1900 a la Mode

Art in America, Sept, 2000 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

Many of the era's debates about the role of ornament, craft, color and popular tradition were reenacted in an appealing selection of children's books. The offerings ranged from Ivan Bilibin's sumptuous illustrations for the fairy tale Vassilisa the Beautiful (1902) to Benjamin Rabier's deliciously silly Drol's de Betes et Drol's de Gens! (1906), whose compartmentalized layout and bearded Noah (groovily striding away from an encounter with a serpent) just might make it the direct forerunner of R. Crumb's Mr. Natural comics.

The organizers appear to have aimed for an evenhanded international survey. Scandinavian design in particular was well represented, and generous attention was paid to American photography. But overall, the American presentation was peculiar. Two Tiffany vases and a Stickley armchair plus six illustrated books marked the extent of American design. There were neither paintings nor sculptures nor pottery by American artists. Frank Lloyd Wright, who surely merited inclusion in the gallery of heroic early proponents of "total art," was represented by a single drawing for the dining room of the Dana House (1902-04) in Springfield, Ill., in the section dedicated to "The Quest for National Sources." To be precise, Wright's design was offered as an instance of "primitivism," and the catalogue cites Wright's repetition of the motif of the indigenous sumac plant as an evocation of an America "des mayas et des wigwams." Indeed, the Native American seems to have loomed large for the French curators, who devoted a separate section of photographs to the subject.

The other American architectural projects were Charles B. Atwood's Fine Arts Building for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, seen in a documentary photograph by Charles Dudley Arnold; Francis L.V. Hoppin's radiant ink-and-gouache rendering of the future Brooklyn Museum (1893), executed for the firm of McKim, Mead and White; and Hughson Hawley's handsome perspective of Daniel Hudson Burnham & Company's Philadelphia Land Title Building (1900). All three show an American architecture that was still subservient to France's Beaux-Arts vocabulary of ornament. Yet Louis Sullivan, whose prodigious and influential work was inexplicably absent from the show (though he is cited in the catalogue), along with other architects of the Chicago School, had already erected buildings that substantially eroded that dependence.

Even more surprising than the somewhat lopsided view of America was the degree to which the objects selected for "1900" seemed incapable of conveying the contemporary realities that are discussed in the catalogue essays. Some sense of the new consumer environment was provided by the inclusion of commercial posters. But the explosion of urban populations, the growth of factories, and the impact of the train and automobile, to note just a few examples, were seen only through the ameliorating mist of Pictorialist photographs, when they were seen at all. Images of labor utterly sanitized the ordeal of work, whether Oscar Hofmeister's 1899 photograph of a pensive peasant woman with a rake on her shoulder, or Felix Thiollier's painting of a slag heap at sunset, in which the silhouetted workers, young and old, seem more akin to Picasso's itinerant saltimbanques than to Courbet's oppressed stone breakers.