Visual Art and the Urban Evolution of the New South

By Deborah C. Pollack

Visual Art and the Urban Evolution of the New South recounts the enormous influence of artists in the evolution of six southern cities—Atlanta, Charleston, New Orleans, Louisville, Austin, and Miami—from 1865 to 1950. In the decades following the Civil War, painters, sculptors, photographers, and illustrators in these municipalities employed their talents to articulate concepts of the New South, aestheticism, and Gilded Age opulence and to construct a visual culture far beyond providing pretty pictures in public buildings and statues in city squares.

As Deborah C. Pollack investigates New South proponents such as Henry W. Grady of Atlanta and other regional leaders, she identifies "cultural strivers"—philanthropists, women's organizations, entrepreneurs, writers, architects, politicians, and dreamers—who united with visual artists to champion the arts both as a means of cultural preservation and as mechanisms of civic progress. Aestheticism, made popular by Oscar Wilde's southern tours during the Gilded Age, was another driving force in art creation and urban improvement. Specific art works occasionally precipitated controversy and incited public anger, yet for the most part artists of all kinds were recognized as providing inspirational incentives for self-improvement, civic enhancement and tourism, art appreciation, and personal fulfillment through the love of beauty.

Each of the six New South cities entered the late nineteenth century with fractured artistic heritages. Charleston and Atlanta had to recover from wartime devastation. The infrastructures of New Orleans and Louisville were barely damaged by war, but their social underpinnings were shattered by the end of slavery and postwar economic depression. Austin was not vitalized until after the Civil War and Miami was a post-Civil War creation. Pollack surveys these New South cities with an eye to understanding how each locale shaped its artistic and aesthetic self-perception across a spectrum of economic, political, gender, and race issues. She also discusses Lost Cause imagery, present in all the studied municipalities.

While many art history volumes concerning the South focus on sultry landscapes outside the urban grid, Visual Art and the Urban Evolution of the New South explores the art belonging to its cities, whether exhibited in its museums, expositions, and galleries, or reflective of its parks, plazas, marketplaces, industrial areas, gardens, and universities. It also identifies and celebrates the creative urban humanity who helped build the cultural and social framework for the modern southern city.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Jan 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781611174335

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VISUAL ART AND THE URBAN EVOLUTION OF THE NEW SOUTH

VISUAL ART AND THE URBAN EVOLUTION OF THE NEW SOUTH

Deborah C. Pollack         

© 2015 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press

Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.sc.edu/uscpress

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Pollack, Deborah C.

    Visual art and the urban evolution of the New South / Deborah C. Pollack.

        pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-1-61117-432-8 (hardbound : alk. paper) —ISBN 978-1-61117-433-5 (ebook) 1. Art, American—Southern States—19th century. 2. Art, American—Southern States—20th century. 3. Art and society—Southern States—History—19th century. 4. Art and society—Southern States—History—20th century. 5. Southern States—Social conditions—1865–1945. 6. Southern States—Social conditions—20th century.

I. Title.

    N6520.P65 2015

    709.75'091732—dc23

    2014023117

JACKET PHOTOGRAPH: Enid Yandell with Pallas Athena, ca. 1897, courtesy of the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

TO EDDIE

CONTENTS

PREFACE | ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

ATLANTA New South Brilliance Ascending from Embers of Civil War

CHAPTER TWO

CHARLESTON Refined Enchantment within a New South Framework

CHAPTER THREE

NEW ORLEANS Lofty Art Soaring above Shallow Ground

CHAPTER FOUR

LOUISVILLE Intertwining Roots at the Portal of North and South

CHAPTER FIVE

AUSTIN Aesthetic Mélange of Grit, History, and Old South Remembrance

CHAPTER SIX

MIAMI, MIAMI BEACH, AND CORAL GABLES Southern Civilization of Northern Dreams

NOTES | SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY | INDEX

PREFACE

In 2010 I received an e-mail from Zane L. Miller, Charles Phelps Taft Professor Emeritus of History, University of Cincinnati, who requested that I tackle the subject of art and southern cities. He remarked, I think that art history and urban history go together and suggested to do what you did in a previous interdisciplinary book I wrote concerning Laura Woodward, a Hudson River School/Florida artist, and her times. Dr. Miller, whom I hadn’t encountered until then, gave me the choice to explore six cities either in Florida or throughout the South. I opted for the broader area of interest. He and I selected the municipalities, and after introducing me to urban historical books, he sent me on my adventure.

During the research I was frankly intrigued that no matter what city I explored, artists and art supporters had a similar and formidable impact on urban evolution, social change, historic preservation, and tourism. Some were actively involved in the planning, promoting, building, and/or beautification of their municipalities. This spurred me to delve further. In doing so I also learned how aestheticism, largely via John Ruskin and Oscar Wilde, influenced citizens of all the municipalities and that artists and art strivers also excelled at trumpeting the New South message and introducing northern art tendencies to their cities. All this made my study fascinating as these notions had not, to my knowledge, been extensively investigated in any other southern art historical publication. Equally compelling was the contribution of women artists and art proponents who united to help improve their cities and in some cases effectuate museums. Finally, concurrent issues such as suffrage and, as it was a story of the South, racial unrest could not be ignored as both subjects affected our cities’ evolution.

This examination of southern urban growth and its relationship to art has been an arduous effort. But it was well worth it, considering how much I learned and can now share.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am extremely grateful to Zane L. Miller, Charles Phelps Taft Professor Emeritus of History, University of Cincinnati, for his innovative idea, generous support, and wise advice. In the very early stages of the manuscript, Dr. Miller made several suggestions and edited a portion of the first draft. He especially helped me with regard to Henry W. Grady’s 1886 New South speech and provided me with a salient quotation from Dr. Miller’s mentor, Richard C. Wade.

I also want especially to acknowledge Alexander Moore, acquisitions editor of the University of South Carolina Press, for his immediate and steadfast enthusiasm for the project. His kindness and encouragement kept me from drowning myself in cupcakes during the review process and the wait for committee approval. My sincerest gratitude is also extended to those anonymous reviewers he selected. They helped me improve the treatise a great deal. He as well as Linda Haines Fogle, assistant director for operations, assisted me in the parameters for the preparation of the final manuscript. I also thank the editorial and design and production staff at the Press.

My husband, Edward Pollack, deserves my special thanks for instilling in me a more thorough appreciation of American sculpture. Additionally, I married into his remarkable period library encompassing rare art books, catalogues, and magazines dating back to the nineteenth century—a collection we have enhanced during our many years together.

I was further assisted by many generous people and institutions, including Paige Adair, reprographics manager, Atlanta History Center; Nancy Adgent, Rockefeller Foundation; Laura Proctor Ames; Andy and Clifton Anderson; John Anderson, preservation officer, Archives and Information Services Division, Texas State Library and Archives Commission; Jim Baggett, head, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Birmingham Public Library; Joyce N. Baker, curatorial assistant/rights and reproductions, Gibbes Museum of Art; Ally Beck, Catalogue Production and Design, Leslie Hindman Auctioneers; Erica Benton, Charlton Hall Galleries, Inc.; Jennae Biddiscombe, registrar, Louisiana State Museum; Germain J. Bienvenu, librarian, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Special Collections, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University Libraries; Holly Blount, Vizcaya Museum and Gardens; John Bodnar; Judith Bonner, senior curator/curator of art, the Historic New Orleans Collection; Amy K. Bowman, photographs archivist, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin; Gene Burch; Paul Burns, Community Relations, Louisville Free Public Library; Laura Cappell, Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries, Otto Richter Library; Tara Carlisle, project development librarian, University of North Texas Libraries; Perry Carter; Zann Carter; Phimister Proctor Sandy Church; Emily Starbuck Crone; Heather Thayer Culligan, collections manager, Atlanta History Center; Liz DeHart, director of marketing and communications, Olmsted Parks Conservancy, Louisville; Robin T. Dettre, coordinator, Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture, Smithsonian American Art Museum; Nicolette A. Dobrowolski, head of public services, reference and access services librarian, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library; Katie Dooley; Sarah Dorpinghaus, digital projects library manager, University of Kentucky Digital Library Services; Tina Dunkley, director, Clark Atlanta University Art Galleries; Abbie Edens, librarian, Columbus Museum; Jimmy S. Emerson, DVM; Kathy Erickson, Office of the Chief Architect, U.S. General Services Administration; Mary Jo Fairchild, archivist, South Carolina Historical Society; James Fetherolf; Susan Finley, Special Collections, University of Louisville; Jason Flahardy, photographic archivist, University of Kentucky Archives; Heather Fox, Filson Historical Society; Cynthia Franco, librarian, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University; Tim Frillingos, museum services manager, Georgia Office of the Secretary of State, Division of Archives and History; Daniel B. Gelfand; Mae Whitlock Gentry, great-niece of Edwin and Elise Harleston; Heather Gilbert, digital scholarship librarian, College of Charleston, project coordinator, Lowcountry Digital Library; Allison Gillette, librarian, Speed Art Museum; Sarah Gillis, assistant registrar, Image Management, Worcester Art Museum; Aryn Glazier, Photo Services, The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History; James Goldsmith; Amy Goodhart, archivist, Woman’s Club of Coconut Grove; Robin Goodman, registrar, Kalamazoo Institute of Arts; Don Graham, Ph.D., professor of English, University of Texas; Chelsea Guerdat, director of exhibitions, Bass Museum of Art; Raechel Guest, executive director/curator, Cornwall Historical Society; Kristen Gurciullo, photographic archives assistant, Florida Photographic Collection, State Archives of Florida; Cynthia Ham, curatorial assistant, Clark Atlanta University Art Galleries; David Verner Hamilton, Verner Gallery, Ltd.; Jason Hayden, director of marketing and operations, Owensboro Museum of Fine Art; Tracey Daniels Hickey, administrative director/events coordinator, Junior League of Athens, Taylor-Grady House; Jana Hill, collection information and imaging manager, Amon Carter Museum of American Art; Janice Hindes, president, Coppini Academy; Mary Beth Hinton, assistant to the director, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library; James J. Holmberg, curator, Special Collections, Filson Historical Society; Dave Holston, former director, strategic design management, University of Texas at Austin; Frank Holt, executive director, Mennello Museum of American Art; Catherine Causier Howell, reference archivist, Austin History Center, Austin Public Library; Dawn Hugh, Archives and Research Center, HistoryMiami; Corrine Jennings, Wilmer Jennings Gallery: Kenkeleba, New York, N.Y.; Faye L. Jensen, Ph.D., executive director, South Carolina Historical Society; Brian Jessee; McGarrah Jessee; Jeff Joeckel, archivist, National Register of Historic Places; Joshua Jones, registrar, Rockford Art Museum; Nicole Joniec, Print Department assistant and Digital Collections manager, Library Company of Philadelphia; Kelly Kerney, research assistant, Valentine Richmond History Center; Diane Kirkland, dianekirklandphoto.com; Michelle Lambing, graphics coordinator, Texas State Preservation Board; Michelle LeBlanc Leckert, CAI, vice president, Neal Auction Company, Inc.; Tony Lewis, curator of visual arts, Louisiana State Museum; Debbie Linder; Martha Loutfi; Barbara Lovejoy, registrar, the Art Museum at the University of Kentucky; Frances Dolly MacIntyre; Richard Manoogian; Helen Matthews, librarian, Atlanta History Center; Michael Stephen McFarland; Peter Mears, associate curator, Art Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin; Jana Meyer, cataloging librarian, South Carolina Historical Society; Michael C. Miller, Calif., manager, Austin History Center; Joey Mistrot, executive assistant, Roger H. Ogden Development; Sharon Mitchell, licensing associate, U.S. Postal Service; Debi Murray, chief curator, Historical Society of Palm Beach County; Jennifer Navarre, reference assistant, the Historic New Orleans Collection; Melanie Neil, assistant registrar, Chrysler Museum of Art; Mary O’Brien, reference archivist, Syracuse University; Roger H. Ogden; Isabella O’Neill, curator, Special Collections, University Archives, Bucknell University; Cynthia Ostroff, manager, Public Services, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University; Clara Paletou; Wallace H. Paletou; James T. Parker, vice president of photo operations, Double Delta Industries, Inc.; Gary Parky, curatorial assistant/preparator, Ogden Museum of American Art; Kathryn Pawlik, rights administrator, VAGA; Marie-Page Phelps, associate collections manager, Rights and Reproduction, New Orleans Museum of Art; Paul Scott Plaschke; Jay and Rebecca Humphreys Rayburn; Reference/Documents staff, Texas State Library and Archives Commission; Susan B. Rittereiser, curator, Archives and Manuscripts, Austin History Center, Austin Public Library; Cheryl Robledo, Masco Corporation; Lisa Rolfe, registrar, Speed Art Museum; Carlyn Crannell Romeyn; Sarina Rousso, assistant registrar, Rights to Reproduction, Georgia Museum of Art; Harold Rondan, Colony Hotel, Miami Beach; Robin Salmon, vice president of Art and Historical Collections and curator of Sculpture, Brookgreen Gardens; Jennifer Scheetz, archivist, the Charleston Museum; Eric Seiferth, reference assistant, Williams Research Center, Historic New Orleans Collection; Manju Sharma, reference and interlibrary loan librarian, Mandel Public Library of West Palm Beach; Beth Sherwood, assistant registrar, Photo Requests and Permissions, Louisiana State Museum; Kathy Shoemaker, associate archivist, Research Services, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University; Geri E. Solomon, assistant dean of Special Collections/university archivist, Hofstra University; Aaron P. Spelbring, MSIS, manager, Archival Services, Avery Research Center, College of Charleston; Lynn Speno, national register specialist, Historic Preservation Division, Georgia Department of Natural Resources; Robert Summers; Bradley Sumrall, chief curator/collections manager, Ogden Museum of American Art; Orion A. Teal, reference intern, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collection Library, Duke University; Vanessa D. Thaxton-Ward, curator of collections, Hampton University; Lish Thompson, LII, South Carolina History Room, Charleston County Public Library; Noreen Timoney, president, the Miami Woman’s Club; Miles E. Travis; William Truettner, senior curator, Painting and Sculpture, Smithsonian American Art Museum; Ashley Trujillo, Archives & Research Center, HistoryMiami; Matthew Turi, manuscripts research librarian, Research and Instructional Services Department, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Bill Turner, Design and Preservation, City of Charleston, Department of Parks; Esther Van Allen, reference librarian, West Palm Beach Library; Robin Lynn Wallace, former associate curator, Special Collections, Filson Historical Society; Mary Wassum, reference librarian, Smithsonian American Art/National Portrait Gallery Library; Adam Watson, Photographs, State Archives of Florida; Kathryn Wirkus; Quiana R. Wright, MLIS, Louisiana reference librarian, State Library of Louisiana; and Margaret Zoller, Reference Services, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Other institutions that were very helpful include ARTstor; Broward County Library; Florida Atlantic University Libraries, Boca Raton Campus and John D. MacArthur Campus, Jupiter; Frick Art Reference Library; Metropolitan Museum of Art; University of Texas Division of Housing and Food Service; New York Public Library; and the Oscar Wilde Society of America.

Finally, a special appreciation must be noted for my two Temple University professors, Glenn F. Benge and Abraham A. Davidson, who imparted a long-lasting fascination with art history. Dr. Benge stressed art’s intriguing connection with its influential past, and Dr. Davidson advised me to try to make art history soar. This is what I endeavored to accomplish.

INTRODUCTION

Visual art in the South has been justly praised and studied in several art history volumes; yet the influence of artists and other cultural strivers in the evolution of several major New South urban centers has not been extensively explored.¹ I have now addressed this paucity by examining the subject in six southern cities—Atlanta, Charleston, New Orleans, Louisville, Austin, and Miami—from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. This interdisciplinary treatise is the first of its kind and focuses upon painters, sculptors, illustrators, and photographers in each of those municipalities, as well as their work chronicling the Old South, New South, and beyond. Their champions—art patrons and women’s groups, integral in establishing a visual art urban foundation—are also investigated, as are gender and race issues concurrent with the development of art associations and establishment of museums.

For hundreds of years, the enchantment of the South has attracted artists, many of whom have immigrated to the region’s cities. There they united with talented native artists and like-minded culture boosters, and strove to secure a municipal visual arts infrastructure. Moreover, they hoped to insure the firmament of their lives—the ability to create and profit from their work in a civilized environment. After all, as the urban historian Richard C. Wade wrote, A city is many things: it is a cultural focus, a social resort, a political center, but before all—though not above all it is a place where people earn a living.² By inaugurating such professional creativity, these artists and their supporters became the impetus of the cultural and at times physical, economic, and sociological advancement of our six New South cities.

While these urban centers are inevitably linked in many aspects, there is a marked uniqueness and flavor to each one. For instance, Atlanta was founded in 1847 and called the Gate City because of its railroad prowess, essential to its economic development. With a befitting phoenix illustrated on its city seal, Atlanta arose from the Civil War’s ashes and rejuvenated itself—becoming Georgia’s capital, a thriving municipality, and an urban business hub with a population of around 550,000 within its city boundaries and over 5.4 million in its twenty-eight-county megalopolis.³ And although Atlanta has rivaled northern commercial centers for decades, its bustling modernity is balanced by a refined quality in its pillared mansions and cultured atmosphere.

Charleston, called the Queen City of the South and the Holy City for its church steeples piercing the sky, was also severely damaged during the Civil War; yet it established its first fine art museum well before our other five municipalities and remains South Carolina’s artistic pulse. It is the oldest of our six cities, founded in 1670 by colonists who named it Charles Town for King Charles II, the merry monarch.⁴ Its structural profile, aside from the modern Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge and a few high-rise buildings in its environs, has not dramatically changed (unlike the skylines of our other southern municipalities), leaving it poised on the harbor like an old-mined jewel. The view of Charleston is enhanced by its churches, including St. Philips Episcopal (established around 1681) and St. Michael’s—as well as an array of stately mansions adorning the battery—making it a picturesque siren to visitors. Horse-drawn carriages ramble on palmetto-lined streets with antebellum buildings enhanced by curly wrought-iron gates—compelling enticements preserved as if time has stopped. All this historical charm makes tourism one of Charleston’s greatest assets. In 2008 over three billion dollars of income came from tourism alone.⁵

New Orleans, the so-called Crescent City, named for the graceful curve of the Mississippi River at its portals, was built on a thin, swampy bank near the mouth of the Mississippi and is wholly dependent on its levees for survival. This low-lying yet ideal shipping center was called an inevitable city on an impossible site,⁶ and months before its incorporation in 1805 Thomas Jefferson declared it entitled to become the greatest city the world has ever seen.⁷ It boasted an early European continental influence—more precisely, French and Spanish. New Orleans’s very name, as opposed to Charleston with its distinctive British origins, stems from Philippe II, Duc d’Orléans, regent of France. These cosmopolitan roots placed New Orleans far beyond nineteenth-century Atlanta and Austin in aesthetic sensibility. In fact, New Orleans had one of the richest cultural infrastructures in place, including Creole traditions. Although its economic and artistic foundation was damaged in the Civil War, the Crescent City has recently boasted several major visual art venues—as many or more than some northern cultural centers.

Louisville, the self-named Gateway to the South—with infinitely more to offer than its beautiful bluegrass; smooth, potent bourbon; sturdy baseball bats; and thrilling thoroughbred horse racing—abounds with visual art heritage. It was established as a settlement by the Revolutionary War hero George Rogers Clark, incorporated in 1778, and named for King Louis XVI.⁸ Louisville has the most parkland of our urban centers and borders the Ohio River (one of its monikers is the Falls City, owing to the low falls of the Ohio at its edge). This makes Louisville the most northern of our southern cities—the border city influenced by northern tendencies, sophistication, and beliefs.

Austin, the City of the Violet Crown (a moniker borrowed from a poem about Athens, Greece), with a majestic Capitol Building facing its main street of Congress Avenue and a 2011 population of approximately 812,025,⁹ is gracefully situated along the Colorado River. It was established as a capital by the Republic of Texas in 1839, planned by its mayor, and as the most western of our six, enjoys the visual-art roots of the Wild West and Texas history, as well as Old South inspiration. Hispanic, indigenous, and African American muses have been added, making Austin undeniably rich in multicultural art. However, the city had largely no art appreciation before the Civil War (and hardly any after it) but soon planted the seed of art in Texas and became a modern art axis by the 1950s.

Finally there is our youngest city, the Magic City incorporated in 1896. The mere mention of Miami in the twenty-first century brings to mind not only the glamour of South Beach and the gleaming skyscrapers at the mouth of the Miami River but also the conglomeration of cities and suburbs—a metroplex—brimming with cultural events. As in Austin these are enhanced by an enormous Latin American influence—ethnic traditions so contiguous to South Florida. Miami as a city was not in existence before the Civil War, but by the turn of the century it quickly grew into a stunning metropolis. (Publicity hoopla was the source of its Magic City nickname.) While it is the southernmost of our cities, it was built from northern dreams and investment. However, Miami is connected to the Old South more than some might realize, as the city was erected on land that once constituted an antebellum plantation owned by South Carolinians.

Miami’s advancement came to pass for the same reason our other metropolitan areas grew to modernity. Each of them had builders, artists, and civic cultural supporters who were greatly affected by the pervading philosophy of aestheticism, the New South vision propounded by Henry Grady, and a vigorous Gilded Age passion to adorn. And in every one of our cities, artists were determined to create a public museum housing a permanent collection of fine art where they could regularly exhibit their work, raise the level of art appreciation, and educate other artists. To achieve all these cultural strivers’ goals, it was necessary for them to ally with numerous other cultivators, developers, and politicians. Together these civilization builders carved out a meaningful urbanity to their milieus—rough-hewn and gritty in some instances and, in others, war ravaged.

The Reconstruction period was troublesome for those accustomed to antebellum times; southerners had to cope with unfamiliar laws newly in place as well as with a wrenchingly different lifestyle. Moreover, carpetbaggers flooded the South, inserting themselves into local government and buying up land for a fraction of its value. However, some carpetbaggers aided in the progress of the cities, and the daughter of a so-called carpetbagger helped inaugurate one of them. A major provocation of art in this age was the Lost Cause movement, ennobling secession and glorifying Civil War heroes. Southern women’s groups and Confederate veteran organizations joined forces to raise funds for immortalizing the Confederacy in monuments and oil paintings. This activity endured throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth. Lost Cause monuments are located in all our six southern cities.¹⁰

As the opulence of the Gilded Age overcame the waning Reconstruction period, a greater influx of artists and cultural proponents emigrated from the North. The 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition occurred as well, assisting in the progress of urbanity. Visitors (many from the South) were inspired by its art and thereby became artists, collectors, and/or cultural philanthropists. But it was the presentation of aestheticism at the Centennial—a vast arts and decoration movement thoroughly embraced by artists—that prompted an elevation of taste in southern citified locales.

The Aesthetic Movement originated in eighteenth-century Germany and was propounded in the nineteenth century by the British artist and critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) (fig. 1) and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of the 1850s.¹¹ Ruskin raised the creation and appreciation of fine and decorative art solely for its beauty to a moral, spiritual, civic, and political level. He and his disciples, including William Morris, later initiated the Arts and Crafts movement in England—an offspring of aestheticism.¹² Much of Ruskin’s theory—that the love of art benefited one’s home, family, and city, as well as society itself—was firmly implemented in American quests for fine art, crafts, and interior decoration. Many of our artists and art supporters and at least one city builder were fervent devotees of Ruskin. And some of our artists were pupils of William Merritt Chase and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, fine painters who embraced aestheticism. (Whistler propounded a more modern aspect of it, popularly known as art for art’s sake.)¹³

FIG. 1. English school, John Ruskin, ca. 1866. Steel engraving.

Aestheticism’s appealing accoutrements included the sunflower, lily, and orchid. These floral attributes were intermingled with gothic revival and exotic Orientalism, which comprised Middle Eastern objects such as the fez, palm, Turkish or Moroccan chair, finely woven Oriental carpet, and peacock feather. Added to the mix were Far Eastern accessories of the Chinese screen and fan, and Japanese lantern, kimono, woodblock print, and parasol.

In general, aestheticism appealed most intensely to women, and they became stronger and more independent because of it. In turn, the school of thought became more accepted and widespread because of their support. Magazines catering to women, such as the Art Amateur and Art Interchange, combined the aesthetic message with feminism and publicized it nationwide.¹⁴ The concept that a middle-class woman could earn a living through her artistic creativity and an upper-class woman could elevate the moral and social atmosphere of her home through fine art and decoration was more than alluring—it was compelling.

In 1882 the charismatic Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) (fig. 2) heavily advanced the cause of aestheticism through extensive American lectures during a widely publicized national tour that included southern destinations such as Atlanta, Charleston, New Orleans, Louisville, Mobile, Galveston, Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio. His influential presentations—with titles such as The Decorative Arts, The House Beautiful, The English Renaissance (also known as The English Renaissance of Art), and Art Decoration—included numerous references to aestheticism in art and often contained quotes from Ruskin, Whistler, and William Morris.¹⁵ Wilde’s talks were well attended and highly inspiring in our cities (yet simultaneously lampooned) and further promoted aesthetic sensibility as the latest modern notion and outrageously popular fad in art as well as fashion. For example, just before Wilde’s highly publicized arrival in Charleston, women already adorned their hats with large sunflowers, Wilde’s aesthetic accessory. Moreover, although Wilde did not lecture in Austin, the city’s first art and decoration alliance was devoted to him.

FIG. 2. Napoleon Sarony, Oscar Wilde, 1882.

The brilliant author’s comments during interviews in the municipalities studied here were almost always about art and cemented the relationship between art and the modernization of a city. For those, Wilde declared, who devote themselves to building railways and factories, there is no conflict. On the contrary, there is entire Harmony between art and commercial and industrial progress.¹⁶ And during incendiary racial tensions, it was Wilde who inspired many a southern artist when he noted that picturesqueness in human costume and habits in America came from only the Indian and the negro and that he was surprised that painters and poets had paid so little attention to these matters, and especially to the negro as an object of art.¹⁷

FIG. 3. Henry Woodfin Grady. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, January 1, 1890, 1.

Several of our art proponents were practicing the principles of aestheticism long before Wilde’s tour. Other aesthetic ideals were injected into southern centers from European artists who settled there. As a consequence the average southern metropolitan citizen, as well as the artist and art supporter, were aesthetically inspired during the Gilded Age. And in some elite southerners’ minds, aestheticism encouraged the belief that the cause of art had essentially replaced the Lost Cause. Others, however, utilized art in expressing their Lost Cause beliefs and clung to the antebellum past.

The propensity of post–Civil War southern immigration was greatly stimulated by Henry Woodfin Grady (fig. 3), managing editor of the Atlanta Constitution, due to the wholehearted acceptance of his brilliant and highly publicized 1886 New South speech. By the time he delivered it in Manhattan before a prominent audience filled with businessmen, the optimistic and patriotic New South notion had been in evidence for several years; and his newspaper, read throughout the country, had influenced numerous cultural boosters.¹⁸ The encompassing New South concept, however, which included encouraging southern prosperity by welcoming northerners as industrial, business, and cultural partners, further permeated the national zeitgeist because of Grady’s rousing 1886 presentation.

The eloquent editor was keenly aware of how essential art and artists were to his mission, as were other visionaries in fulfilling their goals—such as the oil magnate, railroad baron, and art patron Henry Morrison Flagler, who attended the New South event.¹⁹ And it was no mistake that among the other illustrious listeners to Grady’s oration were notable art lovers such as substantial art collector and financier John Pierpont Morgan. Also in the audience was Hiram Hitchcock, owner of Madison Square Garden Company, bank founder, and trustee and treasurer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art;²⁰ Charles Tiffany, owner of Tiffany and Company and father of Louis, the aesthetic designer of fabulous glass and interiors; Morris K. Jessup, the banking and insurance magnate who gave the Metropolitan Museum some of its most significant treasures;²¹ Henry M. Taber, mercantile broker and real estate mogul, who was a life member of the Metropolitan Museum;²² and Richard W. Gilder, another real estate baron, who later built a New York co-op apartment building filled with fine art.²³ Grady no doubt knew the kinds of powerful cultural developers he was inviting to be partners with the South. As early as 1882, his Atlanta Constitution included an Art Notes column plucked from New York newspapers describing the Manhattan art scene.

In his speech Grady offered a distinct profile of the New South and its industrializing spirit: We have challenged your spinners in Massachusetts and your iron-makers in Pennsylvania.²⁴ The foremost New South advocate was also mindful of the amount of determination and energy involved to build a southern civilization in a northern image and the importance of culture inherent in it. After all, as he declared in that noted speech, We have fallen in love with work. We have restored comfort to homes from which culture and elegance never departed.²⁵ His influential manifesto would endure and help propel our cities into modernity.

Almost a year before Grady presented his New South oratory, Charles Dudley Warner (who wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today with Mark Twain) generalized in an article entitled Society in the New South that with all its social accomplishments [and] its love of color . . . the South has been unexpectedly wanting in . . . fine art development. And in a few great houses were fine paintings brought over from Europe and here and there a noble family portrait . . . [but] the traveler today will go through city after city . . . and find no art shop . . . and will be led to doubt if the taste . . . existed to a great degree before the war.²⁶ This defamatory comment on southern urban culture was inaccurate as there had been by then existing art galleries in our New South cities. But none of the municipalities boasted a permanent fine art museum, and the maturation of southern taste in visual art was not yet firmly inculcated.

Nevertheless, another boon to our cities’ southern advancement from 1872 to 1902 was the preponderance of industrial expositions—both regional and international. Atlanta, Charleston, Louisville, and New Orleans excelled at displaying southern ingenuity. In fact, many of the fairs were wholehearted expressions of the New South, beginning with Atlanta’s 1881 International Cotton Exposition. Local artists’ works were fittingly blended in these expos, with a majority of those by northerners and Europeans—many embraced by southern artists in a New South gesture of friendship. New York Hudson River School landscapists, including James and William Hart, and urban genre painters such as John George Brown, famous for his beloved works depicting New York City street urchins, exhibited frequently, inspiring southern artists and art proponents. Furthermore, the finest northern art collectors loaned their masterpieces to some of the southern industrial expositions. These displays increased awareness for the need of permanent museums.

Northern art tendencies, such as American tonalism, a Barbizon-inspired style in which detail gave way to a soft, muted quality, appeared not only at expositions but later in artists’ association shows in the South. Joining the tonalist pieces were works by leading American impressionists, such as Childe Hassam and William Merritt Chase, with their dazzling scenes of the northeastern and/or French beau monde at leisure amid breathtaking landscapes, cityscapes, or interiors. These were accompanied by paintings by members of the later-formed Ashcan school, also known as The Eight. One of the Eight was Everett Shinn, who displayed lively, painterly northern café, theater, bar, park, and street scenes, and won a bronze medal at Charleston’s South Carolina Interstate and West Indian Exposition in 1901.

Women, including suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Julia Ward Howe (who wrote about art), met at these fairs to instill more social, civic, cultural, and suffrage awareness. The fairs also enhanced our cities with national favorable publicity. In 1884–85 New Orleans was the first of them to implement an African American department displaying many artistic, scientific, and other achievements in its exposition, receiving widespread acclaim because of it. Louisville, through its yearly Industrial and ongoing Southern Expositions became renowned as both an artistic and economic leader of the South. Charleston’s 1901 international fair publicized its beauty and culture to the nation, and Atlanta, because of its 1895 Cotton Exposition, secured its position as the dynamic hub of the New South. However, Miami and Austin, which had no fairs, were largely ignored by the Gilded Age national media.

It was apparent by 1901 that southerness constituted an artistic specialness all its own and was no longer alienated from mainstream visual art hubs and publications. This was an important goal of southern urban cultural strivers: to seek recognition of their artists and urban arts milieu as equal to that in any other American or European cosmopolitan cities. It was somewhat achieved when the Art Amateur acknowledged the South nationally for excelling in fine and decorative art, commenting that year, The southern temperament is eminently artistic and the South has given us some of our most famous artists. The magazine added that Newcomb College in New Orleans was the most hopeful school for art pottery in the United States.²⁷

With expositions clearly proving that southern municipalities had fully recovered from the Civil War and Reconstruction, more northern painters and sculptors were enticed to exhibit, visit, relocate, paint, teach, and influence those in the South. This was again the New South ethic in action: forming a partnership between northern and southern visual artists. Indeed, through all these artists a wealth of influential northeastern and continental sophistication penetrated the South, forever altering its provincial outlook. And in 1915 northern appreciation of southern art culture was firmly in place when New Orleans’s Delgado Museum was one of two southern museums highlighted in the book What Pictures to See in America.

However, simultaneously and into the twentieth century, the ugly practice of racial inequality and exclusion hindered the path to modern cultivation. Segregation was in effect and mislabeled separate but equal and antimiscegenation laws were in place. Race riots, which began shortly after the Civil War, continued to occur throughout southern urban centers. Concurrently, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois were enforcing progress. Both of these great men were art proponents and utilized it well to express their philosophies and reach their aspirations.

In opposition to their valiant efforts, the Ku Klux Klan, reorganizing itself in Atlanta in 1915, spread violence throughout the South. But our artists, philanthropists, women’s clubs, and civic leaders, despite racial tensions and other urban blights, were well aware of the importance of art to their individual municipalities. They enforced social change and city planning and beautification programs, much like the late nineteenth century’s northern Municipal Art and City Beautiful movements. Southern urbanites also focused on establishing museums. Many hoped to inaugurate permanent, democratic visual-arts centers—for all audiences, not just the elite.

By 1920 women who had fought for equality for years finally secured well-deserved voting rights and continued to promote art and improve their urban environment in many other ways. Simultaneously, art critics from above and below the Mason Dixon line further acknowledged and celebrated the art produced in most of our six cities. This was enhanced with the advent of the All-Southern Art Association, first formed to promote and protect territorial uniqueness. It all began with a committee of art supporters in Charleston in 1920. In the fall they invited artists from several southern states to participate in their first All-Southern Art Exhibit to be held in March 1921. After the successful showing, letters praising the alliance poured in from throughout the country. Furthermore, that year the respected American Magazine of Art reported that the All-Southern Art Association was among the most interesting recent developments in the field of American art.²⁸ The association rotated exhibits in major southern cities and earned more national publicity. It was renamed the Southern States Art League by 1922, and its impact on the art world remained significant. For instance, the American Magazine of Art focused on New Orleans in 1921 and prominently featured Charleston’s Alice Ravenel Huger Smith in 1926. The same periodical lauded Louisville’s J. B. Speed Museum in 1930. All these cities had artists prominently participating in the Southern States Art League. Clearly the league had achieved its goal by trumpeting the South as a dynamic art dominion.

Our southern civilization builders were nearing the objective of cultural maturity when the Great Depression occurred. However, thanks to federal government relief via the New Deal, artists were commissioned through programs to create municipal photographs, easel paintings, sculpture, and murals (brought more forcibly into the public eye in 1933 through Diego Rivera’s widely exhibited work).²⁹ Federally funded metropolitan art centers were also instituted. Most of the artworks financed by the New Deal utilized the style of regionalism (led by artists Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood), which portrayed American regional history and celebrated and chronicled its education, urbanization, cultural, and agricultural progress. (The very name regionalism came from a southern writers’ movement, with authors such as Robert Penn Warren chronicling day-to-day events of their realm.) North or South, segregation or not, regionalism for all Americans meant taking pride in their own rich tapestry of varied backgrounds. Concurrently, art deco and modernism from across the Atlantic left its imprint on our cities—although somewhat later than in New York—and slowly blossomed throughout sections of the South. While various southern artists wholly adopted cubism and abstraction, others blatantly opposed it, especially staunch followers of aestheticism.

In short, in the decades after the Civil War, artists in these municipalities, by implementing the extraordinary concepts of the New South, aestheticism, and the elegance of the Gilded Age elicited an impact greater than merely providing pretty pictures in public buildings and statues in city squares. They established a synergistic dynamic by joining forces with philanthropists, women’s organizations, entrepreneurs, writers, architects, politicians, and idealistic dreamers. Together they sought to plan, build, beautify, and/or publicize cities; enact social reforms (such as women’s suffrage, integration, and improvement of urban living conditions); ensconce a high cultural foundation; and preserve their historic districts. At times art precipitated controversy and, moreover, incited anger. But for the most part, paintings, sculpture, illustrations, and photography effectuated the aesthetic quest by providing an inspirational incentive for self-improvement, civic enhancement, art appreciation, and personal fulfillment through the love of beauty.

While many art history volumes concerning the South focus largely upon sultry, moss-adorned landscapes of romantic bayous, rural farms, and gardens outside the city, this study will explore the art largely belonging to its cities, either exhibited there or of its inhabitants, parks, plazas, wharves, marketplaces, industrial areas, expositions, mansions, gardens, universities, and business hubs. Additionally it will uncover the impact of art, artists, and cultural supporters upon individual municipalities—reflective of their physical and social development as well as integral to their cultural coming of age. Delving beyond buildings, streets, transit systems, grids, and neighborhoods, this book will explore the realm of creative urban humanity that shaped the framework for the modern southern city.

CHAPTER ONE

ATLANTA

New South Brilliance Ascending from Embers of Civil War

FIG. 4. Atlanta Skyline, ca. 2010. Wikimedia Commons, OTRS System Archives.

On December 22, 1886, when the eloquent Henry Woodfin Grady (1850–1889), innovative managing editor of the Atlanta Constitution, presented his impassioned speech championing The New South, Atlanta had only recently established a viable industrial complex.¹ Moreover, the city had merely a small, unofficial artists’ colony, formed long after Charleston’s and New Orleans’s organized art associations.

A significant hindrance to Atlanta’s early urban art alliance was its date of incorporation: 1847, a century and a half after Charleston was settled and some forty years after New Orleans was established. The other compelling hurdle was the Civil War. Many in the city, especially businessmen, opposed secession; but when the Civil War began, Atlanta became an axis of the Confederacy. Illustrators and photographers (such as George N. Barnard, hired by Sherman) were employed by the army or periodicals during the conflict (figs. 5 and 6); yet little effort was made in the organization of art in the midst of an embattled city.

FIG. 5. George N. Barnard, Atlanta, Before being Burnt by the Order of Gen. Sherman, from the Cupola of the Female Seminary, 1864. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

FIG. 6. Destruction of the Depots, Public Buildings, and Manufactories at Atlanta, Georgia, November 15, 1864. From Harper’s Weekly, January 7, 1865. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Sherman issued a mandatory evacuation before burning and devastating Atlanta. He wrote to Mayor James M. Calhoun (whose father was a cousin of John C. Calhoun): I cannot discuss this subject with you fairly, because I cannot impart to you what we propose to do, but I assert that our military plans make it necessary for the inhabitants to go away, and I can only renew my offer of services to make their exodus in any direction as easy and comfortable as possible. . . . We don’t want your negroes, or your horses, or your houses, or your lands, or any thing you have, but we do want and will have a just obedience to the laws of the United States . . . and, if it involves the destruction of your improvements, we cannot help it.²

After the wreckage hordes of detested Yankee soldiers invaded Atlanta, pillaging what homes were spared and breaking apart what they could not steal. Yet as early as 1865, Mayor Calhoun proposed a rapid restoration of commercial trading with the North, wanting the region’s emigrants and enterprise.³ He also wrote that it was necessary to repair his city’s wells, cisterns, and pumps, as well as fill the gullies and holes; clean the streets of bricks, mortar, and rubbish; and rebuild Atlanta’s market house and calaboose. This renewal had to be accomplished through loans because all the money the city had was Confederate, which shared the fate of the Confederacy.⁴ Atlanta was, in short, financially and largely physically destroyed, and it was Mayor Calhoun’s weighty responsibility to take swift action to restore the municipality’s infrastructure and economic value.

Federal occupation during the dreaded Reconstruction period was coupled with a smallpox epidemic. African Americans left their former plantations and headed toward Atlanta in droves to find employment as they also did in Charleston and Louisville. Others went farther north or tried to find their own bit of land to till. Carpetbaggers, some helped by citizens called scalawags, invaded Atlanta, taking advantage of distressed property owners and intertwining themselves in local politics.

By the time Benjamin Harvey Hill (1823–1882), a former Confederate senator who became a Democrat after the Civil War, declared in 1866, There was a South of slavery and secession—that South is dead. There is a South of union and freedom—that South, thank God, is living, breathing, growing every hour;⁵ Atlanta was still in the midst of rebuilding itself after the catastrophe of war. And city fathers were succeeding in their task. Indeed, that year artist and writer Thomas Addison Richards described Atlanta as a new and thriving city.⁶ The municipality also extended its city limits from the center, thereby slightly enlarging Atlanta. And in September, for the first time since the Atlanta Gas Light Company’s building was burned to the ground by Sherman, gas street lights were once again in operation.⁷

Hopeful signs also soon took shape for Atlanta’s visual art supporters and practitioners. These included the possibility of commissions from the Georgia State Legislature, which became a component of Atlanta’s fine art patronage in 1868 after the state capital moved from Milledgeville to Atlanta due to the latter’s railroad prowess.⁸ There were also other opportunities for artists. Theatrical performances of painted, narrative panoramas or dioramas were a form of entertainment (as they were in Europe and across the United States) and well attended by the Atlanta crowds in the Victorian Age. From 1860 to 1870, approximately eighty-seven panoramas were exhibited in Atlanta.⁹ The plot, along with a lengthy painting of more than one hundred feet literally unrolled, accompanied by music (usually played on a piano) and a narrator, who described each section as it was revealed to the audience. In 1862 at the Athenaeum on Decatur Street, Burton’s Southern Moving Panorama and Diorama featured an early Civil War battle as its main attraction.¹⁰ While these popular expressions of art raised the appreciation of it in the general citizenry of Atlanta, as well as other urban centers such as Louisville and Charleston, they were often executed by traveling artists who publicized their panoramas from place to place and did not remain in the city to build an alliance.

Other forms of theatrical and visual art appeared in the late 1860s, for the media used the term high art, referring to fine art, music, decorative art, and theater.¹¹ In the following two decades, the Atlanta press more frequently utilized the term high art even when referring to furniture, rugs, and lady’s apparel. According to art historian Carlyn Gaye Crannell (Romeyn), high art in the Gate City for the most part had to incorporate high moral value as well as be pleasing to the eye.¹² The correlation between high art and morality was not exclusive to Atlanta, however. It was an aspect of John Ruskin’s aesthetic credo and was described in the New York Times as well as in British publications from as early as 1851.¹³

Several Atlanta periodicals placed original oil paintings and fine engravings and etchings on a loftier tier than mere affordable chromolithographs. Art auctions were popular in Atlanta in the 1870s as well, with exhibitions a week prior to the sale so that ladies would have more time to convince their husbands to acquire a work. The local media approved, proclaiming that all who can afford them should have pictures because they are pleasing to the mind, softening and humanizing to the heart and educate as well as books.¹⁴

Liberal arts were also enhanced when, for a short period of time starting in 1870, the city was the home of Oglethorpe University (chartered in 1835) before it closed in 1872. It reopened after the turn of the century on Atlanta’s main street, Peachtree.¹⁵ An Oglethorpe alumnus, the Georgia-born poet, scholar, and essayist Sidney Lanier (1842–1881) was among those who considered Georgians to be the most broad-minded members of the southern states—much more so than South Carolinians. Therefore, Atlanta as Georgia’s hub soon became the South’s resonant symbol of progress.¹⁶ (Many New Orleanians with good reason may have protested that they were the most progressive in the South.)

Scattered art exhibitions began to appear during this time of waning Reconstruction. For example, in 1872 a large gallery display of prints and original paintings was held underneath Atlanta’s popular DeGive’s Opera House. The Atlanta Constitution saw the show as admirable and encouraged sales when it wrote, It would be the fault of our art-loving community generally, if such handsome productions of brain and pencil are not scattered and broadcast among our homes of taste and refinement.¹⁷

Joining the visual arts was the written word, and in the 1870s a floodtide of southern literature captivating voracious readers of books and magazines became apparent in the region—with artists enjoying employment as illustrators. Artists also portrayed the New South ideals of Henry Woodfin Grady (fig. 3). The visionary wrote one of his first editorials on the New South in 1874¹⁸ and declared in 1876 that the future of the South lay not primarily in politics but in an industrial order which should be the basis of a more enduring civilization.¹⁹ And in the future that basis of industrial order benefited Atlanta immensely, much more so than in any of its southern rival cities.

FIG. 7. James H. Moser, The Bookworm. Fetherolf collection. Grace Fetherolf, James Henry Moser: His Brush and his Pen (Sedona, Arizona: Fetherolf Publishing, 1982), 29.

In 1877 Atlanta became Georgia’s permanent capital, and Grady and his circle of artists, writers, and urban pundits soon enriched, reflected, and revitalized its civilization. Indeed, it was because of fine art connoisseurs, economic promoters, jingoistic politicians, outspoken authors, and visual artists who united to promote Atlanta’s Gilded Age and New South cultural awakening.

One of the artists in Grady’s circle was a young Atlanta native, Horace James Bradley (1862–1896). Bradley became a prime chronicler of Atlanta’s New South development thanks to his ability in drawing and watercolor, which was praised for showing poetic feeling and a free bold handling.²⁰ With the assistance of Grady, the talented delineator became known as an accomplished illustrator of periodicals, including Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and Harper’s Weekly. Bradley was also an influential art booster in Atlanta, establishing classes at his studio in the Young Men’s Library Association building.²¹

Adding to the list of urban cultural celebrities was another young painter, James Henry Moser (1854–1913), described by one magazine editor as genial, gifted, [and] boy-hearted.²² Moser was born in Ontario, Canada, and arrived in Atlanta in 1879, the same year the city obtained its first telephone exchange. Like Bradley, Moser was a friend of Grady’s, and he illustrated southern periodicals and books amplifying Grady’s New South message. Moser also enjoyed painting images of local Atlanta residents.

One can see in Moser’s The Bookworm (fig. 7) that he was capable of rendering Atlanta’s African Americans with artistic sensitivity. The painter was making an optimistic and individualistic comment about this little girl, portraying her as intently reading a book, the artistic symbol of knowledge. Moser stressed the practice of his craft, high ambition, and complete relish of painting the urban black community—admitting that it was his greatest joy as an artist—and while in private notations he occasionally referred to his subjects in the period’s standard jargon, he wrote that he was copiously polishing his technique in portraying them. He also compared these works to the paintings of well-known New York colleagues, such as Thomas Hovenden.²³ But while Moser saw his subjects as individualized human beings, at least one of his major works would be perceived by his southern audience to be a generalized view of African Americans.

By 1881 Moser was garnering national recognition along with numerous magazine commissions he received after providing illustrations for the