Abstract
Victorian artists were remarkably literate; they wrote autobiographies, diaries, and essays and befriended writers and journalists. Writing had become a way to present themselves on the open market and to generate a public image as individuals and collectively within the new professionalism emerging in the century. Letter writing was purposed to solidify and improve artists’ social capital, and their comments were always embedded in social relationships and practices. Thus, artists’ letters reveal much about the artworld structure; its players; and its overlapping spheres of social, economic, and professional identities. Their letters combined frankness with rhetorical pleading and contained their own press releases, studio invitations, and responses to criticism and were often intended for public consumption if used in critics’ reviews. Through letters, artists and critics revealed their reciprocal authority and agency and did not simply reflect the artworld but shaped that world. In their letters, economic gains were sublimated by artists’ desire for fame, Royal Academy acceptance, and a place in art history, then an emerging university discipline, seeking symbolic investments in their reputations and demonstrating that the market is cultural, not just economic. In their letters artists made clear that commodification does not destroy or pollute subjectivity.
Highlights
Recognizing the rhetorical nature of artists’ statements and defining them as performative speech acts, Natalie Adamson and Linda Goddard question ‘the expectations of authenticity and authority that have surrounded the artist’s statement from early manifestations . . . to the present day
Letters reveal artworld networks, the complex intertwined social and professional ties among all artworld players, as artists attempted to be successful in both the canon and the market, sites often incompatible with one another and requiring different rhetorical tactics
The Victorian art press included a variety of information ranging from engravings and criticism to records of exhibitions and sales in a seamless way that indicated a continuum between the market and art production
Summary
Recognizing the rhetorical nature of artists’ statements and defining them as performative speech acts, Natalie Adamson and Linda Goddard question ‘the expectations of authenticity and authority that have surrounded the artist’s statement from early manifestations . . . to the present day. Many of the letters I cite here reveal that while some artists had networks of patrons and critics supporting them, many Victorian artists, especially those who are obscure, struggled to gain a foothold in the artworld and art market In this way, the letters I cite fit Margaretta Jolly’s and Liz Stanley’s suggestion that letters are proto-genres whose distinctive yet infinitely malleable features can be best understood through the social and cultural codes of relationships and whose meanings are in the relationship between writer and reader, rather than in the subject Letters became, like drawings or sketches, revelations of the inner mind of the so-called genius and of the nature of creativity itself, making them worth saving for posterity or for the growing market value they were accruing
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