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“A brilliant essay in cultural history,
gracefully written and full of wide-rang¬
ing imaginative insights. Saisselin’s book
is a pioneering contribution to the his¬
tory of consumer culture.”
—Jackson Lears

The Bourgeois and the Bibelot

Remy G. Saisselin

Traveling in imagination from Tivoli in

1800 across the Atlantic and back to
Italy to Bernard Berenson’s villa, I Tatti?
Remy Saisselin takes us on a historical
odyssey through nineteenth-century art.
Looking at such disparate collectibles
as a cheap plastic copy of Michelan¬
gelo’s David and an overstuffed, ornate
imitation of a Louis XVI settee, he
brings a new perspective to nineteenth-
century art. This is not art criticism or
art history, but rather a study of the psy¬
chological forces that transformed art
from an aesthetic experience represen¬
tative of church and state to a consumer
commodity, symbolic of the bourgeois’s
new God—money. Art collecting be¬
came an art in itself. This new obses¬
sion for prestigious collectibles, or
bibelots, was aptly coined bricabraco-
mania. One art collector explained the
phenomenon as a reaction against the
loneliness and emptiness of the human
heart in the new industrial society and
modern city.

As art became increasingly inseparable

from an economy centered on adver¬
tised goods, new spaces had to be cre-

(continued on back flap)

BOSTON
PUBLIC
LIBRARY
THE BOURGEOIS AND

THE BIBELOT
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2018 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/bourgeoisbibelotOOsais
New Brunswick, New Jersey
 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Saisselin, Remy G. (Remy Gilbert), 1925-

The bourgeois and the bibelot.

Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Art and society—History—19th century. 2. Civilization, Modern—19th
century 3. Art—Collectors and collecting. 4. Art as investment. I. Title.
N72.S6S24 1984 701'.03'09034 84-4701
ISBN 0-8135-1062-7

Copyright © 1984 by Rutgers, the State University

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Bedroom, 1905. Photograph by Byron. The Byron Collection.

Museum of the City of New York.
 C-O N-T E-N-T-S

Illustrations vii

Preface ijc

Abbreviations yvii

ONE
Tivoli: Art and History 1

TWO
Paris and the Aesthetics of the Flaneur 17

THREE

Enter Woman: The Department Store as Cultural Space 31

FOUR

Woman, Desire, and the Bibelot 51

FIVE

The American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal 75

six
Cosmopolis, or the Snob’s Progress 117

SEVEN

I Tatti, or Sublimating Sales 133

v
 VI

Contents

Postscript: From Aura to Inflation 169

Selected Bibliography 175

Indey 181
I-L-L-U-S-T-R-A-T-I-O-N-S

Objects of art from the Louvre (painting)

Lx

Brutus (painting)
1

Passage des Panoramas (photograph)

17

Exterior of the Bon Marche (photograph)

31

Furniture department at the Bon Marche (photograph)

43

Early-twentieth-centuiy bedroom (photograph)

51

Nineteenth-century drawing room (photograph)

66

Courtyard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

(photograph)
75

Isabella Stewart Gardner (portrait)

108

vu
 Vlll

Illustrations
i

Promenade des Anglais (engraving)

117

Bernard Berenson inside I Tatti (photograph)

133

Bernard Berenson and friends at I Tatti (photograph)

153
 Objects of art from the Louvre, by Blaise Aleyandre Desgoffe.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bequest of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1887.
The driver put the bus into third gear, then second, as we began our
ascent and climbed and climbed to reach a parking area on the edge of
a town dimly distinguishable in the evening light of this splendid Ital¬
ian summer. The guide announced Tivoli.
It was the first time I had been here, as indeed it was the first time I
had been to Rome from whence we had come to view the highly rec¬
ommended illuminations of the Villa d’Este, also known for its myriad
fountains and magnificent terraced gardens. But Tivoli had occupied
a place in the landscape of my imagination for years. I had read
Madame de Stael and Goethe and looked at Hubert Robert and Pi¬
ranesi. Tivoli: the very word was charged with historical and cultural
associations. Here milordi on the Grand Tour, great artists, great poets,
the rich and the beautiful had come, and posed, and uttered the ap¬
propriate words about beauty, art, time, and eternity.
And so we got off the bus and followed the guide toward a little
piazza that, from what I could see, seemed to be the center of the vil¬
lage. The piazza was one huge market of souvenirs, reproductions, and
bibelots, all brand new. Never before had I seen such a concentration
of world-renowned and universally admired masterpieces as in the
shops of this piazza, and all reduced to convenient gift sizes. Michel¬
angelo’s David, in plastic, plaster, or alabaster; his Pieta, in the same
materials, as well as luminous plastic; the Leaning Tower of Pisa; the
famous Mona Lisa, Botticelli, Raphael—you name it they had it, some
in beautifully crafted frames, some soft to the touch; and if somehow
during your travels you had forgotten the Eiffel Tower or some other
monument or picture, no matter, you found it here. For the serious
tourist there were slides, in glorious Kodacolor, already mounted for
use in any standard projector, for any kind of enthusiast: early Renais¬
sance, High Renaissance, mannerist, baroque, rococo, neo-classic, ro¬
mantic. The world of art was up for sale as reproductions and sou¬
venirs on this world-famous hill where the great had once feasted and
conversed and thought sublime thoughts.
 }Cll

Preface
I

Tivoli: I had come, I had seen, I had laughed. What delightful

bibelots and what imagination mankind, industrial mankind, dis¬
played in their production. And how modern ingenuity had outdone
the old masters who could only produce one masterpiece at a time!
Here they were by the thousands, in all sizes and materials, shiny, new,
and for sale!
The villa, the gardens, the fountains, the illuminations, in compari¬
son, were rather disappointing; after all, you couldn’t buy those.

I had known about bibelots before my surrealistic experience at

Tivoli. At my great aunt’s Parisian apartment, as we sipped our coffee
after dinner and carefully set our chinoiserie coffee cups on the not
always steady Moroccan folding coffee table, my eyes would gaze at
the heavy bronze ox and rider from Indo-China on the mantlepiece.
And sometimes, turning slightly on the Louis XVI settee (nineteenth
century but a good copy), the children and I would examine the bibe¬
lots on the Chinese-style etagere in the corner of this exemplary late
nineteenth-century bourgeois salon: a rather flat-headed Buddha in
crystal on a heavy bronze base; a cloisonne opium pipe with holder
and tiny instruments with which to prepare the opium; several small
Chinese figurines in ivory; five diminutive ivory elephants, each smaller
than the next; a small Daum vase; silver boxes; photographs of family
members in silver frames; and other little items, themselves put in
little boxes, which, in turn, were placed in the little drawers of this
cabinet of past dreams and tastes. Familiar objects all, familiar bibelots
that had been the delight of children’s imaginations for two or three
generations. They had no value save as souvenirs of another world, an¬
other time, another French Republic; though with hindsight they seem
souvenirs of the late bourgeois world.
On my return from Italy that summer, they were still there, in the
same etagere. As I began to muse on them and the thousands of simi¬
lar others I had seen at Tivoli and other places, like the abbe Laugier in
the eighteenth century suddenly perceiving the origin of architecture
 yizz

Preface

in the primitive hut, I, too, had an illumination. It was, however, not

sudden, but a crystallization, as Stendhal used the term in regard to
love: a variety of perceptions and impressions fell into place and I
came to understand the significance of art in the nineteenth century:
it had been bibelotized!
The pages that follow then, are not those of one more book in art
history concerned with the description of the various movements of
the nineteenth century There are no chapters on romanticism, real¬
ism, naturalism, impressionism, postimpressionism, or symbolism. I
am concerned, rather, with exploring that ambiguous moral and aes¬
thetic space in which works of art or of beauty are no longer defined
by philosophers of aesthetics writing of subjects perceiving objects de¬
fined as beautiful through the aesthetic experience, itself defined in
terms of pure disinterestedness. Nor am I concerned with art critics
writing about works of art they knew in advance to be great art. My
concern is with the very human desire to possess objects of art and
how this desire, accepted at the outset as a distinctive human trait,
was magnified in the nineteenth century and how it affected the per¬
ception and status of art and works of art. Mine is a study in what
might be called the democratization of collecting.

Some readers will immediately think of Veblen’s theory of conspicu¬

ous consumption and assume that what I have to say merely points to
a qualitative rather than a quantitative change in collecting, that con¬
spicuous consumption has always been with us. The names of Renais¬
sance princes are often coupled with those of American millionaires
when collecting is discussed. Aline Saarinen has even written of no¬
blesse oblige in connection with J. P. Morgan’s great accumulation of
treasure. But it ought to be remembered that the capitalists of the
nineteenth century were not at all like the nobility of the old regime
and that conspicuous consumption is not in the same order as noble
spending, depenses nobiliaires, made necessary by one’s station in life,
not possible merely because one had millions to spend.
 The nature of collecting in the nineteenth century must not be con¬
fused; as Joseph Alsop pointed out in his recent book; The Rare Art
Traditions, with patronage of the arts. As going broke magnificently
was an inseparable risk from the obligations of the noble life, so desire
and the accumulation of things was inseparable from the bourgeois
life of the nineteenth century. That some qualitative change had oc¬
curred in the nature of the collecting did not escape the notice of
social observers at the time. Edmond de Goncourt; along with his
brother Jules, a great collector of eighteenth-century French art,
pointed to a psychology of accumulation in the preface to the cata¬
logue of their 1880 collection, La Maison d un artiste. He noted the pe¬
riod’s mania for bibelots and referred to it as bricabracomania, as if it
were a kind of disease. He linked it with an uneasiness of the soul, the
loneliness and emptiness of the human heart in the new industrial so¬
ciety and its modern cities. In the ennui and anxiety of the modern
city with its fast pace, men and women, according to Goncourt, sought
stability, durability, happiness, and spiritual value in the enjoyment
and possession of works of art. Time passed, but works of art endured.
These are of course Pascalian explanations: the enjoyment of art as the
drive to accumulate art objects can be seen as a diversion, a divertisse¬
ment from the human condition. The object, however, in those days of
grand bourgeois accumulation, was not anxious but, rather, reassuring.
Yet this psychological phenomenon does not preclude a specific
historical world that gives this new desire for objects its particular
form and meaning. In this realm, the expansion of the limits that de¬
fined the fine arts transformed what Alsop calls the by-products of art,
such as collecting, tastes, prices, expertise, and so on. In the ambigu¬
ous realm of desire for possessions of beauty, the objet d’art is no
longer defined by some pure and disinterested aesthetic judgment sat¬
isfactory to Kantians, but by the social role of art, by prejudices, pre¬
suppositions, art history, money, and class. On this level the work of
art functions less as a masterpiece within the web of art history than
as a social sign denoting or conferring distinction and cachet upon its
 Preface

possessor. In the old regime possession by nobility conferred cachet

upon the work; in the bourgeois world it is the other way around. Mo-
liere’s Monsieur Jourdain, bourgeois gentilhomme, triumphs over the
common sense of his wife who has been invited to join the local mu¬
seum’s junior council.

My exploration of this ambiguous space where love of possession,

love of art, and social ambition meet is not to be read as a definitive,
scholarly study of art collecting in the nineteenth century. I have not
exhausted the libraries or museums or antique shops of the United
States or of Europe. Nor does the bibliography contain all that I have
read. The readers of the bibliography will notice that I have relied not
only on art historical sources and memoirs, but also on novels, some
of which are all but forgotten. These works are useful for their docu¬
mentary value and for the ambiance or feeling for the times that they
can still impart.
This essay, and the stress is on “essay,” may thus be likened to a
promenade in the course of which I have ambled and mused, like a
literary flaneur, in historical time on an itinerary that takes us from
Tivoli in about 1800, across the Atlantic to the United States, and back
to Europe to Berenson’s villa I Tatti. Why Tivoli in 1800 and I Tatti? Be¬
cause in her novel Corinne, Madame de Stael sums up a view of art
that is as good a starting point for understanding the assumptions
about art with which the nineteenth century began as any. Corinne
and Tivoli and all its ancient associations, marked one limit to my in¬
quiry. I Tatti symbolizes the prestige of high art and of the established
art expert; it also represents the international scope of the current art
market.
And so it seems that the history of art in the nineteenth century
might conceivably be written as the transformation of the work of
art, first perceived as aesthetic object and historical sign, into a super¬
bibelot calling for super prices.
 A-B-B-R-E V-I A T I-O N S

A James, Henry. The American. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907.

AH Berenson, Bernard. Aesthetics and History. New York: Pantheon,
1948.
AL Lee, Vernon. Art and Life. East Aurora, N.Y.: Roycroft Print Shop,
1896.
C Wharton, Edith. The Custom of the Country. New York: Scribner’s,
1913.
D Nordau, Max. Degeneration. New York: Appleton, 1897.
LP Santayana, George. The Last Puritan. New York: Scribner’s, 1936.
OM Bourget, Paul. Outre-mer. 2 vols. Paris: Lemerre and Meyer,
1894-1895.
PA Lee, Vernon. The Beautiful, an Introduction to Psychological
Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913.
PL James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. New York: Penguin, 1978.
R Stein, Roger. Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840-
1900. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967.
TG Taine, Hyppolite. Notes sur Paris: Vie et opinions de M. Frederic
Thomas Graindorge. Paris: Hachette, 1901.
V Bourget, Paul. Voyageuses. Paris: Nelson ed., Calmann-Leyy, n.d.
WP Fuller, Henry Blake. With the Procession. New York: Harper’s,
1895.
Brutus, by Jacques Louis David. Archives Photographiques. The Louvre
 Art is nothing to the people.
Submit the Beautiful to universal suffrage,
and what happens to the Beautiful?
The people rise to art only when art
descends to the people.
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt,
La Revolution dans les moeurs

There was a time when the tourists at Tivoli did not get out of buses to
find a square filled with souvenirs and kitsch. There was a time when
only ladies, gentlemen, cognoscenti, amateurs of the arts, scholars and
artists, poets and writers came to Tivoli. They stepped out of coaches
to sketch, and think, and seek inspiration, or just to have been there;
for Tivoli was part of a gentleman’s education in the eighteenth cen¬
tury. And in the romantic period of the nineteenth century, the liter-
arily inclined wrote as they set on some stone bench in the gardens of
the Villa d’Este, or in the shadows of the pines, by rippling waters,
pages on beauty and human destiny. They knew that works of art and
monuments were not bibelots, that art and time and history were very
serious matters. And these travelers also knew—and found appropri¬
ate—that it was not given to all, and ought not to be given to all, to
pose in the Roman countryside or climb the hill to Tivoli.
When Corinne, heroine of fiction created by anything but a fictitious
Madame de Stael, nee Germaine Necker, adoring daughter of a Gene¬
van banker turned minister of finance under Louis XVI, took her lover
Lord Oswald to her villa at Tivoli, there were no bibelots sold in the
village square. She took Lord Oswald, romantic, melancholy, and pro¬
found man of the North, to show him her collection of paintings,
which were not bibelots. They were in a literal way significant; they
were signs; they had meaning, presumably universal. The collection

3
 4

Tivoli: Art and History

i

was made of paintings that; since Corinne was published in 1807, have
become famous and familiar to innumerable undergraduates taking
low-numbered art history courses for easy credits at high prices. Co¬
rinne possessed histories, religious pictures, poetries, and landscapes.
More important, Corinne, being as well-read, intellectual, and inspired
as Madame de Stael, had arranged her collection in a sequence that
made philosophical and historical sense; for the collection illustrated
the literary-historical philosophy of Madame de Stael, who was none
other than Corinne—as Madame Vigee Lebrun and the Baron Gerard
both knew since they both painted her as Corinne.
The first of Corinne’s history pictures was the famous Brutus by
Jacques Louis David; its pendant, the Marius at Minturne, was by Jean
Germain Drouais, one of David’s best students; while the last of her his¬
tories was the now lost Belisarius of Baron Gerard, one of the master¬
pieces of Napoleonic painting. All these works, taken together, had a
specific meaning: Brutus signified civic virtues that, in fact, resembled
crime; Marius, who is shown exposing his breast to a Cimbrian war¬
rior sent to kill him, while the latter is hiding his face in shame, exem¬
plified glory as the cause of personal misfortune; while the Belisarius,
a favorite of neoclassical art, was an obvious example of unjust per¬
secution. The sacred pictures, a Christ asleep upon the cross by Al-
bano, a Christ falling under the burden of the cross by Titian, also had
their meaning, signifying, in contrast to the histories, the redemption
and hope of the Christian faith as opposed to the hopelessness of the
pagan world. Monsieur Necker had written a book on the consolations
offered by Christianity, especially to the poor whose lot in this world
would be lightened by thoughts of rewards in the next.
As for the poetries and landscapes, they too had a significance. One
was a theme taken from Tasso; another was taken from the Aenead; a
third from Racine; a fourth from Shakespeare. One landscape was a
Salvator Rosa rustic scene; another, a heroic landscape showing Cin-
cinnatus leaving his plow to take up the defense of his country. Finally,
 5

Tivoli: Art and History

Corinne also had an Ossianic landscape that brought tears to Lord Os¬
wald’s eyes. In mood, subject matter, and in association, these poetries
and landscapes corresponded to Madame de Stael's cultural differ¬
entiation between the literature of the North—Shakespeare and Os-
sian—and that of the South—Tasso and Racine—and, by extension,
two different and often opposed temperaments and civilizations. Hers
was a theme that would flourish in the course of the nineteenth century
since the South would ever prove a fatal attraction to poets and painters
of the North from Winckelmann to Goethe, Feuerbach, and Thomas
Mann’s Gustav von Aschenbach, who found his death in the decadent
Venice of Bernard Berenson and Mrs. Isabella Stewart Gardner of
Boston.
Obviously Corinne’s pictures were not merely works to please the
eye, like some rococo nudes or pastorals; together, they represented
more than the collection of an amateur. The choice and arrangement
of the pictures, Corinne’s private guided tour, all signified what art
after the French Revolution had come to mean in the new age of the
arrived bourgeoisie: art works were the signs of history, and hence the
collection presented a rather coherent set of historical and cultural
values, values that distinguished the new ruling class from the old no¬
bility which now had to share social preeminence with the bour¬
geoisie. The old nobility had had lineage, ancestors, breeding, military
glory, and the right to bear arms to distinguish it from the commoners,
as well as debts incurred in keeping up the necessary appearances.
The bourgeoisie would have culture to distinguish itself from the for¬
mer nobility and the threat of commoners who might legally aspire to
its ranks and new ruling status. The principle that all men were equal
under the law, taken seriously by some of the working lower orders,
posed serious problems of authority and prestige for the bourgeoisie.
Surely all men were created equal and were so under the law, but
equally surely some were rather better than others. It was essential to
keep the lower order low and maintain the better sort of people in the
 6

Tivoli: Art and History

right places. It was found that both education and art could do a great
deal in maintaining a social balance. There soon arose what one critic
of the French education system in the twentieth century was to cadi
the aesthetics of distinction. The entire educational system of the
French bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century was founded on the ne¬
cessity of creating a level of distinction that would be an effective bar¬
rier to the lower orders: hence the baccalaureate degree, the achieve¬
ment of which required nonutilitarian Latin, the right table manners,
the right gloves, the right linguistic usage, the proper dress, quite dis¬
tinct from the dress and manners of the working class, the knowledge
of how many glasses to put at a place setting and where to put the
right knives, forks, and spoons. There is no doubt that art could also
play a distinguishing role for a ruling class whose individual members
had often only recently arrived. As the educational system tended to
be increasingly democratized, the idea of distinction in the aesthetic-
artistic realm was bound to become more and more attractive since
the arts were rich in associations of nobility, beauty, leisure, heritage, a
beau monde, and the general phenomenon of snobbism that marked
the world in the time of James and Proust. Aestheticism of the fin de
siecle was implicit in the bourgeois avid for distinction and in the very
foundation of his society.
True daughter of the Enlightenment and of a successful banker,
Madame de Stael was an optimist who believed in progress, liberal¬
ism, and the elite to which she belonged. Her contemporary, Jean
Chrysostome Quatremere de Quincy belonged to the same elite of
bourgeois notables, but he was no banker’s son and so tended to be
somewhat less optimistic than Madame de Stael. Originally a sculptor,
he turned antiquarian and made the acquaintance of the painter Da¬
vid in Italy, became a political exile during the Revolution, returned to
serve Napoleon and then the Bourbons, was appointed perpetual sec¬
retary of the reformed and revived Academy of Painting, transformed
 7

Tivoli: Art and History

under various regimes into the Classe des Beaux-Arts of the Institut.
Having been to Italy; he too had come to think of the arts in noble and
exalted terms. Friend of Canova, he had come to represent the up¬
holder and the defender of the Greek ideal in art. But as he lived on
during the reign of the Citizen-King Louis Philippe, who used to ap¬
pear in public with an umbrella like any bourgeois, Quatremere came
to have fewer and fewer illusions about the status of art in an age of
steam, speed, manufactures, money, art collections, public art exhibi¬
tions, and museums.
For Quatremere had come to understand and explain in prose only
slightly more lucid than Hegel’s, who had understood the same thing,
what no one dared say out loud: art was dead. By this he did not mean
that paintings and sculpture or public monuments were no longer
produced. The contrary was perhaps only too true: too much was
being produced. But he sensed that the nineteenth century—the
modern world—was in a profound disharmony with the forces that in
the past had been the conditions or the “causes” productive of art. The
Greek world had known harmony between its beliefs and the causes
productive of art and for this reason had produced the only valid
canon for art and beauty, and in the mind of Quatremere and his fol¬
lowers both terms were written with capitals and were seen as insepa¬
rable: Art is Beauty. The individual work of art was an intimation of
universal ideal beauty. The theory was Platonic. The models of univer¬
sal beauty were the Greek works that had survived. And the harmony
between Greek life, religion, and art was such that beauty, incarnate in
works of art as well as healthy and handsome Greek youths and maid¬
ens, seemed the product of an ideal nature. But this was far from the
situation of the nineteenth century in which art could only be an evo¬
cation of a lost harmony, an aspiration to regain or reestablish har¬
mony, in short, the ideal. Education in the arts came to be seen as one
way to establish this lost harmony within the modern world. Witness
 8

Tivoli: Art and History

t

the efforts of academies to maintain high art, or the efforts of men like
Ruskin and William Morris to counter the effects of industry and the
machine by preaching for a return to art as craft.
The result of this general malaise about the state of art and beauty in
the new industrial world and its great cities in Europe and North
America was an idealization of art in general and a reverential attitude
toward works of art in particular. The state became concerned with art
as it formerly had with religion. Indeed; in Anglo-Saxon countries reli¬
gion was sometimes confused with art; or vice versa.
It is possible to separate idealism in the arts into various strains; but
those who used the word ideal often failed to draw sharp distinctions
unless they happened to be professional philosophers who lectured
on beauty. The word thus remains a vague but useful term characteris¬
tic of an age. One thing was clear: the ideal was always spiritual; it was
never sensationist and certainly not sensational. And it was never
vulgar. In the early nineteenth century the ideal was the opposite of
the subversive; sensationist; materialistic philosophy of the Enlighten¬
ment; which; as all the well-to-do knew, had been responsible for the
Revolution. Materialism was dangerous to social values and to the sta¬
bility of society. The bourgeois, who had finally arrived after centuries
of climbing, was an idealist, at least in his salon if not on the market¬
place. The bourgeoisie had even found its ideal professor to expound
this doctrine of the new trinity of the true, the good, and the beautiful.
Victor Cousin, eminent eclectic philosopher, pillar of the establish¬
ment, was quite clear on the distinction between the truly aesthetic
from the snares of sensation: the "judgment of beauty is absolute, and
as such, entirely different from sensation.”1 Just as the neoclassical
painters and sculptors jumped right over the art of the baroque and
rococo to find inspiration with the Greeks, so Victor Cousin dismissed
eighteenth-century philosophy to find inspiration in Plato. Plato in-

1. Victor Cousin, Du Vrai, du beau et du bien (Paris: Didier, 1878), 141.

 9

Tivoli: Art and History

sisted on the Idea of Beauty rather than a thing of beauty. The thing
wa§ material; but the Idea was spiritual; intangible, eternal, transcen ¬
dent. Given these premises an artist who produced a thing of beauty
would always be at a disadvantage since beauty was spiritual. He
could only approximate the ideal; but, if successful, his work would
provide an intimation of that ideal.
Sensation, titillation, and strong emotion were thus effectively sepa¬
rated from the admiration of an object of art. Love of beauty and love
of art remained spiritual and therefore pure. The sentiment for beauty,
according to Cousin, the aesthetic judgment, according to Kant, was
so defined as to exclude desire. For the essence of beauty according to
these philosophers was not to prompt desire but, rather, to purify and
ennoble it. “The more a form is beautiful,” wrote Cousin, “not of that
common and gross beauty by which Rubens vainly animates his ar¬
dent colors, but that ideal beauty known to Antiquity, Raphael and
Lesueur, the more is desire tempered by an exquisite and delicate sen¬
timent and sometimes even replaced by a disinterested cult of beauty
before such noble creations.”2 Art and religion were thus not far apart.
The ideal led to thoughts of eternity and the true and absolute ideal
was none other than God. A romantic view of the artist as somehow
close to God and the infinite was thereby joined to a classical aesthetic
theory and its concomitant taste for the works of the Greeks. It was
conveniently forgotten that the Greeks had been pagans and far less
“spiritual” than Winckelmann.
This philosophical-aesthetic idealism was formulated in a variety of
ways and forms. Theophile Gautier, poet, journalist, critic, novelist,
wrote an entire novel about it, namely his famous—or, rather, in¬
famous—Mademoiselle de Maupin of 1835. He also thought that “the
verses of Homer, the statues of Phidias, the painting of Raphael have
raised the human soul more than all the treatises of the moralists.

2. Ibid., p. 145.
 10

Tivoli: Art and History

They have given a conception of the ideal to people who otherwise

would never have suspected its existence.”3 The idea that art could
raise the human soul would not be lost on the bourgeois. As for Ho¬
mer, Phidias, and Raphael, they constituted the very canon of the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres—painter, member of the Institut,
onetime director of the Ecole de Rome, decorated with the Legion
of Honor—though defined as a classicist would here have agreed
with the romantic Gautier. Ingres held the same views about art as
Quatremere de Quincy. He was equally as pessimistic as the perpetual
secretary of the Academie des Beaux-Arts. For him, in his despair at
the lack of beauty in the modern world, the end of art meant that the
great moments of its history were over; nothing greater than Raphael
had been or could be produced. All an artist could do in the modern
world was to maintain the purity of line and the harmony of form
which to Raphael had come naturally. At best, with the proper training,
one could perhaps repeat or emulate Raphael, find inspiration in his
work, but one could never surpass him. As for the rest, the current pro¬
duction of color, movement, romanticism, Delacroix: heresy. Color and
positivism, that is, finicky, minute finishing and attention to detail,
Horace Vernet: heresy. Low subject matter, vulgarity, surface play and
materiality of texture, realism, Courbet: heresy. And it followed that all
other isms to be produced by the age would be merely deviation, deg¬
radation, decadence. As Baudelaire was to tell Manet, you are but the
first in the decrepitude of your art. And so Monsieur Ingres with his
rosette of the Legion of Honor, maintained, against a mounting tide of
vulgarity and materialism, the beauty of Raphael, the ideal, the eter¬
nally beautiful.
As for Quatremere de Quincy, he lived so long in a world he did not

3. Quoted in H. A. Needham, Le Developpement de lesthetique sociologique en France et

en Angleterre au XIXe siecle (Paris: Champion, 1926), 100.
 11

Tivoli: Art and History

like that he came to wish for death. For it was a world of money valua¬
tions and what he called materialist considerations in the arts. By this
he meant museums, exhibitions, private and public collections, all of
which he despised. The enemy of art was not only romanticism in its
myriad manifestations, but also, perhaps more so, the ignorant lover of
the arts and that figure from the seventeenth century, the tulip specu¬
lator, who, in the eyes of Quatremere, came to represent the acquisitive
and speculative spirit that seemed, like democracy, to be conquering
the world. Quatremere looked at the tulip speculator as Tocqueville
looked at rising democracy. And the tulip speculator had, in the mod¬
ern world, become the art speculator, the collector, the curator, the ac¬
cumulator, the dealer. One might say he came to symbolize all those
byproducts of art that Joseph Alsop so knowledgably outlined as in¬
separable from the rare art traditions. Yet even at the Institut, where he
presided and where his authority was undisputed, there were fools
and optimists who saw in the greater and greater production of works
of art, in the exhibitions, collections, and museums, a sign of progress.
As if, Quatremere called out in a speech to the members of the acad¬
emy, the increasing number of boutiques in Paris were proof of greater
civilization!

The allusion to the boutiques was, as we shall see, more significant

than Quatremere himself may have realized. For it was unwittingly
pointing the finger at art’s greatest enemy in modern capitalist society:
the tulip speculator was opening shop and would soon own a depart¬
ment store, becoming a collector in the name of the ideal. Meanwhile,
Tivoli, symbol of the ideal, of art understood as historical sign, with its
association with the antique and Renaissance villas, was turning into a
museum and tourist pilgrimage. Art is dead, long live museums! There
was reason to be pessimistic for those who had believed in the har¬
mony of Greek life and Greek art and had failed to make that telling
distinction between patrons of art and mere collectors. Quatremere’s
 12

Tivoli: Art and History

suspicion of amateurs, collectors and museums were justified even

though he did not, in his time, formulate his suspicions in terms com¬
prehensible to us. For he lived at the beginning of the Museum Age
while we live in the time of museum show biz. The disharmony be¬
tween art and the nineteenth century that Quatremere sensed was the
product of a period in which patronage of the arts was increasingly
being replaced by collection of the art of the past—when, in other
words, history as the accumulation of past works housed in collec¬
tions would threaten the supposed absolute of taste founded on Greek
antiquity What Quatremere did not see, however, was an even greater
danger to art, namely, the very nature of modern life as manifested in
the new, modern, industrial city.
Friend of David and Canova, lover of Italy and antiquity, Quatremere
saw art endangered by color, movement, romanticism, positivism, and
materialism, by which he meant, among other things, what we tend to
regard as romantic and realist art. But the true danger to art, art as he
understood it, was entirely different and would include Ingres and De¬
lacroix, Girodet and Horace Vernet, classicists and romantics, idealists
and materialists.
The man who understood the new danger to art, perhaps because
he was at odds with his society and had not been brought up in the
eighteenth century, was Charles Baudelaire. Poet and Parisian, a fail¬
ure by every middle-class standard of success then and now, Baude¬
laire wasted his inheritance, wrote verses that brought him to court,
and contracted an unspeakable disease from the type of woman re¬
spectable people do not mention in public; yet he was a lucid poet and
critic. He understood quite early on the role of the new rapports
de force, the power structure that would rule the new society; he
also saw what it would mean for the arts, artists, and poets. When
Quatremere thought and wrote about the arts he addressed himself to
persons of his own class, the notables of the nation, the aesthetic elite,
and the officialdom of the arts. Baudelaire, on the other hand, discov-
 13

Tivoli: Art and History

ered the bourgeois, and in the preface to the Salon of1846 he stressed
what the power of this new public meant: "You are the majority, num¬
ber and intelligence; you are therefore power, which is justice.”4 He
saw and understood that this new public would have to be educated
in matters aesthetic, whereas Quatremere simply viewed the unedu¬
cated public as dangerous.
Baudelaire the poet saw what Quatremere had missed in the new
social and political situation in which the arts had to live, namely, the
fascination of the modern city. London and Paris in the eighteenth
century had been relatively large, but until the nineteenth century, the
arts had flourished by and large in slow-paced and modest-sized cit¬
ies. Industrialization under Victoria and Napoleon III increased the
size and population of cities, which effected a qualitative change in life
in such cities as Paris, London, Berlin. What Baudelaire understood
about the city and its effects on life and the arts may be gleaned from
two sonnets that stand as pendants to each other. The first is entitled
Beauty:

I am beautiful, O Mortals, like a dream of stone,

And my breast where all in turn were bruised
Is made to inspire in poets a love
Eternal and mute as the stone.

I rule the Heavens as inscrutable sphinx,

My heart is snow and white as the Swan,
I hate the motion displacing line,
And I never weep and I never smile.

Poets before my grand poses,

Borrowed of the proudest monuments,
Consume their days in austere study:

4. Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres completes de Charles Baudelaire, 2 vols. (Paris: Le Club

du meilleur livre, 1955), 213.
 14

Tivoli: Art and History

For I possess; to fascinate these docile lovers.

Pure mirrors, which everything do beautify:
My eyes, my great eyes of eternal clarity (1:689)

The aesthetic summed up in this sonnet inspired by a statue corre¬

sponds to the aesthetics of Ingres and his cult of Raphael or that of
Flaubert and the endless pain he took over a page of prose. It is the
religion of art, implying discipline and sacrifice though not salvation.
But consider this other sonnet to a passing woman:

The noisy street about me shrieked

When slender and in grand mourning,
Hand ostentatious, balancing garland
And hem, a woman passed . . .

Agile and noble with the legs of a statue,

I, like a madman, from her livid eyes,
Whence issued storms, drank in the sweetness
Fascinating, and the pleasure which kills.

A flash, then night, a fleeting beauty,

Whose look for me a rebirth was,
Shall I then see you only in Eternity?

Elsewhere, so far from here, too late,

Or never: for I know not your way and you not mine:
O thou I would have loved, O thou that knew it. (1:802)

The allusion to fleeting beauty in the second sonnet might easily be

worked into a “classic” opposition of universal, ideal beauty, as in the
first sonnet, and merely passing beauties. It was an opposition fre¬
quently found in the aesthetics of the Renaissance, the baroque, and
the Enlightenment. But Baudelaire is no longer working within the
 15

Tivoli: Art and History

tenets of classical aesthetics. His aesthetics is beyond that of the Re¬

naissance or the Enlightenment: the two sonnets point to a far more
telling opposition. The opposition is not one between ancient and
modern manners within an aesthetic system, such as the baroque, or
the Enlightenment period, which can accommodate both. The opposi¬
tion is no longer between rococo fancies and supposedly classic uni¬
versal values founded on the premise that ancient art is the only true
model for art and aesthetics. At issue rather is idealism, as expressed
in the first sonnet, confused with art, and the experience of beauty in
the world of the modern city. The aesthetic experience of the modern
is set in opposition to the traditional canon of art and beauty. It is not
two styles or two beauties that are at issue but rival aesthetic systems
and values.
The two sonnets mark what we may playfully call a moment of the
Hegelian dialectic: the opposition of thesis and antithesis. Art as con¬
ceptualized by Quatremere, Kant, and Victor Cousin is the thesis; the
experience of the modern city and what it offers the imagination is the
antithesis. At issue is the possibility of art’s survival in a modern world
that is itself rich, exciting, dynamic, tempting, indeed so stimulating to
the aesthetic sense as to make art and its concomitant disinterested
aesthetic experience as defined by philosophers, superannuated.
Idealist art and theory had but one solution to this challenge: ignore
the modern world. The tradition of high art was maintained against
the temptations of the modern world. But both systems—the classical
ideal in art, and the modern city and its products—appealed to the
same human faculty: the imagination.
The modern in the age of Baudelaire was thus no longer what it had
been in the eighteenth century. The modern now was that of the mod¬
ern city, which had itself become a powerful aesthetic stimulant. The
city could be more powerfully stimulating and even aesthetically at¬
tractive than a masterpiece housed in some museum and prompting
responses only among cognoscenti. Quatremere had understood only
 16

Tivoli: Art and History

too well that by 1800 what had been the space of the arts was becom¬
ing a museum. Art was being severed from the source of life. In retro¬
spect even Corinne’s villa looked a trifle educational. Tivoli signified
the end of the classical aesthetic; Paris, that of the modern to come.

Tivoli, as interpreted by Madame de Stael, prefigures the early nine¬

teenth century’s experience of art. Corinne gives Lord Oswald a
guided tour of her collection. Although this collection is didactic, it
supports the idea that works of art are more than luxury items. They
are, in addition, historical signs, as well as objects of beauty. At the
same time, the very site of the visit was an aesthetic and moral experi¬
ence associated with a glorious past, literary, historical, artistic. Lord
Oswald’s visit was also a privilege. Not all were invited to visit the col¬
lection, and not all sought to do so. Corinne’s villa was not a public
museum. Neither she nor her class assumed that art was for everyone,
or that it could or need be understood and appreciated by all. Finally,
Corinne’s collection was not for sale. Thus, insofar as the aesthetic ex¬
perience was concerned with art at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, it was connected with beauty, history, and privilege. The
world created by the bourgeois in the course of the nineteenth cen¬
tury would considerably change this view and status of art.
 Paris and the Aesthetics
of the Flaneur

r
The Passage des Panoramas. Photograph by Anne F. Saisselin.
 It often seemed to Mallet that he wholly lacked
the prime requisite of an eypert flaneur—
the simple, sensuous, confident relish of pleasure.

Henry James, Roderick Hudson

To make the opposition of art in the classic sense and the modern city
clear, let us have recourse to symbolic spaces: the museum and the
experiences it furnishes may be opposed to the modern city and its
stimulants. The classic aesthetic experience was in the past associated
not only with pictures and sculpture, but also with gardens, parks,
views, and the trappings of the noble life; these, in turn, implied cer¬
tain spaces: palace, town house, chateau, and galleries within. The
nineteenth century turned some of these spaces into museums and
created new spaces of aesthetic experience. But these were quite dif¬
ferent and associated with different forms of life and activities. The
new spaces to rival those of art were the passages, or arcades, and the
department stores. There is no doubt that these had predecessors on
the architectural level: the passage can conceivably be regarded as a
gallery adapted not to hang pictures but for some other commercial
purpose, while the department store, with its interior galleries, grand
staircase, majestic grand entrance, great halls, and even cabinets, was a
species of new palace. It was in these new spaces that the nineteenth-
century aesthetic observer discovered the most powerful aesthetic ac¬
tivity and experience of the modern man and, even more important,
the modern woman: the attraction of commodity and luxury items
and the pleasure of purchasing same; in short, the aesthetics of buying
and selling.
I was led to rediscover these new aesthetic spaces of Paris by reading
Walter Benjamin on Baudelaire and Paris. In his study of this poet he
poses the existence of a new aesthetic observer, the flaneur, the walker

19
 20

Paris and the Aesthetics of the Flaneur

in the city. And what happened in the city as one walked about with
the only purpose of seeking out what it had to offer, is that it affected
the imagination. One was stimulated as never before. Quatremere had
not neglected the necessity of the imagination in the appreciation of
works of art; but he had not seen the city would prove a much more
powerful stimulant to it than a masterpiece. And so during lunch
breaks when I worked at the Bibliotheque Nationale, I, too, wandered
in the footsteps of Baudelaire, Benjamin, and Zola’s Nana to discover
these first modern spaces that were to rival the classic spaces of art,
the passages.
The first passage I discovered was the Passage Choiseul, opened in
1825. Soon I discovered others, both in the area and farther away, such
as the famous Passage des Panoramas, one of the early ones-—built in
1800—and made famous not only by Nana but the panorama, stage for
perfectly illusory painting on the grand scale of Paris, London, Rome,
Naples, Athens, Jerusalem, as well as the battles of Tilsitt and Wagram.
These vast panoramas had been patented by Robert Barker of Edin¬
burgh, but two years later, in 1789, the American Robert Fulton and
Pierre Prevost, a landscape painter, joined forces to create one in Paris.
Their panorama is now gone, but the passage is still lined with a vari¬
ety of boutiques. Later I stumbled on the Galerie Vivienne, 1823; the
Passage Verdeau, built about the same time as that of the Panorama;
the delightful Galerie Vero-Dodat, excellently preserved; and later, the
last to be built, the Passage des Princes, 1860. These galleries or pas¬
sages date from the late eighteenth century, such as the Galeries
du Palais Royal, 1786, and the Passage du Caire, very much in neo-
Egyptian style, of 1799. There are, of course, others: the famous and
nearly colossal Galleria in Milan, the Burlington Arcades in London,
and a fine example in Cleveland, Ohio. These passages are interesting
not only sociologically but also architecturally. The Parisian ones date
from the late neoclassicism of the Restoration and the reign of Louis
Philippe. Their motifs are thus neoclassical, but the modernity of the
 21

Paris and the Aesthetics of the Flaneur

arcades lies in the glass roofs that allow daylight to illuminate their
long galleries and the often elegant mosaic and tile floors. These
spaces rivaled those reserved for art and were those of commodity
capitalism. They were also the privileged haunts of that product of the
new city the flaneur.
The nineteenth-century city produced a revolution in aesthetic per¬
ception and attitudes toward works of art that is still with us. The city
expanded the range of the seeable. The art object was redefined, as
was the status and definition of the artist. The eye began to take in far
more than it had in the preindustrial city; some critics have referred to
this widened range of attention as a new eye. This so-called new eye is
sometimes linked to the camera as well as to impressionism. But this
new eye of man in the modern city does not so much presuppose
photography as photography presupposes a new eye. In other words,
the stimulation of the modern city—its multitudes, its variety of ob¬
jects, its thriving life—transformed the gaze and the observer; and the
photographer went hand in hand with the new aesthetic observer of
the modern city, the flaneur.
This new eye was the result of the novel conditions of the bourgeois
regime. Writers, poets, and artists found themselves in a world of eco¬
nomic values, imperatives, and products rather than the religious,
mythic, or traditional values founded on landed wealth. The new re¬
gime incorporated new forms of capital, banking, commerce, and
manufacturing; and the city that resulted was complex, dynamic, and
expanding.
The city as aesthetic or literary experience was not new at all. Louis
Sebastien Mercier’s Tableau de Paris of the late eighteenth century is a
case in point, as are the innumerable pictures from that time of Rome,
Venice, London, Dresden, Paris, and Amsterdam. And it is well known
how Dr. Johnson appreciated and thrived in his beloved London. But
these were still relatively small cities by later standards. The Paris of
Louis Philippe and Napoleon III was on a grander scale, and the new
 22

Paris and the Aesthetics of the Flaneur

aesthetic observer, poet, writer, painter, architect, student, bohemian,

found himself not only in a new city, but also, as Benjamin remarks, in
a new market. And he surveyed the new market for the arts and letters
as he might have surveyed the Panorama. The image is that of Rasti-
gnac surveying the city he would conquer.
The panoramas were not the only art forms prompted by the new
city and its greater scale and population. Literature was also affected,
as was journalism. The feuilletons or physionomies—newspaper ar¬
ticles—were turned into volumes that were in effect literary pan¬
oramas of the new city and its population, habits, foibles: Les Franqais
peints par euy-memes, Le Diable a Paris, La Grande Ville were only a
few of the titles in which prose was supplemented by lithography to
make known the discoveries of the new eye to all those who never left
their corner of the city. The new artists were Gavarni, Daumier, among
other illustrators. The photo or camera eye is implicit in this new per¬
spective on the city and its teeming crowds, types, professions, man¬
ners, morals, works, amusements, places, streets, alleys. The represen¬
tation of this new world also implied a new reader whose interests and
curiosity went beyond the limits of accepted taste to cover all types
of men and women, from rag pickers and cocottes to the elegants at
Tortoni’s and the professional beauties of the opera and the theaters.
Henri Monnier was a master of this new genre of city observation and
reporting that, beginning with various Parisian city types, turned to
the physiognomy of the city itself to produce images of Paris dining,
taking the waters, riding, attending funerals and weddings, going to
work, out in the country taking the air, in court, at the exhibition, in
the music hall, and even at home. There was no theoretical limit to this
physiognomic approach, which may well be the origin of the omni¬
presence of photography in our own day.
This physiognomic genre supposed, as I said, a new aesthetic ob¬
server. This observer was no longer the man of taste in contemplation
 23

Paris and the Aesthetics of the Flaneur

before a picture or a landscape. Nor was he Dr. Johnson’s London idler,

or the spectator of Addison and Steele, or Rousseau’s solitary walker
herborizing in the country. He was the flaneur in the modern city. The
above-named types had been his predecessors with the idler closest to
the flaneur. Today the flaneur is all but gone for the automobile has
made his idling all but impossible. It was the new environment of the
modern city and the historical moment that distinguished him from
his prototypes as well as from Marcel Proust’s promeneur out for a
walk in the country, along Swann’s way or toward Guermantes. For
those who made up Proust’s world hardly strolled in the city but rode
to where they met. The flaneur was not of their class.
As a type he was soon recognized, and his name even had an English
equivalent coined by the anonymous translator of Jules Janin’s guide
to Paris, The American in Paris, or Heath’s Picturesque Annual for 1843,
in which the flaneur is spotted, followed, and called a “lounger.”

Paris is the principal city of loungers; it is laid out, built, ar¬

ranged expressly for lounging. The broad quays, the monuments,
the boulevards, the public places, the flowing water, the domes,
the pointed spires, the noise, the movement, the dust, the car¬
riages which pass like lightning, the active, restless, foolish
crowd, the schools, the temples, the great men who elbow you
at every corner of the street, the beautiful gardens, the statues,
the emperor Napoleon whom you meet everywhere, the soldiers
who march to the sound of all kinds of music,—the Palais Royal,
the most immense shop in the world, where everything is to be
bought, from the diamond of the finest water, to the pearl at
twenty-five centimes; the mob, the motion, the engravings, the
old books, the caricatures, living histories of absurdities of every¬
thing; and the permission to do everything, to see everything,
with your hands in your pockets, and a cigar in your mouth, . . .
 24

Paris and the Aesthetics of the Flaneur

the libraries are open to every comer, and the museums, where
centuries of fine arts have heaped up all their splendours. ... I
hope this is a sufficiently extensive theatre for lounging.1

The lounger, Janin went on, did not perceive himself as such; he was
no idler but a very busy person who set out to his business every
morning and was distracted by the spectacle of the city. The street
transformed him into a lounger who was seen everywhere, and no¬
where: “He is in the gardens of the Palais Royal, to regulate his watch
by the cannon which fires off, discharged by the rays of the midday
sun. He is on the quai Voltaire, occupied in contemplating the antiq¬
uities of the curiosity vendors, or looking at the celebrated men of
Madame Delpech” (165). He can be seen in the rue de Richelieu, the
rue Vivienne, the Place de la Bourse, but above all, “we shall find our
man, in the Passage de l’Opera, at the hour when the rehearsal com¬
mences, and there, he sees passing, in every kind of dress, in satin
shoes, in slippers down at the heel, and even without any shoes at all,
the pretty little danseuses, to whom glory has not yet held out her
hand, filled with laces and cashmeres. Lounger! That word implies
everything” (AP, 166). But there was another arcade the lounger found
particularly to his taste and loved to frequent because of its congenial
atmosphere: “The Passage des Panoramas is his abode. There he is un¬
der shelter, there he is at home, there he receives friends, and makes
his appointments, and there you are sure to meet him. And what finer
saloon can he have, than this Passage des Panoramas? where will you
find more numerous visitors, and more liberty? find prettier faces in
the morning, and more brilliant gas in the evening? Never was a saloon
more fitted with masterpieces, music, refreshment of every kind” (166).
Jules Janin was not the only writer to have spotted the flaneur as a

1. Jules Janin, The American in Paris, or Heath’s Picturesque Annual for 1843 (London:
Heath’s, 1843), 164-165.
 25

Paris and the Aesthetics of the Flaneur

new city type. Victor Fournel, in Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris
(1858), also devoted a few pages to him and compared him to a pas¬
sionate and mobile daguerrotype, sensitive not only to every trace,
changing reflection, event, and movement of the city, but also to the
spirit, antipathies, and admirations of the ever-present crowd. The
flaneur was seen as a free spirit and the phenomenon of lounging, of
being a flaneur, as so novel as not yet to have entered a dictionary.
Fournel distinguished between the flaneur and the idler, thereby rais¬
ing the flaneur to philosophical type: for the simple flaneur observes
and reflects and is in possession of his own individuality. The idler, or
badaud in French, on the contrary, tends to disappear into and allows
himself to be absorbed by the world around him, the crowd, the city
and its life which ravishes his personality, affecting him to the point of
inebriation and ecstasy. “Under the influence of the spectacle the
badaud becomes an impersonal being; he is no longer an individual,
he is public, he is crowd.”2 The flaneur remained a conscious observer
for whom the word boredom had become meaningless: he animated
all he saw, admired all he perceived. He strolled, observed, watched,
espied, and generally amused himself within these newly created
spaces that would eventually transform art and letters: the passages
and arcades of the age of Louis Philippe with their glass roofs and their
shops filled with what were called articles de Paris or articles de
nouveaute but that, today, are more likely to contain anything from an¬
tiques to kitsch, toys, gloves, canes, stamps, curios, books, old photos,
post cards, visiting cards, cameras old and new, lead soldiers, lingerie,
pipes and tobacco, masks, bonnets, oriental goods, and even pizza.
However, his observation of the phenomena of the city life was a
double-edged sword, for he lost his innocence, alienated himself from
the observed, turned into the outsider looking in. In a sense the
flaneur might be seen as a prototype of Steppenwolf. He had turned

2. Victor Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris (Paris: Delahays, 1858), 263.
 26

Paris and the Aesthetics of the Flaneur

I

into the aesthetic observer, somewhat apart from the modern, indus¬
trial city in which the lines of demarcation between life and art, art
and industry, beauty and mere fashion were becoming increasingly
blurred.
In earlier days these had been the new shops of commodity and lux¬
ury capitalism, places of predilection for the flaneur as well as for the
shopper; for shopping had at that time recently become a novel plea¬
sure. Passing from one street to another, piercing entire blocks of
buildings, they sheltered from inclement weather and the mud of still
unpaved streets. Within the great city they were little cities, micro¬
cosms of human activity, taste, desires, temptations. Here the flaneur
might come to get away from a meager garret and stroll at ease, enter¬
tained by the spectacle about him, which was free; here, too, he could
play the chronicler and philosopher of the life of the city and its vari¬
ous and seemingly inexhaustible products, made known by the color¬
ful advertisements called affiches. Here in the passages and the city
the flaneur might escape boredom. For as Baudelaire, Constantin
Guys, and also Gavarni pointed out, only a fool could find himself
bored by the crowd: for it had become a continuous spectacle. Gavarni,
returning from Paris to his room in Montmartre, wrote in his diary in
1828: “Each time I return from Paris I am convinced it yet remains to
be discovered and I am tormented by the desire to try it. Every time I
go there, at every step, I find so much; and as for the feelings I experi¬
ence there in a day, I should need a year to express them.”3 This em¬
phasis on the city’s spectacle as a therapy for boredom is suggestive of
a shift from Pascalian divertissement to modernity.
Pascal in the seventeenth century, the abbe Du Bos in the eigh¬
teenth, and later the architect Jacques Frangois Blondel, had all ar¬
gued that the arts were a noble way of avoiding and overcoming the all
too human condition of ennui. Now if Benjamin is right in following

3. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Gavarni (Paris: Fasquelle, 1926), 37-38.

 27

Paris and the Aesthetics of the Flaneur

Baudelaire and Guys in their opinion about the relation of the city and
ennui; then it becomes possible to see in the city and its products, its
commodities and luxuries, its articles de nouveautes and its shop win¬
dows, a way to construct a new aesthetics, closely linked to capitalism,
built on the need to dissipate ennui. In this sense the flaneur is no
longer the successor of the eighteenth-century spectator but, rather, of
that age's curieuy and collector Only he is a new type of collector, in¬
terested not only in small works of art but also in the products of mod¬
ern capitalism. His attention has shifted from the consecrated object
of the collector and curieux to the products of the city, its spaces,
types, sensations. Fashion and advertising became a redoubtable rival
of art as more and more art was used to promote the products of lux¬
ury. Hairdressers and tailors used fashion plates in their windows;
hairdressers and milliners used wax figures to show off their wares.
“As for the wax busts I’ve contemplated so often through the windows
of milliners and hairdressers,” writes Fournel, “Pradier or Canova
never turned more voluptuous contours, more rounded forms, or
more irreproachable outlines.”4
The flaneur could also note the ingenuity of the merchants’ efforts
to attract passing crowds. The affiches, printed advertisements usually
on colored paper, were a new type of literature raised to an art by the
eloquent use of typography and seductive vignettes, and appealing to
the new fascination with color. As the seventeenth-century critic Roger
de Piles had argued, a good picture really ought to stop a spectator in
his tracks, so the new advertisements stopped the idler, the flaneur,
the shopper in the street, attracting him or her to new products,
awakening new desires, creating new necessities. Zola, in his novel His
Excellency Eugene Rougon, describes in a long chapter the pomp and
circumstance of an imperial procession advancing in magnificent cos¬
tumes to Notre-Dame for an imperial baptism. But when it is all over

4. Fournel, Ce qu'on voit, 292.

 28

Paris and the Aesthetics of the Flaneur

< ,
and the evening settles down upon the city, the last glimpse given of
what is a magnificent Parisian impressionist tableau is that of a huge
frock coat, a titanic advertisement floating in the misty evening near
the tip of the lie Saint-Louis. Zola’s was a vision in which the new aes¬
thetics put the old pomp and circumstance, the aesthetics of mon¬
archy, revived by Napoleon, in true perspective.
Not all advertising was flamboyant; it could be discreet. The new
luxuries, the articles de nouveaute (like works of art in museums to¬
day) could be expertly staged and exhibited in such a way as to attract
the eye of the consumer. The attraction exercised by the shop as a
scene appropriately decorated for and with certain products is brought
out by Flaubert in his Education sentimentale. I allude to the shop of
Alexandre Arnoux in the rue Montmartre, in an area still rich today
with passages such as we discussed. His shop was precisely one of
nouveautes, called, significantly, A l Art industriel: “The high trans¬
parent glass offered the eye a clever display of statuettes, drawings, en¬
gravings, catalogues of l Art industriel; the subscription rates were re¬
peated on the door which was decorated, in its center, by the initials of
the editor. Against the wall could be seen big pictures, brilliant with
varnish, and in the back, two chests loaded with porcelains, bronzes,
attractive curios; the chests were separated by a small staircase closed
by a curtain at the top; an old Meissen hanging lamp, a green rug on
the floor, and a marquetry table made of this interior more a salon
than a boutique.”5
The significance of Arnoux’s boutique is revealed in part by its
name, which suggests the union of art and industry (opposites to a
Quatremere de Quincy); but its attraction lay in its resemblance to a
private, bourgeois interior. Art and industry were united only in the
title; the shop itself separated the two by looking like a living room. For
the separation of art and industry lay at the heart of bourgeois aesthet¬
ics and would have important consequences. The arcades, like Ar-

5. Gustave Flaubert, LEducation sentimentale (Paris: Collection GF, 1969), 58.

 29

Paris and the Aesthetics of the Flaneur

noux's boutique, were a mean between the street and the interior, pub¬
lic and private space, commerce and art. Arnoux’s shop offered the
bourgeois a look at his own interior, one that would most likely be
strictly separated from his work place. It was at this time that the pri¬
vate interior came to be separated from the work place; in the course
of the century the two would come to represent increasingly distinct,
almost antagonistic spheres. It was a separation great with conse¬
quences for art and attitudes toward the arts. For much as religion in a
highly secular society came to be reserved for Sunday, so the arts in
bourgeois society came to be the pretext of special occasions, special
spaces, a special experience, and a life divorced from work. Art came
to be reserved for the private domain, the intimate interior, the private
world of the bourgeois, so that it came to be associated with an imagi¬
nary universe at variance and sometimes in conflict with the public
world, values, and activities of the bourgeois. Hardheaded in business,
the bourgeois might be softheaded in art. The bourgeois interior, in
contrast to the spaces in which others worked for him, became the
space of private fantasies. Here, as Benjamin put it, he gathered objects
from remote places and the past to create the space of his dreams and
secret longings; here, too, his psyche betrayed itself through the ob¬
jects he gathered.
As Arnoux’s shop was the model of a potential interior, so real sa¬
lons, interiors, and houses were later described, photographed, and
published as models for those who wished to create a “house beauti¬
ful,”—which, as Lewis Mumford found in The Brown Decades (1931),
was often confused with a house filled with bric-a-brac. Earl Shinn,
alias Edward Strahan, published the art objects that made up the
“nineteenth-century clutter” of the Vanderbilt mansion in a ten-
volume limited luxury edition.6 Despite its colossal size and expense,
the house of Mr. Vanderbilt was still referred to as a “home,” implying

6. See Jan Cohn, The Palace and the Poor House: The American House as Cultural Symbol
(Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 1979), 119.
 30

Paris and the Aesthetics of the Flaneur

*

privacy, intimacy rather than a palace, which was always somewhat

public. The house expressed Mr. Vanderbilt's personal needs, in con¬
trast to the public need for display of the old nobility The public Mr.
Vanderbilt represented industry, power, wealth, ruthlessness; but the
private Mr. Vanderbilt needed art as only a nineteenth-century bour¬
geois could need it—as only a glutton can require food—quantitatively.
The bourgeois dreaming within his private interior cluttered with
objects from distant places and distant pasts may be likened to a part-
time flaneur come to rest following innumerable occasions on which
he could not resist the desires offered by the new world of the city,
commodity capitalism, and boutiques. As a city type, an aesthetic ob¬
server, the flaneur did not die out until the predominance of the auto¬
mobile on city streets. His connection with the arcades of the city and
his fascination with luxury commodities ended once the space of the
arcades was superseded. The flaneur disappeared into the labyrinth of
the new department stores and was soon lost in a crowd of new aes¬
thetic consumers—women.
Enter Woman: The Department Store
as Cultural Space
The Bon Marche. Photograph by L. L. Roger-Viollet.
 Give the Lady What She Wants.
Marshall Field

When the flaneur wandered into the new department stores he did
not have to enter as a consumer. He went through the doors as freely
as he had entered the passages from the streets. He was free to look,
free to touch, free to allow himself to be seduced, open to desire
for . . . things. The commodities and luxuries existed to be gazed at,
were exhibited to attract, stimulated and induced a state of desire that
transcended need. What distinguished the new department stores
from the old shops and boutiques was precisely their invitation to de¬
sire. Whereas Arnoux’s shop in the Rue Montmartre was attractive, the
department stores were veritable magnets, for you could enter without
having to buy.
The first department store, the Bon Marche, was founded in 1852 by
Aristide Boucicaut; however, it was not until 1869 that Boucicaut ex¬
panded it by building the grand building that still stands on the Rue
Babylone and that Michael Miller, in his study of the store from 1869 to
1920, sees as an embodiment or central institution of what he calls
bourgeois culture. The Bon Marche’s originality as a business venture
lay in its small mark-up of price, compensated for by a high volume of
sales and a rapid stock run. The merchandise was sold at fixed prices,
whereas the old shops and boutiques, which you entered only as a
consumer, never as a flaneur, charged what the buyer could bear or
what he or she was willing to haggle over. Fixed prices were a demo¬
cratic feature, as was free entry into the store. Anyone could enter,
look about, and leave without having to purchase anything. And an¬
other innovation: Boucicaut allowed returns and exchanges for items
bought in his store. Something simple and common today, but genial
at the time; that, too, gave desire free rein, for it was no longer limited

33
 34

The Department Store as Cultural Space

by the article bought and unreturnable. If you could return the article
you could also indulge another desire if the initial item no longer satis¬
fied. There was no longer any regret following the satisfied desire.
The Bon Marche inspired others to follow suit and the second half
of the nineteenth century became an age of great department stores:
Chauchard and Heriot founded the Magasin du Louvre in 1855; Jalazet
the Printemps in 1865; Cognacq the Samaritaine in 1869, the same year
Boucicaut and his wife were expanding theirs. There were parallel de¬
velopments in the United States: Stewart’s of New York, later absorbed
by Wanamaker’s of Philadelphia; Marshall Field in Chicago; Lord and
Taylor’s and Macy’s in New York. The efficiency of department stores
was soon increased in the United States: the first lift was introduced by
Strawbridge and Clothier’s of Philadelphia in 1865; Macy’s and Wana¬
maker’s were using electric lighting by 1878 and the first electric lifts in
the 1880s. Jordan Marsh introduced the telephone into his store in
1876, Marshall Field the pneumatic tube system in 1893, and the cash
register came into use in the course of the 1880s. But these stores also
necessitated a new architecture: new construction materials such as
iron and steel, reinforced concrete, and the vast use of glass all made
for grander spaces and more light, while lifts allowed the construction
of higher and higher buildings. Capitalism had found its palace.
The crowd and passages that had lured the flaneur out of his garret
now drew him into the department stores, which, as Benjamin put it,
put him to use for commodity circulation. But Benjamin, following his
flaneur into the department stores that marked the end of the pas¬
sages, had thought of these stores as a vast marketplace, which they
surely were; yet he seemingly missed the true intent or direction of
these new institutions, namely, their appeal to women.
As Zola saw it, they aimed to victimize women, or, as we might say,
to exploit them. But there is another way of looking at this novel phe¬
nomenon of women and department stores. Instead of exploitation,
one might speak of a certain education of women, if not, indeed, the
 35

The Department Store as Cultural Space

creation of what came to be called "the new woman.” In an essay on

Les Grands Magasins of 1927, J. Valmy-Baisse insisted that the stores
had been created for woman, first to embellish her through toilette
and adornment, and then to ornament her home. In this way the
stores evolved from mere merchandising novelties into centers where
one might learn interior decoration; later, they turned into restaurants,
even art galleries, educating the palate as well as the eye.
This claim is less exaggerated than might appear at first. One need
only follow Dreiser’s Sister Carrie to see how this education worked:
Sister Carrie rises from one experience of luxury to another as she
moves from Chicago to New York, and Dreiser as well as Zola under¬
stood how the stores affected the feminine soul. Looking for work in
Chicago Sister Carrie enters a department store called the Fair:

Carrie passed along the busy aisles, much affected by the re¬
markable displays of trinkets, dress goods, shoes, stationery,
jewelry. Each separate counter was a show place of dazzling in¬
terest and attraction. She could not help feeling the claim of
each trinket and valuable upon her personality and yet she did
not stop. There was nothing there which she could not have
used—nothing which she did not long to own. The dainty slip¬
pers and stockings, the delicately frilled shirts and petticoats,
the laces, ribbons, hair-combs, purses, all touched her with indi¬
vidual desire.1

Having no money to spend, poor Carrie hurried through the store.

But later she visited it again, this time with twenty dollars to spend,
and Dreiser in effect describes a type of aesthetic experience hardly
touched upon or imagined by the classical philosophers of the aes¬
thetic experience:

1. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books, 1981), 22.
 36

The Department Store as Cultural Space

There is nothing in this world more delightful than that middle

state in which we mentally balance at times, possessed of the
means, lured by desire and deterred by conscience or want of
decision. When Carrie began wandering around the store amid
the fine displays, she was in this mood. Her original experience
in this same place had given her a high opinion of its merits.
Now she paused at each individual bit of finery, where she be¬
fore had hurried on. Her woman’s heart was warm with desire
of them. How would she look in this, how charming that would
make her. (67)

Carrie, indeed, in Zola’s terms, is a perfect victim of the department

stores. She instinctively understands their language, which is that of
clothes:

Fine clothes were to her a vast persuasion; they spoke tenderly

and Jesuitically for themselves. When she came within earshot of
their pleading, desire in her bent a willing ear. . . . "My dear,” said
the lace collar she secured from Partridge’s, "I fit you beautifully;
don’t give me up.” “Ah, such little feet,” said the leather of the
soft new shoes, “how effectively I cover them; what a pity they
should ever want my aid.” (98)

Unwittingly Carrie was taking lessons from the new stores and their
creation, the new woman. And in her relation to the department store,
Carrie, as any other woman, was the same in Chicago, New York, or
Paris. Yet it was in Chicago that social conditions, economics, and
Marshall Field had created what came to be known as the new woman,
member of the social set, later of the Junior Council, and part of the
new elite that in the United States would set the fashions and moral
values for other women. The new woman’s husband was in business,
usually doing well, and she, accompanied or not, would make a pil-
 37

The Department Store as Cultural Space

grimage to Europe, coming back loaded with new dresses and other
luxilries as well as with talk of the splendors of Paris and the aesthetic
movement in London. On Chicago’s Michigan Avenue, or New York’s
Fifth, or in her Newport summer residence the new woman might
have lived in an interior that we would probably find rather cluttered
and garish. But she knew that she aspired to taste, art, refinement, and
what was generally referred to as art’s elevating influence. In Europe
this elevating influence was usually called the ideal and was associ¬
ated with art and noble sentiments, but not department stores. Yet it is
undeniable that in the aesthetic education of women, in the formation
of her interior, in the creation of the new woman, and even in this aspi¬
ration for the ideal, the department stores played a very important
role. Historically speaking, they preceded the museums that the new
woman would eventually join as a member of the Junior Council, as a
patron, or even as a member of the education department.
Yet supporter of the arts was not the new woman’s only role. For if
we are to believe Schopenhauer, who thought women looked on men
as the earners of the money they would spend, within the new woman
was the old Eve, cause of man’s fall. In the nineteenth century this
meant women devoured luxuries, ruined man as a demimondaine,
and drove him sick in his money making, only to fall victim herself to
the shiny capitalist apples seen in shops and department stores. Sister
Carrie quite innocently ruined Hurstwood—innocently because she
was unaware of the evil involved in her rise to a life of luxury and suc¬
cess. But Hurstwood himself was a victim of the same belief in material
success since he assumed man had to heap trinkets upon women.
In Au Bonheur des Dames, Zola likens the department store to a ca¬
thedral of modern commerce dedicated to woman. To use Henry
Adams’s famous historical metaphor, the Virgin of Chartres had turned
into the new woman and the dynamo into a department store. In
Adams’s view the power of the dynamo had displaced that of the Vir¬
gin over men’s imagination. In Zola’s world, the dynamic department
 38

The Department Store as Cultural Space

store devours woman. The Bonheur des Dames, Mouret’s store, is not
only a cathedral but a machine into which woman is attracted and se¬
duced. It is worth noting that this view has an eighteenth-century pre¬
cedent in the doctrine of architecture parlante. A tale by Bastide,
called La Petite Maison, tells of the seduction of a woman by the archi¬
tecture of the house, its decor, its sensuous effects, its very luxury.
Zola’s brilliant interpretation of the department store improves upon
this phenomenon by altering the scale of the seduction: the intimate
seduction of the rococo is turned into the mass seduction of a crowd
of women rendered frantic by a new type of artist, neither the archi¬
tect of architecture parlante nor the grand couturier, but the genius of
advertising and display.
The Bonheur des Dames, like its prototype the Bon Marche—and,
as we shall see, Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia—was an architectural
marvel: stone for the base, brick and iron for the rest of the structure,
thus creating an effect of light and spaciousness. Mouret’s expanded
store included two lifts, a buffet, a reading room, and an art gallery.
Owner and manager of the store, Mouret was an advertising genius
who offered the women free drinks and free balloons for the children.
There were also catalogues, posters, and advertisements in the papers.
The Bon Marche issued some 200,000 catalogues of which 50,000 were
sent abroad. Mouret was a brilliant psychologist who claimed that
woman could not resist a sale or publicity and that she tended naturally
to be attracted by noise. To overcome whatever resistance she still pos¬
sessed, he invented returns and lowered prices. He also exploited the
aesthetic effect of displays on his customers, much as the eighteenth-
century architects of expressive architecture had argued that forms,
masses, the play of light and dark affected the soul. Thus for one spe¬
cial sale he created a fairylandlike effect, an atmosphere of spring by
the profuse use of colored umbrellas, and light, colored fabrics floating
in the air. Obviously these special effects had their origin in the the-
 39

The Department Store as Cultural Space

ater: the stage was no longer fixed to the theater and its special space;
theater was made to enter the department store and daily life. The aes¬
thetic experience was generalized and democratized.
As advertising was a species of new literature; so the display of con¬
sumer goods and commodities was a new type of staging. But the en¬
tire machine of the store—the architecture; special displays; special
sales and events—was directed to one end: the seduction of woman. It
was the modern devil tempting the modern Eve. As in the original fall,
in this modern version, it was man again who would be made to pay
for the apple. Mon Dieu que les hommes sont betes went one of Offen¬
bach’s songs, sung by a woman. In Zola’s words:

It was woman the department stores fought over for their busi¬
ness, woman they continually entrapped by their bargains, after
having made them dizzy by their displays. They had awakened
in her flesh new desires and had become an immense tempta¬
tion to which they fatally succumbed, yielding first to the pur¬
chases of a good and careful housewife, then won over by co¬
quetry, finally devoured. By increasing sales, by democratizing
luxury, the stores became a terrible agency of spending, creating
havoc in homes, working up women to the madness of fashion
which was ever dearer and dearer.2

There is no mystery to this seduction. Shopping was integral to the

identity of the new woman. Shopping was liberation. As Elizabeth
Cady Stanton had told women, “go out and buy.” But it was also an
effect of woman’s new situation in society. For the first time in history
the women of the bourgeoisie found themselves free and with leisure
time, whereas formerly they had tended to stay at home and partici-

2. Emile Zola, Au Bonheur des dames (Paris: Charpentier, 1883), 83.

 40

The Department Store as Cultural Space

i

pate in the economic life of the household. The capital accumulation

of the nineteenth century made it possible for women of this class to
enjoy a certain leisure; leave their interiors; and lead a form of aristo¬
cratic life modeled on that of the old nobility. The men worked to as¬
sure the women the possibility of conspicuous consumption. This
contrast of occupations between men and women was manifest even
in their dress: the masculine fashions remained sober, economic, pu¬
ritan even, while the feminine costume or dress was allowed to be
courtly, that is, colorful, luxurious, flowing, impractical, expensive,
decorative. Women set the fashion rather than the men as had been
the case in the old courtly society.
This empire over fashion extended beyond dress to include interior
decorating. Here, too, woman displaced the former creators of fashion
and style, namely, the architects. As the sociologist Rene Konig has
pointed out, this had important consequences: it meant the appear¬
ance of the first truly bourgeois style in interior decoration.

On the one hand this style remained tributary to the feudal pe¬
riod, as witness the cheap horrors spread by industry and called
Louis XV, Louis XVI, or Empire (stiff little chairs with fragile legs,
and heavy chimney pieces). But on the other hand one must
recognize that woman created the conditions of an “intimate”
style of interior decor, precisely a typical modern bourgeois idea
which neither the petite bourgeoisie of the seventeenth or the
*

eighteenth century knew, while the great bourgeois of the time,

when they imagined a characteristic style, only bothered with
ceremonial rooms and not with the intimate interior, intimacy
being a nineteenth century discovery.3

It was in the intimacy of her interior that woman put all those things

3. Rene Konig, Sociologie de la mode (Paris: Payot, 1969), 136.

 41

The Department Store as Cultural Space

she bought, the accumulation of which Edith Wharton, according to

her biographer R. W. B. Lewis, defined as the result of the “voluptuous¬
ness of acquiring things one might do without.”4
Although engaged in commodity circulation and the exploitation
or education of women, the department stores also saw themselves
as cultural agencies responsible for educating taste. Successful, on
the whole, in this role, they became the rivals of a complementary
nineteenth-century cultural space, the art museum. And their cultural
role was such that it eventually blurred the distinction between an at¬
tractive consumer object sold in a department store or in a boutique,
and the objet d’art, which might or might not be in a museum. The
department store also turned the male flaneur into a consumer by at¬
tracting him with their gentlemen’s line of goods; though women were
undeniably their most important and most numerous customers. But
both the flaneur and the woman shopper were moved by the same
desire for and attraction to things and pleasure. The modern aesthetic
experience arose out of desire as the classic aesthetic experience had
supposedly been founded on its lack, defined as disinterestedness.
The flaneur might escape the lure of consumer goods merely by step¬
ping from the Magasin du Louvre into the Musee du Louvre, to stroll,
gaze, and lounge. Yet even there he might be attracted by objects—
objects beyond his desire only because they could not be purchased.
Outside the museum, or before entering it, these objects of art were,
like objects in the department store, also objects of desire, even though
philosophers might have defined them as beyond desire. But they
were a special—because unique—type of consumer item. What differ¬
entiated them is that their value was always said to be beyond price. It
was a subtle distinction but quite false, and it would hardly save art
from commerce in a world in which department stores were as pala¬
tial as museums.

4. R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 374.
 42

The Department Store as Cultural Space

♦

The parallel between museums and department stores ought not

be overlooked. Like museums, department stores were spacious and
often palatial, and, like museums, they were divided into departments.
Both institutions exhibited their wares, though in the case of the
stores, the wares were for sale and were not unique but mass pro¬
duced. There were other contrasts of course. The wares in the mu¬
seum had reached the end point of an itinerary through space and
historical time; the wares in the department stores were arranged as if
on a line of departure. In a sense the department store was an anti¬
museum of modern, productive, dynamic capitalist production in
which objets d art were but one possible line of goods; an almost in¬
finite possibility of commodity circulation existed since this was based
on desire, which by definition of human nature knew no bounds. In
the museum art was the only line of goods exhibited. It was singled
out, distinguished from other items, and thus lent a special aura that
was increased by its inaccessibility and its historical pedigree. But in
the realm of commerce the label would soon rival this pedigree of time
in the battle between the moderns and the ancients. Although the dif¬
ferences between art and commerce, objet d art and consumer ob¬
jects, were stressed on the social, aesthetic, and theoretical level, the
similarities, among the structures, space, and methods of exhibiting
objects in museum and department store remained striking. And as
the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, the similarities in¬
creased: more and more items were declared works of art and entered
museums so that an entire department store could easily have been
turned into a museum by simply freezing its operations and letting it
exist as a monument of a particular moment of our civilization. (That
moment seems almost to have passed as we move closer to electronic
or computerized long-distance purchasing.) In fact, the true museum
of the nineteenth century might well be a department store rather
than a specialized exhibition space reserved for nineteenth-century
painting and sculpture.
 43

The Department Store as Cultural Space

Furniture department at the Bon Marche.

Photograph by N. D. Roger-Viollet.

The department stores were very much aware of their cultural im¬
portance and mission. They pioneered methods of art education that
would later be undertaken by museums in the United States, though
whereas the stores sold works of art, the museums exhibited them and
taught art appreciation. But stores did form taste. Marshall Field in
Chicago “set diligently to educate western taste—his conception of a
merchant s task. ... If the American woman yearned to imitate the
wealthy classes of Europe and the society leaders of the Eastern cities,
 44

The Department Store as Cultural Space

i

she would be indulged with important originals or, where necessary,

with factory ‘modifications’ of European styles.”5
Wanamaker’s, in its Philadelphia and New York stores, was even
more intent upon its cultural mission. Indeed, Wanamaker’s and other
such stores probably did more to give the public a sense of “art,” how¬
ever it may have been understood or misunderstood, than art schools,
academies, or museums if only because they reached a greater public.
Wanamaker’s had a clearly defined "philosophy of art’’:

It is not only the person whose soul sings through his lips, or
who puts his thought on canvas with a brush, who is an artist.
The vehicle of expression does not matter. It is the spirit that
counts. The woman who arranges a room charmingly, who
dresses to express her personality, or serves dinner with grace;
the man who binds a book in good taste, or turns out a chair
that is a pleasure, or lays out a garden to give delight—all are
artists in their way. So too is the store that lives up to its highest
ideals.6

This philosophy was also exemplified in the very building of the store.
As Wanamaker told his architect:

What you must do for me ... is to strive to say in stone what this
business has said to the world in deed. You must make a build¬
ing that is solid and true. It shall be of granite and of steel
throughout. It shall stand four-square to the city—simple, un¬
pretentious, noble, classic—a work of art, and, humanly speak¬
ing, a monument for all time. . . . And who shall say that just to

5. Lloyd Wendt and Herman Kogan, Give the Lady What She Wants: The Story of Marshall
Field and Company (New York: Rand McNally, 1952), 155.
6. John Wanamaker Firm, The Golden Book of the Wanamaker Stores (Jubilee Year,
1861-1911), 245-246.
 45

The Department Store as Cultural Space

live in its shadow and to pass daily through its great Corinthian
' pillars is not turning the minds of thousands of men and women
toward a larger appreciation of the fitness and nobleness and
sincerity of art? (246-247)

Mr. Wanamaker spoke a language no different from that of a Ledoux

and the architecture parlante of the Enlightenment period: the build¬
ing must express the meaning of its purpose and it must educate man¬
kind. Wanamaker’s, like a museum^ was a palace of art—not that of the
past so much as that of the progressive, democratic nineteenth cen¬
tury, an age that was very conscious of the history of art. The interior
was also reminiscent of nineteenth-century museums. There was a
large auditorium capable of seating 1,400 people that was designed
in the Egyptian style, complete with sphinxes, frescoes, and reliefs.
Around this auditorium there were various smaller halls of various
styles: a Greek room, a Byzantine chamber, a Moorish room, an empire
salon, as well as Louis XIII and Louis XIV suites, plus art nouveau
rooms, all “perfect types of their respective styles” (243). In addition to
these period rooms, the store had what any palace had, a grand court
of honor flanked with fine marble columns and panels; it also had
what few if any palaces had, an organ. It stood to reason that such a
fine store sold the best merchandise: “The results of this (artistic en¬
deavor) are felt in the artistic assemblage and display of the fine kind
of merchandise brought from foreign parts, and its distribution into
thousands of American homes, to the betterment of taste, and refine¬
ment in appreciation of the beautiful” (248).
But Wanamaker’s art education was not limited to the expressive ar¬
chitecture of the building and quality of the merchandise sold. It also
purchased and sold works of art. Paintings from the Paris salons were
bought and exhibited in their Philadelphia and New York galleries:

There is probably no other store in the world that has gone into
the Paris salons and purchased the pictures best worth having
 46

The Department Store as Cultural Space

to decorate its walls. It is largely these paintings and this kind of

artistic exhibition, open to all for the coming, that have helped to
convert the Wanamaker stores into vast public museums, quick¬
ening the interest of thousands of visitors, and reaching a larger
number than many museums owned and controlled by the city
and the state. (249)

From 1892 through 1903 Wanamaker’s bought 250 paintings from the
salons, “so comprehensive in subject and characteristic of contempo¬
rary French painting as to be of unquestionably great educational
value to American art students, as well as a source of true pleasure to
the thousands who came to see them” (250). And in 1903 the store
bought 300 paintings, practically the entire stock of the studio of one
Vacslav Brozik who died in Paris in 1901, a historical painter described
as the equal of the greatest. Old masters at these exhibitions were rep¬
resented by copies: there was a bronze cast of the Venus de Milo, a
copy of Atalanta and Hippomenes at the north and south ends of the
grand court, colossal Roman eagles, and a statue of Joan of Arc. The
mural decorations for the New York store auditorium had been done
by Frederick X. Frieseke of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, while
H. O. Tanner produced biblical pictures, and Anna Estelle Rice did “a
large group of mural decorations, reminiscent of the days of Louis XVI,
which are destined when completed, for the wall panels above the ele¬
vators in the new Philadelphia Wanamaker Stores” (254). But art was
not only used to decorate the stores and educate the public, it was
also applied to advertisement pages. The store also organized painting
and drawing exhibitions for children and art students.
This ambitious program for educating and forming public taste was
also carried on in the New York stores once Stewart’s had been ab¬
sorbed by Wanamaker’s. A new store was built next to the old Stewart’s
and the two buildings were joined by a Venetian-style bridge called,
appropriately, the bridge of progress. There were in fact three stores in
 47

The Department Store as Cultural Space

this complex of buildings: women’s wear; men’s and boys’ wear; and
furnishings and decoration. The new building was composed of a se¬
ries of galleries that acted as a teaching museum since it included the
House Palatial of twenty-two rooms and a summer garden. Wana-
maker’s galleries of furnishings and decoration thus comprised forty-
four furnished period rooms “representing various periods, to enable
architects and homemakers to study and select proper furniture and
home adornments, and to enable them to individualize their homes
from the mere commercial furnishing way” (295). When the new gal¬
leries and the House Palatial opened there were more than seventy
thousand visitors on the first day alone. The House Palatial was meant
to be a model “representing the home of a family of taste and wealth;
the best of its type that can be seen in Fifth Avenue, of Hyde Park, Lon¬
don.” Its cost, including the furnishings, amounted to $250,000, which
may seem extravagant, but it was considered “as an educational fea¬
ture that will enable houseowners and architects to judge decorative
schemes and furnishings, . . . without parallel in the world” (296).

If one may claim that in the course of European history up to the

nineteenth century the church, the palace, and the villa or town house
determined the nature of art, then in the bourgeois era, the depart¬
ment store and the museum played similar roles, defining the nature
and status of art. Their rivalry is superficial. The difference is that in
the first, art is part of commerce and in the other, not for sale. The two
spaces in fact correspond to the internal contradictions of bourgeois
aesthetics which are founded on idealism in a world that in its daily
business is anything but ideal. The opposition is that of idealism, asso¬
ciated with high art, spiritual art, intellectual and moral art, to the
power, dynamism, and materialism of capitalism and its products. The
solution to this internal contradiction was not that advocated by a
Quatremere de Quincy who would ensure the survival of high art by
placing it in the hothouse; neither did the moralism of Ruskin or the
 48

The Department Store as Cultural Space

idealism of James Jackson Jarves and others who made a cult of art
offer any answers. More likely the truth lay with Wanamaker’s. In
France the opposition between the ideal and the materialism of con¬
temporary civilization took the form of an institutional opposition be¬
tween art as represented by the Beaux-Arts tradition, doctrine, and
methods of teaching, and the works of art produced for the market,
the salons, the various deviations from the ideal. It was an opposition
much like that between religion and secular snares. The world was
represented by money, luxury, Parisian articles, the attractions of the
market, a modern art for modern times, and the salons des refuses,
officialdom’s concession to artists working outside the canons of the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The power of the modern thus made for an ever
wider gap between official doctrine and practical realities.
In the United States the opposition between the museum and the
department store took a different form since, as we have seen, the de¬
partment store—like museums and like theorists of the arts—believed
in art and insisted on educating the public. The museum, the depart¬
ment stores, the publicists, the moralists, and the reverends were
agreed on the value of art. Indeed, there was no opposition; for Ameri¬
cans, after the Civil War, had come to be convinced that art and cul¬
ture—“Kulcher” as Ezra Pound would later put it—were a good thing.
The only debatable question was which art and which culture was
best for Americans. The symbolic opposition of department store and
museum that I have used metaphorically to explain the internal con¬
tradictions of bourgeois aesthetics took an entirely different form in
the United States, one between aestheticism and vulgarity. The ideal
was associated with a definite type of art, much as in Europe, but it
was opposed not so much to luxury as to the world of commerce,
money, materialism, and progress, even democracy. In France the op¬
position between the conservatives of the Institut and the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts, and the promoters of the art of the modern world, called
materialists or positivists (the realists and impressionists, for example),
 49

The Department Store as Cultural Space

was ultimately an opposition within the world of art, the issue being
the' relation of art to the modern world. But in the United States the
champions of art were aesthetes at odds with their own country and
who fled to Europe on the erroneous assumption that true art, true
culture, and true taste could only be found there. If in Europe the
idealists were conservative intellectuals, in the United States they were
sentimental aesthetes.
But the museum and the department store, used here metaphor¬
ically to explore the nature of bourgeois aesthetics, are also typical of
the bourgeois’s way of apprehending and understanding art. Not only
is he an idealist in his views of high art, but he is also a materialist at
the same time. The idealist in the bourgeois would deny his material¬
ism, but this is not a difficult task since the bourgeois world depends
on the strict separation of the moral and the business world. As an
idealist the bourgeois loves art, speaks of it in the loftiest terms, writes
long treatises on aesthetics, develops the history of art, introduces the
study of art in universities, endows museums and collections, and, fi¬
nally, even if he owns a department store, thinks of educating the pub¬
lic in the realm of art and interior decoration. But as a materialist the
bourgeois, through his spouse, produces a cluttered private interior
and ultimately thinks of art objects as so many items to be collected
and exhibited, even bought and sold if need be. And so the bourgeois
as idealist flaneur and the woman on a shopping spree, converges to
alter radically the nature and status of the art object. What the nine¬
teenth century succeeded in doing through the museum, the bou¬
tiques, and the department stores, was to bibelotize art. In this gen¬
eralized bibelotization woman played a role as significant as that
potential consumer, the flaneur; for in an age in which art was a spe¬
cies of new religion, woman, as in the old religion, was also the tempt¬
ress, and the bibelot her apple.
Bedroom, 1905. Photograph by Byron. The Byron Collection.
Museum of the City of New York.
 Everyone wants to have a mistress,
as everyone wants to go hunting,
frequent watering places and go to the beaches,
and be seen at theatre premieres.

Maxime du Camp,
Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans
la seconde moitie du XIXe Siecle.

The role of woman in the subtle transformation of the status of and

attitudes toward the work of art in the nineteenth century may be fol¬
lowed on several levels: the work of art, which the academy in the
eighteenth and nineteenth century strictly separated from the luxury
item, becomes a luxury item. It also becomes a “collectible,” an apt if
inelegant term sometimes used by antique dealers. Finally, the work of
art functions as an object within an intimate interior space insepa¬
rable from woman herself. These aspects converge to form that phe¬
nomenon of the age, the ubiquity of the bibelot, attribute of the femi¬
nine, so much so that women and luxury are part of the same general
phenomenon of bibelotization. Woman herself turns into a most ex¬
pensive bibelot and yet is, at the same time, a voracious consumer of
luxury and accumulator of bibelots. It is this interrelatedness of
woman and luxury that further explains her link not only to the
bibelot itself, but also to the department store and, even before these
enterprises were created, to that fascinating and ambiguous zone of
the bourgeois style of life and psyche, the demimonde.

Alexandre Dumas the younger’s novel, La Dame auy camelias, begins

with the narrator, a veritable flaneur, out strolling in Paris; he notices
the announcement of an estate sale, vente apres deces, for March 16,
1847, to be held at 9 rue d’Antin. The address, let us note in passing, is

53
 54

Woman, Desire, and the Bibelot

4

not insignificant^ nor for that matter is the date. It is the time of Louis
Philippe, of the passages that fascinated the flaneurs, and the address
is located in a quarter not far from such arcades or from the new
apartments designed as the bourgeois equivalents of the old noble
apartments that were formerly the attributes of the hotels particuliers.
The narrator, being not only a man of leisure but also an amateur de
curiosite, did not fail to go to the sale at the appointed time. Once
there, he immediately noticed that the apartment was already filled
both with men and with women who, though dressed in velvet and
cashmere, looked with astonishment but also admiration, at the lux¬
ury spread out before them. He later understood the women’s reac¬
tions when he realized the apartment in question was that of a demi-
mondaine, a kept woman. The rosewood furniture of the apartment
was superb; there were pieces by Boulle, Sevres and Saxe porcelains
and statuettes, as well as fine Chinese porcelain, velvets, and laces;
nothing was missing from what constituted the luxury and bibelots of
the time.
In the preface of his novel, which is based on a real character,
Dumas, by way of an object (an eighteenth-century ormolu clock), es¬
tablished a link between Marie Duplessis, la dame au?c camelias, and
the Pompadour as well as Madame Du Barry Thus both the bibelot
and woman as luxury items had their precedents in the Paris of Louis
XV and Louis XVI, what with the production of fine furniture, Sevres
figurines, terra-cottas by Clodion, magnificent jewelry, snuff boxes,
and other such small but finely executed and expensive luxury items.
The demimonde in the eighteenth century did not exist in the manner
of the nineteenth, but it was there on a restricted scale, in the form of
an imitation court of women recruited from the theater and the opera,
a class of professionals not only of music and acting, but of what Sten¬
dhal might have described as amour-gout. In the nineteenth century
the possession and flouting of mistresses and courtesans was one way
the successful bourgeois sought to appear noble, aristocratic, worldly,
 55

Woman, Desire, and the Bibelot

dashing even, and at the same time show off his success. Thus, woman
as'well as what she wore and purchased or received as gifts, was an
item of conspicuous consumption supposing a lavish scale. Mar¬
guerite, Dumas’s “heroine” tells young Armand, who has foolishly
fallen in love with her, that if she were his mistress, she would cost him
100,000 francs a year, which, for 1840, was a very considerable sum in¬
deed. Luxury was thus linked to sexuality, as was buying, as we shall
see; and hence haute prostitution was not only a grand luxury but also
a commercial enterprise. The men were considered as possible invest¬
ments for the women: they were carefully looked over and their in¬
comes were investigated before being accepted.
The demimonde, like the real world, and like the financial world
centered about the stock exchange, had a specific setting and a spe¬
cific ritual. The rue d’Antin was one indication as to setting, but there
were other ritual practices: the daily appearance, in a carriage, on the
Champs Elysees, the ride in the Bois de Boulogne, and of course the
loge in the theater or the opera. It was in these places that the demi-
mondaine made her appearance: object of desire, object of luxury,
actress in the ritual of the demimonde, but also actress in the market
place; for all these places in which she appeared, exhibiting herself to
advantages just as articles de Paris were shown to advantage in the
boutiques, were in a sense her bourse.
The link between royal mistresses such as the Pompadour, the Du
Barry, and the Marguerite of Dumas, not to mention the real high
courtesans of the time, implies that a certain type of noble life was
continued by the demimonde. Indeed this demimonde of luxury,
women, gambling, theater, riding, dining and wining, represented for
the bourgeois the noble life of the aristocracy he tried to imitate. It rep¬
resented, also, considerable expense. As Prudence, Marguerite’s
friend, explains to Armand: “How do you expect the kept women of
Paris to maintain their style of life (le train qu’elles menent), without
having three or four lovers at the same time? No single fortune, no
 56

Woman, Desire, and the Bibelot

i

matter how considerable, could alone meet the expenses of a woman

like Marguerite. All in all, with 500,000 francs a year, a man can give a
woman no more than forty or fifty thousand, and that is a lot. And so
other loves make up the sums necessary for the other expenses of the
woman. All these young people with twenty or thirty thousand a year,
hardly enough to live in the milieux they frequent, know very well that
when they are the lovers of a woman like Marguerite, she couldn’t
even pay her apartment and servants with what they give her.”1
But whatever was given, it hardly ever sufficed, for the women of the
demimonde were like a torrent of cash flow. Only the wise put aside
for a rainy day by investing or purchasing property. Marguerite herself
not only died young but also in debt, even though she knew how to
choose her lovers. Doctor Lucien-Graux, in his book on those bills of
hers that she kept and that turned up at her sale and survived to be¬
come collectors’ items, examined her spending in some detail for the
years 1840-1847. They covered a variety of items: bibelots, antique fur¬
niture, restaurants, stable fees and bills, flowers, medicine, sheets and
draperies, dresses, boots, gloves, hairdresser fees, jewelry, wood, coal,
food, picture frames, books, music, glassware for the table, porcelain,
wages, and miscellany. The use of horses and carriages proved partic¬
ularly expensive, as did the apartment she occupied, which cost 3,200
francs a year. And while some items, such as gloves, were inexpensive
in those days of cheap labor, she would buy them by the dozen or the
half-dozen so that she would have a new pair each day And hats, too,
in the end amounted to quite a sum when a new one was purchased
every five days over a period of seventy-five days, fifteen hats in all at
486 francs. Marguerite admitted to spending about 500 francs a day
and was consequently haunted by her creditors, ever on the point of
having her property seized. She prepared for that eventuality by hid-

1. Alexandre Dumas, fils, La. Dame au?c camelias (Paris: Nelson ed., Calmann-Levy, n.d.),
141-142.
 57

Woman, Desire, and the Bibelot

ing jewels, bibelots, and precious items in two other apartments. At

times she would spend 1,000 francs a day and wear a 100,000-franc
gown to a ball.
When it was suggested to her she ought to invest her money for a
future income, she explained why she could not: “An income with the
product of my luxury? In this case [i.e., selling her jewelry and buying
bonds], an income is ruin, unless you enjoy it in solitude. You sell your
horses and your carriage. You occupy a modest apartment, you reduce
personal expenses to a minimum, and, next day, all your adorers have
disappeared. They do not, alas, seek out our qualities. On the contrary,
it is our faults, our extravagance. They are attracted by our luxury, as
the light draws the moth. To renounce luxury would be to surrender
and give ourselves for nothing. But by the sumptuous toilettes, jewels
and horses, we are assured to conquer all those who seek adventure,
all the categories of the debauched, and principally those blase old
men who need a refined luxury.” It is an excellent description of a ba¬
roque spending mentality that is based on the coincidence of appear¬
ance and reality. But Maxime du Camp in his book on Paris saw these
demimondaines and their function in a somewhat different light, as
the distributors of capital, a drainage system for capital that would
otherwise remain fixed and unused, unfructifying. Essentially the
demimondaines, with their vulgar display of riches, were active agents
of the general vulgarization of luxury in the nineteenth century.
Marguerite and her colleagues knew very well that all the money
spent on them and others of the demimonde was not spent for them
but for the men: “egotistical lovers who spend their fortunes not for us,
as they claim, but for their vanity. . . . We do not belong to ourselves,
we are no longer beings, but things” (166-167). Hyppolite Taine’s char¬
acter, Thomas Graindorge, a retired businessman who, having made
his fortune, has turned into an observer of the Paris scene and a liter¬
ary flaneur, makes the same remark regarding the women of the Paris
he sees in the drawing rooms he frequents: “The men watch, leaning
 58

Woman, Desire, and the Bibelot

against the door jambs; gaping, as at a bazaar. Indeed it is an exhibition

of ruffles, diamonds, and shoulders.”2
To Graindorge woman also appears as a luxury item manifesting it¬
self, or herself, through her dress and jewelry. Dress was perhaps even
more important than jewelry; for just as a diamond had to be cut and
mounted to advantage, so woman as a luxury item had to be dressed
advantageously. Dress acted in a sense as the setting to the diamond,
the frame to the picture. Both gown and woman were turned into an
object of beauty by the new artist of the nineteenth century, the grand
couturier: “That little dry creature, dark, nervous, looking like some
roasted abortion, received them (the women) in a velvet morning coat,
proudly spread out on a divan, a cigar in his mouth, ordering them to
‘Walk, turn ’round; good, come back in a week, I’ll compose the toilette
befitting you’ ” (TG, 144).
Ludovic Halevy’s delightful short story, “La Plus Belle,’’ published in
1892, provides an accurate illustration of Graindorge s views of women
in the society of the nineteenth-century’s real monde. Prince Agenor
de Nerins, man about town, constantly mentioned in the gossip col¬
umns of the papers, and taste maker in the world of fashion, discovers
a woman at the opera he has never seen before and pronounces her to
be the most beautiful woman in Paris. The prince is overheard by a
gossip columnist, and thus the bourgeoise Madame Derline, virtuous
wife of a Left Bank notary, finds herself famous overnight. She sud¬
denly realizes too that as the most beautiful woman of Paris she can
hardly go to next Thursday’s ball in a dress designed by her mother’s
unknown, Left Bank couturiere. Consequently, she immediately sets
off to one of the Right Bank’s most famous dress designers for a dress
befitting the most beautiful woman of Paris. She enters an overly

2. Hyppolite Taine, Notes sur Paris: Vie et opinions de Monsieur Frederic Thomas Grain¬
dorge (Paris: Hachette, 1901), 7.
 59

Woman, Desire, and the Bibelot

sumptuous salon artfully littered with the house’s latest creations and
presided over by Monsieur Arthur, who is dressed like a diplomat. Not
being a regular customer, Madame Derline has to see Monsieur Arthur
in his cabinet, which is decorated by photographs of the Princess
Eugenie. Upon learning that the stranger before him is the beautiful
Madame Derline (he had just read the morning paper), Monsieur
Arthur decides he will find the time to create something for her even
on such short notice and begins to study her: "He walked slowly about
Madame Derline, examining her with a profound attention; then took
a few steps back, looked at her from a little farther off. . . . His face was
serious, worried, anxious. A great man of science seeking to solve a
great problem. He wiped his brow with his hand, raised his eyes to
heaven, looking for inspiration in his birthpangs; but suddenly his
brow brightened; the spirit above had answered his call.’’3 Madame
Derline is redesigned in Monsieur Arthur’s mind—the most beautiful
woman of Paris would have a beautiful dress indeed.
But, realizing that her other dresses were no longer fit for her,
Madame Derline leaves only after having bought several other trifles at
800 francs each. Once outside in the rue de la Paix, seeing all the splen¬
did carriages lined up, she also realizes that her old carriage, faithful
servant of seventeen years, will no longer do, so a new carriage is
bought, upon which it becomes obvious that the old horse will no
longer do either and that the old coachman will not fit in with either
the new carriage or the new horse. Art, fashion, beauty, publicity, and
cost are inextricably mixed. No wonder the philosophical Thomas
Graindorge concludes that women share a subtle but certain kinship
with the nature of works of art: “Women and works of art are related
creatures: both may be overtaken by the same kind of fall; they share

3. See Ludovic Halevy, Karikari (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1892), 179; “La Plus Belle” is one
story in this volume.
 60

Woman, Desire, and the Bibelot

<

the same incapacity to adore and produce. They are no longer the
dreams which imagination or illusion may embody What is really
wanted of them is possession or exhibition” (TG, 307).
Woman was the most expensive jewel men wore in society. Saccard,
Emile Zola's financial genius and adventurer of LArgent, bought one
night with Madame de Jeumont for 200,000 francs, a price that entitled
him to exhibit her at a ball. The emperor had made the prestige of that
particular lady by paying 100,000 francs. It is obvious that Marguerite
was right: such women were not only objects to be possessed and ex¬
hibited, but they also shared another characteristic of works of art,
they had a pedigree, a provenance. And as some pictures were valued
in part because of their preceding possessors, so these women were
esteemed, desired, and priced for the same reasons. Graindorge might
have added to his comparison of women and works of art the rela¬
tively low price of works of art compared to the cost of keeping a
mistress.
The purchase of the favors of such women had nothing to do with
amour-passion, save in novels, but, as Prudence knew, everything to
do with male vanity. Madame de Jeumont on Saccard’s arm was as
certain a sign of his financial success as a diamond pinned to his cra¬
vat. She advertised his success. Paul Bourget, writing novels and
stories about a later generation, said much the same thing. In Un
Homme d’affaires, he writes: “One does not keep one of the glories of
the Comedie to amuse oneself,—but to have the air of a man of taste,
almost a patron of the arts and of artists; but also to advertise one’s
talents as a financier and to hear whispers of He must be making a
great deed of money, the rascal, to spend a hundred thousand a year
on Favier.”4
It must not be thought that this confusion between woman and ob¬
ject was confined to those who frequented the Parisian monde or

4. Paul Bourget, Un Homme d’affaires (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1900), 57.

 61

Woman, Desire, and the Bibelot

demimonde or the later Edwardian era. Henry James’s Christopher

Newman; the American, also thought of a wife as “a beautiful woman
perched on the pile” of his financial success, “like a statue on a monu¬
ment.” What he sought, even in looking for a wife, was “the best article
on the market,” and while he valued the woman he had fixed on for
herself, he also valued the world’s admiration for what it would add to
the “prospective glory of possession.”5 And surely Gilbert Osmond in
Portrait of a Lady looked upon his wife, Isabel Archer, as but another
acquisition befitting his exquisite and exclusive taste. As James wrote:
“We know he was fond of originals, or rarities; and now that he had
seen Lord Warburton, whom he thought a very fine example of his
race and order, he perceived a new attraction of the idea of taking to
himself a young lady who had qualified herself to figure in his collec¬
tion of choice objects by declining so noble a hand.”6 Osmond is, of
course, far more corrupt than the frequenters of the demimonde who
did not extend their collector’s instinct to include their wives. They
were more likely to marry for their fortunes than for their affinity to a
rare object. Love, business, luxury, mistresses, and marriage all had
their separate places. Women might be bought as objects—one might
enjoy possessing them for a time—but one hardly married such play¬
things except in novels or plays, or if one were really foolish enough to
fall in love.
These reservations, or limits, did not mean the husband did not also
sometimes view his wife as an object he was proud to show to the
world. Only she was out of the market, so to speak; just as the objet
d art in a museum was beyond it, so the wife. If she committed what
was called a faute, she risked falling into the demimonde. In either
case, woman as object of beauty, luxury, and collection fascinated the

5. See Viola Hopkins Winner, Henry James and the Visual Arts (Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press, 1970), 132.
6. Henry James, Portrait of a Lady (New York: Penguin, 1978), 304.
 62

Woman, Desire, and the Bibelot

i

male imagination. The poet who perceived this assimilation of woman

to an objet d’art was Baudelaire. For him everything that went toward
the ornamentation of woman was part of her: she became a general,
artistic harmony, not only in movement and allure, but also in her
dress, the shimmering clouds of materials in which she enveloped
herself. In addition, according to Baudelaire, the metals and minerals
serpenting about her arms and neck, adding sparkle to that of her
eyes, were part of the same general harmony; she was a work of art, a
new type of divinity presiding over the conceptions of the male mind
and imagination.
The world of luxury into which woman was assimilated was not
only the demimonde but also Paris and modernity. Woman became
the rival of the work of art. She turned into a bibelot herself, sur¬
rounded by bibelots, an expensive object of desire, to be possessed
and cherished, but also exhibited. “Woman” encompassed everything
from an object of beauty and art for the aesthete, of pride of posses¬
sion for the successful speculator, financier, and banker, to an intima¬
tion of transcendent spirituality for poets still enamored of the ideal.
But in the capitalist sublunar world, woman was also a consumer and
as such she represented an extraordinary market for the creators of
department stores, the grand couturier, as well as the antique dealer
and sellers of bric-a-brac.

The department stores had fostered an extravagant taste not only for
clothes but also for “things one might do without.” This desire for
“things” was, as noted in the preface, already remarked upon by the
Goncourt brothers, and by the end of the century it had become a
commonplace observation and object of psychological investigation.
When Laura Jadwin, in Frank Norris’s novel The Pit (1903), realized that
her husband Curtis was lost to her because he was entirely taken up
with bold speculations and making an immense fortune, “she began to
 63

Woman, Desire, and the Bibelot

indulge in a mania for old books and first editions. She haunted the
stationers and secondhand bookstores, studied the authorities, fol¬
lowed the auctions, and bought right and left, with reckless extrava¬
gance.”7 According to this Pascalian logic, shopping had become one
vast escape into divertissement, literally, a diversion from an inner
emptiness. The philosophical essayist Max Nordau saw this desire for
things as a symptom of decadence or, to use his more medical term,
“degenerescence”: “The present rage for collecting, he wrote, the piling
up in dwellings, of aimless bric-a-brac, which does not become any
more useful or beautiful by being called bibelots, appear to us in a
completely new light when we know that Magnan [a French doctor
concerned with degenerates] has established an irresistible desire
among degenerates to accumulate useless trifles/’8
Whatever the explanations given for this generally observed accu¬
mulation of bric-a-brac, the result according to sociologist Rene Konig,
was the bourgeois style of interior decoration, which expressed the
general if at times unconscious or at least unstated values of bourgeois
society, but also, the true status or situation of the art object in that
society. Art joined with fashion, only to be in turn bibelotized. The
bibelot thus became the general characteristic of this bourgeois style
and could be anything, from any time, and any place. In the American
home of the later nineteenth century, the bibelot had been displaced
from a piece of furniture called a whatnot to the more artistic, sup¬
posedly more appropriate, and certainly more up-to-date “Empire
cabinet” designed for bibelots. "Empire” here obviously referred not to
the first empire of the great Napoleon, but to the second empire of
Napoleon III. How else can we explain Harry Leon Wilson’s descrip¬
tion of such a cabinet “with its rounding front of glass, its painted

7. Frank Norris, The Pit (New York: Doubleday Page, 1904), 353.
8. Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York: Appleton, 1897), 27.
 64

Woman, Desire, and the Bibelot

Watteau scenes, and its mirrored back” in his novel, The Spenders, of
1902? The difference between the old whatnot and the new Empire
cabinet marked not only a movement from the new West to the older
East but also an advancement of culture:

The Nines’ what-not in the sitting room was grimly orthodox

in its equipment. Here was an ancient box covered with shell-
work, with a wavy little mirror in its back; a tender motto worked
with the hair of the dead; a “Rock of Ages” in a glass case, with a
garland of pink chenille around the base; two dried pine cones
brightly varnished; an old daguerrotype in an ornamental case of
hard rubber; a small old album; two small china vases of the
kind that came always in pairs, standing on mats of crocheted
worsted; three sea shells; and the cup and saucer that belonged
to grandma, which no one must touch because they’d been bro¬
ken and were held together but weakly, owing to the imperfec¬
tion of home-made cement.
The new cabinet, haughty in its varnished elegance, with its
Watteau dames and courtiers, and perhaps the knowledge that it
enjoys widespread approval among the elect,—that is a different
matter. In every American home that is a home, today, it de¬
mands attention. The visitor, after eyeing it with cautious side-
glances, goes jauntily up to it, affecting to have been stirred by
the mere impulse of elegant idleness. Under the affectedly care¬
less scrutiny of the hostess he falls dramatically into an attitude
of awed entrancement. Reverently he gazes upon the priceless
bibelots within: the mother-of-pearl fan, half open; the tiny cup
and saucer of Sevres on their brass easel; the miniature Cupid
and Psyche in marble; the Japanese wrestlers carved in ivory; the
ballet dancer in bisque; the coral necklace; the souvenir spoon
from the Paris Exposition; the jade bracelet; and the silver snuff
box that grandfather carried the day of his death. If the gazing
 65

Woman, Desire, and the Bibelot

visitor be a person of abandoned character he makes humour¬

ous pretense that the householder has done wisely to turn a key
upon these treasures, against the ravishings of the overwhelmed
and frenzied connoisseur. He wears the look of one gnawed by
envy, and he heaves a sigh of despair. The what-not is obsolete.
The Empire cabinet is regnant. Yet though one is the lineal de¬
scendant of the other—its sophisticated grandchild—they are
hostile and irreconcilable.9

For the latter showed the superior taste of its owner, the superiority
of taste and culture over mere sentimentalism. The bourgeois interior
thus also came to resemble a museum, smaller in scale than the na¬
tional or local institutions, but private, intimate; and yet, the richer it
was, the more capable it was of one day being turned into a public
museum by donation. As such the bourgeois collection was not neces¬
sarily a gallery or collection geared to some historical view of the de¬
velopment of art or the visual expression of some guiding aesthetic or
historical principle. It might be thus among some amateurs or histo¬
rians; but as expressive of the general tendency of the times, it tended
to bric-a-brac, clutter, accumulation.
Santayana, in a once famous novel, The Last Puritan, an astute study of
the New England conscience and mind, described Mrs. Van de Weyer’s
Newport drawing room and the impression it made on Nathaniel
Alden, a Boston Puritan: "The room was littered with little sofas, little
armchairs, little tables, with plants flowering in porcelain jars, and
flowers flaunting in cut-glass bowls, photographs in silver frames,
work baskets, cushions, footstools, books and magazines, while the
walls were a mosaic of trivial decorations (not the work of deserving
artists like those in his own house), but etageres with knick-knacks and

9. Harry Leon Wilson, The Spenders. A Tale of the Third Generation (Boston: Lathrop,
1902), 36-37.
 66

Woman, Desire, and the Bibelot

Drawing room, 1894. Photograph by Byron. The Byron Collection.

Museum of the City of New York.

bric-a-brac, feeble watercolours, sentimental engravings, and slanting

mirrors in showy frames.”10 European interiors of the well-to-do, or of
the “artistic,” were much the same, and on both continents this bibe-
lotization of the interior came to be regarded as a particularly femi¬
nine trait to be distinguished from the more manly enterprise of col¬
lecting works of art.

10. George Santayana; The Last Puritan (New York: Scribner’s, 1936), 45.
 67

Woman, Desire, and the Bibelot

As we have seen, Max Nordau’s interpretation of the accumulation of

bibelots as a sign of decadence implies, by extension, the assimilation
of women to Magnan’s degenerates. The accumulation of bibelots by
women was perceived as an aspect not only of their dominion over the
home in the United States but also as a feminine weakness. And in the
United States as in Europe, women tended to accept this view. In The
Pit the world of art is distinctly contrasted with the world of business,
the “real world” in which real men fight with other reed men and are, in
effect, at war with each other, hard, “always cruel, always selfish, al¬
ways pitiless” (TP, 64). Those men in the street are quite different from
husbands at the breakfast table. They are also quite different from the
artist. “To contrast these men with such as Corthell was inevitable. She
remembered him, to whom the business district was an unexplored
country, who kept himself far from the fighting, his hands unstained,
his feet unsullied. He passed life gently, in the calm, still atmosphere of
art, in the cult of the beautiful, unperturbed, tranquil; painting, read¬
ing, or, piece by piece, developing his beautiful stained glass. Him
women could know, with him they could sympathize” (TP, 64). The
realm of art was the realm of women; it answers to the feminine prin¬
ciple while the battle of the street exemplifies the male principle. Sig¬
nificantly, even Laura Jadwin prefers the man who does battle.
In Europe a similar distinction was drawn, though to exclude
women rather than men from the world of art. Similarly, watchful hus¬
bands tended to keep their wives from reading the more advanced
and daring literature of the day. Educated women, cultivated women,
well-read women, all were often suspect as late as 1900. As Anne
Martin-Fugier has shown in her excellent study of La Bourgeoise
(1983), the culture of the woman of the bourgeoisie could only be that
of an amateur since it did not include the opportunity for profes¬
sionalism. In view of this, the accumulation of bibelots might be inter¬
preted as a compensation for this exclusion from true culture. It may
also explain the ugliness of bourgeois interiors cluttered with bibelots,
 68

Woman, Desire, and the Bibelot

needlework, tapestries, watercolors painted by the lady of the house,

decorated panels, flower arrangements, and all other minor arts that
were considered les arts de la femme.
By 1880 in France women were perceived as mere buyers of bibelots,
which they bought as they did clothing, in their daily bargain hunting.
Men of course collected too, but their collecting was perceived as se¬
rious and creative. Women were consumers of objects; men were col¬
lectors. Women bought to decorate and for sheer joy of buying, but
men had a vision for their collections, a view of the collection as an
ensemble, with a philosophy behind it. Or so the argument went. But
by the 1890s the distinction between feminine accumulation and real
collecting tended, in the bourgeois interior and even the American
millionaire “home,” to be blurred, and the bibelot seemed to have tri¬
umphed, along with a certain view of what constituted “Art.”
The bibelotization of art implies too much of anything from any¬
where in the same space, and hence it is a bourgeois style, rather than
a true style, namely, the creation of artists and architects, of mind dis¬
ciplining imagination, such as Louis XV, Louis XVI, or Directoire, the
styles which suppose a harmony and unity. The bourgeois style, in
contrast, is an economic and psychological style that at worst might be
called the accumulative, or museum style, or, at best, the eclectic. As
the narrator, a painter with a trained eye, of Paul Bourget’s Blue Duch¬
ess remarks of one such Parisian interior: “How not detest the impres¬
sions made by these furnishings and furniture which taste of pillaging
and the junk shop; for nothing is in its place: tapestries of the eigh¬
teenth century alternate with paintings of the sixteenth, furniture of
the Louis XV period with a bishop’s seat, modern draw curtain with
antique material on a chaise longue, the back of an armchair or some
cushion or divan!”11 As the room, so the edifice, the modern successful
businessman’s hotel particulier, manor, or Fifth Avenue “home.” It, too,
was eclectic and flaunted its luxury. The same narrator of the Blue

11. Paul Bourget, La Duchesse bleue (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1898), 168.

 69

Woman, Desire, and the Bibelot

Duchess referred to one of these Parisian hotels—which had its coun¬

terparts in other major cities—as “an architecture of parody, in which
one found a way of mixing twenty-five styles, and of placing a wooden
staircase in the English late medieval manner in a Renaissance stair¬
well” (165). This luxury was completed by footmen in livery, all of
which added to the factitiousness of this insolent luxury In the same
novel, dated 1898, an aspiring poet and playwright is introduced into
the drawing room of the worldly writer Jacques Molan who, being suc¬
cessful, also surrounds himself with the signs of success: “The groom
showed one into a vast smoking room next to a small work cabinet
which displayed a glass case filled with bibelots, all authentic: old Chi¬
nese lacquer, bronzes of the sixteenth century, old boxes, Saxe figu¬
rines, old bonbonnieres. The disparate nature of the objects betrayed
quite well the eternal utilitarianism of Molan. He was ready for pos¬
sible sale, just in case” (110). Descriptions such as this may be found in
most of the novels of the period, European as well as American,
though in the work of Henry James the collection of such bibelots is
perhaps even more important than in the work of Bourget and his Eu¬
ropean confreres, if only because Americans took art so much more
seriously than the more materialistic and corrupt Europeans.
Bourget was among the most perceptive of writers with regard to
the significance of the bibelot. He did not, like Max Nordau, whom he
had read, consider the collection of knickknacks a symptom of racial
or congenital degeneracy. But he did see in it something connected
with the nervous sensibility, the “refined mania of an unquiet period
in which the fatigues of boredom and the diseases of the nervous sen¬
sibility led man to invent the factitious passion for collecting because
his interior complexities made him incapable of appreciating the
grand and simple sanity of things in the world around him.”12
This mania for collecting, linked to the nervous sensibility of the

12. Paul Bourget, Nouveauy essais de psychologie contemporaine (Paris: Lemerre, 1888),
149.
 70

Woman, Desire, and the Bibelot

modern world and its boredom, spread even to those who had no ar¬
tistic sensibility at all. It is here the department stores and boutiques,
with the help of modern industry, intervened to produce the inexpen¬
sive, industrialized bibelot that could be afforded by those who could
not purchase the authentic one. The bibelot was thus to be found ev¬
erywhere and it was this ubiquity and clutter that turned into bric-a-
brac. Bourget thought the bibelot mentality so pervasive that he per¬
ceived its influence in the literary style, phrase, and vocabulary of the
Goncourt brothers, who were inveterate collectors. Their collection
took no less than three volumes of description and cataloguing for
their catalogue, Maison d’un artiste. “By indefinitely looking at works of
art/’ wrote Bourget, “they developed in themselves the impression of
the contour and projection which every object projects against a back¬
ground of atmosphere, so that a sentence describing such an object
seems to them exact only if it also necessarily reproduced this contour
and sally. That is why they proceed by inversion, hoping thereby to
give a species of swelling to their prose, as a line delineates a model”
(186). It was a style, thought Bourget, ultimately derived from Cha¬
teaubriand, based on love of color and the description of sensations,
and this explained why it lent itself so well to the description of the
neurotic sensibility. But one wonders whether Bourget’s observations
on the Goncourt style do not also illuminate some of the characteris¬
tics of Henry James, for example his preoccupation with the defining
of exact psychological nuances, the use of the precise term, word,
nuance, or weight of a sentence. Indeed, may we not say that the bour¬
geois psychology of the novelist, the ever-finer analysis of character, is
also that of observers of objects, of clinicians as of experts of art ob¬
jects? The novelist’s reactions, as well as those of his characters, his
descriptions and analyses, all betray a similar preoccupation with de¬
tail, akin to the almost manic connoisseur of precious objects. But
then this aesthetics of the bibelot, central to the bourgeois interior,
may also be gleaned in the dense universe of Marcel Proust so rich in
 71

Woman, Desire, and the Bibelot

objects, smells, associations, tastes, all contriving to prompt the invol¬

untary memory The world of the bibelot thus turns into the dream
world of the bourgeois, his sentimental world of recall, souvenirs, asso¬
ciations, intimate escape from the world of material cares.
But by the time Proust was writing his great work, this search for
times past through memory, prompted by objects and smells and
touch, the ubiquity and clutter of bibelots had become such as to
strike the consciousness as a problem. Art nouveau may be seen as
one solution to the eclectic nature of the bourgeois interior. For
though art nouveau resulted in new bibelots, those bibelots were inte¬
grated into a general style, a unity. But another solution to bourgeois
clutter and eclecticism was to re-think the whole problem of interior
decoration.
Edith Wharton’s first book, The Decoration of Houses, was not only a
historical survey of interior decoration, it was also a book written
against the clutter caused by the taste for bibelots that had also been
manifest in her mother’s home. It is in fact coextensive with the whole
bourgeois era of civilization, which extends roughly from about 1830
to 1914.
Edith Wharton began her considerations on the bibelot by making
distinctions. French, she wrote, had three words to designate the En¬
glish “knickknack” or ‘objects of small value,” to wit, bibelots, bric-a-
brac, and objets d art. The connotations were not the same: any object
might be a bibelot for some individual; bric-a-brac referred to an en¬
semble of objects, good, bad, indifferent, and amounted to clutter; the
objet d’art implied a quality above the others. The use of these objects
was related not to accumulation but to interior decor and ornamenta¬
tion and to those minor touches that might give a room the charm of
completeness. Objects embellished a room. But only two kinds of ob¬
jects could embellish a room: objects of art proper, such as busts, pic¬
tures, and vases; and useful objects such as lamps, clocks, firescreens,
candelabra, bookbindings. Edith Wharton realized that bibelotization
 72

Woman, Desire, and the Bibelot

4

and clutter had blurred the distinction between a mere bibelot and an
objet d’art. Anyone could acquire bibelots—all you needed was
money. But not anyone could collect or acquire objets d art: "Good
objects of art give to a room its crowning touch of distinction. Their
intrinsic beauty is hardly more valuable than their suggestion of a
mellower civilization—of days when rich men were patrons of the
‘arts of elegance’ and when collecting beautiful objects was one of the
obligations of noble leisure. The qualities implied in the ownership of
such bibelots [i.e., works of art] are the mark of their unattainableness.
The man who wishes to possess objects of art must not only have the
means to acquire them, but the skill to choose them—a skill made up
of cultivation and judgment, combined with the feeling for beauty that
no amount of study can give, but that study alone can quicken and
render profitable.”13
Taste could save one from the general debasement of the passion for
bibelots caused by the industrial production of knickknacks by re¬
establishing the distinction between mere bric-a-brac and art. Taste
also established but two conditions for the use of bibelots in a room:
that they be in scale with the room and that it not be crowded.
Wharton’s critique of bourgeois clutter aimed to preserve the dis¬
tinction of possessing the ultimate bibelots, works of art, by drawing
aristocratic lines between the passionate, democratic, acquisitive
spirit and the commercial bibelotization of fashion. The principle of
aristocratic taste, based on judgment and knowledge of art, was used
to counter the effects of industry and department stores. But at the
same time, as we shall see, it sublimated the work of art by distinguish¬
ing the mere bibelot, associated with commerce and industry, from
the objet d’art, associated with nobility and noble leisure. But this dis¬
tinction did not restore the work of art to its function in prebourgeois

13. Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr., The Decoration of Houses (New York:
Scribner’s, 1901), 187.
 73

Woman. Desire, and the Bibelot

and preindustrial society. The work of art was simply raised to the
rank of sublime bibelot; distinct from the one anybody could buy in a
novelty shop or a department store, or some antique dealer’s shop. But
given the nature of capitalist society, the bibelot, sublime or not, re¬
mained a marketable item.
Historically speaking, the bibelotization of art is worth pondering.
There had always been collectors of works of art, but nineteenth-
century collecting was perhaps unusual not only in scale but also in
kind; for the bourgeois era, in fact, collected anything because it col¬
lected the past, history as well as art. Anything could enter a collec¬
tion. The Gardners of Boston, in 1897, started amassing more than
paintings as they brought home a French Gothic double door, a round
wooden screen for a circular staircase, a beamed paneled ceiling,
stone lions, a Spanish wheel window, a Roman mosaic pavement with
the head of a gorgon, and so forth. Parts of buildings—indeed, entire
buildings—were removed and transplanted to foreign shores. The
past itself was turned into a gigantic quarry of bibelots.
Bibelotization then may well be the bourgeois way of apprehending
and understanding art. It is related to possession, acquisition, and
production. It implies the bourgeois love of the inheritance and pas¬
sion for selling and buying and finding a bargain. Bibelotization even
makes it possible to put the past up for auction. With art nouveau the
link to the past is untied as the bibelot finds its general style as furni¬
ture, statuettes, vases, lamps, perfume bottles, jewelry, all disciplined
into a flowing line that lent a space and the objects within it a unity. Yet
the objects of that style, intended to be objects of art, remained re¬
producible on an industrial scale as some vases or lamps were pro¬
duced unsigned while others were distinguished by a signature. Art
nouveau thus made Alexandre Arnoux’s dream of uniting art and in¬
dustry come true. Like the photograph in its silver frame among the
other bibelots on the table or the etagere, the art nouveau object re¬
mains as an instance of the reproducibility of the bibelot and testifies
 74

Woman, Desire, and the Bibelot

4

to its ubiquity and its femininity. It could be bought in the magasins de

nouveaute or in the department stores. It was made to be fitted into
the intimate; private interior presided over by woman, herself a desir¬
able; living; expensive bibelot presiding over other bibelots she had
gathered about her in her nest.
But the bibelot; no matter how sublime; had at some time been up
for sale; it was a bought object. The old nobility had possessed works
of art and galleries because it was expected of them in order to main¬
tain their rank in society. To the nobleman these were necessities. The
possession of art was, in part, noblesse oblige. It was part of a life-style;
the stage set of his life; inseparable from his rank and its function in
the society of his time. But the bourgeois and his wife; or mistress;
needed bibelots as signs of success, social and financial. Hence, the
importance of possessions. Objects that had come from a past, or
some market or foreign place, which were not originally intrinsic to
the bourgeois world, conferred a distinction that bourgeois activity as
such did not. They also hinted at another distinguishing trait, culture.
The noble had not been defined by culture so much as by feats of
arms, lineage, landed wealth, or, in the case of the noblesse de robe,
learning. But the bibelot as objet d’art could confer distinction upon
the bourgeois, a lesson soon learned by those who had neither educa¬
tion nor letters nor lineage nor taste—only money. By transforming
the bibelot, or objet d’art, into a sign of more than mere possession,
namely, distinction and culture, the Americans abroad played a deci¬
sive role in the history of taste and aesthetics and determined to a
large extent the assumptions and values on which art history would
be written.
The American Impact, or
Shopping for the Ideal
Courtyard. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Photograph by Heins.
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
 Any valuable object in order to appeal to our
sense of beauty must conform to the
requirements of beauty and e^cpensiveness both.
Thorstein Veblen
Theory of the Leisure Class

Edith Wharton’s critique of cluttered interiors appeared at a time

when Americans had been acquiring bibelots and works of art for
about a generation and had made an impact on the European imagi¬
nation precisely as a result of their avidity for culture; which they often
seemed to translate into accumulation. Americans were obviously des¬
tined to play an all-important role in the formation of a specifically
bourgeois apprehension of art. Europe; to be sure, had its collectors
and its collections; such as that of the Due d’Aumale at Chantilly or du
Sommerard in the Cluny in Paris; the Wallace collection in London or
that of Price Demidoff in Florence, Poldi-Pezzoli in Milan, Jacquemart-
Andre in Paris, Don Jose Lazaro in Madrid. Americans, in their collect¬
ing, knew of these and, in some sense, emulated them.
The American concern with culture was a veritable national trait, so
that any inquiry into the specifically bourgeois nature of the apprecia¬
tion and accumulation of art and its role in capitalist society must
surely take account of the most dynamic capitalist society of the nine¬
teenth century. Americans, drawn to Europe and the East, became
great travelers and collectors and instituted tours far grander than
their English predecessors of the eighteenth century, with much the
same results, namely, the migration of works of art from one country
to another.
Yet it is also true that Americans did not look at art in quite the same
way that most Europeans did, if only because so many Americans
were concerned with culture and were also rich. Art thus came to play

77
 78

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

a somewhat different role in American society than in Europe with its

officialdom, its old aristocracies, and its past. The United States pro¬
vided a near-perfect milieu for the development of the purely bour¬
geois view and use of art. For American society was relatively unbur¬
dened by Europe’s feudal past, which had formed artistic tastes and
attitudes. At the same time, as a result of this new cross-Atlantic grand
tourism, European and American attitudes combined to form that ul¬
timate bourgeois aesthetic, social, and artistic phenomenon, the cos-
mopolis, complement of the international art market and aesthetic
phenomenon of the beautiful rich people in the beautiful places look¬
ing at beautiful works of art available for the right price.

European observers of Americans abroad were particularly struck

by two related phenomena: the American woman and the American
interest in culture. To be sure, there was a great variety of Americans,
from the “western barbarian,” to use Henry James’s term, the mil¬
lionaire on an art raid, the social climber, to the college graduate trav¬
eling as an unescorted young lady avid for culture. Henry James took
note of this American invasion of Europe in the November 3,1878 issue
of the Nation and outlined the alleged reasons for traveling abroad:
culture, music, art, languages, economy, and the education of chil¬
dren. He also stressed that whereas the English, French, and Germans
all found their intellectual and aesthetic ideals in their own countries,
only the Americans felt obliged to go abroad for them. He made note of
a particular type, "the unattached young American lady” traveling for
culture, relaxation, or economy (life in Europe being then far less ex¬
pensive than in the United States), who might appear to Europeans as
a touching or startling phenomenon. In the novels of the period they
appeared rather more the latter than the former. Startling indeed,
those Bryn Mawr or Vassar graduates who seemed to know so much
more about art or literature than their European counterparts, though
these might live in chateaux, villas, or town houses filled with art.
 79

American Impactor Shopping for the Ideal

Pierre de Coulevain, a turn-of-the-century French novelist who was

particularly interested in American women abroad and at home dis¬
tinguished three types of such women in the Paris of that period: the
type who sought to enter European nobility thought she had, but
never really knew she had not; the type who lived abroad but kept
within American circles and belonged to what was known at home as
"the best people"; and finally, that other phenomenon, already noted
by James, the artistic type. But Coulevain noted something else that
James did not stress, namely, that on the whole the American woman
was really far more cultivated than her European counterpart. Unlike
most European women, she was a free woman, disposing as she willed
of her fortune.
There were other American types less well known to European nov¬
elists or members of society receiving rich Americans in Paris, London,
or Florence. These “not so innocents abroad,” in a sense, defined a
new type and were different from earlier Americans who had not been
to Europe or were suspicious of her vices. And in addition to the
American fanatics of culture there were those who could not under¬
stand why anyone would take art seriously. They were content to leave
the arts to women and let the women go on their tour alone. Thus to
H. B. Fuller’s character David Marshall of Chicago art was wholly inex¬
plicable. He could not understand why “any man could be so feeble as
to yield himself to such trivial matters in a town where money and
general success still stood ready to meet any live, practical fellow half¬
way—a fellow . . . who knew an opportunity when he saw one. The
desire of beauty was not an integral part of the great frame of things; it
was mere surface decoration, and the artist was but for the adornment
of the rich man’s triumph—in case the rich man were, on his side, so
feeble as to need his triumph adorned. ”1 But Mr. Marshall was willing
to let his wife and daughter improve themselves and was even proud

I. Henry Blake Fuller, With the Procession (New York: Harper’s, 1895), 141.
 80

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

that Jane, his daughter, kept up with the general advance of culture.
But this was hardly acceptable in a man, and his son, unfortunately,
had decided, upon his return from Europe, to be interested in art!
Mr. Marshall, who died from exhaustion just as he and his wife
moved into their new home in a more fashionable part of Chicago, was
an honest man. He summed up one way the bourgeois thought about
art: as adornment. It was for women not men, for a man’s life was sup¬
posed to be dedicated to making money. Mr. Marshall’s views were
similar to those of his European bourgeois counterpart in that equally
aggressive and philistine society of Napoleon Ill’s second empire or
Bismarck’s dynamic new reich or Mr. Gladstone’s prosperous and
moral England.
But, unlike the European bourgeois, Mr. Marshall had not lived in a
world in which the arts had survived from former societies and were
part of the social ambiance, indeed, sometimes even part of the furni¬
ture, and accorded some sort of official status and recognition through
public patronage. Thus Mr. Marshall, though a member of the nouveau
riche, did not, like his European counterpart, think of hiding his lowly
origins and his new money beneath a veneer of culture and art. His
wife and daughters, however, did. They had been to Europe and they
saw other Chicagoans doing that. Mr. Marshall was not ashamed of
being a bourgeois. It had probably never occurred to him he was one;
he had probably never even heard the word. Nor had it even occurred
to him art might be an investment.
But Mr. Marshall was behind the times. He died feeling vaguely that
the world was getting harder and harder and wondering whether it
had been wise to want a new home; he had been content in the old
one. He had not had the social ambitions of his wife and daughter,
dazzled not only by Europe but also by the new houses and the luxury
of a Chicago bent on surpassing the East Coast. But Mr. Marshall was
also out of tune with the new type of capitalist, one who wanted the
 81

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

arts to adorn his triumph and not be thought weak for it. Mr. Marshall
was-not Frank Algernon Cowperwood, Dreiser’s “Titan.” Mr. Marshall
belonged to the old Chicago society and “those who, having grown
suddenly rich from dull poverty could not so easily forget the village
church and the village social standards.”2 His was the “dullest and most
bovine” of Chicago social classes; for him money was the sole standard
of success and society consisted in weekday receptions and Sunday
afternoon calls in which one saw the others and was seen in turn.
Cowperwood was an entirely different sort of capitalist and en¬
trepreneur. He belonged to the newer element of Chicago, having
moved west from Philadelphia; for him the arts were not only useful
adornments but a subject of fascination. Cowperwood loved art,
though he was not an aesthete.
Insofar as he is representative of American attitudes toward the arts,
Cowperwood occupies a middle position between the incomprehen¬
sion of Mr. Marshall and the aestheticism of certain Henry James char¬
acters. Cowperwood is intrigued by art though he is not sure why. But
he desires works of art as he does power and women. He thus invests
in it and sees it playing a role in his future. But when he begins collect¬
ing in Chicago, he has a curiously quantitative approach to it, thinking
first of the sum to spend rather than the works to get:

He decided to invest as much as thirty thousand dollars in pic¬

tures, if he could find the right ones, and to have Aileen’s por¬
trait painted while she was still so beautiful. Addison had four or
five good pictures—a Rousseau, a Greuze, a Wouverman, and
one Lawrence—picked up heaven knows where. A Hotel-man by
the name of Collard, a dry-goods and real-estate merchant, was
said to have a very striking collection. Addison told him of one

2. Theodore Dreiser, The Titan (New York: John Lane, 1914), 60.
 82

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

Davis Trask, a hardware prince, who was now collecting. There

were many homes he knew, where art was beginning to be as¬
sembled. He must begin too. (56)

He goes on the American Grand Tour with his wife Aileen, first to Lon¬
don, where he meets Lord Leighton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Whis¬
tler, thanks to an art dealer who sees in Cowperwood a future client.
But Cowperwood is not attracted to artists as such: “These men saw
only a strong, polite, remote, conservative man. He realized the emo¬
tional, egotistic, and artistic soul. He felt on the instant there could be
little in common between such men and himself in so far as personal
contact was concerned, yet there was a mutual ground on which they
could meet. He could not be a slavish admirer of anything, only a
princely patron" (59). Already the capitalist would be a Renaissance
prince. He buys a Raeburn in London, then goes on to Paris where he
purchases a plowing scene by Millet, a small Jan Steen, a battle piece
by Meissonier, and a romantic courtyard scene by Isabey. Later we
learn that at his first reception in their new house on Michigan Ave¬
nue, his guests were shown not only Aileen’s somewhat showy yet re¬
freshingly apt portrait but also a brilliant Gerome, then highly popular.
Cowperwood’s taste at this stage of his life reflected rather faithfully
the taste of the 1870s in the United States, and his collection corre¬
sponded to those considered the best in the country, namely, those of
the Astors and the Vanderbilts, collections essentially of modern works
from the French and Belgian schools but also containing pictures from
the Diisseldorf school as well as a few old Dutch pictures.
Later Cowperwood’s taste refines itself and he begins collecting old
masters. On a second trip to Europe he becomes aware not only that
Aileen is not the ideal wife but that there are other places to see and
know besides London and Paris. His collection accordingly becomes
more ample and rises to a higher aesthetic level. He brings back a Peru-
gino, a Luini, a Previtali, and a Pinturricchio portrait of Caesar Borgia,
 83

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

picked up in Italy. This Borgia portrait is as significant in throwing

light upon Cowperwood’s character and power as the Gerome had
been: a conqueror a la Borgia in business affairs, he also had enough
women to fill a harem.
On this second tour he expands his collection in other ways, picking
up two African vases in Cairo, Venetian candelabra, Italian torcheros,
found in Naples, for his library, and a Louis XV standard of carved
wood found in Rome. Later he adds jade, ancient glass, and illumi¬
nated manuscripts to his collection, which had also been augmented
by a Paul Potter, a Goya, a Rembrandt portrait of a rabbi, a Hals and
an Ingres, not to mention rugs, draperies, mirror frames, and rare
sculptures.
Cowperwood is representative of the many American millionaires of
the late Gilded Age who built museums for their collections or gave
these to already existing museums. Cowperwood’s taste, the evolution
of his collection, generally parallels the evolution of taste as perceived
in American collections. This is quite evident from Rene Brimo’s L’Evo-
lution du Gout auy Etats Unis d’apres les collections (1938). The first
American collections in New York of the period before and during the
Civil War—those of John Jacob Aster, William Astor, August Belmont,
and W. T. Blodgett, Henry Probasco in Cincinatti, or Henry C. Gikon in
Philadelphia—were filled with the works of eminent academicians:
Meissonier, Gerome, Vibert, Bonnat, Fromentin, Troyon, Knaus, Rosa
Bonheur, Bouguereau, Scheier, Madrazo, Zamacois, Diaz, and Fortuny.
The W. T. Blodgett sale of 1870 in New York, which netted $887,145, had
a few American painters such as William Morris Hunt, Church, and
Dana, among the overwhelmingly more familiar European names.
Henry Probasco had Innes and Thomas Cole in his collection, along
with Jules Breton, Kaulbach, Fromentin, Gerome, and Achenbach, and
KoekKoek.
Yet the most considerable and considered collection was that of Wil¬
liam H. Vanderbilt housed in his French Renaissance palace on Fifth
 84

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

Avenue and Fifty-first Street, designed by Richard Morris Hunt. The

chateau itself was a fine example of the eclectic taste of the times and
was compared to a Roman villa and a Flemish or Venetian merchant’s
palace for its splendor. The doors were reproductions of those of
Ghiberti for the Florence Baptistry while the atrium was in the manner
of Germain Pilon with cloisonne furniture, gilded, and faience derived
from the Persian. The gallery was hung with 208 pictures in three su¬
perimposed rows, as was the fashion in those days. Among the artists
named by Brimo were Alma Tadema, Knaus, Boldini, Rosa Bonheur,
Bouguereau, Jules Breton, Cabanel, Bonnat, Clays, de Neuville, Detaille,
Detti, Fortuny, Gerome, Lefebure, Leloir, Leighton, Roybet, Bracque-
mond; also, Corot, Daubigny, Diaz, Decamps, Millet, Troyon, Turner,
and Delacroix’s Sultan of Morocco and His Guard. Vanderbilt liked pic¬
tures that told a story and paid up to 850,000 francs for a Meissonier
war picture. He would not admit nudes and looked for exactitude of
execution and rendition. While he liked looking at pictures he also,
like a true bourgeois, considered them an investment, explaining that
their price would increase after the death of the artist. This taste and
approach to art collecting was no different from what then obtained in
Europe. It was, from the second empire on through the 1880s, the es¬
prit de salon, and the great painters in vogue were those who were
stars at the salons and also winners of the Prix de Rome. How could
one go wrong purchasing a picture from a Prix de Rome, or even bet¬
ter, a member of the Legion of Honor?
In the United States this salon taste would be questioned with the
introduction of the painters of the Barbizon school by the American
painter William Morris Hunt. Between 1870 and 1900 salon paintings
would gradually be replaced by other works. The department store
magnate A. T. Stewart also had a splendid gallery for his pictures,
one wall for American paintings, the other for European—including
Meissonier’s 1807—for which Stewart paid $85,000. But, in a sign of
things to come, Stewart also began to buy old masters, Murillo, Rem-
 85

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

brandt, Titian. By the end of the century the salon moderns would be
threatened and eventually displaced by the rival claims of aestheticism
and modernism, namely a presumably higher and more spiritual taste
for Italian primitives and masterpieces, or, at the other extreme, a taste
for impressionists and later even for twentieth-century painters.
Cowperwood, like Frick, Morgan, and Mrs. Gardner of Boston, also
built a splendid house in New York to serve as a museum. The style
chosen for this mansion was symbolic of Cowperwood and the tri¬
umphant post-Civil War capitalists. His career in Philadelphia had be¬
gun with a home in the style of modified Gothic; his Michigan Avenue
home had been solidly Norman-French; his New York residence could
only be an Italian palace of medieval or Renaissance origin. It was
meant to reflect his private tastes but also to “have the more enduring
qualities of a palace or even a museum, which might stand as a monu¬
ment to his memory” (WP, 439). The house was to have not one gallery
but two: one for pictures, the other for sculpture and large works of
art. A smaller lounge on the second floor was to exhibit his jades, por¬
celains, ivories, and other small objects. The modern condottiere of
free enterprise would not build a fortress on a hill but a museum on
Fifth Avenue.
Though a man of business, Cowperwood was a very different type
from Mr. Marshall. He was no philistine, no matter what a snob might
have thought, and it was more than means that made him buy his
works of art. Undoubtedly social considerations had played a role, as
had what he had seen in Europe. But Cowperwood was drawn to
beauty, feminine as well as artistic. Like Cardinal Mazarin he would, at
night, go into his gallery and wonder:

The beauty of these strange things, the patient laborings of in¬

spired souls of various times and places, moved him, on occa¬
sion, to a gentle awe. Of all individuals he respected, indeed re¬
vered, the sincere artist. Existence was a mystery, but these souls
 86

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

4

who set themselves to quiet tasks of beauty had caught some¬

thing of which he was dimly conscious. Life had touched them
with a vision, their hearts and souls were attuned to sweet har¬
monies of which the common world knew nothing.” (WP, 382)

In Veblen’s terms, Cowperwood is the very example of conspicuous

consumption that the famous economist associated with the old feu¬
dal nobility. But it should be remarked that the conspicuous con¬
sumption so devastatingly exposed and analyzed by Veblen is quite
different from what is called "noble spending,” just as the life of the so-
called robber barons differed from the vie noble of the ancien regime.
The names of Renaissance princes are often enough coupled with
American millionaires of the nineteenth century to warrant a digres¬
sion marking the difference between them and the old nobility. Aline
Saarinen, for example, wrote of J. P. Morgan’s collections and dona¬
tions in terms of noblesse oblige. But nobility never obliged to the
foundation of museums, though many princely collections eventually
became museums.
It is quite possible to find aspects of what we call the consumption
society in the eighteenth century, both in France and in England, espe¬
cially in the area of luxury goods. But even in late eighteenth-century
France, on the eve of the Revolution, an important distinction was still
drawn between faste and /uye, between magnificence, an attribute
and obligation of the monarchs, princes, dukes, and the court nobility,
and luxury, an attribute but no obligation of the rich. Both faste and
luxe were expensive, both were visible; but their meaning and function
within society differed. Senac de Meilhan in his Considerations sur les
richesses et le /uye of 1787 marks the difference in a telling manner by
alluding to le /uye de Fouquet and le faste de Louis XIV. A monarch, a
prince, a great minister, could be magnificent, whereas a financier
could be luxurious. The nobility were under the obligation of de-
penses somptuaires—lavish expenses and princely liberality—be-
 87

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

cause greatness itself, rank, high station, and the appearance of such
were, not distinct: appearance was reality. An unmagnificent king was
unthinkable. The luxury spending of the financier class in the eigh¬
teenth century was an attempt to gain nobility through the creation of
the appearance of nobility. This meant chateaux in the country, mis¬
tresses, an hotel particulier and furnishings, including a gallery of pic¬
tures. But neither all the rich nor all the financiers were that osten¬
tatious; nor was all such spending considered highly or admired. Nor
were such spenders necessarily lovers of the arts.
The Rothschilds, Morgans, Vanderbilts, and others who accumu¬
lated art objects in the nineteenth century may have been in the tradi¬
tion of the financier class of eighteenth century, but they were under
no obligation to maintain the appearance of nobility, the grandeur as¬
sociated with an ancient name, or the honour of being in the service of
the king. The Due de Choiseul as first minister of Louis XV had little
choice but to appear magnificent and to overspend and find himself
ruined upon his dismissal. Men in high places were expected to spend
in the grand manner.
But while the millionaires of the nineteenth century might have
spent more even than princes on works of art, they did so within a
mental universe wholly unlike that of the late baroque world, for their
economic mentality was still dominated by that of the bourgeoisie, a
“saving for future ethos," to quote Norbert Elias.3 To Veblen, conspicu¬
ous consumption might have looked like the potlatch, but millionaires
were hardly ruined by their collecting. The bourgeois saves for a future
he believes in; the grand gesture in spending is an attribute of the old
baroque court nobility. Debts were no disgrace for that nobility. Debts
and bankruptcy were, on the other hand, a disgrace for Balzac’s Cesar
Birotteau.
Finally, there is another essential difference between the conspicu-

3. Norbert Elias, La Societe de cour (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1974), 48.

 88

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

ous spending of the millionaire and the noble spending of the old
court nobility: the aesthetic center had been displaced. The million¬
aire collected once the cult of art had been elaborated; the aesthetic
part of his life was centered on acquisition, on objects of beauty. But
the aesthetic of the old court nobility was centered on appearance,
grandeur, magnificence. The aesthetic was in the service of nobility
and not a sign of the possession of pecuniary wealth.
Cowperwood is a complex character. He is no barbarian, no mere
rich man who has made his pile in a none too scrupulous manner and
is trying to pass as a man of culture. For he is drawn to the ideal. This
is what makes him a bourgeois, while his energy, daring, dynamism,
and business acumen distinguish him from his European counterpart
as a particularly American type. There were other American types
who, like Mr. Marshall, did not consider art very important and yet
supposed that perhaps it was one’s moral duty to support the arts and
endow museums. Thus Nathaniel Alden, Santayana’s splendidly drawn
Puritan, had a “weakness” for art—a word that speaks volumes—but it
was not such a great weakness as to lead him to like art, only to sup¬
port local artists by buying their pictures as a public duty. But Alden
belonged to an older generation and to New England, and his attitude
was that of the citizen of a new proud republic who thought it a duty
to support the arts in a new society. Cowperwood belongs to a post-
Civil War generation that would be disturbing precisely to the New En¬
gland conscience. |Boston believed in art, and, by the 1890s, as Van
Wyck Brooks remarks, “Boston girls grew up with Botticelli manners.”
An ideal Renaissance, composed of Botticelli, Dante, and Petrarch, as
well as Browning and Ruskin, had been, so to say, Bostonized.4

But how had it come about that Boston girls had Botticelli manners
and that the Renaissance had been Bostonized? Ruskin provides one

4. Van Wyck Brooks, New England Indian Summer; 1865-1915 (New York: Dutton, 1940),
435.
 89

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

answer. He had a disciple at Harvard and many others were preaching

his .gospel of art. The Ruskinian influence helps explain American atti¬
tudes toward the arts and how these attitudes differ from those of the
Europeans.
In Europe idealism was an aesthetic, artistic, and philosophical doc¬
trine that defined itself against, or at least vis-a-vis, other aesthetic, ar¬
tistic, and philosophical doctrines. Idealism in Europe suggests a reli¬
gion of art to some; but it was not a xnoral or sentimental position.
Indeed, in Mademoiselle de Maupin the aesthetic dominates any
moral position, and the book can really be read as a manifesto of mod¬
ern paganism. Idealism in painting referred to specific works: the
School of Athens by Raphael, which begat the Apotheosis of Homer by
Ingres, which begat Delaroche’s Hemicycle in the Ecole des Beaux-
Arts. A philosopher like Victor Cousin might link idealism to the true,
the good, and the beautiful, and ultimately God and eternity; a painter
knew it as the tradition of art derived from antiquity and the Renais¬
sance, and, in the nineteenth century, at bay with a variety of modern¬
isms—or materialism, as Quatremere would have said.
In the United States, however, the aesthetic variant of idealism that
found its way to these shores was hardly ever separated from the
moral, the didactic, or the sentimental. It came to be inseparable from
the so-called genteel tradition of the later decades of the century. Thus
one might argue that in the United States, idealism was the American
position on the arts and not just one among other possible aesthetics.
In Europe the artistic question came to be: what kind of art do you
produce in a modern, secular, bourgeois world founded on industry,
economic power, and money? The same question could have been
asked in the United States and eventually was. But those who made up
that genteel tradition—critics, poets, writers, even painters—hardly
dared pose the question, partly out of private fears, partly because
their position was founded on a conservatism that looked backward.
The public constituting this genteel tradition also differed from their
European counterparts, for the genteel tradition addressed itself to
 90

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

elevating and educating the upper and middle classes, that is, the
monied classes. In Europe the conservative aesthetic was associated
with state institutions and an artistic tradition, and little attempt was
made to educate the nouveau riches of the empire or the third re¬
public by writers, who preferred to ridicule rather than instruct. This
does not mean the bourgeoisie did not have its apologists. One has
only to think of Octave Feuillet or Georges Ohnet, who wrote genteel
novels complete with pure and faithful wives, but there were also the
scandalous Flaubert, Maupassant, and Zola. Indeed it would be easier
to posit an antigenteel tradition in France rather than a genteel one.
Taste was inseparable from class, and it was ever associated with some
historical background.
But in the United States art was not defined by or in the same condi¬
tions. It was, interestingly enough, first defined in writings—from the
lectern, the pulpit, and the editorial chair. Indeed, as a new people, the
Americans of the early decades of the Republic had an advantage over
older peoples, for they started out in history knowing what art was. In
the early decades of the nineteenth century, essays on art undoubt¬
edly outnumbered works of art in the Republic; definitions of art and
beauty, inspired by Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of
Taste (1811) or Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres
(1783) had, in practical, protestant, and utilitarian America, a moral
and utilitarian bias. For in the old world (corrupt) art had all too often
been associated with courts, luxury, and effete nobility.
Later on Americans would also be lectured to on art by Ralph Waldo
Emerson, the sage of Concord, whose essays on art and nature com¬
bine to make up a telling example of an American, New England ver¬
sion of a supposedly universal idealism: romantic, transcendental,
moral, spiritual, neo-Platonic; and yet, strangely enough, if one takes
account of Emerson’s peculiar view of nature, this idealism is both
natural and godlike. Emerson’s view of art is as fine an updating of neo¬
platonism as one may find anywhere. It is also significant that he
 91

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

should have chosen the respectable form of an essay, whereas Gautier

use'd the novel. Emerson’s neo-Platonism remains respectable; Gautier’s
is slightly scandalous.
One may also turn to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s masterpiece The Mar¬
ble Faun, or The Artist of the Beautiful, for more insights into the forma¬
tion of American attitudes toward and beliefs about art. The Marble
Faun has the added attraction of giving the reader a fascinating view of
the American artist in Rome, whose sojourn in Rome testifies to the
strength over the American psyche of the neoclassical aesthetic long
after it was being challenged in Paris.
What is striking about these views of art in Emerson and Hawthorne
is that they are written as if the Enlightenment had never occurred. It
is possible to link these American views to the idealism of Winckel-
mann and the aesthetics of Anton Raphael Mengs with its spiritualized
beauty. But the polemical, combative, Davidian aspect of the first
phase of neoclassical painting is absent from this view of art and
beauty. The writings of Emerson and Hawthorne take us back to Re¬
naissance Platonism, safely jumping over the baroque, not to mention
the frivolous rococo. But they offer a Platonism elaborated by a Ficino
without pricely patronage and within a milieu that is entirely middle
class, a Ficino without the garden of the humanist but luxuriating in
the warmth and color of a New England Indian summer and speaking
not as a savant in a court of poets and princes but as a late Christian
prophet.
Which brings us to the true prophet of art in the United States for
the later nineteenth century, namely, Ruskin. For it was he and his
American followers who really told Americans what art was; and he
knew what it was because like most Englishmen and Americans he
was a Protestant and loved God through God’s work, nature!
The result of this transmigration of Ruskinian views of art and na¬
ture to the United States, combined with the New England influence, is
a theory of art that rests on a spiritualized, naturalistic fallacy sane-
 92

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

tioned by God. Behind the doctrines of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and
the writings and polemics of Quatremere de Quincy—even behind the
statements and opinions of painters and critics, variously described as
romantics, classicists, realists, or naturalists—lay centuries of ques¬
tions about art, theories, and traditions, religious and secular patron¬
age: questions and answers passed on through time by savants and
institutions founded as early as the sixteenth or the seventeenth cen¬
tury. And in Europe there were countless examples of art works de¬
viating from the canons of taste that were in the process of being dis¬
covered and about to be collected.
Behind the theories of art circulating in the United States, there was,
above all, enthusiasm. And whereas in Europe aesthetic choices im¬
plied questions of class, politics, markets, and attitudes toward the es¬
tablished taste, in the United States aesthetic choices tended to reflect
moral and religious beliefs and attitudes. The American businessman
who came to be interested in art and decided to collect may have been
tough-minded, ruthless, and even unscrupulous in his business deal¬
ings and the amassing of his fortune; but when it came to art, he—or
his wife, or his daughter, perhaps even his son, who might have
thoughts, God forbid, of not going into business—was an idealist. This
idealism was not that formulated by a Quatremere de Quincy or Taine.
It was closer to Victor Cousin; it might be said ultimately to derive
from Winckelmann or Hegel, though such an idealistic businessman
may never have heard those names. But as an American he had learned
his art from the great followers of Buskin: James Jackson Jarves,
Charles Eliot Norton, Enrest Fenollosa, a Hegelian, and also from
Emerson, Hawthorne, Henry James, and Henry Adams.

Why did Ruskin have such far-reaching influence?5 His doctrine, as

we have seen, fell on fertile ground that had been prepared by other

5. On Ruskin’s importance in the United States, see Roger B. Stein, Ruskin and Aesthetic
Thought in America, 1840-1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).
 93

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

spiritualists. Yet, Ruskin s appeal lay in his religiosity and style. Ruskin
was eloquent in a century in which eloquence of the pulpit was a
highly regarded literary form. Max Nordau in his work Degeneration
pointed out what appealed to the “anglo-saxon mind ’: he was turgid,
fallacious; yet a master of style; and he was a bigot; also emotional; and
a man of deep sentiment; with the temperament of an inquisitor. In¬
deed; Nordau called him the “Torquemada of aesthetics” (D, 77). Ver¬
non Lee; an English writer living in Florence; put it in a less pictur¬
esque manner: “His philosophy is of far greater importance than any
other system of aesthetics; because it is not the philosophy of the ge¬
nius, evolution or meaning of any or all art; but the philosophy of the
legitimacy or illegitimacy of all and every art.”6 An apt philosophy for a
new nation.
It is precisely this moralistic and Christian inquisition into art that
could appeal to American Puritans and transcendentalists who; as yet;
had no art to speak of in their own country. Art itself became a moral
lesson to be read. And in reading this lesson of art; the American fol¬
lowers of Ruskin were Jansenists in a world going over to the Jesuits.
James Jackson Jarves was not only the first American disciple of
Ruskin, he was the first American to write about art on a theoretical
level; the first great American collector of Italian primitives; and the
first to write art history, art criticism, and aesthetics. His publication
list included Art Hints: Architecture, Painting, Sculpture (1855), Art
Studies: The Old Masters of Italy: Painting (1861); The Art Idea (1864);
and Art Thoughts (1870). His story was told in a novel of Edith Whar¬
ton’s called False Dawn, which implied that his message had come too
soon to a country not yet prepared to accept art, at least as he under¬
stood it. He had considerable trouble trying to sell his collection and
finally gave it to Yale University where it still is. But Jarves was not too
early in bringing art thoughts and ideas to America; for after the Civil

6. Vernon Lee, Belcaro, being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions (London: W. Sat-
chell, 1881), 197-198.
 94

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

i

War the United States was ready to listen. His ideas he had learned
from Ruskin whom he had met in Italy and it was thus through Jarves
that Ruskin’s great influence began in the United States. From Jarves
this influence passed to another disciple, who had also been to Italy
Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard.
The philosophy of art Jarves built up in the course of his life and
that he expressed in his writings was a coherent doctrine concerned
with the history of art and the importance of art in the future of the
United States. Jarves's emphasis on the role of art in the United States
is important because it distinguishes the uses of art in America from
the uses of and attitudes toward art in Europe. In Europe history in¬
cluded a long past whose art was a heritage to be accepted, denied, or
challenged, and even bought and sold. But in the United States history
brought no such wealth of art; history was more the promise of a fu¬
ture, but what the future would be depended in part upon the correct
reading of the past. Since the United States had no past to speak of, the
lessons of the past had to be learned from Europe.
Jarves was no art historian in our professional, university sense of
the word. He had no Ph.D. But he did think of art in historical rather
than purely aesthetic terms. However, because he thought of history in
moral and American terms, he connected art and its development
with the rise and fall of the states and civilizations. For Jarves, as for
Ruskin, the arts were thus signs of the moral stages of developing so¬
cieties. But since in the United States history included the future, art
could play a useful role in the construction of this future. Beauty could
help men perform their moral duties; art might inspire morality and
high ideals and thereby insure the nation’s prosperity and adherence
to the path set by God who had implanted the laws of art within the
laws of nature.
In the early history of aesthetic thought in the United States then, art
and religion were closely linked: not so much in fact or through in¬
stitutions such as the church, as had been the case in Europe, but in
 95

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

the minds of those who thought and wrote about art. They had read
Ruskin, not Kant. There was an additional reason for this union: “Men
like Jarves, Ruskin, and even Norton, were seeking a religion that cut
across questions of creed, a religion of the heart.”7 In Europe, if you
think of art and religion you think immediately of the Roman church;
but the curious thing about Jarves, Ruskin, and Eliot was that they dis¬
missed the Roman Church from their thoughts and talked instead
about the Middle Ages, conveniently forgetting that even the Middle
Ages had been Roman Catholic. The paradox is easily understood
once it is realized that they dismissed the baroque and the rococo as
the corrupt forms of art of a post-Renaissance corrupted church. Such
a view meant of course that historically, valid art is narrowed down to
certain types of ancient and medieval art, mostly Italian: “The medieval
art of Italy seemed to Jarves to be the purest expression of the religious
ideal in art. He pardoned what he felt to be faulty execution in the
works of Giotto, Sano di Pietro and Fra Angelico, and many others be¬
cause these artists had faith” (R, 137). Things had somehow gone
wrong in the Renaissance when sectarianism arose; and the Reforma¬
tion, despite its laudable aim of purifying Roman corruption, led to
fanaticism and the opposition of art and religion. The other villains in
the drama were the Medicis; with them art started its decline because
it ceased to be free. It had to serve princes.
Jarves, and others after him, saw Italian history from the perspective
of the United States. Early republican Florence was perceived as a
democratic city-state permeated by the wholesome spirit of labor and
trade, similar to the early United States. But the Florence of the Medi¬
cis was that of bankers and princes and was marked by the luxuries of
the rich rather than the simple tastes of craftsmen. Looking at the

7. Stein, Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought, 130. On aesthetics in fin de siecle America, see
also Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation ofAmeri¬
can Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1981).
 96

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

world about him did not induce Jarves to change his mind; it simply
confirmed his views of Florentine history. If art had gone wrong in
the sixteenth century the modern world of the nineteenth century
showed only too blatantly that art without faith was but technical abil¬
ity and luxury bereft of the spirituality of true art; it was without ideal.
Quatremere de Quincy had seen in the modern world the real dan¬
ger to the art of the ideal and had spoken scathingly of those who be¬
lieved in progress; Americans tended to think likewise. The modern
world was a danger to the kind of free, moral; democratic art as had
been obtained in the early Renaissance. And modern Paris—thriving;
luxurious; attractive—was opposed to the virtuous Florence of the late
medieval period when art was filled with the spirit of true religion.
Paris came to play in the American imagination much the same role
as it had assumed among Europeans: it stood for modernity but it was
also the antithesis of virtuous America and also of democratic Amer¬
ica. In Jarves’s case Paris was that of Napoleon III. And like the Medicis;
it pointed to the same lesson regarding the effects of despotism on art:
“Despotism has made of Paris a brilliant bazaar; cafe; and theatre; in
truth a well-baited trap for money and morals. Its standard of human¬
ity is low; ambitions narrow; knowledge contracted to selfish aims; and
chase of fleeting pleasure intense.”8 There was no denying; Jarves ad¬
mitted; that it was a brilliant; well-planned; attractive city calculated to
make a good and pleasing impression; just like its shop windows and
the ladies’ toilettes. But it was spiritually destitute. And this brio and
the emperor’s political success were due to the same cause: lack of
morality in the country at large. Jarves had learned his Ruskin to per¬
fection: art; morality society and politics were all united.
This view of Paris was general among Americans who were; after all;
very earnest. Thus Henry Adams; serious about his education; knew it
was frivolous to go to Paris: “France was not serious, and he was not

8. James Jackson Jarves, Art Thoughts (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1870), 255.
 97

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

serious in going there. He did this in good faith, obeying the lessons
his teachers had taught him; but the curious result followed that,
being in no way responsible for the French, and sincerely disapprov¬
ing of them, he felt quite at liberty to enjoy to the full everything of
which he disapproved. Stated thus crudely, the idea sounds derisive;
but, as a matter of fact, thousands of Americans passed much of their
time on this understanding.”9 One is tempted to say that if Paris had
not existed in the nineteenth century it would have been necessary to
invent it to save Americans from Boston.
Be that as it may, it is clear that Paris in the American aesthetic
played a role similar to that which it occupied in the minds of ideal¬
ists, traditionalists, the minds of members of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
It is also obvious that if in the French aesthetic Paris represented the
temptations of the modern, in the American mind it represented the
temptations of sin. The American was ambivalent: Paris was all wrong
about art, yet it was attractive. And the attractions were feminine: lux¬
uries, department stores, fine restaurants, the attractions of the senses,
the toilettes of women, the demimonde—in short, the materialist aes¬
thetic that was disapproved of by the Ruskinians as well as by the
idealists, in whose view art had a mission. But in truth the attractions
of Paris were also American attractions: for after the Civil War the
United States, like Napoleon’s Paris, was becoming a modern, dynamic,
progressive, bustling, thriving, materialist country. New York’s Fifth
Avenue was meant to rival anything Paris or London could offer, so
that the “art idea,” introduced by Jarves into a United States at the
crossroads of virtue and luxury, came to be a moral and aesthetic
weapon against the rising tide of vulgarity.
Whereas Jarves had pioneered “art thoughts” in the United States,
Charles Eliot Norton, another friend of Ruskin, fought the good fight

9. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Boston: Houghton

Mifflin, 1918), 96.
 98

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

against the ever-mounting tide of post-Civil War American bad taste, or,
as Norton used to say, “the horrible vulgarity of it all.” Art education
was not only a moral duty but an absolute and urgent necessity since
the American Medici were capturing the public imagination and oc¬
cupying Renaissance chateaux and pallazi on New York’s Fifth Avenue.
Santayana sketched a marvelous portrait of the new champion of art:

Professor Norton, the friend of Carlyle, of Ruskin, and of Mat¬

thew Arnold, and, for that matter, the friend of everybody, a most
urbane, learned, and exquisite spirit, was descended from the
most typical of New England divines: yet he was loudly accused
of being un-American. On the other hand, a Frenchman of ripe
judgment, who knew him perfectly, once said to me, “Norton
wouldn’t like to hear it, but he is a terrible Yankee.” Both judg¬
ments were well-grounded. Professor Norton’s mind was deeply
moralized, discriminating, and sad; and these qualities rightly
seemed American to the French observer of New England, but they
rightly seemed un-American to the politician from Washington.10

Professor Norton had reason to be sad. He no longer believed in God as

had his Unitarian ancestors; and when he looked about him, Professor
Norton saw Harvard students whom he had to try to educate into
gentlemen.
If Jarves had brought the word to America, Norton would make it
flesh by inculcating it in his students. This did not mean turning them
into artists or art historians. Art and literature could help, however, to
turn them into gentlemen. Here again, as in Europe, art was culture. As
R. L. Duffus wrote of Norton: “We must think of him as a very great gen-

10. George Santayana, “Philosophical Opinion in America/’ in The Genteel Tradition.

Nine Essays, ed. Douglas L. Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967),
101-102.
 99

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

tleman, indeed, trying to make generation after generation of Harvard

students into gentlemen, and through them, to make all Americans
more gentlemanly. That is what art and culture meant for him.”11
Duffus, reflecting on Norton from the perspective of the 1920s,
thought it significant that Norton had chosen the Parthenon as the su¬
preme human achievement. "When New England took up art it was
natural for it to begin with something as perfect and cold as marble”
(18). The inclusion of Greek art within his scope was about the only
point on which Norton differed significantly from Ruskin. Otherwise
his interpretation of art history differed little from that of his master or,
for that matter, from that of Jarves. Culture was represented by Greece
and Italy, especially Florence, between the fourteenth and sixteenth
century. These were the two great moments of mankind. The eigh¬
teenth century had been more generous toward mankind and the
past, for it had counted four great ages from the time of Pericles. And it
had counted the sixteenth century of Leo X as a great age, as well as
that of Louis XIV and Augustus, excluded by Norton.
Before taking his chair at Harvard, Norton had traveled widely in
Italy and slowly formed his opinions on art and taste. On his last trip
to Italy in 1869, low taste had, in his mind, come to be associated with
Paris and New York, and he began to see the same "taste for what is
fashionable, fresh and showy” spread even to his beloved Italy. That
was another reason to be sad. And there were others. Norton’s pessi¬
mism may have been a result of the rising influx of immigrants into the
United States. To Godkin of the Nation this influx represented a threat
to culture. Italy and the arts represented to men of this turn of mind a
refuge, an enchanting ivory tower, sheltered from the modern—New
York and its vulgar multimillionaires, Paris and its fashions, and indus¬
trial, brutal, dynamic America. To see Italy exposed to the same dis¬
ease was sad indeed. And so after some hesitation Norton decided to

11. Robert Luther Duffus, The American Renaissance (New York: Knopf, 1928), 18.
 100

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

return home for good. But it is obvious that teaching in bustling, ex¬
panding, energetic America could not mean what studying art had
come to mean among the few Europeans engaged in that activity: the
scholarly, almost neutral, professional study of the arts in history, in
which their development was followed, the various schools deline¬
ated, and a survey of civilization made. Art also meant, for Norton and
others who began to teach art history—art, for short—after the Civil
War in eastern universities, as Vanderbilt put it, preaching “the gospel
of art.’| Norton had three well-defined aims in mind when, in 1874, he
began to lecture on art: to reveal the significance of the fine arts as an
expression of the moral and intellectual conditions of the past; to illus¬
trate the baseness of present America by way of contrast with the great
moments of the past; and to refine the sensibilities of young men at
Harvard.
Although he began lecturing in 1874, it was not until 1878 that he
lectured on the Renaissance, and not until 1896 that he began using
lantern slides to show the monuments he lectured on. Apparently
Norton lectured as much on Dante as on Italian art. And since the
great moments were Athens and the Gothic period in Florence and
Venice, his task was facilitated. His aesthetic principles were simple:
the aim of poets and artists was, through the imagination, to achieve
the beautiful and the good. He was not at all in accord with trends at
that time linking art and literature with beauty rather than with truth,
and he deplored the views of a James or Flaubert, according to which
the integrity of art existed irrespective of subject matter. Nor was he
sympathetic to Zola, whose ignoble subject matter vitiated the sense of
beauty and craftsmanship. Norton rejected the modern not only in its
incarnation as fashion but also in its arts. He was no more tolerant of
the art-for-art’s sake tradition or the aesthetic movement; for that also
separated art from morality and could potentially be perverse enough
to lead to a fascination with the ugly, the strange, the foul, and the evil.
Norton was an idealist who, had he been French, would probably have
 101

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

found a place in Taine’s Philosophes classiques duXIXe Siecle and been

made fun of as a late seventeenth-century divine or Cambridge Plato-
nist. In fact; his aesthetics were rather close to the idealism of Victor
Cousin. Taine poked fun at this kind of sentimental idealism: “When
one speaks of the ideal; it is with one’s heart; and you think of that
vague dream through which intimate sentiment is expressed; it is
whispered; with a sort of contained exaltation; and when it is dis¬
coursed upon; it is in verse; or in a cantata; one touches it only with
one’s fingertips; or hands joined in prayer as when one thinks of hap¬
piness; heaven; or love.”12
But Norton; to put him back on his native soil; exemplified what
Santayana called the “genteel tradition/’ a feeble; generalized aestheti¬
cism quite divorced from a living art. Indeed had Norton remained in
Europe surrounded by his rare books he would probably have ended
up as a character in a Henry James novel.

The allusion to aestheticism deliberately points to what strikes us as

the negative side of the American national character as it took form;
influenced by New England; about 1900. The United States may not
have had an aesthetic movement presided over by an Oscar Wilde; or
an art-for-art’s-sake attitude struck by a Theophile Gautier; but one
ought never forget Wilde’s mot about Boston being refined beyond the
point of civilization. There existed a diffused aestheticism that; had
theologians been as tough-minded as Americans were in business;
would have seen this aestheticism for what it was; a disguised; uncon¬
scious; heresy. Consider Mr. Hazard of Henry Adams’s novel Esther:

His theology belonged to the High Church school; and in the

pulpit he made no compromise with the spirit of concession;
but in all ordinary matters of indifference or of innocent plea-

12. Hyppolite Taine, Philosophic de I’Art, 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1909), 2:223.
 102

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

sure he gave the rein to his instincts, and in regard to art he was
so full of its relation with religion that he would admit of no
divergence between the two. Art and religions might take great
liberties with each other, and both be the better for it, as he
thought.13

Such philosophical confusion makes it difficult not to fall into the

heresy of aestheticism of art for art’s sake, condemned by the followers
of Ruskin. For if art and religion were one, then all the varieties of devo¬
tion to art were but so many cults; to exclude all but one was to as¬
sume the validity of a single doctrine, in this case art according to Rus¬
kin. Max Nordau was not far off the mark when he called Ruskin a
Torquemada. The theologians who, in the corrupt sixteenth century,
formulated the church’s doctrine on the use of images would have
seen through the Reverend Hazard and the followers of Ruskin in a
flash and recognized a classic case not of hysteria a la Nordau but of
the symptoms that gave rise to the iconoclastic question in the Greek
church, the confusion of the image with what it represented—in
short, a modern version, quite unbeknownst to its practitioners, of im¬
age worship. Aestheticism in the United States existed in a vague, gen¬
teel, Protestant form.
Henry Adams himself, it has been shown, had an aesthete’s charac¬
ter and view of the world. Like many other cultivated New England
minds, he disliked the new America and, by extension, the Renais¬
sance of the Medicis: “There is always an odor of spice and brown
sugar about the Medicis. They patronized art as Mr. Rockefeller or Mr.
Havemeyer does. They are not Dantesque.’’14 He referred to this type of
patronage of the arts as the “goldbug taste.” Like Norton, he disliked

13. Henry Adams, Esther (New York: Holt, 1884), 104.

14. Ernst Scheyer, The Circle of Henry Adams (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1970), 69.
 103

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

modern art, thinking it soulless and mercantile, the victim, as he aptly

put it, of “the universal solvent of money valuations.”
Such attitudes and pessimism explain the American proneness to
aestheticism that may well be the most characteristic American trait
with regard to the arts. But it is also a bourgeois trait, at its most in¬
tense and absurd. The American aesthete was but the obverse of the
hard-working Mr. Marshall of Chicago who could not take art seri¬
ously. Just as in Henry Adams the Puritan was at war with the aesthete,
so Americans were within themselves at odds about art, and the posi¬
tions, like so many others in the United States, were always at ex¬
tremes: one was either Henry James’s Mr. Newman, “the great western
barbarian, stepping forth in his innocence and might, gazing awhile at
this effete Old World, and then swooping down on it”; or again, one
might be Henry James’s Mr. Gilbert Osmond, in whom the lack of dis¬
tinction between religion and art that Mr. Hazard failed to draw mani¬
fests itself as a lack of distinction between art and evil.
There were, it is true, lesser intensities between the extremes; for ex¬
ample, the rather harmless Mr. Ned Rosier who collected bibelots, or
Mr. Verver, the retired millionaire who collected bibelots, objets d’art,
and even a genuine prince, escaped the utter selfishness of Osmond
by thinking of his collection as a future gift to his home town. The
American, seen through the eyes of Henry James and also Paul Bour-
get, was seen to play a central role in nineteenth-century art, if only
because he collected, if only because he was usually so much richer
than Europeans, and if only because he was such an accumulator. Art
collecting was a sublime, pleasurable, novel form of capital formation.
Indeed, considered as capital that did not create more capital or yield
interest, it was the aesthetic because disinterested form of capital. It
was capitalism as the sublime. And among the shadings between ex¬
tremes occupied by Americans, there were those who put art even be¬
fore capital, denying the power of money by that of art, as if the Virgin
of Chartres, incarnate as a work of art, exercised enough power to
 104

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

4

neutralize that of the dynamo. For such people, as James put it in one
telling phrase, “life was a matter of connoisseurship” (PL, 262). Thus
Gilbert Osmond’s sole accomplishment, his fastidious taste, compen¬
sated for all his negative qualities: lack of talent, lack of genius, lack of
prospects, and lack of wealth. There are traits of the dandy in Osmond
but not of the European dandy a la Wilde, Baudelaire, or Gautier, all of
whom were artists, creators, and fighting a war of style against the bour¬
geois. Osmond is the bourgeois aesthete, sterile and possessive, snob¬
bishly fastidious. As Madame Merle said, he had to have the best, even
in women, which he assimilated to his bibelots. Osmond refined his
taste to the most exclusive snobbism. It was his way of asserting his
difference in a democratic society. But it was not nobility that required
a role or meant obligations. In Osmond, aestheticism, taste, fastidious¬
ness, “implied a sovereign contempt for everyone but some three or
four very exalted people whom he envied, and for everything in the
world but half a dozen ideas of his own” (PL, 430). This was the Pu¬
ritan’s certainty of his election on the aesthetic plane. Everything was
damned, everything was vulgar, everyone more or less lost; and he, Pu¬
ritan that he was, must keep himself unspotted. His fastidiousness was
a species of perverse saintliness, perhaps the only one open to the late
Puritan type. Osmond’s view of the world is indeed reminiscent of
what students used to say about Norton’s continuous harping on the
“horrible vulgarity of it all.” But for all his contempt of the world, Os¬
mond did not withdraw from it; for he needed it to assert his superi¬
ority, live his false aristocratic life, and assume his pose, which was
good enough to have seduced even as bright a girl as Isabel Archer.
And the pose he assumed was a pose in the void.
It was an instance of a pervasive nihilism. Osmond himself put the
finger on what was wrong with his position and that of most Ameri¬
cans living in Europe: "I sometimes think we’ve got into a rather bad
way, living off here among things and people not our own, without re¬
sponsibilities or attachments, with nothing to hold us together or keep
 105

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

us up; marrying foreigners; forming artificial tastes; playing tricks with

our natural mission” (PL, 260). In contrast to this exile; the great west¬
ern barbarian who swept down on Europe and then flew back home
with his booty was better off; for at least he returned to breathe his
own air. Those who stayed in Europe with their bibelots; no matter
how splendid their villas or the gardens, lived in a hothouse culture.
They looked at the culture and life of Europeans through tinted glass.
The American aesthete and exile had no historical or organic ties
with the works he admired and sought after, a theme that not only
preoccupied Henry James but was also central to Edith Wharton’s The
Custom of the Country, which, as we shall see, is concerned with one
particular type of American abroad. This distance between Americans
and Europeans was not lost on French novelists either. It was a fre¬
quent interest of Paul Bourget and was also alluded to by other novel¬
ists. Pierre de Coulevain’s intriguing novel Noblesse americaine (1907)
illuminates differences not only of national character but also of atti¬
tudes toward the arts and culture. In the story Annie Villars of a
prominent old New York family marries the impoverished Marquis
d’Anghuilon. There is the classic case of the rich American heiress
marrying poor but authentic French nobility, though in this case it is
also a love match. The newly wed couple spends a few weeks in Rome,
where, in the contemplation of works of art, cultural differences and
perhaps also class differences are brought to light:

Every day the young woman went forth with her Baedeker. Ar¬
rived in some museum she went either to the left or right and
stopped before the first wall of pictures, looked an instant into
her guide, raised her eyes back to the painting, looked at it for a
time more or less long, then recommenced with another picture
and repeated the exercise for hours with a real pleasure and
unequalled conscientiousness. She was not wrong in her admi¬
ration and sincerely enjoyed the sight of these masterpieces.
 106

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

They charmed her eye without prompting in her any emotion.

She saw and saw but she felt not.15

Annie was dutiful about enjoying art. She may even have been to Vas-
sar and taken an art history course and undoubtedly was far more
knowledgeable about art than her husband the marquis. He did not
bother reading Baedeker at all. He looked at far fewer pictures than she
did, but he felt, was touched, by what he looked at. It meant something
else to him. One evening, as they left Saint Peter’s basilica at dusk, they
heard the angelus ringing and the effect of light and sound and the
grandeur of the architecture was such as to stop the marquis in his
tracks and to mutter How beautiful, as he was seized by the moment.
“ ‘Superb! immense!’ Annie cried out, but I don’t remember how many
feet the piazza and colonnade measure; I must go see’” (233).
Annie was obviously not a Henry James character, though she did
have sensibility and intelligence and was undoubtedly more sophisti¬
cated about art than Newman who had masterpieces copied to take
home with him. The difference between Annie and the marquis is cul¬
tural. And it would take time for Annie to note the subtle differences
between Americans and Europeans even though they might share the
same art works—the Americans having purchased them; the Euro¬
peans having inherited them and sometimes lived with them so long
they were taken for granted until some such experience as the mar¬
quis underwent made them take notice. Annie needed time to under¬
stand the difference. As she settled in her Parisian life and the sum¬
mers at the ancestral chateau in the Bourbonnais, she noted the
differences: “By comparing the old manor house with the finest dwell¬
ings of New York, she realized better than she ever had, the difference
which exists between an aristocracy and a plutocracy” (282).
This difference existed also in Europe between the old nobility and

15. Pierre de Coulevain, Noblesse americaine (Paris: Ollendorf, 1907), 231-232.

 107

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

the varieties of new nobles: imperial nobility created by Napoleon,

nouveaux riches, cosmopolitan society and Henry James characters
might have understood the difference without going to Europe simply
by comparing Boston with New York or, worse, Chicago. Thus Boston,
even for Europeans visiting the United States, became the cultural cen¬
ter of the United States. And in Boston, even clutter escaped—though
just barely—being bad taste. One European visitor offered the follow¬
ing description of Mrs. Gardner’s Boston interior of the 1890s:

A sober elegance is the distinctive trait of this [Boston] society

which wishes to show its refinement in all things. To be sure the
splendors of luxury are not absent, but their eclat is muted, so to
say tempered by good taste, which is not always the case. I could,
for example, name a particularly opulent home which might all
too easily have looked like some well-furnished bric-a-brac shop
or some pretentious museum of decorative arts. But with the
greatest tact succeeded precisely in avoiding this danger, so that
nothing was de trop. From the altarpieces dislodged from Italian
churches, bibelots from the eighteenth century, masterpieces of
German and French painting, to the portrait of the lady of the
house,—the most beautiful Sargent ever painted—, everything
was in its place, even the flag of Napoleon’s Grenadier Guards
which, by the corner of a Renaissance chimney, tells the glories
of French armies. No clutter, no profusion, no show; it all fitted
into a savant harmony; it was simply the exquisite frame for a
charming woman.16

But if Boston represented America’s high culture, the price paid for it
was a certain dryness and sometimes even exile, that is, maintaining
the purity abroad.

16. Th. Bentzon, Les Americaines chez elles (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1893), 113.
 108

Isabella Stewart Gardner, by John Singer Sargent.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
 109

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

Osmond and, to a lesser degree, Ned Rosier and Mr. Verver ex¬
emplify this peculiarly American high ideal of culture, taste, and artis¬
tic perfection almost to the point of death. It implies the museum
mentality, the association of culture with a past, and the consequent
rejection of the modern, thriving, vulgar, but living world, which is,
after all, the condition of their disdainful aestheticism. But the fastidi¬
ous aesthete who had to have nothing but the best was but one ex¬
treme of the American intervention in the art world.
The other extreme shall be called "the swooping barbarian.” The
aesthete picked and chose; he might exile himself, lose himself in the
rarefied atmosphere of Europe’s own cosmopolites, aesthetes, dec¬
adents, and nobles out to regild their arms by marriage to an Ameri¬
can heiress. But not everyone was high church, capable of being saints
in the world of high culture. The swooping barbarians—the wife and
daughter of Mr. Marshall of Chicago, or the graduates of Vassar, Bryn
Mawr, Smith, and even Wells College—all found a more direct way of
acquiring culture. After the proper preparation of some course on art
history or appreciation or simply reading Ruskin, they simply traveled
to Europe, did the sights, and returned with culture to create mu¬
seums, perhaps even teach courses in art. For even the barbarians—
and the word was hard and rather unfair—believed in culture after
Jarves, Ruskin, and Norton. It was preached at them in Harvard; it was
lectured on at Yale and Princeton; even in Minnesota, thanks to Pro¬
fessor Gabriel Campbell of the Department of Mental and Moral Phi¬
losophy, art was taught. It was, indeed, a most noble and elevating sub¬
ject, taught by a great many reverends: the Reverend John Bascom, the
Reverend John Lansing Raymond, the Reverend James Mason Hoppin.
They all prepared the great descent that the older generation of Henry
James found somewhat vulgar. But the swoopers knew they were shop¬
ping for the ideal. As Paul Bourget noted on his tour of the United
States in 1893: "You have to hear the Americans pronounce the word
art, simply and with the article, to understand the profound zeal they
 110

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

feel to refine themselves, and also tliis word refined, ever on the lips of
my fellow writers as I visit their club.”17
The result of the American search for the ideal was, much as in Eu¬
rope, the bibelotization of art. Because there was a great dead of money
in the United States, there were a great many bibelots to be bought. For
swooping down on Europe for the ideal meant shopping in the great
bibelot bazaar. For Newman, an international flaneur, Europe—indeed
the world—was "a great bazaar where one might stroll about and pur¬
chase handsome things; but he was no more conscious, individually
of social pressure than he admitted the existence of such a thing as an
obligatory purchase.”18
A further result of this international shopping for the ideal mani¬
fested itself in the bibelotization of the American home. The Gilded
Age was the eclectic bibelot age. Paul Bourget saw in Newport what he
considered the result of American shopping abroad: Elizabethan
houses, French Renaissance chateaux, French eighteenth-century
chateaux or town houses, Italian villas, and, within these, riches be¬
yond belief, all of which he thought a result of the unconscious desire
or need of the American to ennoble himself with a sense of the past, an
honest need, Bourget thought, and one that saved these houses from
what would otherwise have been brutal vulgarity. There was some¬
thing pathetic, yet poetic about this need for something from the past
in this materialistic world of the “check and the chic.” And yet, there
was perhaps just a trifle too much from the past.
In a novella called Deuy menages, Bourget is given a letter of intro¬
duction to a Mrs. Tennyson R. Harris of Fifth Avenue, who lived in a
white marble construction in the manner of the Chateau de Blois.
However, as she is in Newport for the season, the narrator takes him¬
self there to be received by Mrs. Harris in a room that is meant to seem
Parisian but does not quite succeed:

17. Paul Bourget, Outre-mer, 2 vols. (Paris: Lemerre and Meyer, 1894-1895), 1:49.
18. Henry James, The American (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907), 66.
 Ill

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

Mrs. Harris received me in a species of boudoir with windows

on the sea in which I immediately found an image of the salons
I’d seen in Cannes, but it was a parody by excess of imitation, a
caricature by way of outrance. Too many prints, too many pic¬
tures on the overly rich wall fabric, too many flowers and too big
in too many precious vases, too many small English silver ob¬
jects on tables, among too many photographs of princes and
princesses, all with dedications. As for Mrs. Harris herself, she
too seemed almost too beautiful, with her too red mouth, her too
scrubbed teeth, her overly polished hands with their abuse of
rings, and her dress was so much the fashion that she seemed a
femme-affiche, a couturier’s fashion model he’d had the genius
to doll up for export.19

Mrs. Harris knows all the latest Paris gossip, has read all the latest
books, so late indeed that Bourget hasn't even seen them in the Paris
bookshops. Bourget got the impression of an America with a thin Eu¬
ropean veneer. And the dinner too, that evening, is also just too lux¬
urious, what with Meissen dinnerware, a Sevres service of imperial
origin, and the portraits of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, duly in¬
scribed donne par le Roy, hanging on the wall. And when Bourget ac¬
companies Mr. Harris to Georgia in his private train he also notices a
small library of 200 volumes, all first-rate and beautifully bound, and
learns that in his off hours Mr. Harris works at his culture: “It is a big
word which Americans always have on their lips and on their mind,
and which they apply with equal seriousness to morals and gymnas¬
tics, as in ethical and physical culture” (V, 168). Poor Mr. Harris, Bourget
also finds out, is the slave of Mrs. Harris’s cultural snobbism and ambi¬
tion. This truth is revealed to him in a curious performance they wit¬
ness together in which a husband-wife team perform in a variety show.
The wife declaims sublime poetry in free verse of her own creation

19. Paul Bourget, Voyageuses (Paris: Nelson ed., Calmann-Levy, n.d.), 161.
 112

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

and is politely applauded; the husband, a contortionist of uncanny

ability, is wildly applauded and rakes in the money The wife looks
with disdain upon her husband’s “art” and treats him as a nothing.
Bourget is suddenly struck with the resemblance they bear to Mrs.
Harris and Mr. Harris. In short what Bourget sees in this story and in
his Outre-mer, his book about America, is a moral, democratic version
of the relation that obtained between luxury and the grande cocotte of
the Paris of Napoleon III and Louis Philippe. There are no cocottes in
Newport—no adventurers either, he notes, only men who had earned
their fortunes; but there are women who are voracious culture con¬
sumers, as expensive as the demimondaines only set on a pedestal.
They are ladies, they are pure, and they are, for Paul Bourget, symbol¬
ized by the great John Singer Sargent portrait of Mrs. Jack Gardner,
cleverly represented so as to appear almost saintly.
This need Americans have to surround themselves with objects that
represent the dimensions of time, he thinks, is easily explained in a
country in which everything dates from yesterday. But this need for
duration can also have comic effects. In the villas of Newport, Bourget
notices portraits of a Genoese grand siegneur, a Venetian admiral, an
English lord of the eighteenth century, Louis XV by Van Loo, Louis XIV
by Mignard, and a portrait of Napoleon with one of the flags of the
grenadiers, whereupon someone remarks, “Yes, they have the portrait
of the grand emperor, but where is the portrait of the grandfather?”
(OM, 1:79). It is a telling witticism pointing less to the alienation of the
owners, probably well-meaning swoopers, than to society in which art
no longer functions as it did in its own past but has been reduced to
the status of a bibelot, bought by someone who probably knew nothing
of what it once had meant.
That some Americans did not understand the meaning of the
bibelots or objets d art they bought is a frequent theme in Henry James
as well as Bourget and made devastatingly clear in Edith Wharton’s
cruel The Custom of the Country. For Undeen Spragg, from Ohio—later
 113

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

Mrs. Ralph Dagonet of a distinguished New York family; still later Com-
tesse'de Chelles—Paris meant luxury shopping; clothes; modernity
Italy, being art; meant boredom. And for Undeen, one of the Jamesian
swoopers; art meant bibelots that could be exchanged for the life of
luxury. Undeen marries de ChelleS; who, being noble and burdened
with a chateau in the country can hardly afford to live in Paris. When
Undeen wants to leave the country to live in Paris continually de
Chelles says they cannot afford it. Undeen then immediately thinks of
selling the Boucher tapestries in the chateau that have been with the
family since the eighteenth century whereupon de Chelles says: “Ah;
you don’t understand.” Indeed; for de Chelles and many representa¬
tives of his class, Boucher tapestries; family portraits; pictures, old fur¬
niture, all represent their past, their race, their traditions, their very
being as nobles, not to mention the remains of a lost position. These
were no mere bibelots. Given the right price, they were something an
American could obtain. The clash between the swoopers and the
swooped upon was inevitable and de Chelles unleashes his anger at
Undeen:

You come among us from a country we don’t know, and can’t

imagine, a country you care for so little that before you’ve been a
day in ours you’ve forgotten the very house you were born in—if
it wasn’t torn down before you knew it! You come among us
speaking our language and not knowing what we mean, wanting
the things we want, and not knowing why we want them; aping
our weaknesses, exaggerating our follies, ignoring or ridiculing
all we care about—you come from hotels as big as towns, and
from towns as flimsy as paper, where the streets haven’t had
time to be named, and the buildings are demolished before they
are dry, and the people are as proud of changing as we are of
holding to what we have—and we’re fools enough to imagine
that because you copy our ways and pick up our slang you un-
 114

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

derstand anything about the things that make life decent and
honorable for us!20

But the swoopers were irresistible. As Undeen leaves de Chelles for

Moffat; an old attraction from her Ohio days who has become rich on
Wall Street; so do the Boucher tapestries. The old world; both Ameri¬
can; as represented in The Age of Innocence, and European, as repre¬
sented by de Chelles and others met in the novels of James or Bourget,
had no chance against Wall Street. And art, too, had no more chance
against the modern world of luxury and swoopers than did its prod¬
ucts past and present, assimilated to the world of things and the
nouveaux luxe that Undeen loved so much. But as Undeen is finally
satisfied because her new husband, Moffat, can provide all the things
she craves, Moffat, true American that he is, develops a growing pas¬
sion for pictures, furniture, tapestries, and a collection of unmatched
masterpieces, as if somehow a killing on Wall Street did not suffice to
give him a feeling of substance or achievement. And that Moffat, the
swooper, vulgar, uneducated, calculating Wall Street speculator and
barracuda, should also, after having made his pile, think of collecting
works of art sets the seal on this strikingly American passion.
Henry James, returning to the United States toward the end of his
life and meditating on the newly founded Metropolitan Museum of
Art, did not miss the significance of this passion shown even by a
Moffat. The aim, he concluded, was not so much aesthetic enjoyment
but acquisition:

Acquisition—acquisition if need be on the highest terms—may,

during the years to come, bask here as in a climate it has never
before enjoyed. There was money in the air, ever so much money—
that was, grossly expressed, the sense of the whole intimation.

20. Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (New York: Scribner’s, 1913), 545.
 115

American Impact, or Shopping for the Ideal

And the money was to be for all the more exquisite things—for
all the most exquisite except creation, which has to be off the
scene altogether; for art, selection, criticism, for knowledge,
piety, taste.21

But ostensibly it was all to educate the sense of beauty to the soul and
the mind; it was all for the spirit, the trade value of the objects being
merely accidental and incidental. But James seems to be hinting, by
his insistence on acquisition, that in bourgeois society even acquisi¬
tion has been sublimated onto the aesthetic plane. "The Museum, in
short,” he continued, “was going to be great, and in the geniality of the
life to come such sacrifices, though resembling those of the funeral-
pile of Sardanapalus, dwindled to nothing.”22 The funeral pile was
really that of the Old World; and it was a pile of bibelots.
One may read this magnificent intimation of the meaning of the
Metropolitan Museum, and perhaps of the American type of museum,
as the synthesis of two conflicting tendencies regarding art observed
within Americans: the idealist strain tends toward aestheticism; and
the swooping tendency was to accumulate, acquire, consume, pile up.
The American museum of art was the result of a partnership among
Osmond and Moffat and Undeen Spragg. The museum had become
possible because the world of exiles and shoppers was part of a huge,
international, though not always obvious, art market, the cosmopolis.

21. Henry James, The American Scene (New York: Harper’s, 1907), 186.
22.Ibid.
 V

: K: ^ -
Cosmopolis, or the
Snob’s Progress
Promenade des Anglais. Nice, France. 1881.
Historical Pictures Service, Chicago.
 Titles, no matter what anyone may say,
have more value than ever.
A title is as pretty as period furniture or old Gobelin tapestries,
and it decorates a woman far better
than her toilette or her diamonds.

The Duchesse de Blanzac in Pierre de Coulevain’s

Noblesse americaine

Having exhausted the possibilities of the Paris passages, the flaneur as

collector and aesthete—or even as American swooping down on old
Europe—took on his final nineteenth-century form and turned cos¬
mopolite; he boarded a train for Italy home of the arts, refuge of
aesthetes, market for antiquarians and experts, turn-of-the-century
playground of the cosmopolitan crowd.
Walter Benjamin had interpreted the flaneur as assessing the mar¬
ketplace of ideas and literature. We have seen Paris turn into a market¬
place of articles de Paris, nouveautes, luxuries, grandes cocottes. The
luxuries proved irresistible to Undeen Spragg who found Italy, and
even the delightful hillsides of Siena that de Chelles loved, boring in
contrast to the Paris of the rue de la Paix and the rue de Rivoli. But Italy
in other company might have attracted Undeen as she had liked St.
Moritz. For she had found there the cosmopolitan world that her hus¬
band de Chelles defined as "a kind of superior Bohemia, where one
may be respectable without being bored.” And Bowen, a character in
the novel to whom this was addressed, answered: “You’ve put it in a
nutshell: The ideal of the American woman is to be respectable with¬
out being bored; and from that point of view this world they’ve inven¬
ted has more originality than I gave it credit for" (C, 274).
Undeen on her honeymoon with de Chelles was not ready for Italy.
She had been too much taken with the modern to appreciate the true

119
 120

Cosmopolis, or the Snob’s Progress

refinements of Italy. Indeed, Italy in contrast to that modern world de¬

plored by the idealists, provided other "sensations,” to use a fashion¬
able term of about 1900. And one might call these sensations the coun¬
tersensations to those provided by the magasins de nouveautes and
the modern chic of Paris. The flaneur who had been attracted by the
modernity of Paris learned in time to appreciate new sensations, and
in Italy these were sure to be aesthetic and artistic. The sensational¬
ism—the desire at the base of the modern city, the commercial and
industrial civilization of the new world, and the Paris of the second
empire—was transferred to the objet d’art. Thus the danger of being
attracted to Parisian luxury products, slightly vulgar for seekers of the
ideal, would be wholly dissipated in Italy. The fastidious aesthetes as
well as the swoopers were pleased by Italy since it proved to be one
vast marketplace if you but knew the right people and found the right
advice. By 1890, the flaneur had turned into a snob and joined cos¬
mopolis. Cosmopolis knew no frontiers but had its cities, its beaches,
seasons, casinos, and its icons that were all a must.
The cosmopolis of Paul Bourget or Henry James was the art world of
the high bourgeois epoch; it represented a dimension and space in
which art, money, aesthetics, tourism, and connoisseurship blended
into a form of snobbism ever in search of what Henry James called in a
short story, "the real thing.” In the search for this real thing, Paris had
been but a first step, as the Louvre had been but an introduction to the
far vaster art reserves of Italy, and as the articles “de Paris” had been
but an introductory lesson in desire and acquisition preceding the last
lesson, the acquisition and appreciation of that sublime bibelot, the
objet d’art. The first Mrs. Verver, introduced in The Golden Bowl only
as a memory, had been taught the joys of acquisition by Mr. Verver and
had also, under his guidance, graduated from the rue de la Paix onto a
higher plane; Mrs. Gardner of Boston had taken the same ascending
road to the sublime, as she graduated from dresses by Worth, which
 121

Cosmopolis, or the Snob’s Progress

stunned Boston, to famous jewels, which dazzled, to a palace filled

with the very best objets d art, which showed Boston just who she was.

In this bourgeois search for the material grail, Paris was a school for
distinction and snobbism, providing instruction in the various stations
to be reached, the indispensable lines to know, the best shops to fre¬
quent. In this new version of a rake’s progress, the snob’s progress,
Paris as well as London offered the flaneur in his last incarnation the
image of a life-style in which the bourgeois thought he at last ap¬
proached the poetic, aesthetic, dashing (and now defunct) nobility of
the old regime. Ah, but was it really noble? Was it really the real thing?
The preconditions of the snob’s progress were two: letters of intro¬
duction and letters of credit. The latter was most important. Money,
which Henry James found to be in the air about the Metropolitan Mu¬
seum of Art, circulated around the grand hotels, the famous beaches,
the casinos and villas of the cosmopolitan set. Generally, money meant
unearned income, based on vast holdings of real estate, bonds, or
stocks; or, if recently acquired, money usually meant income from a
huge stock market coup or cleverly arranged bankruptcy followed by
even more cleverly arranged suppression of scandal, though there
were bound to be whispers about such and such. In this world of cos¬
mopolis represented by the novelists of the fin de siecle, only the
Americans were singled out as having made their fortunes the hard
way. They might be in Europe on a tour, but they kept up with affairs at
home, directing them from afar and ready to be called back at any time
to save a situation. There were intimations of disasters, of immense
deals and immense wealth. The American man of business abroad ap¬
peared not as a robber baron but, rather, as a new type of feudal lord.
In contrast, the Europeans seemed to be connected with banking,
which allowed one a certain leisure. But, generally speaking, it was
best to avoid talk of background and the origins of someone’s fortune:
 122

CosmopoliSf or the Snob's Progress

whatever was not connected with income from noble land was bound
to be somewhat vulgar, just as the Medicis had appeared somewhat
vulgar to Henry Adams. In any case, work (meaning a few hours at the
office or the stock market) played no role in cosmopolis, was not talked
about, was not even assumed, though money was. The ideal was to
have an income more than sufficient to be free from having to step into
an office at regular times, or at least for a time short enough to leave
the evenings open for a social life. And if, like Dickie Marsh (a Paul
Bourget character described as a Napoleon of business from Marion-
ville, Ohio), you had to keep an eye on your vast holdings and their
management, then you might travel on your yacht, along with three
secretaries who kept continually in touch with affairs at home so that
any important decision might be made on the spot. But if you had
enough wealth to live in the accustomed luxury and felt no inclination
to oversee your investments too closely, then you had twenty-four
hours a day on your hands and the question arose as to what to do
with them.
The form that leisure took among the inhabitants of cosmopolis ex¬
plains why some Americans preferred to stay in Europe rather than
return home, quite aside from their search for culture and refinement.
For as Ned Rosier said succinctly: "There's nothing for a gentleman in
America.” It was a country where everybody worked. Mr. Marshall
could not understand why his son, upon his return from Europe,
wished to live the life of a gentleman and, rather than work, do some¬
thing vaguely connected with art. Even that very refined gentleman
Charles Eliot Norton worked; he taught art at Harvard. There was no
place in the United States for someone whose occupation was doing
nothing. For a man there seemed no alternative to work. Bourget, in
Newport, had been struck by the lack of adventurers and fortune hunt¬
ers. Cannes, Nice, Baden-Baden, Cabourg, Biarritz, all had had their
adventurers—men who were gallant to women and lived by gambling
and marrying rich heiresses, who went about with the rich and fre-
 123

Cosmopolis, or the Snob’s Progress

quented the best circles, but in any case, did not work. Women in the
United States, the women of the rich, that is, were the true leisure class
as Europe understood the term. They had their clubs, teas, social ambi¬
tions, charities, churches; accordingly leisure had come to be thought
of as something for women, and husbands the guarantors of such lei¬
sure and what went with it, namely, culture and refinement.
But in Europe, a gentleman by definition did not work and found
there were a great many agreeable ways of doing nothing, such as
spending accumulated capital. Interest in art or culture provided but
one possible answer to the question of how to spend one’s time and
money in the rites, activities, and displacements of cosmopolitan so¬
ciety. This high life, which was not necessarily aesthetic though it had
its style, produced several social types of which the Jamesian aesthete
is the exception; one does not imagine Ned Rosier or Gilbert Osmond
at the races. Aside from the general category of snobs, a term widely
used to designate most of “society” before 1914, there were the viveurs
and the fetards, high livers and prototypes of what would later be
called playboys, themselves derived from previous types of an earlier
age such as dandies and lions of the romantic period.
Raymond Casal, one of Paul Bourget’s characters, is a good example
of the better type of viveurs. Better in that he was no vulgar fetard or
noceur and had style, dash, and a shrewd knowledge of the world that
kept him from being taken in by it. Intelligent, worldly, a good sports¬
man, an excellent shot—highly important in a society that still settled
affairs of honor by duels—and a known seducer, he was no aesthete;
neither was he particularly interested in the arts or in letters, horses
and women being more his affair. Casal outlined the life of a viveur one
night in a moment of boredom in which he had two hours to fill but
nothing to fill them with:

In the morning there is sleep, one’s toilette, and horse riding.

After lunch there are always a few minor affairs to settle; then,
 124

Cosmopolis, or the Snob’s Progress

from two to six, there is love. If there is no love, there is always

tennis or shooting and fencing. From five to seven, poker. From
eight to ten, dinner. From midnight to morning, gambling or la
fete [which might be interpreted as touring the demimonde].
From ten to midnight there is the theatre, true, but how many
plays are worth seeing twice? One really ought to find a way of
filling those two hours. Perhaps form a club just for that
purpose.1

This life required not only a good constitution but also a good deal of
money. Bourget estimated that the viveur required an income of about
150,000 francs a year to live in style. With that, Paris was his. He might
belong to one or two chosen clubs that the young bourgeois sought
vainly to enter. Such was the viveur de grande espece who married at
forty to recoup his fortune and continue his life by spending his wife’s
dowry. As for the society he belonged to and in which he moved, it had
a hierarchy, constitution, unwritten rules and customs, and even a ge¬
ography. It was a cosmopolis:

Half European, half French which filled the greater part of the
hotels situated around the Parc Monceau and the Arc de Tri-
omphe, as well as a small number of old hotels on the Left Bank.
This society has well-established revenues, a strict etiquette, gal¬
leries of authentic pictures, carefully kept carriages, loges at the
opera, sensational receptions, in brief, an opulent high life decor.
This modern society resembles the age to which it belongs and
whose luxury-aristocracy it represents. Like the times it is
mobile and improvised, all of contradictions, and deprived of
tradition. A great fortune, provided it was acquired without too
much scandal, will force open the door, as will talent, provided it

1. Paul Bourget, Un Coeur de femme (Paris: Lemerre, 1890), 82-93.

 125

Cosmopolis, or the Snob’s Progress

does not show its native egotism. But ruin, on the other hand,
. puts a lock on this door which is hardly ever unlocked.2

The geography alluded to in this passage, the Right Bank and the few
hotels of the Left Bank, points to a merging of the bourgeoisie, the cote
de chez Swann in Proust, with the old nobility of the Faubourg Saint-
Germain, the cote de Guermantes; but this merging also included the
new money aristocracy of well-to-do Jewish families involved in bank¬
ing and finance. It was not an open society but exclusive, despite the
fact that it was based on something classless in theory, namely, money.
As Claude Larcher, one of Bourget’s many writer-characters, explains
to Rene Vincy, a budding writer just invited to his first reception in
society:

You will enter society, my dear, and you will be received often;
but you will never be part of it, no more than I am, no more than
any other artist, no matter how much genius he may have, be¬
cause, quite simply, you were not born in it, and because your
family is not of it. You will be received and parties will be given
in your honor. But try to marry into it and you will find out. . . .
As for those women you dream of as being delicate, fine, and
aristocratic! if you only knew them! They are vanities dressed up
by Worth and Laferriere. . . . There are not ten among them ca¬
pable of true emotion.3

The artificial nature of this society, uprooted, traditionless in the view

of conservatives like Bourget or exiles like James, was reflected not
only in its exclusiveness, its way of trying to appear as an aristocracy,
but also in its very architecture. Though "galleries of authentic pic-

2. Paul Bourget, L'lrreparable (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1901), 7.

3. Paul Bourget, Mensonges (Paris: Lemerre, 1898), 45.
 126

Cosmopolis, or the Snob’s Progress

tures” were mentioned by Bourget as signs of this world, the use of the
epithet is significant as it implies not only a search for the real thing
but also a world of the inauthentic, in close proximity, that must at all
costs be avoided. The alliance between art and this millionaire society
was likely to be based on luxury rather than that of true taste and dis¬
cernment cherished by the connoisseur, amateur, or scholar.
Bourget explained in Pastels that democracy in the nineteenth cen¬
tury had had both a political and an economic effect, the latter in the
realm of commodities and the world of luxury. The democratization of
society and the economy had put in the reach of all what he aptly
called:

un a peu pres de lujce, an almost but not quite luxury. By exten¬

sion the same causes had produced an almost but not quite true
elegance and high life which sufficed, for the undiscerning, to
create the illusion of the real thing. The a peu pres or near enough
had its symbol and principal means of action in the great nov¬
elty stores, the department stores, whence women issued forth
as if dressed by Worth, as if furnished with period furniture, and
as if truly enriched by the curios purchased. But the toilette, the
furniture, the bibelots were, alas, only almost that,—and this al¬
most but not quite that sufficed to maintain the distance neces¬
sary to fool the undiscerning.4

The nearly enough sufficed to satisfy the many who could not afford
the real thing. The real thing could only be bought and acquired by
those who had real fortunes, that is, very great ones. Thus the viveur or
higher liver with his 150,000 francs a year could live the real thing: but
below him, at a lesser level of fortune, lived his a peu pres, his imita¬
tion, almost but not quite the real thing, who lacked a l>je ne sais quoi

4. Paul Bourget, Pastels (Paris: Lemerre, 1899), 5.

 127

Cosmopolis, or the Snob’s Progress

of nobility or position, fortune or personal tact. It could be a bourgeois

ashamed of being one, a stranger trying to be a Parisian, etc. . . , and
he in turn would have his ‘nearly almost the real thing,’ the son of
a tradesman who in his turn would have his approximation, the rich
student from the Provinces who wished to be initiated into the high
life only to be entered into a life of corruption.” (5).
This life of the fete parisienne and its cosmopolitan counterpart, its
setting in ancient or modern hdtels, chateaux, villas, or grand hotels,
amid its bibelots, authentic or nearly so, was in the last analysis that of
Thorstein Veblen’s famous conspicuous consumption. The ritual of
the viveur coincided with the conspicuous spender: “fashionable res¬
taurants and fashionable theatres, the race course in the spring and
autumn, the terraces of Monte Carlo in winter, the beach at Trouville or
the Casino at Aix-les-Bains in the summer, the salons of dressmakers,
linen drapers in vogue, and petticoats elaborated by these artists.”5
There were of course other places to know and be at the right time
with the right people. Cosmopolis had its places of high pilgrimages:
Bayreuth to hear Wagner (you couldn’t really hear him anywhere else,
my dear); Orange, Nimes, Beziers for Gallo-Roman antiquities; Baden-
Baden for the waters and the casino; Dieppe, Cabourg, Deauville, Biar¬
ritz, Cannes, Nice for the right beaches and promenades and, again,
the casinos; St. Moritz to escape the summer heat; Scotland to shoot
grouse; London for its social season, grand luxuries, and social cachet;
and then, of course, there was Italy for aesthetic experiences. Italy, for
cosmopolitan society, mobile, exiled, restless, was the closest thing
to home.

Italy was a very special, privileged place in late bourgeois culture. It

not only had an immensely rich artistic heritage to be pilfered and
rummaged in by millionaire Americans. It was also the source of

5. Paul Bourget, Dualite (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1901), 184.

 128

Cosmopolis, or the Snob s Progress

infinite; ever-renewed; aesthetic experiences and discoveries; sensa¬

tions and enthusiasms. Italy was the center of cosmopolitanism; the
hub about which the cosmopolite world revolved. Bourget set his
novel Cosmopolis in Rome not in Paris; which was reserved for other
aspects of the late bourgeois world; and another of his studies of cos¬
mopolite mores; Une Idylle tragique was set in Nice and Cannes. But
Rome he used as a setting for the type of international society of mil¬
lionaires; mostly Americans; Jewish bankers and financiers; impover¬
ished nobles; collectors; aesthetes; fashionable writers; ruined or ec¬
centric Italian princes; even slightly mad scholars and anarchists;
which made up cosmopolis. Dorsenne, Bourget's protagonist; a success¬
ful; fashionable; cosmopolitan; and therefore rather nihilistic writer
pessimistic; believing in nothing; committing himself to nothing; is in
Rome writing a book about Italy. Who was not writing a book about
Italy around 1900? Bourget himself had written one entitled Italian
Sensations, a title that bespeaks the basis of aesthetics and aestheti¬
cism about 1896; what with all the talk and wilting about tactile values
and empathy around that time. It was a title; however also directed
against the rising “scientific school” of art criticism that insisted upon
the right attributions of the works one might see in small; out-of-the-
way Italian churches; a criticism so obsessed with attribution as to for¬
get the amateur observer’s capacity for pleasure. Bourget proclaimed
the flaneur’s right to enjoy Italy and its works of art even at the risk of
wrong attributions.
Within Italy there were places of particular election and association.
Florence was a dream of lightness; art, mysticism a la Botticelli and Fra
Angelico, a city whose sublimated love of the body could be seen in
the forms of fine adolescent youths; but; above all, it was the city of art
and the Renaissance, no longer disapproved of by Jarves or Adams.
The “quinzaine de Florence” was a must in the early spring when the
light and air were pure and fresh. To live there was somehow to live in
the company of Lucca della Robbia, Sandro Botticelli, Fillippo Lippi,
 129

Cosmopolis, or the Snob’s Progress

and the great Donatello. And there was so much to learn in those
mornings in Florence as one wandered about the city with Mr. Rus-
kin’s little red book, entitled, precisely Mornings in Florence. But the
city also satisfied and stimulated the diseased, languishing, fragile,
and slightly perverted souls summarized and defined by the lily and
the iris. The atmosphere of Florence was definitely Paterian; Jarves
and the other Puritans who had approved of early and late medieval
Florence but frowned on the Renaissance were gone; it was all right to
love the Mona Lisa, to ponder Leonardo, and to talk of Michelangelo.
And in the hills above the city of Alberti and Brunelleschi, those evoca¬
tive names conferring distinction on those who knew them, the rich
and cultivated, the cognoscenti and the aesthetes, the rich Americans
and the English milordi lived in villas set in delightful gardens, studied
and described by Mrs. Wharton and illustrated by the late post-pre-
Raphaelite Maxwell Parrish. Here were the privileged of cosmopolis,
who knew the real thing and were aware of their art sensations. But for
the cognoscenti and those sincere Americans ever on the search for
culture—or for a bargain—even this place of privilege was not enough.
Those in the know went beyond Florence into the hills, to Siena or Pisa,
and to the Umbrian hills where hidden treasures might be glimpsed in
little hillside churches, where perhaps truer sensations might be felt
than at the Uffizi, already so crowded, already threatening one’s art
sensations and obfuscating the tactile values.
And of course there was Venice, also a special place of pilgrimage for
the lover of beauty and the seeker of special sensations. It was, per¬
haps, a more complex aesthetic experience than Florence, which, as
everyone knew, was the Renaissance, a bit intellectual, even if spiritual.
Venice offered something else. If in the eighteenth century one had
come to Venice for the carnival, in the fin de siecle bourgeois culture
one went to Venice for romantic associations, remembrances of great
loves past, Musset and George Sand who had loved and wept there
and written books about it later. Wagner had died there; and Nietzsche,
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Cosmopolis, or the Snob’s Progress

too, had stayed in Venice. Venice sefemed to attract those aesthetes fas¬
cinated with death and decay, an association best captured by Thomas
Mann’s Death in Venice, in which the city represents both the south,
light, and warmth but also its corruption and misery, its far niente,
and its end to the categorical imperative. And for the less effete bour¬
geois, there was the ritual of life at the grand hotel, the hour for tea, the
beach, the visits to churches and museums, the princely life in some
rented pallazo on the Grand Canal.
Indeed, if Florence induced a dream of spirituality or spiritualized
sensations, Venice was the experience of the beauty of matter, color,
delight in the senses, delight in the pleasures of sight. It was also a
perfect refuge from progress, that terrible progress that turned the
world ugly with its factories and produced an ugly mood among the
working classes. In Venice the lower classes were so much happier;
they sang as they maneuvered the gondolas for the rich tourists. It was
almost a privilege to be poor in such a place of beauty. Venice with its
watery world, its shimmer and gliding gondolas, was an image of the
vague, the fluid, the infinite, the eternally languid that the fin de siecle
loved so much. Venice was a watery Carriere, the dissolution of form
in Turner and Monet, a grand opera in Tiepolo, a masquerade, the ulti¬
mate illusion of beauty in which the false aristocracy of cosmopolis
mirrored itself. But there was a touch of death about the place, and a
melancholy and romance summed up in Giorgione. Here the tactile
values of a school of art inspired by mind and form yield to optic val¬
ues. The divine Sandro yields to the tender reverie of Giorgione. Here,
on the Rialto and among the still, brilliant waters of the lagoons, rather
than in misty Holland, one could find the true reflection of Baude¬
laire’s /uye, calme, et volupte.

One could also speak of Rome, Naples, Pisa, and Orvieto, and so
many other cities, all with their sense of place, their particular sensa¬
tions, their treasures—but there are enough guide books for that.
From another point of view Italy was not so much sensations as a mar-
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Cosmopolis, or the Snob’s Progress

ketplace for both swoopers and aesthetes. It was the ultimate bazaar
whgre culture lay within reach and could sometimes be had for a
song. Here Americans might safely turn into dilettanti. Here at last that
American desire to satiate the eye, which Paul Bourget thought devel¬
oped among Americans to a higher degree than among Europeans,
could be fulfilled. But the delight in works of art, the seeking out of
aesthetic and artistic sensations, was but the sublime surface of some¬
thing that had different motivations. The ultimate experience was per¬
haps not so much the contemplation of beauty but its possession, and
the ultimate aesthetic activity and sensation, acquisition. On his visit
to the United States, Bourget did not fail to notice this alliance of the
aesthetic with speculation, quoting an overheard remark apropos of
the then current financial crisis: “The Italians are rather low down just
now, and there are things to be had sub rosa. But in this moment no¬
body can profit by it” (OM, 1:74).
Italy was a beautiful market. But it was a market that required guides
or investment counselors, for the real thing was not immediately ap¬
parent or to be found by or offered to all. The bourgeois as collector
wanted the real thing, the best, the sure thing, the safe thing, the au¬
thentic, and thus it is that in bourgeois society even disinterested
scholarship and the mania for attribution could prove indispensable
and turn into something delightfully unexpected such as a profit or a
corner on the market.
The general bibelotization of art in the nineteenth century, with its
search for the real thing, its nearly so, and its approximation was
bound to come up against the problem of authenticity. Since the object
of art had been uprooted from its ancient sites and functions, stripped
of its religious and social and political associations, it had become, re¬
gardless of the definitions of philosophers, an object with an exchange
or trade value. Thus the moment of the expert had arrived. And the
flaneur as American tourist seeking culture, refinement, and the real
thing, made his way to I Tatti.
4
 I Tatti, or
Sublimating Sales
 Bernard Berenson inside I Tatti.
Photograph by Robert M. Mottar, Scope Association, Inc.
Courtesy of Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University.
 The snob is the bourgeois gentilhomme of aesthetics.

Pierre Veber, Chez les snobs

I Tatti is a villa located outside of Florence that once belonged to the

late Bernard Berenson: art expert, connoisseur, and art historian. B.B.,
as he was familiarly known, donated I Tatti to Harvard University. In
this book we are interested in him less as an expert than as a character
out of Henry James or Paul Bourget.
One of the peculiar characteristics of cosmopolis was that one could
never be quite sure who was or was not an art dealer. It was such a
genteel profession that it seemed no profession at all, and the line be¬
tween trade and a disinterested love of art was entirely blurred. In the
aesthetic realm there existed a demimonde, one in which the work of
art was discreetly up for sale among friends and connoisseurs without
ever being up for sale in public. Cosmopolis produced a set of ama¬
teurs who loved the arts, knew them sometimes to the point of exper¬
tise, and collected them, but who might, in need and given the proper,
discreet circumstances, part with a piece or two. Dealing in art in this
way was a gentleman’s way of making money without embracing a vis¬
ible profession, which might make for a loss in prestige and status.
One of Paul Bourget’s characters is an excellent example of a type
familiar enough in cosmopolis. Bernard de la Nauve appears in a tale
called La Pia set in the hills of Tuscany between Florence, Siena, and
Pisa. Bernard de la Nauve supplemented a severely diminished in¬
come by selling works of art that he collected but was not unwilling to
part with. He was part of the fete parisienne, a leisured viveur as Bour¬
get called him, but gifted, and he was also a part of cosmopolis. De¬
spite his diminished means, he lived as if he had 50,000 francs a year.
An elegant bachelor, he rode his own horse in the morning, dined and
supped in fashionable restaurants, was to be seen in his orchestra
chair at all the premieres, and loved and played as expensively as

135
 136

I Tatti, or Sublimating Sales

when he’d ruined himself in the usual way in Paris. He belonged to an

ancient though untitled family that had for some time been dissipating
its fortune. Bernard also belonged to a class of semiadventurers who
lived a life of leisure made possible by a variety of methods: coups on
the bourse; gossip writing for some newspaper, foreign or domestic;
or means more or less admissible in good society. But Bernard de la
Nauve had his own expedients. He was, in the post-Goncourt sense of
the word, an artist; he had taste, he sang, he painted, wrote, was an
excellent raconteur, and had a passion for old furniture and paintings,
rare faience and old tapestries. And so when he had to supplement an
income that in the course of his life was gradually diminished by 90
percent, he began to give up some of his collected objects not to mer¬
chants but to friends. This activity soon became a way of making a liv¬
ing that allowed him to live on the level of the elegants in the circles he
frequented: “The bibelots thus sold were one day replaced by others,
which in turn were sold and replaced. In short the dilettante turned
into a brocanteur in black tie and tails who may, in all the houses in
which he dines, recognize here a desk-set, there a terra cotta, else¬
where a frame, or piece of furniture which came from his small en¬
tresol of the rue Matignon” (V, 45-46). His clientele was obviously
chosen; art in cosmopolis was not for everyone. (There were the de¬
partment stores for everyone.) Art in cosmopolis supposed a monied
elite, and la Nauve sold his bibelots, all authentic, exclusively to mil¬
lionaires setting up a residence in Paris, the rich of the stock exchange,
Russian or Polish grands seigneurs, the kings of petrol or salt pork, or
some Argentine or Honduran magnate. He also sold to Dickie Marsh,
the Napoleon of business who appears in Une Idylle tragique. Bour-
get’s narrator tells la Nauve he considered Americans the feudal and
magnificent lords of the modern world; but la Nauve answers that they
were enormous children playing with the toys of old Europe.
B.B. was an American version of la Nauve. His lineage was not as an¬
cient and distinguished, to be sure, and there was no dissipated for-
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I Tatti, or Sublimating Sales

tune behind him; but he was the American taking the bibelots of old
Europe very seriously indeed; making of culture a discreet com¬
modity of the objet d art a sure thing; all on a discreet; genteel; exclu¬
sive level. At I Tatti about the luncheon table the ambiguities of bour¬
geois culture were carefully veiled and never allowed to show.
Berenson was not from an ancient family fallen on hard times be¬
cause of a generation of viveurs; he came of immigrant stock; from
people who had come to the United States to “make it” in the new
country. The missing aristocratic background was made up for by
Boston’s aesthetic culture and Harvard, which prepared the young
Bernard Berenson for his future achievements and his transsubstan¬
tiation into the divine B.B., sage of I Tatti. And Harvard meant, in Be-
renson’s youth, Charles Eliot Norton and his particularly Bostonian,
transcendentalist, and Unitarian view of art and Italy. But it also meant
for Berenson the discovery of Walter Pater, of whom Norton disap¬
proved but with whose aestheticism Berenson fell in love, envisaging a
Paterian, epicurean way of life that was dedicated to art. Boston and
Harvard, corrected or softened by Pater, thus gave Berenson that pecu¬
liarly idealist view of art that derived from Ruskin by way of Jarves, was
filtered by reverends, expounded by Norton, and somewhat sensu¬
alized by Pater, who, as George Moore once remarked, always had some¬
thing of a vicar about him. Indeed, Pater’s aestheticism was implied in
Norton’s philosophy of art even though the Puritan in him could not
admit this. To Norton’s New England mind there had to be more to art
than the famous hard, gemlike flame of aesthetic appreciation.
Berenson, when he left Boston for Europe in 1887, had first thought
of being a writer. He had been seduced by Pater’s prose, and Mrs.
Gardner had helped Berenson financially on the understanding he
would cultivate himself further in Europe and turn into a writer, per¬
haps like Francis Marion Crawford who also had been patronized by
Mrs. Gardner. But Berenson in Europe became more and more fasci¬
nated by pictures, though his dream of being a writer was somewhat
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I Tatti, or Sublimating Sales

realized in his library and love of conversation. But the eye became
Berenson’s dominant sense and was turned not toward a white page
to be written on but, rather, toward pictures to be scrutinized, ana¬
lyzed, photographed, classified, and compared, so that seeing turned
into knowing. The literary life envisaged as self-cultivation, the dream
of his Paterian utopia, took second place to the activity of purchasing
books and building up a library, reading, conversing, and in the very
setting of these activities, the villa I Tatti. Only later in life did Berenson
turn into an essayist, producing not only essays on art but also jour¬
nals and an essay on aesthetics. The Harvard aesthete had turned into
a cosmopolite expert posing as a great humanist.
Berenson can be considered a representative of late bourgeois cul¬
ture in its Boston variety. Logan Pearsall Smith, his brother-in-law,
points to the role of culture in this society in his memoirs: “I became
vaguely aware of Culture, not indeed as a thing of value in itself, but as
bestowing a kind of distinction upon its possessors, a distinction supe¬
rior in some mysterious way to that of the big-game killer which had
hitherto been my ambition and my dream.”1 Logan’s initiation into
culture had been instigated by his sister Mary, later Mary Costelloe,
later still Mary Berenson. Likewise, Berenson had been converted to
the culture that later became a ritual at I Tatti. And culture as these
two understood it was a mixture of Boston and Pater and, beyond
these, Matthew Arnold and his “best that has been known and said in
the world.” Although Arnold’s famous definition is that of a moralist
and writer, Berenson needed only to add the best that has been
painted for the definition also to be his. Certainly culture conferred
distinction upon him as it was meant to do upon the money magnates
of the time. In a letter to Mary, Berenson defined culture in purely Pa¬
terian terms as “the real selfish passion for training oneself to have en¬
joyment of the exquisite and beautiful thing lead on to the enjoyment of

1. Logan Pearsall Smith, Unforgotten Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1939), 82.
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I Tattif or Sublimating Sales

one even more beautiful."2 This emphasis on enjoyment is important.

Culture as understood here no longer has anything to do with the val¬
ues assigned it by Madame de Stael and her generation with its sense
of history Indeed, this Paterian-Berensonian concept of culture is not
French at all, as Edith Wharton well understood: "Culture in France is
an eminently social quality, while in Anglo-Saxon countries it might
also be called anti-social. In France, where politics so sharply divides
the different classes and coteries, artistic and literary interests unite
them; and wherever two or three educated French people are gathered
together, a salon immediately comes into being.”3
New England culture was less social but much more spiritual; San¬
tayana poked fun at the New England view of culture in his descrip¬
tion of the Simkins’s home: "The house was religiously quiet; not one
speck of dust; flowers everywhere discreetly placed; charming old-
fashioned manners; one glass of sherry; one stroll in the garden; a little
music in the picture gallery, where there was a drawing by Mantegna”
(LP, 407-408). And Miss Eugenia Simkins was perfection herself: "Beau¬
tiful, gentle and wise. There was nothing superior that she didn’t love
—Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Giotto, and Botticelli, Blake, and Turner.
There was nothing inferior at which she didn’t shudder” (LP, 408). By
Berenson’s time the process of assimilating culture to social and class
distinction was a fact. It distinguished the bourgeois from the lower
classes and from the mere possessor of wealth. In a society tending
increasingly toward democracy, class distinction came to be based on
aesthetic considerations rather than on ancient lineage; on moral quali¬
ties, degrees, or diplomas rather than on money. As Berenson wrote:

Culture submits character to aesthetics, and not aesthetics to

character. I am not sure even that there have been many aiming

2. See Sylvia Sprigge, Berenson: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 107.
3. Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: Scribner’s, 1964), 261-262.
 140

I Tatti, or Sublimating Sales

so solely at culture who have aesthetically appreciated character,

as I have. So culture is perhaps possible in a condition of things
in which class distinctions are very great. Then a few of the high¬
est class can devote themselves solely to culture without harm,
and perhaps to the great advantage of the community. But in the
modern state that is scarcely possible, and in the state to come
culture will not be possible at all.4

Berenson’s involvement with art was thus more than that of the art
expert. It was inseparable from culture as it was thought of in the pe¬
riod of about 1880-1914. And the relation of Berenson as critic and ex¬
pert to the art market, as well as his pose as a man of culture, ex¬
emplify the role of art in bourgeois culture at its apogee. Culture at this
time was far different from what it had been: different from that of the
eighteenth century; from that of a Montesquieu and the nobility of the
robe with its sense of history, just as it was different from the historical
imagination of a Chateaubriand, also a great poseur; or from that of
Macauley or Madame de Stael. Presumably it was true hellenism. Pater
in this respect is rather revealing. He makes some interesting false re¬
marks about Voltaire that help to define the Paterian view of true cul¬
ture: “Voltaire belongs to that flimsier, more artificial, classical tradi¬
tion, which Winckelmann was one day to supplant, by the clear ring,
the eternal outline, of the genuine antique.”5
Voltaire may have been many things, but he was not flimsy and did
not belong to the classical tradition but, rather, to a modernity particu¬
lar to his age. But then Pater’s and Berenson’s views of culture were
even beyond the idealism of Jarves, Ruskin, Arnold, or Norton. Beren¬
son’s views belonged to the culture of cosmopolis, which is why he

4. Bernard Berenson, The Bernard Berenson Treasury, ed. Hanna Kiel (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1962), 38.
5. Walter Pater, The Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1935), 169.
 141

I Tatti, or Sublimating Sales

could easily figure as a character in Paul Bourget; in this culture art,

bibelots, sensations, play a far greater role than knowledge and intel¬
lect. Outwardly, B.B.’s culture was that of his books, his conversation,
his perspective, and his setting. As for his famous talk, always alluded
to and commented on, even noted down by Count Morra, if we are to
judge from his journals, letters, biographers, and the various famous
people who left notes of their visits to 1 Tatti, it was not the conversation
of a genius but of an aesthete, a man of wide reading, and on a level
with the sort of reading provided by such books as Anatole France in
Slippers or the Garden of Epicurus, selections from Maeterlink, or
B.B.’s brother-in-law’s famous book entitled Trivia. It was cosmopol¬
itan chitchat, the talk of a man who had read much, seen a lot of art,
knew the right people, had been to the right places, and was also a
good observer of the milieu in which he circulated.
The result of this talk and of his being talked about was a kind of fin
de siecle humanitas at last discovered by the public after the Second
World War, a humanitas that would not be boring to his friends, his
little circle of admirers ever at his feet, as the master at the luncheon
table dropped his mots and uttered words of wisdom. One thinks, on a
far higher and more organized level, of the very popular lectures of
Professor Caro at the College de France and the lectures of Bergson
always attended by women of fashion. And more recently the easy
manner of Lord Clark talking to millions about "civilization.” The cul¬
ture of social gossip, it included some risque stories and opinions
about books, life, manners, women, love, art, and history. Always be¬
hind it all was the idea that art was the basis of civilization and not the
other way around. For Berenson, even religion was ultimately a fine
art, spiritual nourishment, life enhancing.
And art in this view of the world was aesthetic art, or high art, mostly
European, mostly Italian, mostly quattrocento and cinquecento, al¬
though Japanese art was also admitted into this aesthetic realm be¬
cause of its perfection of line and form. It was an aesthete’s view of art
 142

I Tatti, or Sublimating Sales

and its history, very Bostonian in its Italian and Japanese orientation;
Anglo-American in its emphasis on the Renaissance; and Germanic in
assuming a pure, disinterested aesthetic experience and its pretension
to scientific expertise. Berenson’s view of civilization was that of a Pa¬
ter; his hellenism was Victorian and had nothing in common with that
of Nietzsche who saw the barbarians beneath the polish of Greek art.
The polar opposite of this hellenism was not barbarism but nineteenth-
century philistinism. Hellenism; with its association with beauty as
well as paganism; was the bourgeois’s latest way of not appearing
bourgeois. For Berenson hellenism ignored Greek science and philoso¬
phy. In the words of Meryle Secrest; the latest of Berenson’s biogra¬
phers; “To him the summit of human achievement was the Greek con¬
cept of the human form; and his criteria were those of the Golden Age:
clarity proportion; order, and harmony. That art might exert its power
through its ability to evoke terror primitive awe; fear or disgust, was
outside his philosophy. For Berenson, the beginning and end of art
was delight.”6
Berenson’s views were far less advanced than those of a Quatremere
de Quincy or a James Jackson Jarves and the generation of the neo-
classicists who were convinced that art might serve as an instrument
for the education of mankind. Berenson’s “philosophy” of art com¬
bined eighteenth-century epicurean aesthetics with Pater’s view of the
Renaissance as itself an aesthetic moment. But then cosmopolis,
which included in part Berenson’s clientele and guest list, could
hardly be expected to espouse a philosophy of art not based on plea¬
sure: acquisition and possession were pleasure, and in the last analy¬
sis the entire aesthetic rested on desire, no matter how veiled or subli¬
mated to something presumably spiritual.
Berenson judged art, as his critic Georges Waldemar remarks, ac-

6. Meryle Secrest, Being Bernard Berenson (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979),
187.
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I Tatti, or Sublimating Sales

cording to some archetypal model he judged to be universally valid,

much like his former professor of art at Harvard, Charles Eliot Norton.
The archetype was Greece and the Renaissance. And his view of the
Renaissance was little more advanced than that of Pater, whose little
book on the Renaissance ends with a chapter on Winckelmann. Beren-
son even failed to understand, as Waldemar points out, that the Re¬
naissance did not mark progress in art, along the lines thought of and
argued by Vasari and later classicists, but was in fact only a new con¬
vention of representation and, hence, a new attitude of man toward
the world. Waldemar goes so far as to conclude that Berenson was in
the last analysis only an academic, in which case one might make him
a successor of Quatremere de Quincy, though he was a far less rigor¬
ous thinker. Blit then there is reason to accept Waldemar’s judgment.
The academic is, after all, reassuring to the bourgeois since he repre¬
sents the established sure thing. And Berenson did not or did not wish
to understand modern art—cubism, futurism, surrealism—in this
again resembling his Harvard mentor. He admitted Cezanne to his per¬
sonal pantheon of artists for his supposed classicism but failed to see
what Cezanne meant to his fellow artists. Instead of perceiving in
Cezanne a certain anxiety about painting in the modern world, he saw
the Mediterranean landscape.
But then painters, the artist as creator, did not figure in Berenson’s
meditations on art and art history; they were at best craftsmen. Ab¬
stract, nonrepresentational art could not be art for reasons Berenson
explained according to his theory of tactile values and because he was
convinced cubists and futurists were incapable of mastering spatial
representation, which he obviously linked with the Renaissance. Be¬
renson the aesthete was no great theorist. And he was repulsed by a
modernity foreign to someone nurtured, as he was, on the genteel tra¬
dition of spiritualized, aestheticized, and Bostonized Florence.
Aside from his expertise and connoisseurship of Italian Renaissance
art, Berenson's contribution to art history as a discipline was thus pri-
 144

I Tatti, or Sublimating Sales

marily that of an aesthete. Form and content were one; the end of art
was delight; subject matter was secondary a mere pretext for the art¬
ist’s expression of formal values and their execution. The image was
neither a key to the meaning of the work nor a thread to follow in a
world of ideas and the imagination that existed beyond the frame of
the picture and belonged to the world in which the artist had lived. It
was not B.B. who invented the science of iconography. It was left to the
later Panofsky to “read” pictures, as one might an emblem book, just as
it was left to Max Dvorak to think of art history as Geistesgeschichte, an
aspect of the history of the human spirit, which it already was for the
Enlightenment, Hegel, Quatremere, and Madame de Stael. As a thinker
about art and its relation to social forces, Berenson did not even rise to
the level of Jarves or Norton, and he never produced a cultural history
such as Burckhardt’s. But perhaps their work smacked too much of
professionalism and was thus repugnant to the aesthete for whom art
was pure enjoyment. In Berenson’s views, art seemed to have nothing
to do with myth, magic, religion, power, politics, or ostentation. Aes¬
thetic art was for aesthetic enjoyment. The counterpart of scientific
criticism was scientific aesthetics, as the counterparts of the market
value of art were tactile values and life-enhancement. Berenson’s views
of culture and art, as well as his aesthetics, were what they were be¬
cause they eminently suited cosmopolitan society, its market, its hedo¬
nistic view of art, and art’s position as supreme bibelot. Expertise was
assessing the bibelot; aesthetic enjoyment was enjoying the bibelot.
But it was not enough to assert such views of art and culture: the valid¬
ity of these views had to be demonstrated scientifically. The aesthete
had to justify himself to the Puritan; hence, the curious nature of fin
de siecle aesthetics.

As Henry James had noted, Berenson’s was an age of advertisement.

Put into advertising form, Berenson’s aesthetic theory, modeled on the
famous Guinness is good for you, lets itself be reduced to art is good
 145

I Tatti, or Sublimating Sales

for you. The market was far more limited than that for Guiness, but it
made up in quality and mark-up what it lost in volume.
When Berenson asked himself why one felt pleasure before a work
of art he came up with the idea of “tactile values.” He formulated this
theory in his book Florentine Painters of the Renaissance and elabo¬
rated on it in his later book, far more theoretical than his others, Aes¬
thetics and History: “Tactile values occur in representations of solid ob¬
jects when communicated, not as mere representations (no matter
how veracious), but in a way that stirs the imagination to feel their
bulk, heft their weight, realize their potential resistance, space their
distance from us, and encourage us, always imaginatively, to come into
close touch with, to grasp, to embrace, or to walk around.”7
Although these tactile values are connected with the materiality of
things represented, as opposed to the much touted spirituality of art,
these tactile values are precisely those qualities of the work of art that
make it “life enhancing”: “Tactile values are life enhancing and do not
excite mere admiration, but give gratification and joy. They therefore
furnish a basis upon which, as critics, we may erect our standards of
judgment” (AH, 60).
The emphasis on gratification and joy, this promise of a special ex¬
perience as opposed to mere admiration, is worth underlining since
all the nouveautes, articles de Paris, laces, bibelots, and dresses in chic
shops and department stores were also instruments of gratification, so
gratifying as to prompt purchasing. The work of art with its tactile val¬
ues was a powerful bibelot indeed. And what made it a bibelot was
that the tactile values had nothing to do with the subject matter. Had it
been otherwise the Puritans who purchased all those Italian madon¬
nas would have had to take account of the subject matter, which was
associated with the detested Roman church. But tactile values, not
subject matter, made primitive stone carvings, as well as Florentine

7. Bernard Berenson, Aesthetics and History (New York: Pantheon, 1948), 63.
 146

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madonnas, or Venetian landscapes, into works of art, just as in modern

times these same values made some paintings by Degas into works of
art: “What is it but tactile values combined with movement that makes
us pass over and almost forget in so many of Degas’ paintings the vul¬
garity of his washer-women, his far from appetizing ballet girls, and
his shapeless females tubbing and sponging?” (AH, 66). Artists may
turn such vulgar creatures into something life enhancing because the
artist gives them form, which Berenson defines as “radiance from
within,” while the tactile values turn into something mysterious called
“ideated sensations” that exist in the imagination and are "produced
by the capacity of the object to make us realize their entity and live its
life” (AH, 67). It sounds dangerously as if B.B. expected the millionaire
buyers to feel the life of the washerwomen painted by Degas. But it
could hardly mean that and so must point to something else.
The ideated sensations are unconscious, prompted by the artist
who draws the perceiver’s attention “to the muscular changes, the ten¬
sions and relaxations that accompany every action no matter how
slight.”
We react physiologically, though unconsciously, to the picture and
thereby experience joy and life-enhancement. Exercise is good for you,
and looking at a Ucello you can exercise without fatigue, uncon¬
sciously, and feel the thrill of battle, without losing an arm or a leg. It is
this experience of life-enhancement that became the test of true art,
for “representations that communicate feelings of dejection or nausea
would be the less artistic, the more skillfully and successfully they
were done.” At this point the work of art and its effect-—ideated sensa¬
tion produced by the tactile values—is reminiscent of Pavlovian experi¬
ments: works of art are defined as stimulants in a search for delight
and happiness, with the good and the bad in art defined as a physio¬
logical response. Or shall we compare them to consumer items to be
purchased according to one’s likes or dislikes or appetites?
But no, the danger of such a vulgar interpretation of tactile values
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and their effects is avoided by defining the joy prompted by the work
of art as being pure of desire. Life-enhancing, ideated sensations “must
remain intransitive, inspiring no definable desire, stimulating no ap¬
petite, rousing no lust for sensual enjoment. We must not glide or slip,
or still less leap from ideated to real sensations, from art to actuality”
(.AH, 70). And thereby is the Puritan saved from damnation, and all
those Italian virgins in the frames remain safe, and buying art is no sin,
but an intimation of a higher, purer, truer, and more perfect life. Tac-
tility being imagined, sensations being ideated, remain safe, disinter¬
ested, as the old idealism is saved despite all the talk of joy, tactility,
and sensations. The church of art is saved from the bazaar.
In Henry James’s The American the Reverend Babcock finally parts
with Newman because although they both love pictures, Newman en¬
joys them and Europe too much like an “unregenerate epicure.” Before
separating, Babcock sermonizes Newman: “Art and life seem to me in¬
tensely serious things, and in our travels in Europe we should espe¬
cially remember the immense seriousness of Art. You seem to hold
that if a thing amuses you for a moment, that is all you need ask of it;
and your relish for mere amusement is also much higher than mine.
You put, moreover, a kind of reckless confidence into your pleasure
which at times, I confess, has seemed to me—shall I say it?—almost
cynical” (A, 72). In Berenson’s aesthetic the almost cynical is made safe
by spiritualizing the sensations, defining the amusement as disin¬
terested life-enhancement. At the same time the reintroduction into
the aesthetic argument of the notion of disinterestedness, borrowed
from Kant and a safe Pietistic background (as distinct from the same
notion to be found in the abbe Du Bos, which is that of the man of the
world judging a work of art without the jealousy and “interest” of art¬
ists and professionals), also removes the supreme bibelot, the work of
art, from the dangerous place of desire, the market.
The work of art thereby once more finds its specific place in the
realm of the ideal, so dear to fin de siecle aesthetes and the wives of
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millionaires who knew that money wasn’t everything. “For ideated sen¬
sations,” Berenson continued, “that constitute the work of art belong
to a realm apart, a realm beyond actuality, a realm of contemplation, of
‘emotion remembered in tranquility,’ a realm where nothing can hap¬
pen except to the soul of the spectator, and nothing that is not temper¬
ing and refining” (AH, 70). But ideated sensations and tactile values will
give you much more than a glimpse of the ideal; they lead to that rare
moment, the secularized religious experience that frees you of desire
and the world, the aesthetic experience:

In visual art the aesthetic moment is that fleeting instant, so brief

as to be timeless, when the spectator is at one with the work he
is looking at, or with the actuality of any kind that the spectator
himself sees in terms of art. He ceases to be his ordinary self,
and the picture of building, statue, landscape, or aesthetic quality
is no longer outside himself. The two become one entity; time
and space are abolished and the spectator is possessed by one
awareness. When he recovers workaday consciousness it is as if
he had been initiated into illuminating, exalting, formative mys¬
teries. In short, the aesthetic moment is a moment of mystic vi¬
sion. (AH, 84-85).

You, too, can know through art the ecstasy of Saint Theresa. But of
course what the visionary sees or unites with in the contemplation of
a work of art is not God but something less theological, something
much more vague, “the inner life of things,” to use a phrase of T. E.
Hulme’s. The artist, for Berenson as well as for his contemporary Berg¬
son, was less of an inventor than a seer. “Artistic personalities are
equivalent to distinct modes of seeing, and are something in the na¬
ture of a sport,” writes Berenson in one of the few places of Aesthetics
and History in which he considers the artist (AH, 222). This sport can
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be in the nature of genius: what the artist sees, he places before the
public, and he is followed in turn by other artists who adopt his vision
and propagate the vision of the genius by their skill: “Something new,
something never seen before was placed before the eye of a public as¬
tonished and fascinated by Leonardo. His vision of things was popu¬
larized by scores of pupils” (AH, 223). And, most marvelous of all,
Leonardo created unconsciously, because artists are not really thinkers
but craftsmen: “The real artist, if at the moment of creation he thinks at
all, thinks of little but his craft, the action and arrangement chiefly, and
of the skill and mastery he has acquired previously—I mean how to
draw, how to paint, what proportions, what types to give his figures”
(AH, 103). It is a remarkable attitude for a man who is sometimes taken
for the last humanist, a great Renaissance connoisseur, and represen¬
tative of hellenism. For in this view art is deintellectualized and the
idealism of Berenson and the fin de siecle avers itself to be very differ¬
ent from that of the academic tradition, for, to use Reynold’s terms,
painting was a mental activity and no mere mechanical skill. The ideal¬
ism of the fin de siecle was not to understand art as something about
beauty, the ineffable, the mystic vision that art supposedly prompted.
The aesthetic experience is something the mind cannot grasp. This
view was widely held at the time and it is worthwhile exploring why.
This mystical approach may be attributed to Bergson, as it was by his
arch enemy Julien Benda who engaged in a long polemic with him
and the times; in addition, it was also attributed to Berenson by his
disciple T. E. Hulme.

According to Hulme, Bergson’s theory of art was the same as Scho¬

penhauer’s, but it was better stated: in Schopenhauer, “Art is pure con¬
templation of the Idea in a moment of emancipation from the Will. . . .
In Bergson it is actual contact with reality in a man who is emanci¬
pated from the ways of perception engendered by action, but the ac-
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tion is written with a small ‘a’, not a large one.”8 If this is art then it is
less activity than contemplation. Art is confused with the aesthetic, the
aesthetic moment with mysticism, and creation is a kind of vision. The
work, as object, as superbibelot, has somehow disappeared. It is as if
intelligence were excluded from creativity, as if Leonardo had never
filled all those notebooks of his with speculations about the nature of
his art, as if innumerable poets had not reflected upon their art and
written poetics, as if painters had never written academic discourses,
as if works did not exist save in that ideal realm of contemplation; fi¬
nally, it is as if history had been eliminated. The reason for this radical
spiritualization of art and its experience lies in Bergson’s strict separa¬
tion of intellect (the mechanical) and life (the intuitive). But then for
Bergson, according to Hulme, the artist is not an inventor in the classic
Renaissance or even baroque sense but someone who dives into the
flux of life and comes out of it with a shape or form he attempts to fix
forever as a work of art: “He cannot be said to have created it, but to
have discovered it, because when he has definitely expressed it we
recognize it as true” (152).
Thus art reveals reality, as it did for the neo-Platonic mannerists,
though their respective realities may differ. The artist, in contact with
reality—not the world of Platonic forms or ideas but the flux of life—
makes others see what he has seen and as such remains, though not
an inventor, an exceptional being: “It is only by accident, and in one
sense only, that nature produces someone whose perception is not
riveted to practical purposes; hence the diversity of the arts. One ap¬
plies himself to form, not as it is practically useful in relation to him,
but as it is in itself, as it reveals the inner life of things” (152). This is at
once a romantic and bourgeois view of the artist; he is born that way,
he is privileged, he is the romantic genius; but he is impractical, he is

8. T. E. Hulme, Speculations. Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, 2d ed. (Lon¬
don: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 149.
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not made for this world, he is like Baudelaire’s albatross, splendid in

flight, awkward on the ground. Art is therefore not a metier (no craft
for any bourgeois son to learn but a diversion, an amusement); it is gift.
Monet was only an eye, but what an eye!
But the special nature of the artist confers uniqueness on his work
and, therefore, rarity, value distinct from that of the manufactured, re¬
producible object. The definition of the artist as someone diving into
the flux of life and finding something to express as art, this separation
of contemplation from action and the discrediting of the old idea of
invention also serves to confuse the artistic and the aesthetic and,
therefore, the artist and the aesthete: both are seen as contemplatives,
differing from each other only in that the artist has a skill not pos¬
sessed by the other, otherwise complementary. The application of the
term artist to connoisseurs like la Nauve or the Goncourts is indicative
of this confusion between artist and aesthete, also found in the person
of Whistler or the aesthetic movement. If the romantic artist pro¬
claimed his superiority over and separation from the bourgeois by
stressing his creative genius, the fin de siecle bourgeois, posing as an
aristocrat, puts the artist in his place by reducing artistic production
to skill while raising the aesthetic to a form of contemplation that he
shares equally with the artist. If the artist is left to dive into the flux of
life to bring back a formed vision, the bourgeois as aesthete or collec¬
tor in turn recognizes the artist who depends for his livelihood on this
recognition. The artist becomes a dependent of the bourgeois in a way
he never was to the nobility of court and town who left questions of
taste to architects, directors of the academy, court painters, and cre¬
ators of various luxuries.
But the bourgeois as aesthete, the reader of aesthetic criticism, pro¬
claims himself the equal of the artist in matters of taste because he
claims to be disinterested: “From time to time,” writes Hulme, “by a
happy accident, men are born who either in one of their senses, or in
their conscious life as a whole, are less dominated by the necessities of
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action. . . . They do not perceive simply for the purposes of action:

they perceive just for the sake of perceiving” (154). But, as Whistler puts
it, “the voice of the aesthete was heard in the land, and catastrophe is
upon us.” For by this distinction of action and contemplation, the ar¬
tistic remains pure, untainted by practiced considerations or by the
market, separate from the practical world and from business. Painters
do not really paint for money but for art’s sake. Writers do not really
write for money either but for literature’s sake. Dr. Johnson and innu¬
merable others who earned their living, meager or opulent, by their
pen, may be safely dismissed as hacks or journalists; for the essence of
art lies elsewhere, beyond worldly success, in the artist’s vision and
the aesthete’s recognition of that vision. And if the artist could commu¬
nicate his vision it was because his mind was conceived along the
same lines as that of the aesthete in search of life-enhancement. Intelli¬
gence, work, and knowledge were safely left out of this picture of the
artist since these were associated with the practical, everyday, worka¬
day world of action, business, purpose. On the whole this aesthetic
was that of rentiers living off unearned income and having nothing to
do but contemplate.

The implications of this aesthetic theory are amusing when consid¬

ered with regard to Berenson’s own activities. His intelligence—active,
practical—is used in his criticism and expertise, the authentication
and certification of works of art. It was the side of his life that allowed
him to make a living even though he had no inherited fortune like so
many others in cosmopolis. But his intelligence and the income he de¬
rived from it, which allowed him to live in style at I Tatti and in various
grand hotels on his travels as the season demanded, were presumably
less important or real than the contemplation of pictures and the
landscape for the sake of contemplation. Obviously this aesthetic, rest¬
ing on the confusion of the artistic and the aesthetic, positing a pure
purposeless perception, is possible only within the context of a rentier
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Bernard Berenson and friends at I Tatti.

Photograph by Robert M. Mottar, Scope Association, Inc
Courtesy of Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University.
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class on a prolonged villeggiatura.' The aesthetic of the exiles, English

as well as American living in or about Florence or some other Italian
city, was the aesthetic of cosmopolis.
But in Berenson’s case the aesthetics of cosmopolis was that of
someone who had to keep the ideal, the Ruskin-Jarves-Norton-Pater
line, pure and strictly separate from the practical side of expertise, art
in the service of dealers, art objects to be bought or sold. A curious
shift has occurred: sin, once connected by the Puritan with pleasure
taken in the work of art, as opposed to the Reverend Babcock’s high
seriousness, has been shifted to the commerce of art. The bourgeois is
ashamed of his commercial background; for he longs to be an aristo¬
crat with no taint of trade upon him or behind him. In the fin de siecle
period, this fear of trade made for an aesthetic aristocracy that con¬
cealed its millions behind an aesthetic facade. The market was thus
kept strictly separate from “art”; the last humanist was in no way an art
dealer. The old dualism of matter and spirit was mobilized in a new
form to veil the reality of bourgeois society and existence that, for all
its aesthetic trappings, its aesthetic moments, and its women talking of
Michelangelo or writing books about Donatello, was, as Paul Bourget’s
writers and artists clearly saw, based only on and cared only for
money.
But there are further amusing implications to this aesthetic of pure
perception and life-enhancement. It is, really, a tourist aesthetic, sup¬
posing the sleeping car and the grand hotel. It is as if all those works of
art gathered in museums—the Uffizi, the Louvre, the Brera—or per¬
ceived on tour in Italy, or Egypt, and even in far Japan or India, had
ceased to be the products of history (the "signs of the history of man¬
kind” to use Quatremere’s telling phrase) and were, instead, merely
stimuli for traveling millionaires, cultured milliners, or bored cosmopo¬
lites. This tourist aesthetic, concerned with the enjoyment of works of
art, is but a vulgarized form of Pater’s rarified aestheticism. Whereas
Ruskin linked Christian morality to art, Pater constructed a morality
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based on art that promoted life lived as art, stressing not the spirit of
art but its sensuous qualities. Evangelical purism was supplanted by
aesthetic fastidiousness and the result was aesthetic criticism, as dis¬
tinct from historical or intellectual criticism. Pater aestheticized his¬
tory, making of the past a vast romantic affair that resulted in a craving
for the picturesque. The art work was thus transformed from a his¬
torical monument or sign into a vehicle of enjoyment for either the
aesthete’s refined pleasure or for the crowd of tourists. The grand tour¬
ist of the eighteenth century was not the direct ancestor of Cook’s tour
or Baedeker’s guide. The grand tourist of the fin de siecle and the late
bourgeois world went to Italy for sensations and acquisition more
than for education or accomplishment. The work of art, that supreme
bibelot of the sleeping-car set, was ultimately but a very select and rare
consumer item, an article de nouveaute from a romantic past rather
than a modern department store. History had been eliminated by an
aesthetic based on the latest science, psychology.

Berenson’s unstated assumptions and the implications of his aes¬

thetic doctrines were made more explicit by his rival and neighbor Vi¬
olet Paget, alias Vernon Lee. This is not to say she commented on Be-
renson as she had Ruskin but that her aesthetic, more systematically
expressed, was more clearly stated than Berenson’s. It is only from the
perspective of the postbourgeois and the postcultural world in which
we live that the inanity of that aesthetic becomes apparent. Vernon Lee
had a far better mind than Berenson, and her Art and Life (1896) and
her essay on The Beautiful (1913) show her thinking to advantage and
represent the traditional type of aesthetic treatise as Aesthetics and
History does not.9 B.B.’s thinking on aesthetics, which dated from his
Florentine painters, was so close to Vernon Lee’s own that she grew

9. Vernon Lee, Art and Life (East Aurora, N.Y.: Roycroft Print Shop, 1896); The Beautiful, an
Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913).
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suspicious of involuntary plagiarism and caused a certain cooling of

their relations for many years.
Both Art and Life and The Beautiful were essays in the psychology of
art. Her reasoning rested not on metaphysical definitions of the beauti¬
ful and of art, as did the classical aesthetics; but on what happens
within us in the presence of beauty It was the same question that had
prompted Berenson to come up with his idea of tactile values. Both
Vernon Lee’s essays were empirical rather than dogmatic or rationalis¬
tic. And both B.B. and Vernon Lee were convinced that such attempts
to understand the psychology of art were scientific.
The Beautiful started with an empirical; verifiable statement rather
than an abstract definition of beauty: “Beautiful implies on our part an
attitude of satisfaction and preference” (PA, 2). Much the same was for¬
mulated in the earlier Art and Life: “The contemplation of beauty re¬
freshes and invigorates our spirit” (AL, 14). A concession is made to
Kant by emphasizing that the beautiful is neither the good nor the
true; though beauty is admittedly a power for good. But though beauty
is not the good; Lee argues, it is good for you: it invigorates the spirit or
soul; it is life enhancing; it satisfies. Her language is dangerously close
to that of advertisement. The reason the beautiful is invigorating is that
both it and the good have a common source in the vital, primordial
energies necessary to man’s survival in the universe, so that beauty
and its satisfactions may be linked to the theory of evolution. Beauty is
one of the higher products of evolution. Thus beauty and the higher
objects of life—the altruistic function, for example, or the higher har¬
monies of universal life, and the nobler growth of the individual—co¬
incide: “Under the vitalizing touch of the beautiful, our consciousness
seems filled with the affirmation of what life is, what is worth being,
what among our many thoughts and acts and feelings are real and or¬
ganic and important, what among the many possible moods is the
real, eternal yourself” (AL, 21-22). The beautiful has thus been natu-
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ralized, the work of art assimilated to some function in the general

evolution of mankind, and the distinction between art, nature, and the
senses blurred.
Julien Benda, the author of the famous Treason of the Intellectuals,
had in a devastating critique of the aesthetics of the pre-1914 period, as
summed up in Bergson, pointed to a distinction that the partisans of
Bergson had overlooked or passed over, a distinction between two op¬
posed sensibilities that corresponded to different aesthetics. There
was a sensibility for form, solidity, and clarity of outline that involved
the senses of touch and sight. The other was the musical sensibility,
based on the ear, smell, taste, tending toward the fluid, the contourless
form, and more troubling to the soul than the plastic sensibility. The
first type of sensibility he considered masculine, the second feminine;
the first tended toward centrality, the second he saw as the sensibility
of a decentralized consciousness.10 The plastic he saw as classical and
aristocratic; the musical he saw as romantic and democratic.
These tendencies of sensibility are to be found in Berenson as well
as in Vernon Lee. The tactile values of the former and the vitalism of
the latter correspond respectively to the classical and the romantic,
the masculine and feminine. And both in effect based their aesthetics
on the nervous system, the physiological basis of the sensibility. Thus
we can all vibrate to music and empathize with tactile values, capaci¬
ties that represent the unstated democratic aspects of the psychology
of art. For if art is indeed a question of physiological responses, then,
since all men are biological, all men can respond to beauty.
But neither B.B. nor Vernon Lee could or would go that far. Though
their aesthetics were based on psychology and sensibility, they were
intended to be exclusive and reserved and attributed to an elite. In

10. Julien Benda, Belphegor. Essai sur lesthetique de la presente societe franqaise (Paris:
Emile Paul, 1918), 40-41.
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spite of science, evolution, nervous systems, empathy, "satisfying” re¬

actions to the beautiful, in spite of a language close to advertisements,
the aesthetic of life-enhancement was saved from democratic implica¬
tions by the imposition of limits that made it an upper-class aesthetic
after all. The limit was imposed; it had nothing to do with any logic, sci¬
ence, or internal necessity. Arguing like the theologians of old, Vernon
Lee wrote that the physiological basis of aesthetics can lead only so far,
just as in religion theological argument for belief in God can only go
part of the way; the last step belongs to faith. The seventeenth-century
critics who pondered the beauties of style and wondered why some
writings pleased more than others were more honest with their je ne
sais quoi to designate something pleasing beyond the rules of art than
the fin de siecle aesthetes and aestheticians were with their tactile val¬
ues and life-enhancing qualities or ideated sensations. In the aesthetic
of Vernon Lee the leap from reason and science to faith was not a theo¬
logical statement of belief but an askesis: "into all aesthetic training
there must needs enter an ethical, almost an ascetic element” (AL, 23).
The physiological foundation of aesthetic pleasure, the insertion of
the beautiful into the process of evolution, is not about to sap the foun¬
dation of the religion of art. The aesthete is turned into a lay saint; the
Puritan may have his art and his religion. Physiology and biology lead
in the end to the aesthetic moment that B.B. called mystical; a mo¬
ment, however, only prepared for by aesthetic training. Aesthetic exer¬
cises replace spiritual exercises. For beauty bestows pleasure only to
the degree the recipient or novice is capable of "attention, intelligence,
and reverent sympathy.” The Reverend Babcock excommunicates
Christopher Newman.
For the religion of art, as Roger Fry would find out when he tried to
apply Berenson’s theory of tactile values to the understanding and ex¬
perience of modern art, was a high church. Having been taken to task
for his attempt to democratize the enjoyment of art in his theoretical
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work Significant Form, which implied an aesthetic based on the senses,

he w^s later to write:

I now see that my crime had been to strike at vested emotional

interests. These people felt instinctively that their special culture
was one of their social assets. That to be able to speak glibly of
T ang and Ming, or Amico de Sandro [one of B.B.’s creations] and
Baldovinetti, gave them a social standing and distinctive cachet.
This showed me that we had all along been labouring under a
mutual misunderstanding, i.e., that we had admired the Italian
Primitives for quite different reasons. It was felt that one could
only appreciate Amico di Sandro when one had acquired a cer¬
tain considerable mass of erudition and given a great deal of
time and attention, but to admire Matisse required only a certain
sensibility. One could feel fairly sure that one’s maid could not
rival one in the former case, but might by a haphazard gift of
Providence surpass one in the second.11

It is now obvious that an aesthetic built on physiology had to be

democratic and that the form of its argument, the disposition of terms,
was similar to that used to attract buyers in a department store. Class
distinctions in this aesthetic could only be maintained by recourse to
the aesthetic of the old regime and the distinction between higher and
lower arts, that is, aesthetic art and the merely pleasurable. Art re¬
mained serious, as the Reverend Babcock would have it, through this
distinction, as did the rule that not all were capable of the higher plea¬
sures of art since this required the exercise of the will, attention, and
training, all of which was not given to everyone.

11. Frances Spalding, Roger Fry; Art and Life (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1980), 68.
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The distinction between the higher and the merely pleasurable arts
implied distinct classes of people. It is tempting to make taste, in this
scheme, correspond with an upper class and mere pleasure with the
lower classes; but, in fact, it did not work out that way. In Vernon Lee’s
terms the distinction was not so much one of class or income as one
between a true aesthetic elite and the philistines. One might be of the
elite and yet not be rich in the ordinary sense of the word. “Our real
aesthetic life,” she writes, “is in ourselves, often isolated from the beau¬
tiful words, objects, or sounds” (AL, 53-55). And this aesthetic life pre¬
sumably has nothing to do with the possession of beautiful objects.
The true aesthete is thus isolated from the merely rich by separating
the aesthetic realm from the notion of property, from the possession of
bibelots. Aesthetic experience is defined as good, unselfish, altruistic.
For the center of the experience, that mystic moment of union, is not
in the object, which can be possessed, but in the emotion: “All strong
aesthetic feeling will always prefer ownership of the mental image to
ownership of the tangible object; any desire for material appropriation
or exclusive enjoyment will merely be so much weakening and adul¬
teration of the aesthetic sentiment. In every person who truly cares for
beauty, there is a necessary tendency to replace the legal illusory act
of owning by the real spiritual act of appreciation’’ (AL, 53-55).
The bourgeois concept of private property is thus separate from the
aesthetic domain. The rich with their bibelots need not feel they have
deprived anyone of aesthetic enjoyment, which is not guaranteed by
ownership. And they do a positive good by endowing museums, build¬
ing collections, and supporting the acquisition of objets d art. At the
same time this separation of the object possessed from the aesthetic
experience, which is internal and emotional, makes possible the crea¬
tion of an infinite number of art history courses built on slides that
“represent” the object not present in the classroom, courses that may
prepare the student for the aesthetic experience. A vague, ideal realm
of aesthetic experience is posed as open to all with the proper pre-
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paratory askesis. The aesthetic realm is the old paradise, though there
was, in the novel conditions of the late bourgeois world, no one to
write that it was more difficult for a rich man to enter this paradise
than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. But the separation
of true aesthetic appreciation from ownership of the object that
prompts it consoles nonowners. They are not aesthetically deprived.
They may look at but not touch the works of art. They need not envy
the owner of a Botticelli to truly appreciate his work as, in the crowded
Uffizi, before the Birth of Venus, "the tactile imagination is roused to a
keen activity, by itself almost as life-heightening as music. But the
power of music is even surpassed where, as in the goddess’s mane-like
tresses of hair fluttering to the wind, not in disorderly rout but in
masses yielding only after resistance, the moment is directly life¬
communicating. The entire picture [B.B. continued] presents us with
the quintessence of all that is pleasurable to our imagination of touch
and movement. How we revel in the force and freshness of the wind, in
the life of the wave.”12

The separation between true aesthetic appreciation and legal own¬

ership of the work may have satisfied impecunious aesthetes, pro¬
fessorial aestheticians making do with a middling salary, but it must
have seemed blatantly false to any true collector. And any art dealer
not posing as a humanist among transmigrated Boston gentility dis¬
coursing to admiring graduate students and future museum curators
must also have known this doctrine to be either false or simply irrele¬
vant in the real, as opposed to ideal, world. In auction houses as in
private transactions it was desire not aesthetic theories that ruled the
souls of bidders.
The connoisseur and the aesthete, and perhaps even the last hu-

12. See Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson. The Making of a Connoisseur (Cambridge,
Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1979), 231.
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manist with his exquisite hands and his astounding eye; may have felt
superior to the American millionaire who bought a Bernardo Luini
without batting an eye because it was supposed to make him appear
cultured (if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it, noted J. P.
Morgan); and the aesthete might look on such as mere philistinism
and mutter to himself that, after all, the newly rich are always vulgar.
But these were the consolations of those who had to ask the price. In
the long run, the presence of the picture bought, the objet d art ac¬
quired, and the bibelots seen in the salon and the drawing room lent
their owners part of their aura; indeed, the aura of the work was trans¬
ferred to its owner. And in time, with gifts to museums, parties and
dinners in black tie and tails given for curators and directors and even
scholars, the possessors ceased to be merely “proud possessors” and
became spiritual, cultured, genteel, and ever so generous. The trans¬
formation of the merely nouveaux riches into the cultural elite follows
logically, though not explicitly, from the doctrine of life-enhancement.
How could the rich remain vulgar once they had glimpsed, thanks to
the effect of tactile values and ideated sensations, the realm of the
ideal? How could you still be vulgar after a mystical experience? They,
too, learned to savor, appreciate, enjoy that higher realm which awaited
them after a long day at the office, the firm, Wall Street, and the cares of
business. The art works possessed were, aesthetic theory notwith¬
standing, the concrete form of the ideal: a collection, a chateau, a villa,
a house on Fifth Avenue. Askesis was for the less wealthy. With enough
wealth you could always buy enough indulgences to be exempted
from askesis. In the end the aesthetics of cosmopolis was Januslike:
exclusive for the poor, open to the rich. And the rich knew it. That is
why in questions of authenticity they relied on experts and not on the
aesthetic experience.

B.B. was not a philosopher; neither was he an art historian, and for
all his talk of culture, his humanist pose, he was first and last a con-
 163

I Tatti, or Sublimating Sales

noisseur of Italian art, an expert, a kind of insurance agent in a very

tricky trade. Cosmopolis was not only an international playground but
also an international art market in which the shrewd investor ceased
being quite so sure of himself. He and his wife knew they wanted “the
real thing.” And in this vast marketplace of cosmopolis, I Tatti was
rather like that shop of Alexandre Arnoux on the rue Montmartre; it
looked more like a salon than a shop.
If B.B. as aesthete was the product of the times, so was he as expert.
He was the right man at the right time, even in the right place. The art
expert became an important figure of the international scene only in
the late nineteenth and twentieth century. He even made his appear¬
ance in fiction at this time. In former times collectors had relied for
advice and knowledge on merchants, amateurs, or connoisseur-
friends, and even artists; but all this had changed by the time B.B.
came on the scene. Art history had become a specialized discipline,
requiring increasingly specialized knowledge. The number of great,
original works of art that might enter the market had been considerably
reduced by the creation of national collections; but dealers, agents for
these, and, consequently, the competition, had also increased.
However, as Max J. Friedlander also pointed out, elements foreign to
the art market and scene had entered it, namely, aristocrats, society
women, sons of rich families, and people generally unconcerned with
the reputation of a firm because they were free-lance dealers. (The ex¬
ample of Bernard de la Nauve provides a case in point.) Prices thus
increased, as did the tension among the works available, the dealers,
and the risks involved. Finally, the market was, as Friedlander puts it,
Americanized, which means the Americans tended to rely more on ex¬
perts than others did. When experts are used they run the risk of dis¬
pleasing clients; however, on the other hand, they can rightfully main¬
tain that they are not responsible for the prices. But the rage for
experts at this time, Friedlander further points out, was also con¬
nected to the rage for a work with the artist’s name attached to it. This
 164

I Tatti, or Sublimating Sales

_ 4

increased the expert’s responsibility in the trade. Ifyou told a prospec¬

tive buyer that such and such a work was late fifteenth-century Ger¬
man or Italian^ people tended to be disappointed. Ifyou said it was by
the master of such and such an altarpiece at such and such a place,
that was better. But best of all was to pin the artist’s name on the work.
And so expertise became a thriving, profitable industry.
Paul Bourget poked fun at this mania for expertise and scientific
method in the identification and authentication of unsigned works of
art, and Meryle Secrest, author of a recent biography of Berenson,
thinks the story was directed at B.B. In The Lady Who Lost Her Painter,
an up-and-coming young art historian and expert discovers a great
Italian work of the fifteenth century that he attributes to an important
name. But the work is a forgery, painted by a young painter in need
years before the expert discovered it. The painter reveals to the expert
that he painted it, but the expert refuses to accept this because he is
convinced his methodology is foolproof, scientific, infallible. Bourget
described the expert’s method:

To criticize a canvas, instead of enjoying it, as you or I might do

in our intimate being, is to anatomize it, dissect it line by line,
grain by grain. Then there begins, to verify its origin and history,
a patient bureaucratic labor, a life of bookworms, weeks spent in
rummaging through old papers, establishing a dossier; exper¬
tises on handwriting, letter by letter, point by point, infinite com¬
parisons with photographs. What more! And all this to arrive
finally at some uncertain date and a contestable name. That is
criticism.13

Berenson spent perhaps less time in archives than in churches, in-

defatigably studying details as well as wholes, and he also used photo-

13. Paul Bourget, La Dame qui a perdu son peintre (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1910), 36-37.
 165

I Tatti, or Sublimating Sales

graphs a great deal. There is no doubt as to his expertise and the

validity of most of his attributions. But the significance of this desire
for authentication; for attribution; however important it may be for art
history also has another dimension: for what was being certified was
“the real thing.” And this certification affected the price. The bibelot
had left the realm of the ideal to enter the market and it possessed not
its aesthetic aura so much as its quotation. In B.B.’s case too; given his
growing fame; the authentication and attribution; signed; also repre¬
sented a blessing and a certificate of real value. The two threads so
closely intertwined in bourgeois aesthetics and society the ideal and
the market; are inextricable. The blessing was cachet; a certified value;
a blue chip in cosmopolis. But B.B. could not admit this and insisted
that neither criticism nor expertise led to true appreciation of art: “In
general/’ he told his friend Count Morra; “art criticism is completely
useless work—commercial and heterogeneous. The critic ought to do
only one thing: tell us which works are beautiful. ... A work of art is
like a woman; 'll faut coucher avec.’”14
One wonders whether B.B. realized that his allusion to works of art
as women made of him a metaphorical pimp. Be that as it may this
downgrading of criticism was part of his elaborate facade; he needed
his expertise to maintain the facade. And the last humanist who pro¬
fessed to disdain criticism made his entry into cosmopolis with a
grand devaluation of Venetian paintings from private collections shown
at the New Gallery in London in 1895. The labels on the pictures of this
memorable show exhibited the attributions of the owners as they had
come down by tradition or been given by the dealers. Berenson looked
and wrought havoc: of 33 so-called Titians he accepted 1, and of the
120 pictures shown; he accepted only 15 as correctly attributed. Now a
Titian demoted to “workshop of” or “follower of” is not only no longer

14. Count Umberto Morra, Conversations with Berenson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965),
254-255.
 166

I Tatti, or Sublimating Sales

a Titian; it is also a financial loss. The supreme bibelot was a market

item even on the level of high art; and aesthetic enjoyment and life-
enhancement suddenly diminished if its price fell. And the bourgeois
who might talk of the ideal to the women in his salon knew it. And that
is why he relied on the art broken the expert.

Looked at without sentiment and preconceptions; the objet d’art

was thus also a force for sublimating money into a different form of
wealth. Berenson not only played an important role in this sublima¬
tion of money; he also lent the supreme bibelot an aura that placed it
in a realm beyond all vulgar thoughts of money and the marketplace.
In this he was of course helped by the ideologies of Jarves, Norton; Pa¬
ter, and the genteel tradition. And in this role; on the level of theory he
was an exemplary figure of late bourgeois culture. But his effectiveness
lay beyond theory: it lay in the very setting and ritual of life at I Tatti;
the villa outside Florence; the city of Renaissance culture. Florence
had been important to Jarves and Norton; and Berenson interpreted
its culture as that of a yearning for the aesthetic, for refinement, for the
life of culture; but which bourgeois historians had also seen as the be¬
ginning of modern history. The regularity of life at I Tatti—the work in
the morning on his books, followed by lunch with many guests with
B.B. playing the role of "the autocrat at the luncheon table,” followed
by more conversation and a walk or a ride in the country to enjoy the
landscape—all this contributed to cast an aura upon the possessors of
works of art by association with a genteel life. And in the summer there
were trips to St. Moritz, or expeditions to little churches lost in the
hills, or to some great museum to study paintings. All this bespeaks
the cosmopolitan setting of the art market and a style of life that was a
style of selling.
With B.B., the villa, ruling-class architecture since the Palladian era,
becomes the villeggiatura of the transatlantic and sleeping-car set. And
the very location of I Tatti signaled the high regard in which the art of
 167

I Tatti, or Sublimating Sales

the Renaissance was still held: it localized the source of true aesthetic
value and experience, it explained the sensuality of tactile values as
reconciled with the spirituality of aestheticism, as Giotto and Dante,
Botticelli and Ficino, may define the sensuous and tactile joined to the
mystical. But I Tatti defined a fin de siecle view of the Renaissance,
closer in spirit to Pater and Burckhardt; and if the Medicis are remem¬
bered it is not as bankers and astute politicians, using art in a pro¬
pagandist^ way, but as aesthetes, patrons, presumably disinterested,
of the arts. Life in the Renaissance had been “artistic,” picturesque as
in the poems of Browning. But Florence was safe too for the taste of the
times; ik^yas prebaroque; it was not a city associated with the art of a
corrupted, sensuous, theatrical Roman Catholicism, so that even the
location of I Tatti near Florence exemplifies the Jarves-Norton view of
art history.
On a less sublime level, however, disregarding the gentlemanly pose,
the chitchat at the table, the image of the last humanist, Berenson
eventually turned into a Medici in reverse. For whereas they trans¬
muted gold into the works and riches of art, he transformed the riches
of art into an income, though one exquisitely veiled by the fin de siecle
humanitas in the form of love of art, a fine library, some choice pic¬
tures, and conversation in which money was never mentioned. The
culture of I Tatti was that of the rich at a particular historical moment,
that in which culture still played the role of distinction, and it was sold
with the art work. I Tatti, the grand hotels and the rich beaches, were
but the setting of a discreet art business. As the high courtesans of
the second empire had had their setting in the luxury of the theater
and opera, the Bois or the Champs Elysees, the villa outside Florence
was the setting of the great expert, a kind of grande cocotte of the art
world.
Commerce, aesthetics, and astheticism, expertise and trade were all
inextricably confused in the figure of B.B. who had worshipped at the
feet of Walter Pater; posed as an aesthete devoted to art and beauty,
 168

I Tatti, or Sublimating Sales

self-styled Hellene; follower of Morelli, the founder of scientific con-

noisseurship; sage of I Tatti and center of an international confrater¬
nity of those who had known B.B. and been to I Tatti. But his achieve¬
ment—celebrated in books, photographs, memoirs—rested on a
fragile skeleton in the closet, the skeleton of all bourgeois aesthetics:
the trade value of art, money made in selling rather than in creating or
commissioning works of art. The intrinsically priceless objet d art en¬
tered an international art market; the disinterested love of beauty was
turned into a profit; the art expert turned into an intermediary be¬
tween conflicting desires. And the name of the game was cachet. The
work attributed and certified was a work blessed; the bourgeois love of
the real thing, now a sure thing, was satisfied, his fears of “being taken”
stilled. It was, in the post-Reformation world, a new form of indul¬
gence buying. The limits between villa and marketplace, or investment
office, blurred; the tone of talk and trade was exquisitely polite; the spir¬
itual values covered the pecuniary values with an aesthetic veil. The
flaneur sipped his tea or sherry, listened to the master, and sat down
to write his broker. Life was enhanced by art; it might be troubled by
the rise and fall of the market, but the picture was at last the real thing.
The view from the terrace was splendid. The collection in the villa of
the best, a lesson in discretion, discrimination, taste.
But the pictures at I Tatti reminded one famous visitor of something
else. When Max Beerbohm was shown to his room he was handed a
card on which were noted the artists and works hanging in the room
and was moved to exclaim, “Oh, a Menu!”
 P O-S-T-S-C-R I-P-T

From Aura to Inflation

Some twenty years ago, in a very distinguished midwestern museum

of art, a director, a few curators, and a dapper, scholarly, cosmopolitan
New York art dealer were conversing over lunch in the shade of newly
planted trees of a recently finished inner courtyard. As is often the
case when conversation is of art among curators, art historians, and
dealers, talk turned not to ineffable beauty but to the quoted prices of
masterpieces. The dealer pronounced that the true value of art could
not be priced, that masterpieces had no price; there was no talk of an
art market. Later I had occasion to visit his and other galleries in New
York and Paris. Seated in Louis XVI armchairs, leaning comfortably
back (more so than in any Bauhaus creation), as domestics brought in
one tempting painting after another to dazzle and charm my soul and
mind, I gazed upon these lovely objects of desire and beauty. It was
discreet, genteel, polite, and suave; it was so far beyond the mar¬
ketplace, it could have hardly been called selling in galleries of such
four-star grande classe. It was as if the Harvard Business School and its
multiple replicas or imitations had never existed. And it seems now, in
retrospect, to have been a denial of Walter Benjamin’s thesis about the
loss of aura, as if indeed, B.B. had definitely preserved it. But as a Mo-
liere doctor once said, “nous avons change tout cela."
These galleries in the grand manner still survive, but the term art
market is today definitely current, and the nineteenth-century dis¬
parity or tension between high art and the bibelot has taken on new
and intriguing forms. Today culture is an industry; the purchases of
masterpieces by major museums becomes a media event; and mu¬
seum exhibitions are raised to international blockbuster status as art
and its ideated sensations are marketed like any other product. As for

169
 170

Postscript: From Aura to Inflation

bibelots, they are still very much with us, marketed not only in a vari¬
ety of department stores or gift shops but also, thanks to glossy pho¬
tography, unsolicited mail order catalogues sent out by firms that
sometimes call themselves collections. But despite this mass market¬
ing, the aura of art survives: thousands still line up for hours for a
Cezanne, Picasso, or King Tut exhibition. For all those in the lines, art
and the art work is still something special, unique, a once-in-a lifetime
event, and that aesthetic experience, despite the discomfort of lines
and tired feet, is a must. Indeed, may one not say that after all the work
of the experts of the period of B.B., exhibitions are more of a must than
ever before, because one may now be sure that the works are, at last,
identified and absolutely authentic? That they are, at last, as Henry
James might say, “the real thing”?
Consider then the storm in the teacup of the art world when a few
years ago an eminent collector of modern art (modern art has finally
been accepted as nearly equal in status, in some circles at least, to cin-
quecento madonnas), a former governor of an imperial state, allowed
the reproduction of ninety-six selected pieces from his collection—-in
a limited edition, of course. At about the same time a famous former
director of an equally famous museum endorsed, in writing, an expen¬
sive reproduction of an Andrew Wyeth painting. A famous art critic,
the very model of an art establishment figure, rose to the defense of art
and wrote of “hype,” “shamelessness,” and “selling of haute schloch.”
The eminent critic’s literary shock seemed to betray a curious lack
of historical understanding of what the German social literary critic
Theodore Adorno referred to as the "aporetic” nature of art. Indeed,
why be surprised or indignant at the marketing of reproductions
when art works, old or new, great, good, bad, indifferent—or even
kitsch—are also marketed even by art critics? Why write of “haute
schloch” in an age that includes antiart in museums of fine art? The
bourgeois connoisseur, as we have seen, has always loved, desired, and
accumulated art, not to mention match boxes, bottle caps, stamps, glass
 171

Postscript: From Aura to Inflation

bottles, locks, keys, dolls, toys, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And since
modern, efficient, sophisticated marketing techniques may be used to
sell even a president to a people, there is no reason not to sell art, as
well as reproductions and bibelots, in the same way The not-too-well-
off bourgeois who has taken an art course in the wrong college and
has been motivated by all those glossy slides, the less rich petit bour¬
geois, the blue-collar worker aspiring to class, the half-educated col¬
lege student, the Ivy League, Harris tweed proletariat may, thanks to
reproductions, live in an art environment made up at least in part by
endorsed reproductions. After all, ours is an age of plastic flowers.
But what would the marketing of these endorsed and prestige, or
shall we say “elite," reproductions do to the status of the original work
of art? Would they pose a new threat to the aura of the authentic art
work? Would the long work of art education be lost among the public
rushing to buy endorsed reproductions? Would people cease to un¬
derstand the distinction between the unique and the series? Were
graduates from the business school threatening graduates in art his¬
tory? Walter Benjamin had only explored the loss of aura within a spe¬
cific historical context, that of his childhood, in which original works
were posed on easels in the salon, curtains drawn tightly, green plants
watered by maids, and places set with at least three different glasses.
But Benjamin’s Marxist eschatology had blinded him to the marvels of
post-business school capitalism. He had not foreseen that aura, far
from being lost, would be regained—and marketed. The shocked
critic of Fun City had failed to understand the true significance of the
endorsed collection of reproductions. The marketing of art and se¬
lected endorsed reproductions can of course be denounced on the
plane of idealism, as Quatremere de Quincy did the art world of his
day; or it can be dismissed, gleefully, as an inevitable aspect of corrupt
bourgeois culture. But both positions are founded on the failure to see
that the aesthetic experience has shifted from the contemplation of
the work of art to its acquisition. Modern techniques of reproduction
 172

Postscript: From Aura to Inflation

make possible this democratic aesthetic experience of acquisition to a

greater and greater public of art-educated individuals.
In this shift of interest from work to acquisition; the museums are far
from guiltless. Quite apart from their own sales desks; or indeed sales
departments; and catalogues of cards; reproductions and bibelots; not
to mention the cookbooks sold by some, the mentality of museum rul¬
ing circles has for years been dominated by the acquisitive spirit and
the will to outbid one another. International sales call forth interna¬
tional competition and publicity. At their conclusion; one director,
somewhere; will at last be able to exclaim triumphantly: “Ha; we got it;
and the other guy didn’t!” The killing on the market becomes a killing
in the auction house. And the crowds line up to gape at a famous phi¬
losopher gazing at a bust of a famous poet. It was evident a long time
ago that beauty the disinterested love of art; the imperative of conser¬
vation; and the disinterested scholarship of art; or the education of
public taste (assuming this can be done in museums or universities);
had taken second place to the grand moments of a director s life: tri¬
umph in the auction room. The aura of art, thanks to the media; has
rubbed off on directors and museums.
What the ex-governor-collector and ex-director did by endorsing re¬
productions was to let the cat out of the bag, which upset the art critic.
The old idealist aesthetic of beauty the old role of art as a sign of social
distinction and culture, has been laid to rest. Art remains the sign only
of wealth and the aura about it is the aura of gold. Art no longer distin¬
guishes the grand seigneur, the prince, the gentleman or virtuoso, the
cultured individual, the eccentric collector or ever-avid accumulator,
or even the genuine lover who hung, slightly untidy, about auction
houses and rummaged in old antique shops. The art work is a sign of
wealth and with reproductions it can even produce what it never did
before without a sale, dividends.
To understand this novel development we must give up all thought
of idealism, aura, and the wickedness of endorsed reproductions. This
 173

Postscript: From Aura to Inflation

latest adventure of the work of art in the period of its reproducibility is

best understood within the general phenomenon of contemporary in¬
flation with the help of the baroque economics of mercantilism and
the gold standard. For the multimillionaire who proposes to issue a
limited series of reproductions of works from his collection is acting
like a baroque prince or monarch issuing currency As the prince had
his effigy on the coins minted, the multimillionaire issues signs of his
taste. The collection of originals in this marvelous system acts as bul¬
lion in a financial system based on the gold standard. The reproduc¬
tions are to the original collection what paper money is to gold bul¬
lion. The value of the reproductions remains constant for as long as
the edition remains limited. The currency is sound when backed by
bullion and when the degree of gold or silver in the coins is unaltered.
The reproductions are the investment of persons of limited wealth and
they are backed by the originals of a collector who is a judicious man
of taste, wealth, prestige, and power, as solid as the House of Morgan
was to its investors. Indeed, the reproductions may be far more stable
and sound than currency that may be increased or decreased by the
director of a reserve bank under some political or market pressure. As
for the ex-director endorsing the reproduced Wyeth, he may readily be
likened to a sound and respected investment counselor. After all, when
E. F. Hutton talks, people listen. The model of this behavior is purely
economic, albeit neither Keynesian nor Reaganian; nevertheless, it il¬
lustrates the dynamics of capitalism: a system that succeeded in turn¬
ing antiart into art was bound to replace art eventually as the object of
aesthetic experience and activity. Indeed one may conceivably argue
that the art market within the capitalist system of today represents the
survival of the baroque imagination avid for brilliance, glory, transcen¬
dence, and illusion. And what greater illusion is there than that of
being able to get nothing for something?
The new system of the arts cum reproducible sign of wealth is not
only democratic since it can spread art to all but also aristocratic since
 174

Postscript: From Aura to Inflation

it maintains class distinctions in a subtle, invisible manner even within

institutions whose democratic characteristics are touted by a demo¬
cratic rhetoric. Money, as the nineteenth-century bourgeois soon saw,
does not make a safe base for class distinctions; there were, after all,
periodic arrivals of nouveaux riches on the scene. Hence the necessity
of culture and the aura of art as class distinction. But today, modern
marketing and the credit card, along with publicity and the media,
threaten culture and aura. A new form of class distinction has arisen,
cleverly hidden not only from the masses but, best of all, from the edu¬
cated middle class: the foundation of class distinction on the posses¬
sion of original works of art. Class distinction is no longer based
merely on the quantity of money (after all you can steal the money and
be rich without becoming respectable very soon), but on those who
own originals as opposed to those who own only reproductions. But
since reproductions are images of originals owned by the rich, the less
rich are thereby allowed to share in the wealth, share in the same val¬
ues, as our economic metaphor turns into an aesthetic trickle-down
theory of taste. And all is for the best in the best of all possible eco¬
nomic and aesthetic systems.

Henry Adams once pessimistically observed that the great problem

of the twentieth century would be for the American brain to catch up
to the American brawn. He had cause to be pessimistic though not ex¬
actly for the reasons he may have had in mind. For the brain did catch
up; but it was that of the business school graduate quite infected by
what Adams so wonderfully described as the universal solvent of
money valuations. As for Adams’s one-time colleague, Charles Eliot
Norton, he might have found a better understanding of the plight of art
in his time, though hardly any consolation, had he read Thorstein
Veblen as well as Dante.
 S*E*L*E*C#T*E*D

B-I B L I O G R A P H Y

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Alsop, Joseph. The Rare Art Traditions: The History of Art Collecting
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Berenson, Bernard. Aesthetics and History New York: Pantheon, 1948.
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175
 176

Selected Bibliography

-. The Passionate Sightseer; from the Diaries, 1947 to 1956. New

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Boulenger, Jacques. Sous Louis Philippe: Les Dandys. Paris: Ollendorf,
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Selected Bibliography

Dumas, fils, Alexandre. La Dame aux camelias. Paris: Nelson ed.,

* Calmann-Leyy, n.d.
Fischel, Oskar, and Max von Boehn. Modes and Manners of the Nine¬
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Fuller, Henry Blake. With the Procession. New York: Harper’s, 1895.
Goblot, Edmond. La Barriere et le niveau. Paris: Alcan, 1925.
Guinon, Arthur. Decadence. Paris: Librairie theatrale, 1901.
Gunn, Peter. Vernon Lee: Violet Paget. London: Oxford University
Press, 1964.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Marble Faun. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1891.
Hitchcock, Henry Russell. The Architecture ofH. H. Richardson and
His Times. Hamdon, Conn.: Archon, 1961.
Hughes, Rupert. The Real New York. New York: Smart Set, 1904.
Jones, Howard Mumford. The Age of Energy: Varieties of American
Experience, 1865-1915. New York: Viking, 1970.
Konig, Rene. Sociologie de la mode. Paris: Payot, 1969.
Lano, Pierre de. LAmour a Paris sous le Second Empire. Paris: Empis,
1896.
Lee, Vernon. Art and Life. East Aurora, N.Y.: Roycroft Print Shop, 1896.
-. Belcaro, being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions. Lon¬
don: W. Satchell, 1881.
-. The Beautiful, an Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913.
Lewis, R. W. B. Edith Wharton. A Biography. New York: Harper and
Row, 1975.
Lucien-Graux, Docteur. Les Factures de la Dame aux Camelias. Paris:
Privately printed, 1934.
 178

Selected Bibliography

Lynes, Russel. The Taste-Makers. New York: Harper's, 1947.

Mariano, Nicky. Forty Years with Berenson. Introduction by Sir Ken¬
neth Clark. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1966.
Martin Fugier, Anne. La Bourgeoise: Femme au temps de Paul Bourget.
Paris: Grasset, 1983.
Maurer, Emil. Der Spatburger. Bern: Francke, 1963.
McAllister, Ward. Society as I Have Known It. New York: Cassel, 1890.
Miller, Michael B. The Bon Marche: Bourgeois Culture and the Depart¬
ment Store. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.
Morgan, H. Wayne. New Muses: Art in American Culture, 1865-1920.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978.
Mumford, Lewis. The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America,
1865-1895. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1931.
Morra, Count Umberto. Conversations with Berenson. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1965.
Nash, Roderick, ed. The Call of the Wild (1900-1916). New York: George
Braziller, 1970.
Nordau, Max. Degeneration. New York: Appleton, 1897.
Pater, Walter. Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas. New
York: Modern Library, n.d.
--. The Renaissance. London: Macmillan, 1935.
Pasdermadjan, H. The Department Store, Its Origins, Evolution and
Economics. London: Newman, 1954.
Samuels, Ernest. Bernard Berenson. The Making of a Connoisseur.
Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1979.
Saarinen, Aline. The Proud Possessors: The Lives, Times, and Tastes of
Some Adventurous American Collectors. New York: Random
House, 1958.
Schuyler, Montgomery. American Architecture and Other Writings. 2
vols. Edited by William H. Jordy and Ralph Coe. Cambridge,
Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1961.
Secrest, Meryle. Being Bernard Berenson. New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1979.
 179

Selected Bibliography

Smith; Bonnie G. Ladies of the Leisure Class. The Bourgeoises of

.Northern France in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton; New
Jersey: Princeton University Press; 1981.
Smith; Logan Pearsall. Unforgotten Years. Boston: Little, Brown, 1939.
Stael, Germaine de. Corinne, ou l ltalie. Paris: Charpentier, 1841.
Steegmuller, Francis. The Two Lives of James Jackson Jarves. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1951.
Symonds, John Addington. In the Key of Blue and other Prose Essays.
New York: Macmillan, 1893.
Taine, Hyppolite. Notes sur Paris: Vie et opinions de M. Frederic
Thomas Graindorge. Paris: Hachette, 1901.
-. Philosophic de l Art. 2 vols. Paris: Hachette, 1909.
-. Voyage en Italie. 2 vols. Paris: Hachette, 1898.
Tharp, Louise Hall. Mrs. Jack. Boston: Little, Brown, 1965.
Tomkins, Calvin. Merchants and Masterpieces. The Story of the Met¬
ropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Dutton, 1970.
Tomsich, John. A Genteel Endeavor: American Culture and Politics in
the Gilded Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971.
Veblen, Thorstein. Theory of the Leisure Class. Introduction by John
Kenneth Galbraith. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973.
Wendt, Lloyd, and Herman Kogan. Give the Lady What She Wants: The
Story of Marshall Field and Company. New York: Rand McNally,
1952.
Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. New York: Scribner’s, 1934.
Wharton, Edith, and Ogden Codman, Jr. The Decoration of Houses.
New York: Scribner’s, 1901.
Winner, Viola Hopkins. Henry James and the Visual Arts. Charlottes¬
ville: University of Virginia Press, 1970.
Zeldin, Theodore. France 1848-1945. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1977.
Zola, Emile. LArgent. Paris: Charpentier, 1927.
-. Au Bonheur des dames. Paris: Charpentier, 1883.
-Nana. Paris: Fasquelle, 1926.
I

'

• : ■ ■
 I • N • D • E • X

Acquisition, 114-115,120 and, 109,112, forms of leisure in

Adams, Henry, 37,122; aestheticism Europe and, 122-123; living in Eu¬
and, 101-102,103; Paris and, rope, 104-109; meaning of bibelots
96-97 and, 112-114; men with no interest
Adorno, Theodore, 170 in art and, 79-80; women on tour
Advertisements: affiches, 26; Beren- and, 78-79
son and age of, 144^145; depart¬ Antiquity, 7, 8, 9, 11,12
ment stores and, 38-39; as rival to Arcades. See Passages
art, 27-28 Architecture: bibelotization of art
Aesthetics: Adams on, 101-102; and, 68-69, department stores
analysis of spending and, 88; basis and, 34, 38, 44-45; of high life,
of, 158, 159; Berenson and, 125-126; houses as museums and,
144—149,154-155,158-161; 85; modern city and, 19; of Vander¬
bibelots and, 70-71; bourgeois bilt mansion, 29-30, 83-84. See
and, 151-152,168; city and, 21; also Houses
culture and, 139-140; defining life LArgent (Zola), 60
and, 160; department stores and, Arnold, Matthew, 138
47, 48, 49; ownership and, Art: for art’s sake, 102; Baudelaire
160-161; Pater and, 137; sensibility and, 12-15; Berenson and,
and, 157; taste and, 92; thought in 141 —144,149-152,163-166;
U.S. and, 94; variant forms of U.S., bibelotization of, 68, 73,110; bour¬
89,101-102,103 geois view of, 78; Bourget and
Aesthetics and History (Berenson), American attitude toward,
145,148,155 109-112,131; Cousin and, 8-9;
Alsop, Joseph, 11 French Revolution and, 5-6;
The American (James), 147 Ingres and, 10; Italy and, 119-120,
The American in Paris, or Heath's 130-131; James and, 147; Jarves
Picturesque Annual for 1843 and, 93-94, 95-96, 97-98, 99; Nor¬
(Janin), 23-24 ton and, 97-101; psychology of,
Americans: art as adornment and, 156; Quatremere de Quincy and,
80, 81-83; collecting in Europe 6-7,10-12,13,15-16; religion and,

181
 182

Index

Art (continued) The Beautiful (Lee), 155-156

8, 9, 94-96; reproductions and, Beauty, 79, 156; art and, 7-8; Baude¬
170, 171-174; Ruskin and Ameri¬ laire and, 13-15; of bibelots to
can attitude toward, 88-89, 91- wealthy, 85-86; Cousin and, 8-9;
93, 94, 95, 96, 97; Vanderbilt and, psychology of art and, 156;
30 Quatremere de Quincy and, 10
Art dealership: Berenson and, 136, Beauty (Baudelaire), 13-14
154-155,163-164, Bourget on, Beaux-Arts tradition, 48
135-136 Beerbohm, Max, 168
Art galleries, 169-170 Benda, Julien, 149, 157
Art Hints: Architecture, Painting, Benjamin, Walter, 19, 22, 26-27, 29,
Sculpture (Jarves), 93 34,119, 169,171
The Art Idea (Jarves), 93 Berenson, Bernard, 135,170; aes¬
Artists, high life and, 125. See also thetic theory of, 144-149; art and,
Painters 141-144; as art dealer, 136,
Art and Life (Lee), 155-156 154-155,163-164; biographical
Art market: analysis of, 169-174; in sketch of early life of, 137-138;
Italy, 130-131 as connoisseur of Italian art,
Art nouveau, 71, 73-74 163-166; culture and, 138-141; Lee
Art patrons, 88, 102; collectors as, on thinking of, 155-158, 160; phys¬
11-12 iological basis of aesthetic plea¬
Art Studies: The Old Masters of Italy: sure and, 158-161; theory of art
Painting (Jarves), 93 and, 149-152
Art Thoughts (Jarves), 93 Berenson, Mary Costelloe, 138
Au Bonheur des Dames (Zola), 37-38 Bergson, H., 149-150, 157
Authenticity, 131; Berenson and, 164, Bibelotization phenomenon, 53; of
165-166 American home, 110-111; of art,
Automobiles, 23 68, 73, 110; bourgeois understand¬
ing of art and, 73; interiors and,
Baccalaureate degree, 6 65-66; Wharton on, 71-72
Badaud (idler), 25. See also Flaneur Bibelots: Americans and meaning of,
Balzac, Honore de, 87 112-114; cabinets for, 63-65; in¬
Barker, Robert, 20 dustrialized, 70; James and, 69,
Bascom, John, 109 112; as symbol of success, 74;
Bastide, Jules, 38 Wharton and, 112; women and,
Baudelaire, Charles, 10, 19, 26; the 59-60, 62, 67; works of art as
arts and, 12-15; women and, 62 (Berenson), 145
 183

Indent

Blair, Hugh, 90 77; department stores and, 34;

Blondel, Jacques Frangois, 26 shops and, 26, 27; women as
Blue Duchess (Bourget), 68 bibelots and, 62
Bon Marche, 33 Caro, Professor, 141
Boredom, 25, 26 Cash registers, 34
Boston, 88, 97, 107 Cezanne, Paul, 143
Botticelli, Sandro, 161 Cities, 8; Benjamin on, 19-20; in
Boucicaut, Aristide, 33 Italy, 127-130; modern world and
La Bourgeoise (Martin-Fugier), 67 art and, 13, 15; observations of
Bourgeoisie: as aesthete, 151-152, flaneur and, 21-30; spatial con¬
168; art and fashidn and, 63; art cepts and, 19. See also Paris
and French Revolution and, 5-6; Clark, Lord, 141
Baudelaire and, 12-13; bibelotiza- Collecting, 72; bourgeoisie and, 65;
tion of art and, 73; department Bourget on, 103-104, 105; as con-
stores and, 39-40, 47; develop¬ noisseurship, 103-104,105; de-
ment of art and, 29; as idealists, generescence and, 63; as
8; interiors and, 65-68; private investment, 81-83; mania for,
property and, 160-161; use of art 69-71; nineteenth-century, 73;
by, 78 Norris on, 62-63; travel in Europe
Bourget, Paul, 120, 122, 164; Ameri¬ (swooping barbarians) and,
cans and art and, 109-112,131; art 109-114; Vanderbilt and, 83-84
dealers and, 135-136; collecting Collections, 72; Corinne’s (Corinne),
and, 103-104, 105; culture and, 4, 5, 16; James on, 69;
141; financial success and women Morgan and, 86; reproductions
and, 60; high life and, 123-126; and, 170; Steward and, 84-85; Van¬
interiors and, 68; Italian cities derbilt and, 84
and, 128 Collectors: in America, 83; as art pa¬
Boutiques. See Shops (boutiques) trons, 11-12; in Europe, 77
Brimo, Rene, 83-84 Considerations sur les richesses et le
Brooks, Van Wyck, 88 /uye (Meilhan), 86
The Brown Decades (Mumford), 29 Conspicuous consumption, 40, 127;
Brozik, Vacslav, 46 noble spending and, 86-88
Corinne (Stael), 3-5, 16
Cabinets for bibelots, 63-65 Cosmopolis (Bourget), 128
Campbell, Gabriel, 109 Coulevain, Pierre de, 105; American
Camp, Maxime du, 57 women and, 79
Capitalism, 21,103,171, culture and, Courtesans, 54-57, 60
 184

Indey
l

Cousin, Victor, 8, 92; idealism and, and, 40-41, 49; leisure and shop¬
89,101 ping and, 39-40; the new woman
Couturier, 58-59 and, 36-37; parallel between mu¬
Crawford, Francis Marion, 137 seum and, 41-44, 47-49; Zola on,
Culture: acquiring (in Europe), 34-35, 36, 37-38, 39
109-114; American concern with, de Piles, Roger, 27
77; Berenson and, 137, 138-141; Display (department store), 38-39
Bourget and, 141; difference be¬ Dreiser, Theodore, 35-36, 37, 81-83
tween American and European, Du Barry, Madame, 54, 55
106; difference between North and Du Bos, Jean Baptiste, 26
South and, 5; James and, 78, 79; Duffus, R. L., 99
men and, 111; Norton on, 99; San¬ Dumas, Alexandre (fils), 53-57
tayana and, 139; Wharton and, 139 Dvorak, Max, 144
Custom of the Country (Wharton),
105; meaning of bibelots and, Education, 90; in the arts, 7-8, 98;
112-114 department stores and art, 45-47,
49; department stores and women
La Dame auy Camelias (Dumas), and, 34-35, 37; French, 6
53-57 Education sentimentale (Flaubert), 28
Daumier, Honore, 22 Elevators, 34
Death in Venice (Mann), 130 Elias, Norbert, 87
Deau menages (Bourget), 110 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 90-91
The Decoration of Houses (Wharton), Essays on the Nature and Principles
71-72 of Taste (Alison), 90
Degas, H. G. Edgar, 146 Esther (Adams), 101-102,103
Degeneration, 63, 67, 69 Europe: American leisure in,
Degeneration (Nordau), 93 122-123; Americans collecting in,
Delacroix, Ferdinand, 10, 12 109-114; Americans living in,
Democratization of society, 126,139, 104-109
159; reproductions and, 173-174 Europeans, as collectors, 77
Department stores, 11,19, 70, 74; ar¬ L’Evolution du Gout auy Etats Unis
chitecture of, 34, 38, 44-45; art d’apres les collections (Brimo), 83
education and, 45-47, 49; creation
of, 33-34; displays and advertise¬ False Dawn (Wharton), 93
ments and, 38-39; Dreiser’s Sister Fashion: art joined with, 63;
Carrie and, 35-36, 37; extravagant bibelotization of, 72; as rival to art,
taste and, 62; interior decorating 27; women as bibelots and, 62
 185

Index

Feuillet, Octave, 90 Gratification, Berenson and, 145,

Ficino, Marsilio, 91 146, 147
Financial success: Bourget and, 60; Greeks (ancient), 7, 8, 9,11,12
James and, 61; women and, 55-58, Guys, Constantin, 26
60-61
Flaneur, 49, 53,119,121; department Halevy, Ludovic, 58
store (male), 41; Italy and, 120; new Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 91
eye of, 21; observations of (in Hegel, G. W. F„ 92
Paris), 21-30; passages and, 20-21 Hellenism, Berenson and, 142-143
Flaubert, Gustave, 14, 28, 90, 100 His Excellency Eugene Rougon
Florence, 154, analysis of^l28-129; (Zola), 27-28
Berenson and, 166-168; Jarves Hoppin, James Mason, 109
and, 95-96; Norton and, 99. See Hotels, 69
also Italy Houses: Wanamaker’s as teaching
Florentine Painters of the Renais¬ museum and, 47; of wealthy,
sance (Berenson), 145 29-30. See also Architecture
Fournel, Victor, 25, 27 Hulme, T. E„ 148, 149-150
Friedlander, Max J., 163 Hunt, Richard Morris, 84
Frieseke, Frederick X., 46 Hunt, William Morris, 84
Fry, Roger, 158-159
Fuller, H. B., 79-81 Idealism: of art, 8; Baudelaire and
Fulton, Robert, 20 beauty and, 15; Berenson and,
147-148; department stores and,
Galleries. See Passages 47, 49; European and American,
Gardner, Isabella Stewart, 5, 73, 107, 89; formulation of, 9-10; senti¬
112, 120, 137 mental, 101
Gautier, Theophile, 91, 101; art and, Income (unearned), 121
9-10 Industrialization, cities and, 13
Gavarni (Sulpice Chevalier), 22, 26 Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique, 10,
Genteel tradition, 101; Santayana on, 12, 14
101; in U.S., 89-90 Interior decoration: bourgeois style
Girodet-Trioson (de Roucy), 12 of, 63; department stores and,
Golden Bowl (James), 120 40-41, 49; Wharton on, 71
Goncourt brothers (Edmond de, and Interiors: bibelotization of, 65-66;
Jules de), 26n, 70 bourgeoise and, 67-68, 71;
Les Grands Magasins (Valmy- Bourget on, 68, Wharton on, 71
Baisse), 35 Italian Sensations (Bourget), 128
 186

Index

Italy: art and, 119-120; cities in, 124-125; shopping and depart¬
127-130; Jarves and, 95-96; ment stores and, 39-40
as marketplace, 130-131; Norton Leonardo, 149, 150
and, 99 Lesueur, Daniel, 9
I Tatti (Berenson villa), 166-168 Letters of credit, 121
Letters of introduction, 121
Lewis, R. W. B., 41
James, Henry, 81,100,101,103,105,
Life-enhancement, Berenson and,
107, 109, 120, 144, 170, 174, art and,
146-147,154
147; collection of bibelots and, 69;
Lighting (department store), 34
culture and, 78, 79; financial suc¬
Literature: art in U.S. and, 90-91;
cess and women and, 61; meaning
Berenson and, 138; cities and, 22;
of bibelots and, 112; Metropolitan
collecting in, 103; women and, 67.
Museum and, 114-115,121; as ob¬
See also names of specific authors
server of objects, 70
and specific literary works
Janin, Jules, 23-24
Luxury, 53, 54, 57, 126; women as
Jarves, James Jackson, 142; art and,
item of, 58-59, 62
93-94, 95-96, 97-98, 99; idealism
of, 48
Mademoiselle de Maupin (Gautier),
Johnson, Samuel, 21, 23, 152
9, 89
Journalism, 22
Maison dun artiste (Goncourt broth¬
Joy, Berenson and, 145,146, 147
ers), 70
Manet, Edouard, 10
Kant, Immanuel, 156 Mann, Thomas, 130
Kogan, Herman, 44n
Mansions. See Houses
Konig, Rene, 40, 63 The Marble Faun (Hawthorne), 91
Marriage, 61
The Lady Who Lost Her Painter (Se- Marshall Field, 36, 43-44
crest), 164 Martin-Fugier, Anne, 67
The Last Puritan (Santayana), 65-66 Materialism, 8, 47; as enemy of
Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles art, 11
Lettres (Blair), 90 Maupassant, Guy de, 90
Ledoux, Louis, 45 Meilhan, Senac de, 86
Lee, Vernon: Berenson and, 155-158, Men: art as adornment and, 80,
160; Ruskin and, 93 81-83; as collectors vs. women as
Leisure: forms of American (in Eu¬ consumers of objects, 68; conspic¬
rope), 122-123; for high livers, uous consumption of women and,
 187

Index

40; as department store flaneur, 41; New eye (city observation), 21,22
leisure and, 123; the "new” woman Newspapers, 22
and, 37; real world and, 67; with New York City, 99
no interest in art, 79-81; women Nobility, 74; old and new, 106-107;
and financial success and, 55-58, spending and, 86-88
60-61 Nordau, Max, 63, 67, 69, 93, 102
Mengs, Anton Raphael, 91 Norris, Frank, 62
Mercier, Sebastien, 21 Norton, Charles Eliot, 104, 122, 137,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 143; art and, 97-101; Jarves and,
114-115,121. See also Museums 94, 95
Miller, Michael, 33
Mistresses, 54-57, 60 Ohnet, Georges, 90
Modernity: art and, 48-49; idealist Oswald, Lord, 3, 5, 16
art and, 15; Quatremere de Quincy Ownership, 160-161
and, 96
Monet, Claude, 151 Paget, Violet. See Lee, Vernon
Money: class distinctions and, 174; Painters: Berenson and, 143,
fortunes of high society and, 148-149,150-152; collection in
126-127; playboys and, 124; un¬ Corinne and, 4; Cowperwood (The
earned income and, 121-122 Titan) and, 85-86; department
Monnier, Henri, 22 stores and, 46; Florence and,
Moore, George, 137 128-129; high society and, 125;
Morgan, J. P., 86, 162 Ruskin and, 95; in Vanderbilt col¬
Mornings in Florence (Ruskin), 129 lection, 84
Morra, Count, 141,165 Paintings: Berenson and Titian,
Mumford, Lewis, 29 165-166; in Corinne, 4, 5, 16; de¬
Museums, 172; bourgeois interiors partment stores and, 45-46; emo¬
resembling, 65; James and, tional responses to, 105-106; in
114-115,121; modern city and, 19; Newport villas, 112
parallel between department Panoramas, 20, 22
stores and, 41-44, 47-49; patrons Paris, 121; aesthetic space in, 19-20;
of art and, 11-12; wealthy houses city observation and, 21-30; mod¬
as, 85 ernity and, 96-97; Norton on, 99;
passages in, 20
Nation, 78, 99 Parrish, Maxwell, 129
Necker, Jacques, 4 Pascal, Blaise, 26
Needham, H.A., lOn Passages, 19,119; analysis of, 20-21;
 188

Index

Passages (continued) Rice, Anna Estelle, 46

arcades and, 28-29; lounger and, Rome, 128
24, 26; new spatial concept in city Rubens, Peter Paul, 9
and, 25 Ruskin, John, 102, 129, American at¬
Pastels (Bourget), 126 titude toward art and, 88-89,
Pater, Walter, 137, 138, 140, 142, 91-93, 94, 95, 96, 97; moralism
154-155,167 of, 47
Patrons. See Art patrons
La Petite Maison (Bastide), 38 Saarinen, Aline, 86
Philosophes classiques de XIX? Siecle Salon of 1846 (Baudelaire), 13
(Taine), 101 Santayana, George, 65, 88; culture
La Pia (Bourget), 135-136 and, 139; genteel tradition and,
The Pit (Norris), 62-63, 67 101; Norton and, 98
Plato, 8-9 Sargent, John Singer, 107, 112
Playboys, 123-124 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 37, 149
La Plus Belle (Halevy), 58 Secrest, Meryle, 142, 164
Pompadour, 54, 55 Shinn, Earl, 29
The Portrait of a Lady (James), 61 Shopping: department stores and,
Pound, Ezra, 48 39-40; as a diversion, 63
Prevost, Pierre, 20 Shops (boutiques), 70; Arnoux’s
Prices: art and, 169; department (Education sentimentale), 28, 73;
stores and, 33, 38 capitalism and, 26, 27; Quatremere
Private property, 160-161 de Quincy and, 11
Proust, Marcel, 23, 125; interiors and, Significant Form (Fry), 159
70-71 Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 35-36, 37
Smith, Logan Pearsall, 138
Quatremere de Quincy, Chrysos- Snobbism, 6, 104, 120, 121
tome, 20, 28, 47, 89, 142, 143, 154, Society: democratization of, 126, 139,
171; art and, 6-7,10-12,13,15-16; 159; reproductions and, 173-174
modern world and, 96 Spatial concepts: arcades and, 29;
modern city and, 19; passages
Raphael, 9, 10, 14 and, 25
Raymond, John Lansing, 109 The Spenders (Wilson), 64-65
Religion, art and, 8, 9, 94-96 Spending: extravagance of kept
Renaissance, Berenson and, 143 women and, 55-58; nobility and,
Reproductions, 170,171-174 86-88; works of art and, 81
Returns and exchanges (department Stael, Germaine de, 3-5, 6, 16, 139
store), 33-34, 38 Stanton, Elizabeth Cody, 39
 189

Index

Stendhal, 54 Vernet, Horace, 10, 12

Stewart, A. T., 84-85 Voltaire, 140
Stewart’s (department store), 46 Vulgarity, 48, 57, 104, 146, 162
Strahan, Edward, 29
Waldemar, Georges, 142-143
Tableau de Paris (Mercier), 21 Wanamaker’s, 44-47, 48
Tactile values (Berenson), 145-148, Wendt, Lloyd, 44n
157 Wharton, Edith, 41, 77, 105,129;
Taine, Hyppolite, 57-58, 92, 101 culture and, 139; interiors and, 71;
Tanner, H. O., 46 Jarves and, 93; meaning of bibelots
Taste: aesthetic choice and, 92); and, 112
American (1870s), 82; evolution of Whistler, James McNeill, 151,152
American, 83; mania for bibelots Wilde, Oscar, 101
and, 72; Norton on, 99 Wilson, Harry Leon, 63
The Titan (Dreiser), 81 Winckelmann, J. J., 92, 140
Titian, Berenson and authenticity of Women: art and, 53; Baudelaire and,
paintings of, 165-166 62; bibelots and, 67; Bourget and,
Tivoli, 3, 11, 16 60; conspicuous consumption
Touring: aesthetic aspects of, and, 40; as consumers of objects,
154-155; American men and, 68; as courtesans and mistresses,
82-83, 121; American women and, 54-57, 60; department stores and
78-79; collecting and, 109-114 education and, 34-35, 37; depart¬
Treason of the Intellectuals (Benda), ment stores and the “new,” 36-37;
157 financial success and, 55-58,
Trivia (Smith), 141 60-61; as items of luxury, 58-59;
leisure and, 123; literature and, 67;
Ucello, Paolo, 146 of successful American men, 80;
United States. See Americans traveling abroad, 78-79; as works
of art, 59-60, 62
Valmy-Baisse, J., 35 Wyeth, Andrew, 170, 173
Vanderbilt mansion, 29-30
Vanderbilt, William H., 83-84 Zola, Emile, 27-28, 90, 100; depart¬
Vasari, Giorgio, 143 ment stores and, 34-35, 36, 37-38,
Veblen, Thorstein, 86, 87, 127 39; women and, 60
Venice, 129-130
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ated in which to sell and display it. Ar¬

cades, museums, and department stores
(like Bon Marche and Wanamaker’s)
proliferated alongside the mania for
collecting. Homes were redefined as
showcases. A “new woman” was cre¬
ated, to be viewed as a bibelot herself,
devoting her existence to the pleasures
of shopping. In this ambiguous world of
acquisitiveness, the art object was no
longer defined by aesthetics but by its
social role, social prejudices, presuppo¬
sitions, associations, money, and class. A
work of art came to function less as a
masterpiece inviting a critical reaction
than as a social sign conferring distinc¬
tion upon its possessor.

Saisselin’s intriguing book spans the

history of art in the nineteenth century
and shows the slow transformation from
art perceived as a historical sign and
aesthetic object to art as a collectible—a
super-bibelot with its corresponding su¬
per-prices.

Remy G. Saisselin is an art historian and

the author of several books, including
Taste in Eighteenth-Century France and
The Rule of Reason and the Ruses of the
Heart.

Photograph by Byron. Bedroom, 1905.

The Byron Collection.
Museum of the City of New York.

Rutgers University Press

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