The American Art-Union
Utopia and Skepticism in the Antebellum Era
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"For more than a decade the New York-based American Art-Union shaped the creation, display, and patronage of art across the country, boasting as many as 19,000 members from almost every state. For an annual fee of five dollars, members received an engraving after a painting by a notable US artist and the annual publication Transactions (1839-49) and later the monthly Bulletin (1848-53). Most importantly, members' names were entered in a drawing for hundreds of original paintings and sculptures by most of the era's best-known artists. Those artworks were displayed in its immensely popular Free ...
"For more than a decade the New York-based American Art-Union shaped the creation, display, and patronage of art across the country, boasting as many as 19,000 members from almost every state. For an annual fee of five dollars, members received an engraving after a painting by a notable US artist and the annual publication Transactions (1839-49) and later the monthly Bulletin (1848-53). Most importantly, members' names were entered in a drawing for hundreds of original paintings and sculptures by most of the era's best-known artists. Those artworks were displayed in its immensely popular Free Gallery. Unfortunately, the experiment was short lived. Opposition grew, and a cascade of events led to an 1852 court case that proved to be the Art-Union's downfall. Its meteoric rise and its sudden and spectacular collapse still raise a crucial question: why did such a successful and influential institution fail? Forged in cultural crosscurrents of utopianism and skepticism, the American Art-Union's demise can be traced to its nature as an attempt to create and control the complex system that the early nineteenth-century art world represented. The Art-Union achieved substantial victories, fostering renowned artists and cultivating a culture of collecting and interest in US art. However, its plans often produced unintended results that attracted as much blame as praise. The institution was undone not by dramatic outward events or by the character of its leadership, but by the character of its utopianist plan. This study breaks the organization's activities down into their major components to offer a structural rather than chronological narrative that follows mounting tensions to their inevitable end"--
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