Jennifer Greenhill

My book project examines the centrality of “the picture,” as a concept, to commercial practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Right at the time that lush and complex color pictures became essential to the intertwined industries of advertising and magazine publishing, art directors, psychologists, and the pushers of products committed significant energy to theorizing the seductive sales potential of visual material, analyzing the formal operations and social effects of pictures both on the page and in the mind’s eye. They instructed illustrators and designers to devise layouts that would operate “as pictures” regardless of the content of the composition, including typography, decorative cuts, borders, unmarked space, and the paper page itself. All of this material—even the text penned by copywriters—would, if successful, be converted into a mental image in the mind of the potential buyer. The commercial picture producers were thus not only mind manipulators but also interior designers, making pictures for phantasmic environments they could only imagine.

While scholars have addressed the place of art in the history of advertising, they have overlooked the pictorial foundations of the advertising trade literature and the capacity of artists to theorize, through their own visual means, the perceptual terms and material conversions that structured late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century marketing discourse. By drawing the work of illustrators and graphic designers into relation with the advertising trade texts, which are remarkable for the visual methods by which they  articulate their claims, my book tells a new story about the language of commerce at the advent of the pictorial advertising age, revising existing conceptions of the “art” of illustration, the intersubjective territories of the market, and the boundaries of experimental visuality in the period.

My dissertation examines the contested place of humor in American art in the years following the Civil War, when the nation was engaged in developing, for the first time, a truly ‘high’ sense of culture. Conservatives sought to present an image of unshakable seriousness on the world stage, one demonstrating that the nation had finally achieved some level of civility. Humor undermined this image and was seen accordingly as something that had to be contained or concealed.

My study demonstrates the ways in which painters and sculptors struggled to preserve a place in fine art for an ambitious and critical humor. They worked against conservative impulses that sought to channel humor into a restrictive set of normalizing guises or to ghettoize it as properly belonging to more mass forms of artistic production. Winslow Homer breaks with the hackneyed conventions of antebellum genre painting to establish the seriousness of humor, in effect theorizing its place in American art and culture; Enoch Wood Perry violently deconstructs humor’s capacity to inoculate citizens against the disruptive effects of difference; William Holbrook Beard runs humor underground, revealing the depths to which it had to be repressed; Augustus SaintGaudens invokes the ridiculous in his sublime and relentlessly humorless artistic statements; and John Haberle exploits humor’s protean shiftiness, pointing the way toward the high intellectual value that humor would achieve in art of the twentieth century.