Art Review: “Taxing Visions: Financial Episodes in Late Nineteenth-Century American Art”
“Tattered and Torn” (1886), by Alfred Kappes. Smith College Museum of art, Northampton, Mass. It’s not such an alluring title for an art show, and one’s hesitation may well double upon learning that the exhibition – a collaborative effort between The Huntington and the Palmer Museum of Art at Pennsylvania State University – emerged out of the co-curators’ Ph.D. dissertations. Fortunately, after researching the underbelly of the optimistic American Dream as it applied to art and artists during the last 40 years of the 19th century, Leo G. Mazow and Kevin M. Murphy made their subject fairly accessible to the rest of us. As the curators (and co-authors) explain, “Taxing Visions” “explores the subject matter of taxes, rent, economic depression, and financial inequality in a group of visually provocative paintings and works on paper.” This tallies up to 34 works from 31 collections, and includes pictures by unfamiliar names as well as a few pieces from the likes of George Inness, Albert Pinkham Ryder and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. During the years represented – from just before the Civil War through Reconstruction and the various financial panics and depressions (1857, 1869, 1873…
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