, 11, 13, 125, 127 culture and commerce 11, 33–36, 108 introduction 26–27 middlebrow culture 5, 9, 20, 76–79, 101–102 The Metropolitan Miniatures 8, 26–29, 36–47, 93, 108–109,118 Metropolitan Seminars 4, 12, 49, 52–53, 55–59, 64–67, 72–74 Non-Fiction Book Club 27 popular art education 8, 9, 86, 90, 125 print of Rembrandt’s Aristotle 1, 12–13, 105, 109–116, 119, 121, 123–125 Travelers Book Club 27 Book-of-the-Month Club News 26 Boston Museum of Fine Arts 3, 77 Botticelli, Sandro 63 Bourdieu, Pierre 5, 31, 59, 67–68, 119, 188–189n.80 Brennan, Shiela 19–20 Brown, Blanche 92, 197n.60 Brown, John E. 94, 198n.69 Burnham, Sophy 142 The Calumny of Apelles (Botticelli) 63 Canaday, John introduction 12–13 popular art education 127, 128, 135, 137–139, 141–154, 213n.87 reproduction and quality 104–106, 119–121, 123 Metropolitan Miniatures 30 Metropolitan Seminars 50–55, 57, 61–67, 71, 74, 76, 79–81, 185n.37 capitalism 5–6, 70, 72, 78 Carnegie, Dale 63 Cartmell, Van 52–53 Cavell, Stanley 147 CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System) 66 Cesnola, Luigi Palma de 85 Cézanne, Paul 30 Chanin, A. L. 137 Choate, Joseph H. 84, 88 chromolithographs 116–117 “Cinderellas” see poster stamps Clapper, Michael 117

Cohen, Lizabeth 12, 70 Cold War 12, 70, 93, 98, 150 Collingwood, R. G. 134–135, 145–146 collotypes 117–118 Conn, Steven 83 Contemporary American Painting (Bauer) 136–137 Cot, Pierre 62 Crown Publishers 115 Cubism and Abstract Art (exhibition) 137 Currier, A. A. 34 Cusk, Rachel 76 da Vinci, Leonardo 30, 35 Damrosch, Walter 10, 71 Dana, John Cotton 89–90 Danto, Arthur 146 Darbel, Alain 31, 59, 67–68, 188–189n.80 Daumier, Honoré 63 Davenport, Russell W. 132–133, 152 Davidson, Marshall 108, 111–112, 121, 123 introduction 9 reproduction and quality 108, 111–112, 121, 123 Metropolitan Miniatures 28, 30–32, 37–38, 44 Metropolitan Seminars 50–57, 61, 74–76 Davis, Delanay Inc. (printers) 21 de Forest, Robert 85 de Kooning, Elaine 150–151 de Kooning, Willem 137–138 Dewey, John 63 Didi-Huberman, Georges 122 Diffey, T. J. 100 DiMaggio, Paul 77 distance learning 2, 10 “Diversity, Equity Accessibility, Inclusion” (AAM) 153 Dürer, Albrecht 152–153 Dyer, Richard 154 Easby, Dudley Jr. 34, 38, 50, 66, 72–73, 111, 115–116 Edman, Irwin 97–99 Education through Art (Read) 96 Emerson, Waldo 91 Enjoying Modern Art (Newmeyer) 135 Episcopal Academy, Philadelphia 80

Index Erickson, Alfred W. 109 The Eternal City (Blum) 54 Excellence and Equity: Education and the Public Dimension of Museums (AAM) 153 “Family of Man” (MoMA) 120 Federal School, Minneapolis 10 Felton, Jack 25 Fiery Peaks 118 Film Associates of California 66 “Football Persimmons, and Modern Art or First Day in the Art Class” (Hayman) 129 Frankfurt School 80, 148 Frankfurter, Alfred 133 French Rococo painting 54 Friedlander, Walter 137 Gardner, Al 44 Gasset, José Ortega y see Ortega y Gasset, José General Education in a Free Society (Harvard University) 90, 94 General Foundation of Women’s Clubs 65 Giotto 139 Goffman, Erving 140–141, 151 “Good Art, Bad Art, Modern Art” (Canaday) 62 Goodman, Nelson 5 Göring, Hermann 53 Graña, César 45–46, 120 Gray, Cleve 143 Great Books Foundation 5, 64 Green Stamps 20 Greenberg, Clement 78–79, 132, 137, 152, 154 Gresham’s Law 6 Guilbaut, Serge 134, 136, 150 Gurian, Elaine Heumann 11, 153, 155 Haas, Robert K. 26 Habermas, Jürgen 135 Hals, Franz 120 Harris, Dianne 70 Hartford, Le Roy C. 20–21 Harvard University 90, 94–96 Hauser, Arnold 135

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Havemeyer bequest Met, (1929) 130 Hayman, Darcy 129 Head, Matthew (John Canaday) 51 Hearst, William Randolph 132 Heimer, Dr. Lili 18 Heinrich, Theodore 38–39 Hellman, Geoffrey 54 Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery 38 “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow” (Lynes) 119 Higher Education for American Democracy (presidential commission) 94 Highet, Gilbert 101 History of Modern Painting (Muther) 138 Hitler, Adolf 133 Horn, Francis 97 “How Many Did You Get?” (newspaper piece) 72 How to Develop Self-Confidence and Influence People by Public Speaking Carnegie) 63 Howe, Winifred 83–86, 117, 194n.3 Hudson River School 152 Huldah, Cherry Jeffe 118 Hunt, Herold 96 Huxley, Aldous 132–133 Idea: A Concept in Art Theory (Panofsky) 149 “Illuminations of Fifty Great Paintings” (exhibition) 120 Institute of Contemporary Art 136 The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Art (Canaday) 65 Ivins, William M. Jr. 86 Jaffe, Herman 15–19, 21, 23, 26 Janson, H. W. 128, 133 Jayne, Horace 15, 17–18, 31, 172nn.12-14, 173n.18 Jones, Howard Mumford 101, 107–108, 121 Jones, Louis C. 110 Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum see BodeMuseum Kaufmann, Edgar Jr. 110 Kaye, Otis 109–110

238

Index

Kelleher, Bradford 112–116 Kent, Henry W. 20–21, 85, 97–98 Kokoschka, Oscar 62 Krasner, Lee 150–151 Kudos (Cusk) 76 Kuspit, Donald 150 Lange, Konrad 123 Last Judgment (Michelangelo) 54 Latham, Hugh 18–19, 21–22, 25–27, 173n.19 “Leave it to Beaver” (TV show) 71 Lee, Charles 27 Leen, Nina 131 Leja, Michael 150 Levine, Lawrence 77, 192n.124 Life Magazine 37, 70, 120–121, 130–133 Lindberg, Gary 141 The Lonely Crowd (Riesman) 6 Look magazine 132 Lott, Laura 154 Loughry, Kenneth 112–115 Louvre Museum 83, 91, 130–131 Low, Theodore 89–90, 92 Lynch, Warren 111–114 Lynes, Russell 101, 118–119 McCann-Erickson advertising agency 109 McCarthy, Joseph 132 McClellan, Andrew 4, 152 Macdonald, Dwight 6, 78–79, 101 Mainstreams of Modern Art (Canaday) 65 “Making the Met, 1870–2020” (exhibition) 9 Malraux, André 121–123, 206nn.76-7 Manet, Édouard 30 Mann, Thomas 88 Manoguerra, Paul 132 Márkus, György 100 Marsden, George 2–3, 6 Marshall Field (department store) 23 Martini, Simone 54 Marxism 99, 148 Marzio, Peter 116–117 Maurer, David 140 May, Elaine Tyler 2, 70 Meiss, Millard 143

Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) abstract art 130, 131, 136, 140, 151 art reproductions 103–105, 107–109, 117–125 collaboration with the BOMC 1–2, 5, 9, 11–13, 127 Junior Museum 86–87 Metropolitan Miniatures 4, 12, 15–47 Metropolitan Seminars 4, 12, 49–82, 141 middlebrow culture 5 museum accessibility 7–8, 127, 152–156 museum agreement with Whitney Museum and MoMA 130–131 popular art education 3–4, 12–13, 83–102, 141 print of Rembrandt’s Aristotle 1, 12–13, 105, 109–116, 119, 121, 123–125 social role of the museum 10–11 School Notebooks Sheets 118 Met Trustees’ Report (1947) 130 Met Board of Trustees 72 The Metropolitan Miniatures albums 28–31 art gallery 40–42, 180n.103 Book-of-the Month Club 26–28 culture/commerce divide 33–36 end 42–47, 49 introduction 15–17 list of 157–165 production 31–32 project 17–26 subscriptions 36–39, 179nn.91, 94 Metropolitan Miniatures Art Gallery 15 Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 121 Metropolitan Seminars in Art books 60–64 cultural landscapes 67–72 introduction 12, 15 list of 165–166 middlebrow culture 49–59, 77–81 misteaching art 74–77 problems and complaints 72–74, 190nn.102, 105, 107, 191nn.109, 111 readership 59 selling 64–67, 188n.72 The Metropolitan Seminars in Art: Great Periods of Paintings (Canaday) 57

Index The Metropolitan Seminars in Art Slide Program 128 Michelangelo 120 “Midcult” (Macdonald) 101 middlebrow culture xi, 3, 5, 8, 12–13, 20, 45, 54, 77–81, 101–102, 108, 119, 128, 146, 152, 155, 168n.17, 193n.137, 215n.131 Miller, Keith 143 Mills, C. Wright 6 Miniatures and Seminars collaborations with the BOMC 127–130 and contemporary art 131 introduction 1–13 middlebrow culture 77–78 popular art education 149, 154 postwar art education 84, 86, 90–93, 99–102 products received 27 projects 107–110, 118, 121 quality importance 107–109 readership surveys 153–154 Rembrandt reproduction 109–110, 118 serving a unified public culture 155 subscribers 124 treatment of art 148–149 Mirandola, Pico della 135 “Modern Art and the Dignity of Man” (Taylor) 135 “The Modern Artist Speaks” (forum) 136 Modley, Rudolf 18–19, 23, 173n.18 Mont Sainte-Victoire with Viaduct (Cézanne) 30 Montebello, Philippe de 10–11, 120, 124 Morgan, J. Pierpont 83, 85 Morris, Frances 85 Mother and Child with Bird (Harunobu) 103–104 Mount, William S. 152 Musée du Luxembourg 130–131 museum accessibility 2, 8, 11, 81, 86, 92, 127, 150, 152–155 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 66, 130–133, 136–137 The Museum and Popular Culture (Adam) 90 The Museum as a Social Instrument (Low) 89–90

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“Museum without Walls” (Malraux) 121–122 “The Museum’s Educational Credo” (Howe) 83 “Music Appreciation Hour” (NBC) 10, 71 Muther, Richard 138 Namuth, Hans 130 National Art Education Association (NAEA) 93, 96, 129 National Association of Publishers (NAP) 34 New York Journal-America 132 The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (Ashton) 142 Newman, Barnett 131, 144 Newmeyer, Sarah 135, 210n.40 Norton, Charles Eliot 91, 136 Ogg, Oscar 35 Oration on the Dignity of Man (Mirandola) 135 The Organization Man (Whyte) 6, 95 Ortega y Gasset, José 129 Panofsky, Erwin 149–150 Parton, James 117 The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (Shahn) 54, 63 Paulhan, Jean 135 Peterson, Richard 101 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition (1876) 117 Philadelphia Museum of Art 18, 83 Pictograph Corporation 18 Piper, Rose 150–151 Plato 123 Pollock, Jackson 130–132, 137–138, 140, 147 popular art education art or con game 138–147 communication 148–152 explaining abstract painting 136–138, 211n.53 introduction 127–130 unintelligibility of abstract art 130–136, 208nn.12, 15, 209nn.24-5 poster stamps 15, 17–23 postwar homes 70–72

240

Index

Poussin, Nicolas 30 Powel, Lydia Bond 7–8, 88, 124–125 Prang, Louis 117 Pratt Institute 97 The Principles of Art (Collingwood) 134 The Print Collector (Daumier) 63 Putnam, Robert 6 radio 3, 6–7, 10, 70, 86–87, 89, 92, 135, 140, 153 Radway, Janice 8, 76–78, 101–102 The Railroad (Manet) 30 Raphael 53 Ravitch, Diane 3–4 Read, Herbert 96, 136 Redmond, Roland 23, 25, 55–56, 66 Rembrandt 37, 39, 52 Renaissance 100, 137, 149–150 Renn, Melissa 120, 205n.70 The Return of Curiosity (Thomas) 81 Riesman, David 6, 95 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 120 Rockefeller, John D. Jr. 56–57 Rorimer, James 49, 54–58, 65, 73, 107–110, 113–114, 121, 123 Rosin, Axel 34–35, 66, 110, 115–116 Rothko, Mark 131 Rousseau, Theodore Jr. 31, 53–54, 102, 111–114 Rubin, Joan Shelley 5, 26, 43–44, 77–78, 91, 101, 168n.17 Ruskin, John 98 S&H (Sperry and Hutchinson) 20 Sachs, Paul J. 53, 56 Sackheim, Maxwell 26 Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata (van Eyck) 103 Salinger, Margaretta 30, 49, 182n.4 Sarton, George 35 Schapiro, Meyer 89, 91–92, 132–133, 135, 148, 151 Scherman, Harry introduction 2 Metropolitan Miniatures 9, 26–27, 35–39, 42–44, 46–47, 176n.56 Metropolitan Seminars 49–50, 56, 58, 66, 78 reproduction and quality 108, 113–114

Schlesinger, Arthur 134 Sears Roebuck 118 segregation 5–6 Seldes, Gilbert 135, 140–141 Seventeen (magazine) 21 Shahn, Ben 54, 63 Shaw, Theodore L. 74–76, 141 Shils, Edward 94–95, 101–102 Silverman, Lois 154 Siqueiros, David Alfaro 144, 149 Sistine Chapel 120 Skira (publishing house) 107, 201n.13 Smith, Ruth F. 139–141, 144–145 Soby, James Thrall 136, 211n.54 The Social History of Art (Hauser) 135 The Soup (Daumier) 63 Spacks, Patricia Meyer 67 Spigel, Lynn 65, 70, 72 Stalin, Josef 133 stamp collecting 9, 19–20 Standen, Edith A. 30 Stecker, Robert 100–101 Steele, H. Thomas 20 Stet (magazine) 25 Stewart, Susan 41–42 The Storm (Cot) 62 Streat, Thelma Johnson 150–151 Survival: The Salvage and Protection of Art in War (Rorimer) 57 Sweeney, James 133 The Tastemakers (Lynes) 119 Taylor, Francis Henry introduction 3–4, 7–8, 11–13 Metropolitan Miniatures 15–18, 22–23, 27, 31–32, 35–40, 43–44, 46–47, 172n.12 Metropolitan Seminars 49, 51, 53, 66, 74, 81 popular art education 127–136, 139, 141, 145–155 postwar art education 83, 86–91, 99, 196n.32 reproduction/quality 112, 118, 122 “The Teaching of Visual Arts in General Education in the United States of America” (Ziegfeld) 93–94 television 6–8, 66, 70–72, 86–89, 124–125, 135

Index “Television and the Metropolitan Museum of Art” (Powel) 7–8, 88, 124–125 The Tempest (Kokoschka) 62 Thomas, Nicholas 81 Time Magazine 109, 152–153 Tolstoy, Leo 139 Tomkins, Calvin 7, 18, 85, 90 Twentieth-Century American Paintings 130 van Eyck, Jan 103 Velázquez, Diego 53 Victoria and Albert Museum 83, 85 “Visual Arts in General Education” (UNESCO Seminar) 93 visual literacy 3–5, 9, 12, 31, 61, 63–64, 72, 77, 79, 102 The Voices of Silence (Malraux) 122 war stamps 18 Wasserman, Burton 118 Weil, Stephen 10–11 Weitz, Morris 146–147, 213n.102 “What is a Painting?” (tele-lecture) 65–66 Whistler, James 128

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White Collar: The American Middle Classes (Wright Mills) 6 Whitney Museum of American Art 130–131, 136 Whyte, William 6, 80, 95 William Mount exhibition 154 Williams, Gray 111–113 Williams, Raymond 71 Wind, Edgar 122 Winlock, Herbert Eustis 7 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 146–147 Wolczek, Walter 25 Wölfflin, Heinrich 137 Wollheim, Richard 145 women 8, 21, 30, 169–170n.42 Wood, Meredith 33–34, 55, 57–58, 66, 72, 103 “Young People’s Concert” (TV program) 71, 189n.96 Yunkers, Adja 142 Zerner, Henri 122 Ziegfeld, Edwin 93–94 Ziegfeld, Ernest 94–95, 97 Zolberg, Vera 3, 54, 88, 124

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Plate 1 The Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures, albums and stamps, 1955. Photo: Nancy Duff.

Plate 2 Metropolitan Seminars in Art, 1958. Courtesy of the Audio-Visual Resource Centre, School for Studies in Art and Culture, Carleton University. Photo: Nancy Duff.

Plate 3 The Metropolitan Miniatures Art Gallery, Series 1, 1947. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY / Art Resource.

Plate 4 The Metropolitan Museum of Art Album Art Stamps, 1941. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY / Art Resource.

Plate 5 Adventures in Art, 1941. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

Plate 6 The Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures. Courtesy of the Audio-Visual Resource Centre, School for Studies in Art and Culture, Carleton University. Photo: Nancy Duff.

Plate 7 Peter Blume, The Eternal City, 1934–7 (dated 1937 on the painting). Oil on board, 86.4 × 121.6 cm, Museum of Modern Art, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund. © Estate of Peter Blume / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SOCAN, Montreal (2021). Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

Plate 8 Ben Shahn, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, 1931–2. Tempera and gouache on canvas mounted on composition board, 84 × 48 inches. Whitney Museum of American Art. © Estate of Ben Shahn / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SOCAN, Montreal (2021). Digital Image © Whitney Museum of American Art / Art Resource, NY.

Plate 9 Pierre Cot, The Storm, 1880. Oil on canvas, 234.3 × 156.8 cm. Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Bequest of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1887. Metropolitan Museum of Art / Open Access.

Plate 10 Oscar Kokoschka, The Tempest or The Bride of the Wind [Windsbraut], 1913. Oil on canvas, 181 cm × 220 cm. Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland / Public Domain.

Plate 11 Honoré Daumier, The Soup, c. 1862–5. Black ink, watercolor, grey-brown wash, and black pencil, 30 – 49.5 cm. The Louvre, Paris. Photo: Thierry Le Mage. Credit: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY / Art Resource.

Plate 12 Honoré Daumier, The Print Collector, c. 1860. Oil on canvas, 34.1 × 26 cm. Purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, 1954. The Philadelphia Museum of Art. Credit: The Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY / Art Resource.

Plate 13 Metropolitan Seminars in Art promotional envelopes. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY / Art Resource.

Plate 14 Metropolitan Seminars in Art promotional brochure. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY / Art Resource.

Plate 15 Photograph from Metropolitan Seminars in Art promotional brochure. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY / Art Resource.

Plate 16 1950s Family Watching Television. ClassicStock / Alamy Stock Photo.

Plate 17 “Color Proofs in Progression,” from Julian Soubiran, The Art and Technique of Photo-Engraving. New York: Horan Engraving Co., 1952, p. 45.

Plate 18 Arnold Böcklin, Island of the Dead, 1880. Oil on wood, 73.7 × 121.9 cm. Reisinger Fund, 1926. Metropolitan Museum of Art / Open Access.

Plate 19 Rembrandt, Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, 1653. Oil on canvas, 143.5 × 136.5 cm. Purchase, special contributions and funds given or bequeathed by friends of the Museum, 1961. Metropolitan Museum of Art / Open Access.

Plate 20 Otis Kaye, Heart of the Matter, 1963. Oil on canvas, 127 × 108 cm. Anonymous gift. The Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: Elyse Allen. Image source: Art Resource, NY / Art Resource.

Plate 21 Promotional envelope for the BOMC Print of Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, 1962. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY / Art Resource.

Plate 22 Promotional brochure (recto and verso) for the BOMC Print of Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, 1962. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY / Art Resource.

Plate 23 James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, 1871. Oil on canvas, 144.3 × 162.5 cm. Musee d’Orsay, Paris. Photo: Jean Schormans. Credit: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

Plate 24 Altered version of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1: Portrait of the Artist’s, Metropolitan Seminars in Art Slide Program (1965). Courtesy of the Audio-Visual Resource Centre, School for Studies in Art and Culture, Carleton University.

Plate 25 David Alfaro Siqueiros, From the Dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz to the Revolution—The People in Arms, 1957. Mural, Museo Nacional de Historia, Castillo de Chapultepec, Mexico City. © Estate of David Alfaro Siqueiros / SOCAN , Montreal (2021). Photo: Bob Schalkwijk. Image source: Art Resource, NY / Art Resource.

Plate 26 William Sidney Mount, The Raffle (Raffling for the Goose), 1837. Oil on mahogany, 43.2 × 58.7 cm. Gift of John D. Crimmins, 1897. Metropolitan Museum of Art / Open Access.