Picturing 'a city for a single summer': paintings of the World's Columbian Exposition

Relatively few nineteenth-century American paintings picture and interpret urban space. The contemporary functions of art, the working methods of artists, the mechanisms of patronage, and a general anxiety concerning the meaning and character of American cities resulted in little of what we could call pictorial urban introspection or celebration. It is particularly important, therefore, to investigate such a notable exception as the campaign to picture the World's Columbian Exposition by such artists as John H. Twachtman, Thomas Moran, Theodore Robinson, Childe Hassam, and Winslow Homer, artists whose reputations rest on their images of nature. Taken as a set, the seventy or so extant oils of the fair executed by the four dozen artists who undertook the subject reveal a remarkably uniform interpretation of its spaces, its forms, and its cultural meaning.(1)

Paintings of the Exposition, held in Chicago's lakeshore Jackson Park in 1893, describe it as if it were a city and in so doing collaborate in the larger project to imagine magnificent, almost magical, and deliberately ironic transformations: the pile of California oranges is an obelisk (both marking a spot and marking nothing), the daily parade of camels and tribal finery is a Cairo wedding procession (both celebrating the surrender of noble virginity and celebrating nothing), the staff-on-lath Court of Honor is grandly Roman, eternal urban public architecture (both historically resonant and pasteboard simulacrum).(2) The questions that this essay asks are: what is the nature of the transformation the painters achieve, and what is the image they create in recording select aspects of the fair for future retrospection? Put another way, if seen as material evidence of how the fair's ideology was read by a group of visually acute professional observers, what can these works tell us about the cultural work that the fair and the medium of painting were called on to do? Through these images one can begin to understand the nature of the fair's popular success and access whether the tale it told Americans (and others) about America in the language of material culture was regressive or progressive. By eliding markers of class, ownership, individualism, infrastructure, work, and entrepreneurial competition, the paintings and the fair they record map for us not only potential fin-de-siecle architectural and technological futures but also social visions. What they intend is celebration; what they achieve - by selection, by omission, by reiteration, by framing, and by point of view - is a curious commentary on the fair's utopic ideology.

Focusing on what contemporaries would have understood to be the beautiful rather than the picturesque or technologically innovative aspects of the fair, the painters created images that we simultaneously understand to be of a city (a city has history, denizens, a future) and a memory (evoking those scenes experienced but no longer experienceable by the viewer). As such the paintings are both celebratory and nostalgic. The Exposition as a whole was, on its surface, an art project, although it was also a vehicle for novel technological prowess, reactionary ethnography, model urban social relations, and much else, and the paintings silently echo this surface-interior dualism.

This essay will investigate the nature of the pictorial order recorded by these images and will touch on their role as surviving material evidence of the Exposition within America's fabricated cultural landscape. Just as the fair's elaborate infrastructure, its coordinated planning, and its Roman vocabulary became active agents in modeling subsequent city planning in the United States, so these paintings participated in that long-range project, instructing Americans not only in what the Exposition buildings and grounds looked like but also in how they were to be perceived and understood, and incorporated (as idea if not as physical form) into a permanent future.

The Columbian Exposition was not only one of the most ambitious events of its type, it was also one of the most documented. The focus here is on paintings, both those representative of the vast majority in terms of subject, point of view, and tone, and a few that present themselves as exceptions, pointing up pictorial (and conceptual) possibilities overlooked or avoided by the rest. Unique images in oil on canvas or watercolor and gouache on paper constitute, of course, only a fraction of the images produced of and for the fair. Photographs, engravings, lithographs, souvenir handkerchiefs, expansive verbal descriptions pictured the project for an eager national audience as well as for the twenty-seven million visitors seeking a record for future memory even as they relished their immediate Exposition experience.(3) It would seem that these rather different media - one utilized in perhaps a hundred unique images painstakingly crafted by hand and purchasable by single patrons, and one resulting in thousands of impressions by mechanical reproduction for a broad popular audience - would represent technical, social, and pictorial polarities. The distinction in media, however, between images produced in unique examples (paintings) and those produced by mechanical reproduction (photography and graphic means) is not as clear as it might appear; some paintings were made primarily for reproduction (especially the monochromatic watercolor and gouache works on paper), and other paintings are known to have been executed utilizing such popular media as photographs.(4) Moreover, the images discussed here were not all made on site as we might expect; they include projections of what will be, and retrospective images of what has been as well as documents of immediate visual experience. Hence the functional distinction between paintings and prints is ambiguous. Documentary, promotional, mnemonic, illustrative, instructive, elegiac - both categories of images functioned in diverse and overlapping ways for multiple audiences.