American Art Union

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The American Art Union was an art association founded in New York City in 1839 , which existed until 1853 and, on the basis of subscriptions from its members, pursued the purpose of promoting the public's taste in art through exhibitions , the acquisition and raffle of works of art, and publications publicly accessible art to establish and promote comparatively still poor United States . It was the largest of five other art associations in the country and had a great influence on the art business of its time.

history

The concept of acquiring art objects with money from annual membership fees after deducting the organization costs of an association and raffling them among the members originated in the Helvetic Republic around 1800 and had spread from Switzerland to the federal states . When the German art historian Gustav Friedrich Waagen , director of the Berlin Gemäldegalerie , was invited in the 1830s to report on German art associations to a committee of the House of Commons in London , he recommended their concept, which led to the establishment of the first art associations in the United Kingdom came.

Lithograph by Francis D'Avignon (1813–1871) for the AAU raffle in 1847
AAU advertisement in The Literary World newspaper listing the works of art that were raffled in 1849 (excerpt)
Illustration for the AAU raffle in 1850 in The Illustrated London News , 1851
Mexican News , lithograph by Alfred Jones (1819–1900) after a painting by Richard Caton Woodville exhibited in the AAU gallery in 1849, 1851, annual gift of the AAU to its members

Following the example of British art associations, in particular the Art-Union of London and the Edinburgh Association for the Promotion of Fine Arts in Scotland , established business people, who formed a management team of 14 under the name Apollo Association , founded in New York City a society that was called the American Art-Union (AAU) from 1840 onwards. In 1844 this name became their official name. Among the people in management was Charles Leupp , one of Manhattan's leading merchants, and Philip Hone , a former New York mayor. They transferred the Apollo Gallery , founded in 1838 by the portrait painter, engraver, gallery owner and art dealer James Herring , which was one of the first galleries in New York to allow evening visits using gas lamps, into the Perpetual Free Gallery . This gallery , operating on Broadway , was available to members of the AAU free of charge and non-members for a fee for the exhibition and sale of art. In the course of its 13-year existence, its permanent free art exhibition has attracted around three million visitors. The number of club members, who determined the club’s annual budget through their subscriptions, rose from 686 in 1840 ($ 5205) to 3233 in 1845 ($ 16,165) to 18,960 in 1849 ($ 94,800). The five presidents of the AAU in office over the years were from 1839 to 1841 the doctor John Wakefield Francis (1789–1861), from 1842 to 1843 the businessman Daniel Stanton, from 1844 to 1846 the poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant , from 1847 to 1849 the businessman and politician Prosper Montgomery Wetmore (1798–1876) and from 1849 the businessman and art collector Abraham Martling Cozzens (1811–1868).

The AAU, which, in contrast to the old patrician class of New York, represented the more modern art conceptions of an aspiring liberal bourgeoisie on the American east coast, saw itself as judge and guardian of an emerging American art. In her educational sense of mission, she wanted to reach and educate even the simplest people in the most remote parts of the country. To this end, she operated art criticism in her publications . She spread her taste in art, which she perceived as "correct taste", by means of words and images by publishing corresponding prints in her organs, in the Transactions of the American Art Union and especially in the columnist Bulletin of the American Art Union , Art explained, commented on what happened in the art business and reported on its activities. The artists supported by the AAU were mainly landscape painters from the Hudson River School , such as Thomas Cole , Jasper Francis Cropsey , Asher Brown Durand and John Frederick Kensett , but also painters such as George Caleb Bingham , Emanuel Leutze and Richard Caton Woodville , who had moved to Europe and influenced American art with genre paintings from the Düsseldorf School .

The concept of the AAU, which not only enabled its members to receive the association organ by post, including an engraving of a work of art by a notable American artist as an annual gift, for an annual fee of five dollars, which corresponds to about 150 dollars of today's purchasing power , but also opened up the opportunity Getting a valuable picture drawn was initially a sure-fire success. For members who exhibited their art in the permanent free exhibition, there was also the advantage of reaching a larger audience, not least through the lively reporting in the newspapers.

After the number of members of the AAU living outside New York had grown to over two thirds by the end of the 1840s, the problem arose that unforeseen shipping costs put a considerable strain on the budget of the association and thus significantly fewer funds were available, valuable art objects for the to acquire annual club lottery, which caused the number of subscribers to plummet in 1850. In the years 1849 and 1850 a publicly conducted, ugly dispute arose with a competing art association, the International Art Union , a branch of Goupil & Cie of the Parisian art dealer Adolphe Goupil (1806-1893). Under the leadership of James Gordon Bennett , editor of the New York Herald , there was also a wave of acrid press comments accusing the AAU of nepotism, abuse of power, mismanagement and the running of an illegal lottery, prompting around 3,000 members of the AAU left. This in turn affected the club's finances, which were so difficult at the end of 1850 that the management decided to postpone the annual lottery. The AAU's New York State Supreme Court finally dealt the fatal blow by ruling in June 1852 that the AAU's annual lottery was illegal. The AAU was then forced to disband. At the end of 1852, pictures and sculptures owned by the AAU were auctioned. Objects that could not be auctioned and other AAU estates passed into the possession of the New York Historical Society in 1863 , whose members included many former members of the AAU. The bulletin was discontinued in 1853. In 1854 the AAU exhibition building was taken over by the Düsseldorf Gallery of the businessman and art collector Johann Gottfried Böker .

Fonts

  • Transactions of the Apollo Association for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in the United States . New York City, 1839–1842 ( digitized ).
  • Transactions of the American Art Union . New York City, 1844–1849 ( digitized ).
  • Bulletin of the American Art Union . The Union, New York City, 1848-1853 ( digitized ).
  • American Art-Union Distribution , New York City, December 22, 1848 ( digitized version )

literature

  • Charles E. Baker: The American Art Union . In: Mary Bartlett Cowdrey (Ed.): American Academy of Fine Arts and American Art-Union, 1816–1852 . New-York Historical Society, New York City 1953, Volume 1, pp. 95-311.
  • Maybelle Mann: The American Art-Union . ALM Associates, Otisville / New York 1977.
  • Rachel N. Klein: Art and Authority in the Antebellum New York City. The Rise and the Fall of the American Art-Union . In: Journal of American History . Volume 81, Issue 4 (March 1995), pp. 1534-1561.
  • Patricia Hills: The American Art-Union as Patron for Expansionist Ideology in the 1840s . In: Andrew Hemingway, William Vaughan (Eds.): Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790-1850 . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1998, pp. 314-339.
  • Malcolm Goldstein: The American Artist and His Friends . In: Malcolm Goldstein: Landscape with Figures. A History of Art Dealing in the United States . Oxford University Press, New York City 2000, ISBN 0-19-513673-X , pp. 15 ff. ( Google Books ).
  • Amanda Lett, Patricia Hills, Peter John Brownlee, Randy Ramer: Perfectly American. The Art-Union & its Artists . Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa / Oklahoma 2011, ISBN 978-0-9819-7992-2 .
  • Kimberly Orcutt (with Allen McLeod): Unintended Consequences: The American Art-Union and the Rise of a National Landscape School . In: Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide . Volume 18, Issue 1 (Spring 2019), online .

Web links

Commons : American Art-Union  - collection of images, videos, and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Joy Sperling: "Art, Cheap and Good": The Art Union in England and the United States, 1840-60 . In: Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide , Volume 1, Issue 1 (Spring 2002)