The Aura of Mechanical Reproduction Victorian Art and the Press.pdf

The Aura of Mechanical Reproduction: Victorian Art and the PressAuthor(s): Julie F. CodellSource: Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring, 1991), pp. 4-10Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the Research Society for VictorianPeriodicalsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20082493 .

Accessed: 13/11/2013 13:38

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Research Society for Victorian Periodicals and The Johns Hopkins University Press are collaborating withJSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Victorian Periodicals Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Wed, 13 Nov 2013 13:38:53 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=rsvp

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=rsvp

http://www.jstor.org/stable/20082493?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


The Aura of Mechanical Reproduction: Victorian Art and the Press

Julie F. Codell

"Il desiderio di riproducione e un desiderio de morte" ?Jenny Holzer, Venice Biennale, 1990

"A depiction is never just an illustration.... [I]t is the site for the construction and depiction of social difference. To understand a visualisation is thus to inquire into its provenance and into the social work that it does... to note its princi

ples of exclusion and inclusion, to detect the roles that it makes available, to understand the

way in which they are distributed, and to decode the hierarchies and differences that it natural ises. And it is also to analyse the ways in which

authorship is constructed or concealed and the sense of audience is realised."?Gordon Fyfe and John Law, Introduction, Picturing Power: Visual Depiction and Social Relations: The

Sociological Review, Monograph #35 (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), p.l.

Visual reproductions in the 19th century, whether of Old Master paintings or natural land

scapes or social conditions, were created out of

a new visual syntax in emerging contexts for

disparate audiences. The language, audience, intentions of reproductions were different from those of high art: the producers of reproductions

were differentiated from the painter, sculptor and architect, while the audience for reproduc tions was a new mass audience embracing heter

ogeneities of class, education, gender, and

economic means.1 Our present destabilization of

originality through mass simulations has roots in the visualization and depiction practices of the

Victorians.

Depiction?what and how subjects are

depicted?reflects and determines social and

political life, as depiction intersects with centers of power and authority. Although these two issues of VPR will focus on depiction in art,

images in art participated in other discourses of

medicine, science, economics, and gender, all of

which were increasingly subject to visual

images complementing their respective verbal texts, reproduced in a syntax shared with art

reproduction. Spectators learned the visual syn tax of reproduction; once learned, this language became the means of perceiving, discriminating,

understanding whatever subjects were repro duced. In the case of art, this visual education was enmeshed in discourses about the nature of

art making?originality, creativity, conception vs. manual labor, the didactic function of art?

and the division of labor which penetrated other areas of Victorian manufacture. It is important not to underestimate the constructive power of

images: "art reproductions are not mere illustra

tions of the texts they accompany but are in themselves arguments about the originals."2 Images are constitutive of their subjects; they are exegeses on their subjects, rather than trans

parent means we look through to see the original that is reproduced. Furthermore, means of repro duction constitute social, culturally shared ways of seeing, which, once we are accustomed to

them and take them for granted, we assume to

be natural. How many of us have been disap

pointed to see the duller original work of art after studying it from a luminescent slide or

glossy reproduction?

Reproduction Techniques and the Division of Labor: Original Artists and Copyist Engravers

The construction of subjects is part and parcel of the construction of art viewing formed by technical innovations, exhibition practices of the

Royal Academy, and publications of reproduc tions which spawned not only public spectating but the categories and tastes of art critics, as well.3 Much has already been written about the various techniques of reproduction and their his tories.4 While there were varieties and mixtures of techniques (e.g., covering a copperplate with steel to allow more printings off the plate)

within each technique, there were essentially three major non-photographic methods used in the 19th century: (1) Relief print was the only technique of the three which could be printed simultaneously with letterpress on the same

presses and with the same ink, making it com



Codell 5

mercially viable. It was done by cutting away the negative areas of an image of which the pos itive areas would then take the ink (e.g., wood

engraving and wood-cutting). (2) In intaglio processes the image is cut by the pressure of the

engraver's hand on the burin or bit into a metal

plate by acid. (3) Lithography was invented in 1796 by Loys Senefelder, in which the image,

neither elevated nor depressed, is drawn with a

crayon on the flat plane of a stone and repro duced by the mutual incompatibility of water and grease. Lithography, both colored and black and white, was a major means for reproducing the art of the past in the early 19th century.

In the 1860s Thomas Bolton created a method

allowing a wooden block to receive a photo

graphic image, thus preserving the original draw

ing, previously destroyed in the former wood

engraving process, and affording the creation of new techniques to imitate the continuous tone of

photographs in the reproduction of art works.5

Photomechanical methods were applied to all three kinds of printing, though the line block was the most successful translation into photography and encouraged many innovations from artists

and publishers. Photomechanical reproductions were heralded as closer to the original artist's intentions, requiring less of the mediating artisan

printer. Furthermore, these reproductions re

sponded better to mass printings; electroplating of blocks, for example, allowed almost unlimited

copies and made it possible to enlarge images by combining several blocks, as in the case of the

Illustrated London News' image of the view of London in 1842 which consisted of 60 blocks cut

by 19 engravers.

The economics of art production and reproduc tion were characterized not only by the division of labor operative among reproduction tasks?

the artist's drawing, the engraver's print?but also by the artist-etcher who did both paint and

print, and by the majority of artists whose for tunes were made largely by the lucrative sale of

copyrights for the prints of their paintings. A crucial distinction is whether the print is auto

graphic, done by the artist's own hand, or allo

graphs, prepared by a printmaker from an artist's drawing. The division of labor, inscribed

by class and therefore by educational systems (academy vs. workshop), affected quality, style,

production, commercial success, and the dis course on the nature of artistic creativity.6 The

artistic identity of the engraver was usually sub

merged, his work considered mere imitation or

copying, while the painter's identity was inscribed by creativity and originality. Engrav ing shops often employed craftsmen who

engraved originals they never actually saw.7

The construction of the modern artist is inscribed by economics, institutions, and media

technologies of the Victorian art infrastructure.

In the 19th century artists sought to control the

printmaking of their own works and to create

original prints in limited editions, a practice that had been largely moribund (with the exception of Turner) since the end of the 18th century when

William Hogarth was "pioneering the develop ment of a commercial/artistic infrastructure."8 James McNeill Whistler, among others, stirred a renascence of printmaking, reviving lithography and etching in England, often on the large, mon

umental scale of painting.9 His brother-in-law Francis Seymour Haden, as President of the

Society of Painter-Etchers, sought to establish

original etching in the gap between high art

painting and copyist engraving.10 The revival of original etching coincided with a new interest in the surface textures of paintings, probably as a result of photography's capacity for reproducing the artist's handling. The etching revival fore

grounded artistic handling and allowed great freedom of expression, first in copyist etchings of Leopold Flameng and Jules Braquemond who

brilliantly reproduced textures of paintings and decorative arts, and later in original etchings of such major artists as Whistler.

Gordon Fyfe in "Art and Reproduction" (see fn. 1) describes the conflicted relations between the

painter as original author and "the 'translation' of

the reproductive engraver" (403). Fyfe argues that the division of labor separated artists and engravers

through mass reproductions in the press, creating "the increasing isolation of the labour of reproduc tive engraving from the intellectual means of pro

duction" (404). Technical innovations were

designed to improve "engraving's capacity to

report the values of other media," though some

times engravers actually improved the drawing and perspective of the originals! Engraving was the site of aesthetic and economic tensions

between artists and artisans competing to satisfy new markets created by the "'terracing' of taste

which was partly determined by the weight of mid dle-class demand for access to the fine arts" (409).



6 VPR Spring 1991

Victorians witnessed continuing debates in cultural politics punctuated by Select Commit tees (e.g., in 1835, 1836, 1837, 1841 and 1863) to remove the taint of aristocratic privilege from the RA and to accommodate engravers' claims to artistic creativity and production. The Royal Society of Painter-Etchers (founded 1880) was one consequence of those debates and of

engravers' anger at the RA for limiting engrav ers to Associate status and their numbers to six.

But even in the RSPE in its early years, mem bers debated whether to allow as members copy ist engravers who were eventually and

begrudgingly admitted to increase membership funds and keep the Society solvent. The debate

was at this time rather moot, since handicraft

reproduction was already being overtaken by photography.

Finally, it is crucial to remember that a funda mental practice in the education of artists since the 17th century was the copying of works by

Old Masters, and many collectors and connois seurs commissioned artists to make copies of

past masterpieces, e.g., Ruskin who sent Charles

Fairfax Murray to Italy to copy works by Italian Renaissance painters. Many painters made

money in their early years by hiring themselves out as copyists, e.g., Turner and Thomas Girtin

who together copied works by John Robert Coz ens for Cozens's patron. Plaster casts of antique and Renaissance sculptural monuments were

standard pedagogical tools in academic educa

tion, resulting in legacies of enormous collec

tions of plaster casts, as in the Victoria and Albert Museum.11 Artists also collected prints for their own imaginative resources and libraries of images and styles, and they painted from pho tographs of figures and landscapes.

The significance of photography literacy, which most of us now take for granted, is recap tured in William Ivins's Print and Visual Com

munication (1953) in which he situates

photography in its historical period as contrast

ing and displacing manual reproductions. Pho

tography recontextualized printmaking to make the audience sensitive to the way prints were

reproduced by suddenly foregrounding this medium which, before photography, had been seen as more transparent, less intrusive on the

reproduced images. The advent of photographic reproduction eliminated copyist engravers and their aesthetic, as well.

As Ivins notes, engravers chose pictures to

reproduce "not for their merits but as vehicles for the exhibition of their particular skill" (69). In the wake of these practices there arose a con

noisseurship based on the authority of reproduc tive engravings reflected, as Ivins points out, in the aesthetic vocabulary of the 18th century: har

mony, dignity, proportion, and nobility. Ivins's central argument is that photography restored handling, texture, colorism and tona?ty to the reproduced image and presented an image closer to the hand and intentions of the original artist, giving us the presence of the image as a work of art. As recent scholars have argued, this assump tion of the transparency of "the photographic

medium suffers from a naive naturalization of a

culturally produced visual language, but Ivins offers some sense of the drastic transformation and new relationship to the reproduced work for those spectators who, trained to see by engrav

ing, had to learn the new visual syntax of pho tography.12 Reviewing Ivins's arguments, Fyfe notes that the photographic image, interpreted as

having a higher truth-value than the engraved image, maintained a distance between the repro duction and the original, to which it referred as

residing elsewhere and as part of an authorita

tive canon, a distance that had already been created in the separation of the painter from the engraver in the production of reproductions. In a

letter to Charles Fairfax Murray, Dante Gabriel Rossetti noted how photography enhanced paintings: "The Durer and Holbein portraits are

glorious?perhaps such things as those gain a new vividness in photography not inferior to

their painted quality."13

Trevor Fawcett also argues that handicraft

engraving was untrustworthy:

Their transcript could not be literal. At any one of the possible stages of initial copying in line and wash, chalk, or watercolour; of squaring down, reversing the image, tracing, transfer

ring, handling burin or needle, biting and stop ping out, scraping and burnishing, proofing and correcting; down to the final inking of block or plate and running through the press, hand or eye or judgment might err over pro portions and relationships, compositional detail, tonal gradation, or the estimated weight of hue and chiaroscuro. Only rarely was the engraver working with the original in front of him, and even if he were he still abandoned



Codell 7

more of the picture surface?traces of han

dling, brush-strokes, impasto, glazes?and

replaced it by an alien code of dots and hachur

ing, ruled lines and swelling curves, crisscross

and lozenges, passages of intense black and

highlights of uninked paper. At every turn the

personality and mannerisms of the engraver intruded.14

I quote Fawcett at length because of his method of intersecting the technical information about both printmaking and painting with a sensitivity to the codes of each medium. Fawcett notes the various translations of painterly styles which different technologies managed to convey, as

well as the limitations of each. Estelle Jussim also argues that the syntax of the medium con

trolled both the nature of the information retrieved from the painting and the ways that information was represented.15

It is important to remember that along with art ists and artisan printmakers, publishers deter

mined the production of prints and speculation about their mass consumption. One of the most successful of the printseller-publishers was Ernest Gambart who imported prints valued at ?20,000 in 1845 and exported about ?5,000 worth of prints.16 The Printseilers Association, founded in 1847, attempted to control produc tion and the prices of proofs and lesser impres sions and to authenticate genuine prints with

their Association stamp, a practice attacked by Haden, who considered them mere tradesmen as

opposed to the artistic painter-etchers. Presses such as the Kelmscott Press also affected techni cal developments and artistic training; in the case of Morris's Kelmscott, an archaic graphic style and woodblock appearance were advo

cated. Kelmscott, in turn, was influential on

painting. With cheap reproductions numerous

magazines and journals (notably The Graphic, the Illustrated London News; early reproduc tions in the Penny Magazine, organ of the Soci

ety for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and

among art journals, The Art Journal, The Maga zine of Art, and The Portfolio) could fill their

pages with images for an international reader

ship; artists at home could examine the art of colonial and non-Western cultures, and some

journals, like The Studio, actually encouraged the development of new techniques. The Portfo lio under Philip Hamerton actively promoted the

production and patronage of original engraving

and etching, reproducing on its pages diverse

styles by artists, unhomogenized by the artisan

engraver's hand.17

Editors of art periodicals, such as S. C. Hall, Marion Harry Spielmann and Philip Hamerton

sought to bridge the gap between high art exhibi tion practice with its established patronage net

work and the new press's commercial potential for reaching an emerging mass audience of art

consumers. They tried to educate readers' tastes

to traditional high art, while simultaneously pro moting artists' careers through lucrative, com

mercial forms of reproduction.18 Taking a hand in this self-promotion and synthesis of the cultu ral capital of high art with the commercialism for a mass audience, artists and illustrators created

styles to exploit the limitations and potentials of

photomechanical reproduction, e.g., the minimal

style of Phil May, or the more radical simplifi cation of Aubrey Beardsley.19 A thorough ana lytic study of the transference of visual syntax

from the flat linearity of reproductions to high art painting, architectural facades, or sculptural

three-dimensionality has yet to be undertaken by art historians, but it is likely that the widely dis seminated language of reproductions profoundly affected high art style, as it trained spectators and artists alike to new ways of seeing and new

visual discriminations. Beginning in the 1880s catalogues of international expositions and annual Academy exhibitions included reproduc tions of works exhibited, sometimes by the orig inal artists themselves.

Art History and Reproduction

Intersecting with the histories of reproduction in Victorian England is the formation of the dis cipline of art history itself. Art history's devel opment is marked from its beginnings in the last half of the 19th century by arguments about the

meanings and interpretations of photographic reproductions collected by connoisseurs and scholars in libraries and reproduced in periodi cals for educated readers.20 Engravings and chromolithographs of Italian Renaissance art

published by the Arundel Society had a pro found influence on British artists and critics, such as the Pre-Raphaelites and John Ruskin and were indispensable to early art writers. The use of images in art lectures occurred during the Victorian period: Joshua Reynolds did not use any visual images to accompany his lectures,



8 VPR Spring 1991

while Turner made paintings and drawings for his RA lectures.21 The Arundel Society began with copperplates and several draughtsmen and

engravers in 1852-53, but then turned to wood

engraving cut by the Dalziels (a practice defended by Ruskin) to reproduce Giotto's Arena Chapel frescoes. After 1856 with the financial assistance of A.H. Layard, the Society concentrated on colored prints, both more popu lar and more expensive, which led to some

severe criticism of the Society in the 1860s for

the inaccuracy of the reproductions.22

Art historians relied on photographs as they developed extensive collections which are still invaluable for scholars today, such as the photo archives of the Alinari Company, or of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence or the

Witt Collection in the Courtauld Institute in London. The first art historical work to be illus trated with calotype reproductions of paintings derived from engravings (because they

appeared to the publishers and spectators as

clearer and more legible than photographs which then were blurred and blotchy) was Wil liam Stirling's Annals of the Artists of Spain (1847-48). Similar projects were undertaken and soon photographs, negatives, replica casts

and electrotypes were sold cheaply to consu

mers as early as 1859 by the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albeit

Museum). In 1852 the Victorians began to assemble a complete photographic corpus of

Raphael's works, a suggestion first made by Prince Albeit, and in 1853 the British Museum hired its first official photographer, Roger Fen ton. Yet, because photographs were still gener

ally dark and illegible, most illustrated

magazines in the 1850s still used wood

engravings, and printshops sold mostly intaglio and lithography. In 1849 the Art Journal claimed to have reproduced 37 steel engravings of paintings and sculptures and over 800 wood

engravings.23 Yet after the invention of photog raphy (c. 1839) to the end of the last century,

more works of art had been reproduced than had been reproduced in all the previous centu

ries combined. The explosion of photographic images of the art of the past profoundly affected Victorian beliefs and attitudes toward the past which had consequences, in turn, for

Victorians' understanding of the relations

among art, culture, nationalism, and the role of

the artist24

In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction," Walter Benjamin describes the loss through mass reproduction of the art work's

aura, the magic power inherent in the physical presence of the cult art objects of the middle

ages and the Renaissance which are produced only once and which require that we make a pil grimage to them to see them25 As Benjamin notes, reproductions are independent of the

object and bring the art to us. The reproduced object is detached from history and tradition by the plurality of its own simulations and by the creation of an entirely new relationship between

the object and the spectator in space, the specta tor's space not the cult object's space, and in

time as the technological present gains promi nence at the expense of the pre-industrial past

from which its ties are cut.

In Benjamin's words, reproduction served "the

desire of contemporary masses to bring things 'closer' spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the

uniqueness of every reality by accepting its

reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by

way of its likeness, its reproduction." Judging from the overwhelmingly favorable response of Victorians to the possibility of possessing their own cheap copies of academy paintings and from the popularity of periodical illustrations and of

Christmas centerfold reproductions in maga zines, it does appear to be the case that reproduc

tions, though lacking the aura of an altarpiece,

acquired a new post-industrial aura. Benjamin

argues that the aura and ritual value of earlier art

were transformed by reproduction away from tra

dition and toward what he called an exhibition value. Through reproduction the presence of a

work was its absence, its substitution by a copy.

Its value was the quality of being exhibited, seen and appropriated by the spectator. The magic of

reproduction provided a new access and cultu

ral empowerment for emerging classes desiring to appropriate socially acceptable simulations of a much-loved or much-praised work which signi fied status and educational achievement.

We can add that the Victorian reproduction of art placed art in an entirely new context, the

page, not the gallery wall. The page offered its own often jumbled context with news stories, interviews, juxtaposed yet unconnected images, as John Berger noted 20 years ago26 This



Codell 9

decontextualized displacement had a powerful impact on the affective and conceptual recep tion of images. As Benjamin points out, the academy walls were not sufficient for mass

spectating of easel paintings. Such art had ear lier in history been experienced by small num bers of people, sometimes only by a coterie or court audience. In the 19th century in England and on the Continent, paintings were met by the

masses at first with little mediation between the crowd and the artworks, often only a small shil

ling catalogue to accompany the FLA visitor. For Benjamin, the publication of reproductions was a

logical and necessary mediation between art and the masses in order that the reception of art could be made orderly, comprehensible and accessible through controlled social and ideological means.

These means were mapped by a confluence of

painters, engravers, critics, publishers, readers, technical innovations, hegemonic traditions, eco

nomic opportunities, modern educational sys tems, and the desires of emerging classes for cultural empowerment by bringing the histori cally and geographically distant into their homes.

?Arizona State University

Notes

the Printing Historical Society, History of Photography, Print Collector's Newsletter, Visual Resources, and

Media, Culture and Society. Among the most relevant of the many histories of photography are Aaron Scharf,

Art and Photography (London: Penguin, 1974); Van Deren Coke, The Painter and the Photographer (Albu querque: U of New Mexico P, 1964 and 1972); H.

Gernsheim, The Origins of Photography (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982); Grace Seiberling, Amateurs,

Photography, and the Mid-Victorian Imagination (Lon don and Chicago: U of Chicago, 1986). Studies of indi vidual artists and critics also exist, e.g., Anthony Dyson, "Images Interpreted: Landseer and the Engraving Trade," Print Quarterly, 1 (1984), 29-43; Michael Har

vey, "Ruskin and Photography," Oxford Art Journal, 1

(1985), 25-33.

5See Clive Ashwin, "Graphic Imagery, 1837-1901: A Victorian Revolution," Art History, v. 1 (Sept. 1978), 363-64, for an excellent survey of the changes in methods and the effects of these technical changes on style in Vic torian printed illustrations.

6Ashwin, 360-70.

7 On the economics of engraving and the work of William

Ivins in distinguishing between handicraft engraving and

photography, see Gordon Fyfe, "Art and its Objects: Wil liam Ivins and the Reproduction of Art," in Fyfe and Law,

65-98.

o

Gordon Fyfe, "Art Exhibitions and Power During the Nineteenth Century," in John Law, ed., Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 23.

Gordon J. Fyfe, "Art and Reproduction: Some Aspects of the Relations between Painters and Engravers in Lon

don, 1760-1850," Media, Culture, Society, v. 7 (1985), 399-425.

9 Fyfe and Law, 3 citing John Berger, Ways of Seeing

(1972).

3See Helene Roberts's two essays, "Art Reviewing in the Early Nineteenth-Century Art Periodicals," Victorian

Periodicals Newsletter, #19 (March 1973), 10; and "Exhi bition and Review: The Periodical Press and the Victorian Art Exhibition System," in The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings, ed. Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff (Leicester and Toronto, 1982), 79-107.

Valuable surveys include Arthur M. Hind, A History of Engraving and Etching (New York: Dover, 1963; orig. pub. 1923); William M. Ivins, Jr. Prints and Visual Com munication (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953); Anthony Dyson, Pictures to Print?The Nineteenth

Century Engraving Trade (London: Book Press Ltd., 1985); Estelle Jussim, Visual Communication and the

Graphic Arts (New York and London: R.R. Bowker, 1983); D. Alexander and R.T. Godfrey, Painters and

Engraving: The Reproductive Print from Hogarth to Wil kie (catalogue of an exhibition at the Yale Center For Brit ish Art, New Haven, 1980); Ruari McLean, Victorian

Book Design and Colour Printing (Berkeley: U of Cali

fornia, 1972); Celina Fox, Graphic Journalism in Eng land During the 1830s and 1840s (New York and

London: Garland Publishing, 1988); Phillip C#e, ed., The

Graphic Arts and French Society, 1871-1914 (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers UP, 1988). There are several important journals in this field, as well: Journal of



10 VPR Spring 1991

^Kathleen Lochnan, The Etchings of James McNeill Whistler (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1984).

For an examination of the problems Haden faced in

trying to establish etching as an original art while main

taining ties to a mass consumer market, see my essay

"Artists' Professional Societies and Dealers' Galleries:

Production, Labour and Aesthetics," in The Making of a

Modern Art World in Britain, ed. M. Kitson and D. Solkin

(London: Yale Mellon Centre, 1991), forthcoming.

See Albert Boime, "Le Mus?e des Copies," Gazette

des Beaux-Arts (1964), 237-47, and H. Hutter, ed., Origi nal, Kopie, Replik, Paraphrase (Vienna: Akademie der

Bildenden K?nste, 1980).

i ? See, for example, John Tagg, The Burden of Repre

sentation (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1988); Roland

Barthes, "The Photographic Image," Image, Music and

Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang,

1977); and Victor Burgin, ed., Thinking Photography

(New York and London: Macmillan, 1982).

13Letter #33, n. d. [probably 1870s], in Murray Collec

tion, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Univer

sity of Texas at Austin. Quoted with permission.

1 Trevor Fawcett, "Graphic Versus Photographic in the

Nineteenth-Century Reproduction," Art History, 9 (June,

1986), 186.

15Jussim.

16Fawcett, 189. See also Jeremy Maas, Gambart, Prince

of the Victorian Art World (London: Barrie & Jenkins,

1975).

17Ashwin, 366, cites The Studio's encouragement of

Mortimer Menpes's drawing with lithography crayon on

Japanese tissue over a textured surface to create a frottage effect. Menpes had been an apprentice of Whistler's. On

the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, see

Scott Bennett, "Revolutions in Thought: Serial Publica

tion and the Mass Market for Reading," in The Victorian

Periodical Press, ed. Shattock and Wolff, 225-57. The

other periodicals mentioned are discussed in my essays on

The Portfolio in VPR, 20 (Fall, 1987), 83-92, and on M.H.

Spielmann, editor of The Magazine of Art, in VPR, 22

(Spring, 1989), 7-15.

18Hartley S. Spatt, "The Aesthetics of Editorship: Creat

ing Taste in the Victorian Art World," Innovators and

Preachers: The Role of the Editor in Victorian England, ed. Joel H. Wiener (Westport, CT and London: Green

wood Press, 1985), 43-59. Spart analyzes the different tac

tics for advocating aesthetics taken up by these editors.

9Ashwin, 368-69. See also my entry on Phil May in the 1890s Encyclopedia of Art and Literature, ed. George

Cevasco (New York: Garland, 1992), forthcoming, and

James Thorpe, Phil May: Master Draughtsman and

Humorist (London: George Harrap, 1932). There are

numerous studies of Beardsley's style available.

See the essays surveying the diverse art publications in the 19th century in Trevor Fawcett and Clive Phillpot, eds., The Art Press: Two Centuries of Art Magazines (London: Art Book Co., 1976).

o? Trevor Fawcett, "Visual Facts and the Nineteenth

Century Art Lecture," Art History, 6 (December, 1983), 442-60.

Fawcett, "Graphic Versus Photographic," 197. See also T. Ledger, A Study of the Arundel Society 1848-1897

(Oxford, D. Phil. Thesis, 1978) and Robyn Cooper, "The

Popularization of Renaissance Art in Victorian England: The Arundel Society," Art History, 1 (1978), 263-93.

23Fawcett, "Graphic Versus Photograph," 189-93.

24See Anthony Hamber, "The Photography of the Vis ual Arts, 1839-1880: Part I," Visual Resources 5 (Winter,

1989), 289-310. Studies on the reproduction methods in

art history and related questions of aesthetics include

Donata Levi, "L'officina di Crowe e Cavalcaselle," Pros

pettiva, 26 (1981), 74-87, on England's first modern art

historians; W.M. Ivins, "A Note on Engraved Reproduc tions of Works of Art," Studies in Art and Literature for

Belle da Costa Greene, ed. D. Miner (Princeton, 1954), 193-96; M. Babst Battin, "Exact Replication in the Visual

Arts," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 38 (1979

80), 153-58.

25Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah

Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books,

1969), pp. 217-51.

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), chapter 4 treats the juxtapositions and d?racin? sig

nifications of visual images on the page.



The Aura of Mechanical Reproduction Victorian Art and the Press.pdf

Documents

Transcript of The Aura of Mechanical Reproduction Victorian Art and the Press.pdf