Italians Come to America

In the eventful year of 1913, Art in America was founded and more than 70,000 people saw Marcel Duchamp's nude descend its staircase at the Armory Show. The new journal, however, made no mention of the landmark exhibition of modern art in its pages. Instead, its first issues featured articles on works by Veronese, Matteo da Siena and Donatello, and exactly one essay on an American artist, Whistler.

Conceived as a journal of art historical scholarship that could compete with the major European publications, A.i.A. was, in significant part, concerned with documenting and encouraging the great migration of old-master paintings to America. Now, this may seem like an uncomplicated cause-who could argue with old-master paintings?-but at the time large portions of the art we are used to seeing in museums today were dismissed out of hand, both in the press and at the dinner parties of wealthy collectors. Italian paintings were particularly controversial, especially those medieval works sometimes referred to as "primitives," as well as works from the early Renaissance. A sense of how strange this art appeared to contemporaries is preserved in Henry James's 1897 description of a child's view of the religious paintings in the National Gallery in London, with their "patches of gold and cataracts of purple, with stiff saints and angular angels, with ugly Madonnas and uglier babies, strange prayers and prostrations."1 The adult who has taken the child to the gallery tells her that the paintings represent "silly superstition," and thinks it is an "affectation" to admire "such ridiculous works." At the turn of the century, Botticelli was most definitely not on everyone's list of great painters, and an educated American could hardly be expected to know the name Duccio, let alone to have seen one of his tempera panels.

A.i.A. entered the lists with flags flying: in 1914, for example, it published more articles on Italian painting than it did on the art of all the rest of the world combined. The writers for the new magazine faced a number of challenges in arguing for a broader acceptance of trecento and quattrocento art. New collectors and the people beginning to visit America's museums and private galleries felt uneasy in the presence of works that seemed to them overly mathematical, or disturbingly sensual, or troublingly Catholic. Interestingly, the dismissal of "stiff saints and angular angels" may not have been so far from the way the New York Times wrote off Duchamp's Cubist-like nude as "an explosion in a shingle factory." At the same moment Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) was heralding the arrival of modernist aesthetics on American shores, A.i.A.'s contributors were busy persuading their readers to take seriously a variety of ways of seeing. Not incidentally, these connoisseurs were also stoking a vibrant market for Italian paintings.

The first issue of A.i.A. featured the article "A Nativity and Adoration of the School of Pietro Cavallini in the Collection of Mr. John G. Johnson," which exemplifies how matters of perception, taste and access converged in the publication. The author of the essay was one of America's leading critics, Bernard Berenson (about whom I've recently written a biography); the collector, John Graver Johnson, was an adventurous American corporate lawyer in the midst of acquiring one of the great assemblages of Italian works outside of Italy.

The article begins with what seems to be a very plain description, but description can assert a viewpoint, too, in its way. Berenson carefully catalogued the Adoration scene, writing:

On a boat-shaped mattress, perilously balanced on the steep ledge of a bluish rock, the Virgin reclines, looking to her left at the coffin-like crib in which lies the Holy Child wrapt in swaddling clothes. By the crib lie an ox and an ass of unusually small size. An angel clings to the right edge of the rock, looking at the Virgin, and on the corresponding side is another angel, while, above the first, a third angel, with a face of ecstasy, greets the rising sun.2

The oddness of space and figures had long been a source of consternation about medieval painting. Critics said of these works, as they did of Cubist paintings, that they didn't seem naturalistic or real. In his seemingly straightforward description, Berenson subtly refutes these charges, asserting that all of this-the "boat-shaped mattress," the animals of "unusually small size" and the bodies that "perilously" recline-belongs to art that is still, as he says later, of great "loveliness."