Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

In this paper I assess the growing social role of visual culture and public taste in US civic culture, 1890-1920 through the lens of the Metropolitan Museum and several progressive dealers, such as Martin Birnbaum, Alfred Stieglitz and Joseph Brummer, all of whom helped shape the early 20th-c. US artworld by seeking to spread cultural knowledge to a wide general public and fuel a growing US cosmopolitanism. These dealers’ attention to public access to historical and cultural knowledge was aligned with the new radical social mission of museums in the “Progressive Era,” 1890-1920: to expand public access (Sunday openings begun in 1891), apply democratic principles, remove elite associations, develop public education programs, and adopt European museums’ art historical chronologies and display practices. The lead reformer, New York’s Metropolitan Museum, motivated changes that spread to emerging Midwest museums and the popular press that increasingly wrote about artworld cultural events. While anticipated in the mid-19th century, as critics, artists, dealers and collectors became more prominent in public life and sought to reach a wide public, these change met with limited success. After 1900, however, a widely literate public with educational and economic resources and leisure to enjoy new modes of transportation and communication began avidly seeking cultural capital by collecting prints and photographs of European art and attending museums, stimulating prolific photographic companies, urban museums, a flourishing art press, myriad books about art, artists, and collectors, and museums’ new attention to their social role.