The world in St Louis: Phillip Prodger surveys the extraordinary range of art shown in the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1904 World's Fair, perhaps the last gasp of the great nineteenth-century salon exhibitions

Apollo, Dec, 2004 by Phillip Prodger

When Halsey Ives sat down to write the ground rules for the Palace of Fine Arts at St Louis's first and only world's fail; idealism flowed from his pen with flourish. He was determined it would not be another international salon of the least common denominator. 'All art work', he wrote, 'whether on canvas, in marble, plaster, wood, metal, glass, porcelain, textile or other material--in the creation of which the artist-producer had worked with conviction and knowledge--are recognized as equally deserving of respect in proportion as it is worthy from the standpoints of inspiration and technique.' (1) In other words, the Art Palace would house an exhibition driven by the highest standards of artistry and the most liberal interpretation of method. Works would be evaluated solely on their effectiveness, and all media--including painting, sculpture, drawing, ceramics, and photography--would be equally valued. Buoyed by such progressive thinking, the official prospectus for the Fair assured readers that 'considerations of quality will take precedence over those of quantity'. (2) In no time, Ives's invitation to potential exhibitors with its hopeful words was printed in nine languages, ready for distribution to the arts academies of the world in the summer of 1902. (3)

In retrospect, the timing of lves's preparations should have been his first clue that not everything would come about as planned, as the Fair was postponed for a year due to delays in finance and construction. It had been slated to open in 1903, marking a hundred years since the purchase of the territories west of the Mississippi by President Thomas Jefferson. Instead, the centenary of Lewis and Clark's expedition to explore the territory from 1804-1806 was commemorated. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition, as it was to be known, had also been timed to occur exactly ten years after Chicago had held its own world's fair, the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Inter-urban rivalry was a subtext of both fairs: in the late nineteenth century, Chicago and St Louis still wrestled for the unofficial title of capital of the American midwest. Chicago's fair might have been first but St Louis's was to be grandest--the city reserved more than twice the acreage for its fair than Chicago had and prepared to upstage its northern neighbour in every conceivable way.

Ives, who was employed comfortably as a professor of art at Washington University in St Louis, was a logical choice to organise the displays of the Art Palace. Trained as an artist and military draughtsman, he had lived for a time in Mexico and was said to have an unusually international outlook. (4) He had also been the head of the art department at the Chicago Exposition, which was considered a logistical triumph if not a resounding aesthetic success. Armed with the experience of 1893 and recognising its shortcomings, Ives felt he could produce an art salon for the ages. Using the contacts he had developed in Chicago, he set out to find interesting, cutting-edge examples of contemporary art and to vet work more thoroughly than he land in Chicago. The St Louis Art Palace was to be unreservedly forward-looking and more selective than its predecessor.

Officially the emphasis in St Louis's Art Palace was to be contemporary art, which was defined for the purposes of the exhibition as art of the previous ten years. The display (Fig 2) was housed in a structure designed by Cass Gilbert (1859-1934), occupying the highest promontory of the grounds in Forest Park. It was laid out in three Grecian-inspired buildings: a central, permanent building made of stone and two connected, temporary buildings made of staff mixed with hemp and straw. The central building, which was intended ultimately to house the St Louis Art Museum, was dedicated to American art, while the adjoining buildings were given over to twenty-six other countries. (5) The largest spaces in these were dedicated to France, Germany and Britain, although most other European countries were represented. In addition, smaller displays were mounted by Argentina, Brazil Canada, Ceylon, China, Cuba, Japan, Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru. (6) The inclusion of a permanent, central building increased costs significantly. At nearly a million dollars, the Art Palace was roughly twice as expensive as comparable Fair palaces, such as the Palace of Liberal Arts and the Palace of Varied Industries. (7) Consequently, the building was smaller and more austere than it might have been. Perhaps as a result of these compromises, Gilbert obscured the building completely during the course of the Fair by placing his fantastical Festival Hall directly in front of the Art Palace.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Although art of the previous decade was the centrepiece of the display, earlier works were also included in separate, limited sections. This was achieved by creating two special categories within the United States galleries. The first was a retrospective section dedicated to American art produced from the date of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 until 1893. The second was a loan section of examples owned by American public and private collections. By adding these two sections, Ives and his colleagues effectively fashioned a way to include any work to their liking, although the official catalogue of the Art Palace made clear that the influence of a work on American artists would be paramount. (8)