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

Abstract

Wendy Jean Katz, professor of art history at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, shows how “the politics of the antebellum press affected the meaning of American art in ways that have gone unrecognized” through “political positioning” within art and art criticism, which “actually shaped antebellum politics” (p. 1). Katz explores how the burgeoning power of the press paralleled national, social, political, and economic growth in the sixty-year era examined in this informative text. Katz provides extensive primary resources of antebellum art criticism from scholarly journal articles, newspapers, and magazines, and highlights the importance of archives and special collections. Notable scholarship by Clement Greenberg, Frank Luther Mott, Alan Wallach, and others used by Katz supports connections to early journalistic form and function, social movements, art history, and criticism. Katz notes the attention given to women and immigrants as antebellum readers, revealing targeted bias, and she also details the growth of literacy, nationalism,...