The Artistic Commitment of Kenyon Cox: An American Neoclassical Artist

Abstract

At the end of the nineteenth century, the United States had undergone deep transformations. The second Industrial Revolution had created huge amounts of new wealth and power. This led to an alteration of the urban social fabric and to a repositioning of the country on the international scene.Since the 1870s, the American Renaissance had been a vehicle for the diffusion of new values and new concepts. As a broad neoclassical movement in the arts, it was committed to a rewriting of the country’s national past.At the time, Kenyon Cox (1856-1919) distinguished himself as one of the major artists of the movement, but also as one of its most influential critics and theorists. Cox developed theories on what painting was supposed to be and what it should be a vehicle of, but also, on what painting had inherited from the past and what its goal for the future should be. The goal of this paper will be to show in what way Kenyon Cox’s general theories on art, on history and on society can be seen as forms of artistic commitment. This will be done by using a selection of his writings from the 1890s to the 1910s. His ideas mirrored both the angst of deep social transformations brought on by the second industrial revolution, and the martial enthusiasm which led to the war with Spain.