A Visitable Past [antikvár]

PREFACE This study focuses on a large and various group of images of Venice by American artists, works that seem to have perplexed scholars in their traditional quest for the American character of American art. These works constitute a definable set, however, and their very existence comments upon the larger quest for an American culture in interesting, if indirect, ways. They are not as well known as those iconic celebrations of nature with which we are most familiar in nineteenth-century painting, but neither are they topographical exercises set in a merely alien locale. They pursue complex goals, interesting interrogatives, and they do so in such numbers, with such a concentration of energy that it seems curious that they have heretofore eluded both the art historical and the cultural historical canon. Nineteenth-century American paintings of urban subjects are rare in spite of the example set by the French from midcentury in their enthusiastic painterly investigation of Paris. Given this apparent reluctance to pursue urban pictorial problems, this single substantial venture into architectural subjects triggers the curiosity of those interested in American interpretations of architectural space and stmcture. The present study is an investigation of the meanings that can be discovered (and how those meanings can be discovered) in these artists' several approaches to this singular urban subject. The facts of this Venice-viewing phenomenon, matters concerning artists' biographies, tourism, and popular culture, are discussed in another work, an exhibition catalog entitled Venice: The American View, !860-1920. ' The current work moves in another direction—toward close analysis of visual texts within the context of the universe of works as a whole. Because this is primarily an interpretive work, a narrative of the discovery of meaning in relationships, the examples discussed have been chosen to explicate most clearly those structures and juxtapositions. But the study began as an investigation of the entire corpus of Venice images, and the na- ture of the works dictated the shape of the analysis from the outset. The images discussed are, then, deliberately representative of the types of views produced and also exemplary of the artists' approaches to finding meaning in their subject and creating meaning in their interpretation. That some of the most talented artists found in Venice the occasion for some of their most creative, aesthetically successful thinking and painting is a fortunate but not surprising fact which, I hope, will contribute to interest in this study and in the subject as a whole. Beyond an investigation of American late nineteenth-century interpretations of Venice, of die past, and of the fact of belatedness of which they are a symptom, this book also centrally concerns itself with issues of theory and approach. It assumes that objects contain within their structure significant and decodable attitudes, or as Jan Mukarovsky has put it: The understanding that the artistic sign establishes among people does not pertain to things, even when they are represented in the work, but to a certain attitude toward tilings, a certain attitude on the part of man toward the entire reality that surrounds him, not only to that reality which is directly represented in the given case. The work does not, however, communicate this attitude—hence the intrinsic artistic "content" of the work is also inexpressible in words—but evokes it directly in the perceiver. We call this attitude the "meaning" of the work only because it is rendered in the work objectively by its organization, and it is therefore accessible to everyone.^ The argument that objects, and images of objects, are encoded with intellectual postures that are culturally suggestive, even eloquent, links the art object to its context in a manner unobtainable in most models of art historical investigation. Specifically, this study suggests that by thinking in terms