Sadakichi Hartmann

Critical Modernist

Sadakichi Hartmann, Jane Calhoun Weaver

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780520067677
• eBook ISBN: 9780520909588
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Brilliant and controversial, art critic Sadakichi Hartmann wrote copiously about American and European art and the shaping of American culture during the decades from 1890 to 1910. Jane Weaver has recovered and assembled over fifty of Hartmann's critical writings from influential, though often obscure, turn-of-the-century journals. These reviews and theoretical essays not only provide some of the earliest known criticism of important artists and photographers of the period, but also make Hartmann's fundamental—and uniquely American—definition of modernism available to students of art and cultural history. A most useful adjunct to the text is a complete bibliography of Hartmann's writings on art, as well as an annotated checklist of all the artists treated by Hartmann in this book.

Sadakichi Hartmann (1867-1944), half German, half Japanese, learned the American cast of mind and heart as a beloved young disciple of the aged Walt Whitman. Reflecting the poet's zealous vision, Hartmann's piercing commentaries on the art centers of Boston and New York offer unparalleled documentation of the years before and after 1900.


Brilliant and controversial, art critic Sadakichi Hartmann wrote copiously about American and European art and the shaping of American culture during the decades from 1890 to 1910. Jane Weaver has recovered and assembled over fifty of Hartmann's critical

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHRONOLOGY
• Boston Toward the End of the Eighties
• How an American Art Could Be Developed (Suggestions for a Platform)22
• A Tuesday Evening at Stephane Mallarme’s
• A National American Art
• [On Women as Artists]
• Boston Art Gossip
• Buddha’. Scene XII27
• La Modernité in Painting
• Art Photography in Its Relationship to Painting
• A Few Reflections on Amateur and Artistic Photography
• [On the Necessity of Art Criticism in America]
• [On the Solitude of American Artists]
• New York Artists’ Models
• The New York Camera Club
• Color and Texture in Photography
• Subject and Treatment
• On Pictorial and Illustrative Qualities
• The “Flat-Iron” Building— an Esthetical Dissertation
• Repetition, with Slight Variation
• The Value of the Apparently Meaningless and Inaccurate
• Aesthetic Activity in Photography
• White Chrysanthemums
• A Monologue
• On the Lack of Culture
• The Technique of Mystery and Blurred Effects
• The Unconventional in Portrait Photography
• The Inquisitorial System
• From “The Decadence of Sculpture”
• Unphotographic Paint: The Texture of Impressionism
• [The Scarlet Departure]
• “The Younger American Painters” and the Press
• The American Picture World
• On Originality
• Broken Melodies
• The Esthetic Value of Cubism
• A Contribution to the Technique of Draughtsmanship: The Relation of Drawing to Handwriting
• On Pictorial Projection
• [On the Process of Selection]31
• Thomas W. Dewing
• [On Arthur B. Davies]
• [On Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer]
• [On Claude Monet]
• [On William Merritt Chase]
• A Visit to A. P. Ryder!
• [On Thomas Eakins]
• [On Robert Henri]
• [On Winslow Homer]
• [On Augustus St. Gaudens]
• Alfred Stieglitz: An Art Critic’s Estimate
• The Split in the Art Society
• A Chat on New York Sculptors
• Puvis de Chavannes
• Boston Artists
• [On Childe Hassam]
• Eduard J. Steichen, Painter-Photographer
• John Donoghue
• An Estimate of George Luks
• [On William Glackens]
• Selections from
• Rodin’s Balzac
• Structural Units
• Once More Matisse
• From a Hollywood Studio
• What is the Matter with Eisenstein?
• CHECKLIST OF ARTISTS NAMED IN THE ESSAYS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ART WRITINGS BY SADAKICHI HARTMANN
• INDEX