(Excerpt from American Artists
American art flows not from...)
Excerpt from American Artists
American art flows not from tradition but, in a specially marked sense, from the individuality of the artist. The men who have played a constructive part in the building up of our school have in many cases received their training abroad, but have used it in a fresh, very personal manner. It is in appreciation of some of these men that the following pages have been composed; in some cases to recall figures not always remembered at the present day. My chapters have been written on various occasions. I hope, however, that they have the unity which should come from years of faithful study of American art and from Whole-hearted delight in the manifestations of its.
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Catalogue of the Etchings and Dry-Points of Childe Hassam, N.A.
(The first complete catalogue of the etchings and engravin...)
The first complete catalogue of the etchings and engravings by Childe Hassam, who began making prints in 1915 at the age of 56 when he as already an acclaimed painter. There are 156 illustrations.
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(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
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The Life Of Whitelaw Reid: Journalism, War and Politics V1
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(Originally published in 1907. This volume from the Cornel...)
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Royal Cortissoz was born on February 10, 1869 in Brooklyn, New York, United States. He was the only child of Francisco Emanuel and Julia da Costa (Mauri) Cortissoz. His father, although of Spanish descent, was a native of England who had immigrated to Brooklyn around 1855. His mother had come to America from Martinique.
Education
Cortissoz attended public schools in Brooklyn. He received two honorary doctorates: from Wesleyan in 1927 and from Bowdoin in 1942.
Career
Between 1883 and 1885 he went to work at the firm of McKim, Mead, and White, architects, in New York City, where his father may have been employed. A precocious writer from the age of fourteen, when he began to write weekly letters to a Kansas City newspaper, Cortissoz published his first article on art in January 1886, shortly before his eighteenth birthday. During the period of his employment with the architectural firm Cortissoz traveled to Italy with McKim, where they chose works in the Vatican sculpture gallery to be reproduced in plaster for display at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.
In 1891 he became the art critic on the New York Tribune, a position he held for fifty-three years. In the 1890's, in addition to his newspaper work, he contributed articles regularly to Harper's and Century on such topics as the National Academy of Design and the American Academy in Rome.
Cortissoz and his wife shared the literary editorship of the newspaper from the time of their marriage until 1912 or 1913, and during this period he produced his first two books, Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1907) and John La Farge: A Memoir and a Study (1911). In these books Cortissoz praised both artists for their intelligent use of the classical tradition, and indeed he was able to understand their works fully, because they are as much a part of the Renaissance revival era in American taste as are the buildings of McKim, Mead, and White. But after the sudden and definitive turning away from all aspects of the Renaissance tradition that was caused by the exhibition of Postimpressionist and Cubist works at the Armory Show of 1913, Cortissoz became an adversary of contemporary developments. He was unable to abandon the idea that art is an imitation of nature, and so in Art and Common Sense (1913), he wrongly described Van Gogh and Cézanne as Impressionists who had failed to achieve sufficiently naturalistic effects.
Unbending in his resistance to modernism, Cortissoz continued throughout his life to attack the mainstream of twentieth-century art while praising the old masters and artists such as George De Forest Brush and Paul Manship, who continued to adhere to the Renaissance idea of beauty.
The 1920's and 1930's were also Cortissoz's most prolific period as an author. In 1923 he published American Artists, followed by Personalities in Art (1925), The Painter's Craft (1930), Guy Pène du Bois (1931), Arthur B. Davies (1932), An Introduction to the Mellon Collection (1937), and The Works of Edwin Howland Blashfield (1937). Cortissoz's wife, who had long been an invalid, died on August 13, 1933.
In December 1941 M. Knoedler and Co. held a loan exhibition of paintings in its gallery in honor of Cortissoz's fifty years as critic on the Tribune. The works for the show were chosen by Cortissoz himself; among them were favorite old master paintings by Botticelli, Rembrandt, Velasquez, and Vermeer, and American works by Whistler, La Farge, Sargent, and Bellows. Cortissoz continued to write regularly for the Tribune until 1944 when heart trouble caused his retirement.
He died of heart failure in his home on October 17, 1948. After an Episcopal service at the Church of the Ascension, he was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in New York.
Cortissoz developed his principles of art criticism in the last decade of the nineteenth century, a decade during which he steeped himself in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Cortissoz looked to works of art not only for evidences of sound technique, intelligence, beauty, and refinement, but also for qualities of morality and character. It is in this respect that what he himself called his "Victorian temperament" shows itself most clearly in his criticism.
(Originally published in 1907. This volume from the Cornel...)
Membership
Cortissoz had been elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1908. In 1924 he was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was appointed to the board of directors in 1930. In 1925 he was made an honorary fellow of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in 1928 was elected to honorary membership in the American Institute of Architects.
Personality
Although Cortissoz's blindness to the values of modern art and the dogmatism of his attacks upon it are serious flaws in his thinking, they by no means completely nullify his achievement. His narrowness may have reinforced the public's fear and distrust of modernism, but most of his long career was devoted to educating the public to the virtues of the old masters of the Renaissance and their tradition.
Connections
On June 1, 1897, he was married in London to Ellen MacKay Hutchinson, the literary editor of the Tribune. They had no children.