Radically Anti-Modern

Abstract

By 1863, new beliefs about the relationship between individual consciousness and the objects of its knowing was dividing American culture, including the art world, into three distinct groups. Mainstream artists and the Pre-Raphaelites both sought to create truthful representations. Mainstream artists like Frederic Church were indirect Realists who assumed that they could know the truth of things in the world as they existed in themselves apart from the perceiver’s apprehension of them. The Pre-Raphaelites were direct Realists who argued that mainstream methods were tainted by subjectivity. Anti-modern conservatives, the Pre-Raphaelites insisted that to create truthful representations artists needed to empty themselves of self, which could be accomplished only with the aid of something like divine grace. Opposed to both these groups was an emergent faction that included artists such as John Frederick Kensett, Sanford Gifford, and Winslow Homer. These artists accepted the inescapability of subjectivity, abandoned the ideal of truth in art, and embraced the idea that works of art should be valued primarily as expressions of the artist’s unique experience.