SOURCE: An introduction to Sadakichi Hartmann: Critical Modernist, edited by Jane Calhoun Weaver, University of California Press, 1991, pp. 1-44.

Few writers were as important to the art of the United States at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century as Sadakichi Hartmann (1867-1944). Although primarily remembered today for his contribution to the history of photography, Hartmann was above all a knowledgeable, perceptive critic of painting and sculpture whose brilliant intuition of an emerging modernism illuminates American art in the decades on either side of 1900.

In spite of his well-known essays on photography and the appearance of his History of American Art in bibliographies of the era, Hartmann has never been precisely located in the history of American art and photography. This is in part because the period of Hartmann's greatest activity has not yet attracted great scholarly interest among art historians; however, as [the] essays [in Sadakichi Hartmann, Critical Modernist: Collected Art Writings] demonstrate, a reading of the 1890-1915 era in American art is virtually impossible without recourse to Hartmann's writings.

From the beginning, Hartmann demonstrated a remarkable ability to identify the artists and ideas that would become the primary forces of twentieth-century American art. The changing focus of his writing takes us through early nationalistic idealism to the spirit of the fin de siècle and the modern age. Hartmann knew most of the major American artists of the period and wrote about all of them; his articles on artists and issues were penned with the heartfelt conviction that art, in all its manifestations, is the most important creation of any civilization.

Hartmann began writing art criticism in Boston at the end of the 1880s. From early (and unsigned) articles in The Advertiser and The Boston Transcript, he moved on to increasingly ambitious ventures, bolstered always by the encouragement and affection he had received a few years earlier from the great mentor of his youth, Walt Whitman. Hartmann left Boston in 1889; he lived in New York for three years, where he became involved with the young artists and literati of the city and wrote poetry, plays, and newspaper features. In 1892 Samuel S. McClure, founder of the first American newspaper syndicate and the first illustrated magazine, hired Hartmann to be a roving correspondent in France.

Hartmann spent the winter of 1892-93 in Paris with his new wife, Elizabeth Blanche Walsh. Through the auspices of his American friend and fellow Whitman enthusiast, symbolist poet Stuart Merrill, the young writer was welcomed into the inner circle of Stéphane Mallarmé and the symbolistes. In Paris Hartmann met J.A.M. Whistler, Claude Monet, and Maurice Maeterlinck. Among the poets there he saw Henri de Regnier, Jules Laforgue, Gustave Kahn, Jules Renard, Remy de Gourmant, "and the bearers of these pompous names: de Montesquieu, Tristan Corbiére, and Lautreamont—all with a generous talent for the happy combination of words." Mallarmé himself must have enjoyed Hart-mann's presence; he later sent the aspiring poet three graceful letters of praise for works Hartmann sent him for review.

Hartmann returned to Boston inspired by the advanced art and literary movements in France and determined to begin a publication of his own, to be called The Art Critic. He journeyed up and down the Atlantic seaboard gathering support for the project, and eventually 750 artists became subscribers to the sheet that marked Hartmann's formal and fiery entry into the American art world. The list includes many of the best known artists in the United States: Albert Bierstadt, William Merritt Chase, Augustus St. Gaudens, Childe Hassam, Thomas Dewing, Albert Pinkham Ryder, George Inness, and William Sartain from New York; Robert Henri and architect Frank Furness from Philadelphia; and museum curator Ernest Fenollosa from Boston. Although the periodical lasted only three issues, the contents present a startling amalgam of fin de siècle commentary and militant American art criticism. A program for the development of a "national art" is described in organized detail, followed in dazzling contrast by a discussion of the Parisian fin de siècle. Hartmann describes the branches of French symbolist poetry and gives his readers (perhaps their first) knowledge of Paul Gauguin, Maurice Denis, Fernande Khnopff, and Félicien Rops.

Hartmann's commentary on the symbolist movement was printed the same month that Arthur Symons's discussion of symbolist literature was published in Harper's Monthly Magazine; although Hartmann was the first to discuss symbolist artists, Aline Gorren's article "The French Symbolists," which appeared the previous spring in the March 1893 issue of Scribner's Magazine, is generally cited as the first major writing on the symbolist movement in the American press. Hartmann's description of artists was highlighted by a thoughtful essay on the work of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes proclaiming the artist's ability to provoke "original" sentiments and thoughts through the muted colors of his frescoes. This article would surely have been noticed by his artist-readers, for Hartmann concludes that Puvis's art is "one of the phases that will lead eventually to a new art."

The untimely end of The Art Critic was brought about by scandal and financial ruin after Hartmann's erotic play Christ was printed and distributed in Boston. The young author was arrested by the Watch and Ward Society and spent Christmas of 1893 in the Charles Street Jail; the Hartmann family funds were depleted by his legal defense.

After returning to New York, where he remained until the mid-teens, Hartmann began in earnest his complex role in American art. Writing for a variety of publications, he became a widely acquainted figure in the New York art world. Reviews, essays, columns, and books on art, as well as two more short-lived periodicals of his own, are the rich legacy of those years.

By the end of the 1890s Hartmann's interest in photography led to a close friendship with Alfred Stieglitz and, subsequently, to a place of prominence as a pioneer in the new field of photography criticism. Hartmann's essays not only offered critical evaluation of individual photographers and new photographic techniques but also encompassed broader issues of modernism in all of the arts. He became an integral cog in photography circles, and he played a subtle but essential role in the development of modern American photography aesthetics.

Hartmann's activities among other artists continued into the new century as well; he became a regular in the group that would become "The Eight," having written early, important criticism of Robert Henri, George Luks, and William Glackens. He provided direction for the acquisition of an important collection of American drawings at the Carnegie Institute of Art in Pittsburgh, contacting artists as the deputy of Director John Beatty. On a more avant note, in 1902 he staged his first "perfume concert," an experiment in synaesthesia. During Hartmann's delivery of a travel monologue, various floral fragrances were blown toward the audience by enormous electric fans in order to evoke the essence of distant cultures—an obvious continuation of his immersion in symbolism.

Perhaps the most direct and accomplished evidence of Hartmann's symbolist experience and involvement lies in his plays, particularly the religious plays: Christ, Buddha, Confucius, Baker Eddy, Moses, and Mohammed. Although a discussion of the plays is beyond the scope of this essay, special mention of Buddha should be made in the context of art; the final scene, which is dedicated to "Students of Color Psychology" and which was specifically praised by Mallarmé, is an imaginary fantasy for productions of the future that incorporates fireworks and lighting effects into a scene to be staged on an enormous field eight hundred feet long.

After The Art Critic Hartmann's most important publishing activities occurred during his New York sojourn; they include his Art News (1896-97) and his last attempt at publishing a periodical, The Stylus (1910-11). In addition, he wrote columns for The Criterion, Musical America, The Studio, and the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung; a few miscellaneous essays were published in Forum, Century, and The Daily Tatler. Camera Notes and Camera Work contain many of his most important critical essays, and he published articles in virtually every photographic magazine in existence at the turn of the century.

Hartmann wrote a number of art books, of which A History of American Art (two volumes, 1902) and Modern American Sculpture (Folio Edition, 1902) are critically important to the modern historian for their overview of contemporary art. The Whistler Book (1910) is the most graceful exposition of Hartmann's ideas, as well as a sensitive interpretation of the style of the American expatriate painter J.A.M. Whistler. (That publication, rather than A History, is Hartmann's true magnum opus for its logical organization, flowing prose, and critical acuity.)

The world of publishing was not one of easy access to Hartmann. For one thing, he used two contrasting modes of writing that may have been a problem for established publishers. In his abiding wish to attach American art to the greater Western tradition that preceded and surrounded it, Hartmann sometimes demonstrated an erudition too broad for his reading audience to assimilate and, indeed, too erudite for his own undefined purpose; possibly as an antidote to that intense effort, he also, on occasion, adopted a flip, satirical style that alienated his readers in an entirely different way. His impulsive, often abrasive manner did little to endear him to periodical editors interested in deadlines and steady production.

An even greater hindrance to Hartmann's writing career was his general inability to conduct business and social transactions in the traditionally prescribed manner of the United States in the late nineteenth century. Hartmann's social problems became legendary, as did his asocial proclivity to seek financial support from friends, acquaintances, business associates, and artistic colleagues. For that reason, most of his New York peers (Alfred Stieglitz being a notable exception) later came to shun him; there is little mention of him in much of their memorabilia. Since history is not often kind to the unremembered, even a man who was vital to the intellectual culture of his era—and a wildly colorful figure to boot, as Hartmann surely was—can often be neglected.

In spite of being virtually unrecorded by his contemporaries, Hartmann's growing importance to the New York art world after 1890 is evident from the contents of publications that remain which contain his writings and, in some rare instances, an account of his activities. Following his second arrival in New York after the demise of The Art Critic in the winter of 1894, he became involved with old and new friends as a seriously committed member of the art community.

Thomas Dewing and especially Arthur B. Davies were his friends then; Thomas Eakins and Robert Henri continued to be acquaintances from earlier years. Hartmann provided all four of these artists with some of their earliest critical evaluation. The private galleries, intimate art clubs, and public cafes of Old New York became familiar haunts to Hartmann, the critic. The most fabulous place he frequented was the secluded private art club that restaurateur Francis Moore established in the cellar of his elegant townhouse. Furnished with a shooting gallery and billiard tables, the club served as an elaborate retreat for Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, and others, who decorated the walls of their host's home with their art. In addition, Hartmann's wife, writing as "Elizabeth Breuil," became one of the infant movie industry's first script writers; very likely, Hartmann moved in film circles as well.

Hartmann slowly gained a more acutely sensitive view of American art and art issues during the New York years, which is not to say that he was traditional in either his approach or in his concept of the meaning of art. His lively intellect, sensitive eye, and articulate, irreverent voice generated a critical style of increasingly advanced persuasion that was attractive to a small, knowing art audience.

E. W. Simmons, a painter who moved in virtually every circle in the New York art world, was quoted as having this candid opinion of Hartmann: "Hartmann may be capricious and malicious and rather careless at times, but he is, after all, the only art critic we have who knows a good picture when he sees it, and who is not afraid of expressing his opinion."

Hartmann's earlier firsthand experience of the Parisian fin de siècle worked to create a counterpoint to his growing knowledge of art and artists in the United States; his involvement with photography and photographers before the turn of the century simply expanded his discussion of the aesthetic problems that were beginning to form the great modernist conundrum.

Of all Hartmann's primary intellectual contacts, Walt Whitman and, later, Alfred Stieglitz were the most significant forces in the formation of Hartmann's art writing. In the late 1880s, Whitman provided inspiration and a process of intellectual Americanization to the sensitive youth, who had been born in Japan, raised in Germany, and sent alone to Philadelphia at the age of fourteen. There was a strong mutual admiration between the young writer and the old poet; Hartmann professed that, next to his mother, Whitman was the most important person in his life. Whitman, cited by his biographer Horace Traubel, said of Hartmann:

Sept 8, 1888:

But Hartmann is more than the organizer of a Whitman club. I wish you could meet him: his views on things Occidental, as they say, are rare, novel—should be heard. They come from one who has his roots in the other side of the planet—was raised under surprising differences of perspective. Take his ideas of Holland, France, Germany, England (he has been in all those countries) and you will find them very often just the things we need to have told us. Hartmann has written astonishingly good studies. His observations on America are bright—surprisingly searching—some of them.

Sept. 14, 1888:

I have more hopes of him, more faith in him, than any of the boys. They all seem to regard him as a humbug—or if not that, a sensationalist anyhow or an adventurer. I can't see it that way. I expect good things of him—extra good things: not great, but good. The Boston fellows seem to be particularly strong against him: some of them seem to think that if he is not a bad egg he is at least the raw stuff of a bad egg. That sounds familiar: lots of the most amiable people have from time to time anonymously written me the same facts about myself.

Later, Hartmann wrote a feature piece for a Boston newspaper that was a fantasy interview with the poet. Whitman was furious at the errors the article contained, calling the text of his reported comments "the projected camel of [Hartmann's] imagination." The loyal Traubel, recalling Hartmann's rather crude attempts at establishing a Walt Whitman Society in Boston, commented that Hartmann had "more abused the poet than anyone." Whitman, however, revealed his affection for the young writer in spite of his anger:

He is away from home—helpless—a poor enough creature—yet I have a soft spot for him—a liking for him—after all—poor boy!

The depth of the relationship between the young Hartmann and the old Whitman was apparently astonishingly deep. In some fundamental way chords were struck between the poet who would die in 1892 with neither a wife nor a child by his side and the young immigrant who so longed for a loving, understanding family. From all that is known, Hartmann spent little time with Whitman after the attempt to establish a Walt Whitman Society failed, but surely Whitman was touched by the young man's action and very likely even knew of Hartmann's expressed wish to be Whitman's nurse so that he might care for him.

After Whitman's death, Hartmann was the recipient of Whitman's personal copy of the 1876 author's edition of Leaves of Grass. The book, now in the Rare Manuscripts and Books Room of the New York Public Library, was purchased by Oscar Lion for his collection of Whitman manuscripts and subsequently acquired by the library as part of the Lion collection. Both Lion's and Hartmann's bookplates are on the inside cover pages; a handwritten notation says "From the personal collection of Walt Whitman. An unsigned copy." On the verso of the flyleaf is pasted a photographic image of Whitman; opposite that a typed paragraph contains the following information:

1876 Edition

Presentation copy to Sadakichi Hartmann

Notation in the handwriting of H. Traubel

This photo of Whitman never appears in this volume but is generally autographed and placed in the companion volume, "Two Rivulets."

H. T. told Mr. Hier that Whitman requested him to give this copy to Hartmann after his death. This was Whitman's personal copy.

One supposes that the writer of the text after Traubel's note is Oscar Lion. Hartmann undoubtedly sold the book during one of his desperate attempts to raise cash. This kind of documented link between Hartmann and Whitman adds credibility to the notion that Hartmann's zealous Americanism sprang from the purest source imaginable in the late nineteenth century, the crooning poetry of Walt Whitman's native songs.

If Whitman was a fatherly influence in Hartmann's life, Alfred Stieglitz was a peer and fellow art militant. By 1898, when he met Stieglitz, Hartmann had acquired a wife and children, had become an American citizen, and was a critic of some note. It was Hartmann, in fact, who was better known to the art world than photographer Stieglitz. Hartmann was captivated by the art and personality of the German-speaking Stieglitz and immediately wrote of his admiration for Stieglitz's photographs. Not surprisingly, Hartmann was thereupon asked to contribute to the journal of the New York Camera Club, Camera Notes, which Stieglitz edited. The two men formed a close, almost familial bond that endured thirty-odd years, as attested to by their long correspondence. Stieglitz, who shared Hartmann's continental cultural roots, considered the writer a genius and was generally very tolerant of Hartmann's eccentric ways. He may have been Hartmann's most appreciative admirer; certainly he was the publisher who gave him his widest artistic audience.

The influence Hartmann and Stieglitz exerted on each other was particularly pronounced in the years directly following their first meeting. Stieglitz later declared that Hartmann was his most important artistic influence in the years 1898-1907. Hartmann played a many-sided, essential role as musing philosopher/art critic in the activities of the Photo-Secession, founded by Stieglitz in 1902. He also become the most prolific writer for the journal of the movement, Camera Work. There is little doubt that Hartmann's fin de siècle orientation and powerful convictions about art and the direction of American art were a guiding force in the early years of the Secession; in the years after 1907, however, when the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession began showing European moderns, it was Stieglitz who brought new art ideas to the attention of his friend.

The very controversial drawings of Rodin captured Hartmann's imagination, as did the work of Henri Matisse. Both artists received salient praise from Hartmann before they were popular successes in the United States. Hartmann was also able to respond with remarkable alacrity to the new American modernist painters; his articles on Marsden Hartley in 1909 and Max Weber in 1911, for example, stand as seminal discussions of those artists.

Photo-Secession waters were especially turbulent for Hartmann during the complex, confusing period of American photographic history around the turn of the century when great conflict existed between Photo-Secession and Salon Club photographers, of whom Curtis Bell became the leader. Within the Secession, Alfred Stieglitz reigned supreme. He was not only the ideological center of the movement, he was its imperial patron, controlling every aspect of its activity. A cache of correspondence reveals Machiavellian plots between Stieglitz and one of his lieutenants as Stieglitz became obsessed with expanding the power of his position. The independent Hartmann, refusing to fall into line, became the focus of enormous hostility from Stieglitz and his followers.

On this occasion, and others, Hartmann stood by his critical beliefs in the face of a good deal of personal animosity. The breach between himself and Stieglitz continued for a number of years, after which Hartmann once again published in Camera Work (whereupon the content of aesthetic writing in the journal greatly improved). Hartmann and Stieglitz resumed their friendship, and it continued unabated for the rest of their lives as an association of untiring art warriors.

Participation in the photography movement brought about one of the most curious phenomena of Hartmann's critical career. For reasons to be elaborated later, Hartmann adopted a pseudonym/persona for his writing about photography; if nothing else, this action seemed to precipitate great productivity. Under his own name and as "Sidney Allan," Hartmann produced an astonishing amount of material for the art/photography literature of the period. Of his writing for photography journals, the most critically significant clusters of articles were the twenty-two that appeared between October 1898 and December 1902 in Camera Notes and the thirty-five essays and poems that were published between January 1903 and July 1912 in Camera Work.

The virtual end of Hartmann's active involvement in the New York art world occurred soon after the first decade of the new century; around 1911 Hartmann unaccountably felt his days as an art critic to be over. In spite of respectable publishing success, he gradually withdrew from the centralized activity in which he had played so important a part. National lecture tours occupied him (and "Sidney Allan") instead; journeys west led in decreasing circles to the California coast, a place to which Hartmann was particularly attracted because of the asthma attacks which had come constantly to plague him. (Still, he spent enough time in New York to be hailed "The King of Bohemia" in 1915.)

Hartmann lived in San Francisco and its suburbs for a few years late in the teens; by the early twenties he had settled in Southern California, where he lived for the rest of his life. In keeping with pioneer tradition, life, in a sense, began anew in the West for the embattled art critic. Hartmann, symboliste of the 1890s, became a regular of the movie crowd in Hollywood and a lecturer to the intellectual and European émigré contingent in Los Angeles; the resident philosopher of Camera Work became a sage Hollywood correspondent for the London-based Curtain.

Always better accepted by European intellectuals than Americans, Hartmann became a favorite guest at gatherings in the West Hollywood home of architect Rudolph Schindler and his wife Pauline, where Sunday evening open houses included Edward Weston, neighbor Theodore Dreiser, and Schindler's Austrian compatriot and fellow architect Richard Neutra. (The house itself is a landmark of American architecture; called Schindler's masterpiece, it is the prototype for later developments in modernist California architecture.) The bond between Hartmann and Schindler resulted in Hartmann's using Schindler's studio as a lecture hall from 1925 to 1930. Perhaps through Schindler, Hartmann met Los Angeles art patron Alice Barney, who sponsored a West Coast production of the "perfume concert."

His amazing, unquenchable zest for life led Hartmann to continuing forays on the Los Angeles intelligentsia in the thirties, as well as to wild debaucheries with the hard-drinking crew of W.C. Fields, John Barrymore, and company. Although Hartmann was admired by artists Ejnar Hansen, Peter Krasnow, and Ben Berlin, the image he projected to the film-star group was that of an aged, alcoholic jester in the ragged intellectual garb of a distant, suspect past. That portrayal was sharply drawn by Gene Fowler in Minutes of the Last Meeting, begun in Hartmann's lifetime and published in 1954. Fowler's original intent had been a biography of Hart-mann; the book evolved into a chronicle of the group's escapades. This strangely limited picture of Hartmann gives no evidence that Fowler knew of the significance or scope of the man's earlier accomplishments.

In spite of those often mad goings-on, Hartmann never faltered in his self-appointed, lifelong task of writing about art and life and ideas. Even as he retreated in his later years to a shack near his daughter's home near Banning on the Morongo Indian reservation, Hart-mann's continuing ties to the American intellectual community were reflected in correspondence with luminaries such as Ezra Pound and George Santayana; Pound included Hartmann in a poem and expressed the sentiment that if he had not been Pound he would have wished to live a life as Sadakichi Hartmann.

In point of fact, the peripheral brilliance of Hartmann's acquaintances and friendships among the best-known figures of American arts and letters over several decades forms an irresistible distraction to the critical commentary that is Hartmann's contribution to the literature of art. A list of Hartmann's contacts is a compendium of culture that extends from Whitman, Mallarmé, and Albert P. Ryder to Stieglitz, Schindler, and Charlie Chaplin, so that the task of defining Hartmann's importance and location in the history of art becomes one of selecting the significant from the merely fascinating.

Before engaging in a more elaborate analysis of Hartmann's critical writing during the vital New York years, I would like to present a brief overview of the prevailing art milieu in the United States as background for better understanding Hartmann's relationship to it.

Looking back into the last century, one clearly sees that in the aftermath of the Civil War art making, art acquisition, and art appreciation were sharply on the rise in the United States. Although Americans had always engaged in them, the activities were welcomed as never before in the newly mended republic.

For eager young American artists in the seventies and eighties, travel to the continent became essential. The art of the Old World provided inspiration; continental academies and studios of individual artists served as their technical training ground. Thoughtful art writers, of whom Hartmann was to become one of the most militantly prominent, urged returning ranks of painters to create images of American life and landscapes rather than to depict the more usual scenes of quaint European peasants and continental pastorales.

Whatever the locale they were painting, artists continued to emphasize the beautiful, especially as beauty was reflected in nature and as the beautiful was represented by the artist in ideal imitation of the natural world. Beauty in nature and beauty in art through nature (as well as the artist's ability to paint it and the viewer's ability to appreciate it) were closely and directly linked to God in the Transcendentalist philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and others. This religious (one might say holy) sanction for the triad of man, art, and nature underlay much of the American art matrix of the nineteenth century; the enduring subject matter of landscape and everyday life (commonly called genre) continued, as well, to be the established core of American academic, "high art" painting.

An essential component of an American artistic description of both the natural world and the world of human activities was the kind of close representation of the observable that we ordinarily call "realism." As Jules David Prown has noted, Americans have a strong penchant for realism in their art that is deeply rooted in the American character, for realism was, and is, a reflection of our pragmatic and materialistic value system. In urging artists to use local subject matter, Hartmann and others were simply extending the concept of realism to encompass locale as well as style; as we shall see, Hartmann noted important structural changes in the ongoing American realist tradition.

The reception of art in nineteenth-century America thus came to be endorsed as a mirror of the goodness of God and the nobility of man. Education became the means for this art to become properly assimilated by the American public. Self-improvement through education was a particularly strong imperative in the postwar years and curriculae in the public school system expanded to include music and art education. Adults, too, joined "art appreciation" activities taking place in every major city. The goal of all of this art education was not merely learning about art or how to practice it; art educators perceived art as a primary means to self-betterment and, beyond that, as a kind of pathway to heaven. Art was defined as "ennobled labor" that offered the growth which is the "End and Aim of Existence … the very essence of Heaven," in the words of John Ward Stimson, America's leading art educator, writing in The Art Critic.

Like educational concepts, aesthetic issues were overshadowed always in the nineteenth century by the needs of a nation arranging for its own great future. Nearly every facet of American society was being carefully honed and polished to contribute to the brilliance of the Columbian gem. In the simplest and most direct way, art became an accessory to nationhood in the postwar years. Not only were Americans attempting to forgive and forget the ghastly war through positive efforts at unity, but the nation as a whole was compelled to absorb tidal waves of European immigrants. An accomplished art of indigenous origin was thought to be an essential part of the new American "race," its unity and vitality. Art provided symbols of national ideals; the formal institutions of art became the prized signifiers of a fully developed civilization.

Hartmann's manifesto in the first issue of The Art Critic sounded the message in specific terms in "Appeal to All Art Lovers":

America, employed in the tremendous task of building up a new race from the waste of other nations, of transforming this conglomeration into a nation of useful, self-supporting citizens, has

gained wealth, power, the respect of other countries, but, as yet, she has developed no art. We lack reverence and enthusiasm in our admiration for the beautiful. … Let us belong if we will to different creeds, entertain different political and moral views, different ideals for our mental, emotional and physical nature, but let us be united in the one effort to render our national life richer, purer, and more powerful, by giving to it a National Art.

This powerful emphasis on nationhood was like a protective cloak that warmed and nurtured, even while it isolated, the art of America. Nationalism, as an ideal, was not unique to the North American continent; nearly all the Western world was caught in its fever, and American critics tended to view foreign art in nationalistic terms as well. (One American writer began an important article on French art by saying, "More than that of any other modern people French art is a national expression.")

The insulation in the United States was neither absolute nor altogether harmful, for the art matrix of theory and tradition here was relatively thin; the sheltered years of the waning century generated a richer and more complex artistic environment than had existed earlier. Indeed, if the American art environment was overprotected from drafts of European artistic and critical change, the substance of that environment was strengthened to a greater position of statement and response: without substance (that is, a developed structure of instruction, practice, critical appreciation, and patronage of art) there could be no apparatus for integration and/or deviation from the Western tradition from which American artistic tradition arose.

American art critics suffered and were rewarded in like measure as artists by their isolation. The genus of critics increased by leaps and bounds after mid-century as publications and periodicals multiplied. In spite of their increasing number, critics became no less solitary in writing about art in America, each behaving as if he/she alone were in a critical pastime; in this way, individual American critics reflected the national isolation to a fair degree. (Not until the twentieth century would there be anything resembling a school of critics who engaged in dialogue with each other.)

Even in relative seclusion, however, the nineteenth-century American critic could not ignore the global phenomena of which perhaps the most far-reaching was the industrial revolution. By the end of the century, increased mechanization of daily life affected art by generating an artistic shift to the handmade, willfully creative object that was intended to serve as an art corrective to the machine-made (and thus non-art) object.

This expressive response was characterized in Western art and architecture by the use of organic form, dreamlike imagery, contrived color, and sinuous line—a style variously labeled art nouveau, jugendstil, and symbolism (an outgrowth of the earlier impressionism of the painters of France). These styles evolved into a kind of protomodern art that contained, as its essence, a variation of natural representation. Even though an emphasis on classic techniques of painting and style prevailed, changing notions of beauty were slowly incorporated into every national idiom.

Technological advances complicated the definition of art in a far more direct way through the invention of photography. In the early nineteenth century, art writers did not include photography in their discourse because the new invention was looked upon simply as a system of operations that documented the human presence and its manifestations through a mechanically produced likeness. Soon after mid-century, however, a growing number of photographers argued that their mechanical/ chemical process was an artistic medium by means of which they, as artists, created an art object—that is, the photograph.

The aforementioned themes of beauty, nature, ideal representation, and in the United States the necessity of an American art were then required to render service to the photograph as well as to the painting, for photography could not be elevated to the status of art until the aesthetic of the painted image was applied to the photographed image. That alchemistic transformation of changing photography into art was performed, among others, by Sadakichi Hartmann, who became one of the first art writers in the United States to deal with photography. Because he arrived at photography as an established art critic, Hartmann assumed a remarkable position of authority within the movement of photographic art.

In order fully to understand art and photography criticism at the century's turning, then, one must examine art writing and theory to establish the foundation for the aesthetics of photography (a task largely beyond the limitations of this essay). American art critics dealt not only with individual artists but also with general questions of artistic technique and the peculiarly American problem of style in the late nineteenth century; that is, with the success or failure of the artist both to demonstrate mastery of techniques learned abroad and to integrate those techniques with an American idiom. If successful, the artist was exhorted to create the beautiful and to reflect moral strength, thereby giving image to a great national art. As mentioned earlier, the range of the American critical response to art was limited since art theory was partially tied to encouraging artists to produce an art of American content in keeping with American ideals.

By contrast, the protomodernist tendency (illuminated in American art, for example, in Hartmann's discussion of the "decadence" of Robert Henri's Parisian paintings of the early 1890s) was one that would increasingly ignore any responsibility for "nationhood." Protomod-ernist art, in its growing attention to formal elements of painterly construction rather than to the narrative content of subject matter, required a critical response that was not limited to the concerns of a single nation or ideal.

Continental art theorists, in constructing that response, wrote of art as an endeavor that could be enriched by considerations quite apart from local needs or even the intangible requirements of the beautiful. The most advanced European theories shifted the discourse from the problems of the human artist manipulating his media to a regard for the art object as an independent entity: art was described as having its own continuing imperative of "unfolding" cyclical design; conversely, from outside the object and apart from it, art was said to gain much of its meaning through the empathetic interpretation given to it by the human viewer who engaged in a subjectively mirrored exchange with the object.

American artistic and critical tradition in the 1890s was not yet rich or free enough to embrace and sustain inquiry to the depth and complexity of the continental schools from which it originated. Hartmann was certainly one American writer who was familiar with the German philosophical background that gave particular rise to late nineteenth-century art theory, and he may have been the most successful American art writer of his generation to integrate that theory into his writings, particularly those after 1900. In order to discuss the various modes of Hartmann's writing, the genre of art writing, as a whole, deserves some definition here.

If one considers art writing to be a literary form, one might conceive of that form as existing in a hierarchy of partitioned layers. Philosophical considerations of the nature of art (unattached as they are to the practical, everyday world of the artist) exist at the "highest" level of abstract thinking. Descending from these sublime heights of idea, one proceeds first to the historical study and then to the contemporary monograph that deals with an individual artist and his work or groups of artists and issues raised by their collective efforts and influences. Gravitating further earthward, one arrives at the writings in the periodical press and the reports of the here and now in the art world. Within that tradition, journalist-critics who review and evaluate current work hover above the journalist-reporters who describe art events without critically judging them. Interpretation of art bestows wings on the interpreter; the more effectively he is able to deal with ideas, the higher he will soar in the intellectual universe. Hartmann claimed expertise at all levels of art writing; he can well be said to have enjoyed intermittent success with each one.

In demonstrating this facility, Hartmann was alone among his peers, all of whom pursued a more limited number of forms for their criticism. The American art critics of the nineties were, as a group, more numerous and more capable than any who had preceded them; they are worth far more attention than the brief identifying survey with which this study will have to be content. The writer among them who was probably the "highest" academic theorist was John Charles Van Dyke, a man whom Hartmann respected very much and whom he claimed to be the only art author to outsell Hartmann himself.

Van Dyke was one of the first art historians in the United States; educated as a lawyer, employed as a librarian at the New Brunswick Theological Seminary, he was a professor of art history at Rutgers from 1889 to 1929. Among his many wide-selling publications was a series of lectures entitled Art for Art's Sake; published in 1893, the treatise dealt with the "technical" side of painting. (Like most American writers, Van Dyke loosely interpreted the concept of l'art pour l'art as "art for the sake of beauty in art.") In 1894 he wrote Textbook of the History of Painting, which was widely used as a college text until the 1930s. Hartmann, who wanted nothing to do with the tools of scholarship, valued Van Dyke's brisk (if opinionated) historical accuracy and meticulous citations; on the other hand, he clearly enjoyed Van Dyke's weakness in evaluating contemporary painters.

An earlier historical writer of even greater importance both to American art and to Hartmann's writings was Samuel G. W. Benjamin. By the nineties, Benjamin's literary fortunes were well defined in many areas; within the field of art he had written Continental Art in American Art Collections (two volumes, circa 1879), What is Art: Art Theories and Methods Concisely Stated (1877), and the two-part series Our American Artists (1879, 1881), which enjoyed popularity far in excess of the audience of young people for whom it was intended. Benjamin's excellent writing obviously served as an inspiration to Hartmann's own American zeal.

Very disturbingly, however, Hartmann lifted passages of Benjamin's historical discussion virtually intact for use in his A History of American Art. Even taking common journalistic "borrowing" practices of the day into account (which Hartmann describes in an unpublished essay), Hartmann's plagiarism of historical descriptions of artists, whether directly from another source or from his old notes on another source, is a troubling lapse of critical integrity and a cause of difficulty for the scholar. Fortunately, his habit of using other writers' material seems to be confined to historical accounts; one can, with reasonable certainty, look to Hartmann's evaluations of contemporary artists as being his own.

A quartet of artist-writers, all of whom had been academically trained, were significant in the nineties: William A. Coffin, Kenyon Cox, Arthur Hoeber, and John La Farge. John La Farge was a distinguished American artist whose travel tales of Japan captivated the art public; they were of special importance in the growing emphasis on oriental art (especially in Boston) and they were of personal interest to Hartmann, who never ceased to yearn after his oriental heritage. Kenyon Cox, an accomplished writer by any standard, exacted ongoing admiration from Hartmann for his fine academic background and graceful prose (but not, unfortunately, for his painting). Cox's defense of the classical tradition (consolidated in a series of lectures under the title The Classic Point of View, delivered at the Chicago Art Institute and published in 1911) is one of the more important theoretical statements in American art history. Arthur Hoeber's writings for Century, Harper's, and The New York Times surpassed any fame gained by his paintings, although Hartmann considered him incompetent in both fields. Coffin was a solid, traditional essayist; he contributed to Century and Scribner's and was also a lively activist in New York art world organizations.

Of the popular critics, James Gibbons Huneker was the most farflung, encompassing both music and art in his rather flamboyant grasp. A writer of colorful, operatic prose, Huneker had modernist leanings; he particularly admired Hartmann and was probably responsible for Hartmann's tenure as a columnist for Musical America, of which Huneker served as editor.

Among art writers in the American popular press, however, there are two whose longevity alone would propel them to the first ranks of interest. They served as recorders for the entire modern period between the Civil War and World War II: Clarence Chatham Cook and Royal Cortissoz.

Cook was a fiery art columnist for the New York Herald Tribune in the important postwar era of 1863-69. He wrote many essays and books, the most well-received of which was a collection of writings on the decorative arts entitled House Beautiful (1878). In his later years, Cook served as editor from 1884 to 1892 of International Studio (the American edition of the prestigious British Studio). Hartmann, who knew Cook and admired his uncompromising stance, called him the "dean" of the early art editors.

Certainly that title can be said to have been earned by a later "dean," Royal Cortissoz. Especially influential around the turn of the century, Cortissoz was a very competent, very conservative writer and critic. Among his publications after 1900 were biographies of La Farge and Augustus St. Gaudens. In 1891 The New York Herald Tribune appointed Royal Cortissoz art and literary editor; he held that post for an astonishing fifty years. Although Hartmann respected Cortissoz's conscientious efforts, the two were at distant odds on issues of modern art. Nevertheless, on the occasion of the 1941 celebration of Cortissoz's half-century career, Hartmann wrote an eloquent letter of appreciation for the many years of Cortissoz's "interpretation of what is fine and right."

Although not represented in the contemporary press on a regular basis, the writer-critic Mariana Griswold (Mrs. Schuyler) Van Rensselaer wrote much of importance about American architecture; she also wrote occasionally about artists. Her Book of American Figure Painters (1887) contained one of the more perceptive contemporary essays written on Winslow Homer. W.C. Brownell ("French Art," Scribner's, September-November 1892) and Theodore Childs ("Some Modern French Painters," Harper's, May 1890) both wrote distinguished surveys of French art. George Sheldon wrote a well-known series of interviews with American artists entitled Hours with Art and Artists (1882); he had published a book on art in private American collections entitled Recent Ideals in American Art in 1880. None of these writers seems to have known Hartmann; their prosaic and traditional approach is at some distance from his own.

By the later nineties, writers on art were also looking at photography; the most noted of these was Charles Caffin, who became Hartmann's cohort on Camera Work. Caffin was actually British, having emigrated to Chicago in 1892 to assist in the decorating department for the Columbian Exposition. He was an Oxford graduate and became a widely published writer on art and photography in this country. Although many of his books are on the order of art guides, his Photography as a Fine Art (1901) is of finer quality and serves today as a standard reference of the period. Curiously, Hartmann makes no mention in his papers of his noted modern companion (nor did Caffin write of Hartmann). They surely knew each other well; Caffin may have been closer to Hartmann theoretically than any other writer.

As a writer among these art writers, Hartmann followed their lead only rarely. While he wrote essays on occasion, they tended to be shorter rather than longer. Very long essays presenting a great many facts by Hartmann are to be questioned for their sources. (A primary example of such an essay is the two-part, literally encyclopedic "Dekorative Kunst" which appeared in the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung.)

Lengthy expositions of history or fact fit neither Hartmann's style nor his abilities. His formal education ended at fourteen; since his command of intellectual knowledge was acquired in intense self-administered doses, Hartmann was understandably lacking in the skills of a methodological approach or the pleasures of leisurely didacticism. His analysis rested on an intuitive eye, an understanding of past tradition, and an emotional poetic response to which an important fourth element was often added: ironic distance.

With this quality, Hartmann could compare the vaunted Stéphane Mallarmé and his Mardi to the famous Episcopalian minister Phillips Brooks and his Boston congregation; both used the same techniques to manipulate their audiences, Hartmann declared. Or he could coolly look at the greatest sculptor of America and, while praising him for his undoubted talent, point out that Augustus 'St. Gaudens had reached his pinnacle of success just as much through magnificent business acumen as through artistic genius. These were not the usual, or popular, kinds of statements made by critics in the nineties, who were expected to reflect the goodness and purity of the art and artists about which they wrote.

During the late century, the form Hartmann most often had available for his writing about artists was the short article, or, in the periodicals mentioned, the "art column," which could fill an entire page. Much of his best commentary on artists is condensed to a few paragraphs; the best of it crackles with insight.

Among the most memorable of these critical passages is one that describes Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins as our greatest American artists. Written in 1895 and published in Musical America (29 October 1895) at a time when Thomas Eakins was living in relative obscurity in Philadelphia, Hartmann's evaluation is unique. A careful reading of these paragraphs and others reveals the threads of the contrasting styles that comprise the fabric of the new in American art as Hartmann saw them.

Because Hartmann was not a notably organized thinker or writer and because his art criticism was written sporadically as occasion and opportunity presented themselves, the totality of his writing seems very loosely structured; yet Hartmann was able to take many of his critical writings from the 1890s and construct a pastiche of them (some as far back as the 1893-94 Art Critic) that forms a creditable whole for A History of American Art of 1902. Volume one covers painting; volume two discusses sculpture, the graphic arts, European art, and "Latest Phases."

In reading that book, one can admit to the logic of his categories and feel more enlightened about his critical approach to American art; the scholarly reader must be reminded, however, that virtually every passage about a prominent contemporary artist contained in A History of American Art appeared first in an earlier periodical. Often the transposition is not literal, but the wording remains similar. Because A History is a virtual compilation of Hartmann's works, discussion of its contents is useful in looking for prevailing themes.

Hartmann follows Benjamin's sensible chronological divisions: pre-1828, a time of individual artistic effort; post-1828, or the "Old School" of painters led by the artists of the National Academy of Design; and post-1878, or the "New School" of painters who proceeded from the formation of the Society of American Artists. The determining factor of each period is the dominant leadership. This practice of seeing artists in the context of the larger artistic group of their time is a valuable method for analysis that has sometimes been neglected in American art historical studies in which interest in the single artist tends to overlook the larger galaxy of which he may have been the brightest star.

Looking back to the earliest period of art in America, Hartmann sees little development of significance except for the portaits of John Singleton Copley and the painting of the nude Ariadne by John Vanderlyn. There was no artistic community; each artist had to "seek his own salvation." After 1828, when a formal organization was finally in place, there ensued a fruitful fifty-year period when artists sought to "endeavor to pass to styles more naturalistic and poetical, to endow American art with traits distinctly native," as Hartmann described it. Landscape and genre were the two subject matters of choice. Hartmann declares that the great painters emerging from the era were Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins.

Hartmann's choice of these two representatives of the Old School is very carefully couched in continuing approbation for their work, which, Hartmann says, "has rather increased than lost in interest." In lauding them together—and Sadakichi Hartmann was the first to do so—he proclaimed Homer and Eakins as "the realisation of what all the men since 1828 had struggled for, the beginning of a native art." Because both men were still very much alive and still painting at the turn of the century when this book was written, Hartmann further explains his designation of the two as Old School (rather than New School) painters:

I mention them in this chapter, because they asserted themselves long before the appearance of the so-called New School of 1878 and because the tendency to depict reality which they persistently clung to during all their career, has been superseded by other aims and ideals of art. (A History 1:189)

The emphasis here is mine; "other aims and ideals" clearly belong to the New School, which will be discussed shortly.

Returning to Hartmann's categories, the Old School was the dominant realist tradition; it became infused in the second half of the nineteenth century with "spontaneity," "individuality," and "strong, frank and decided ways of expressing something American"—all terms that Hartmann applied to Homer and Eakins, the culmination of the Old School. Their expression might be angular, crude, or even grotesque, but it carried the message of national strength in a manner that Hartmann declared over and over to be "vigorous," much in the way that Whitman declared that art must be "virile." Homer and Eakins were the prototypes for this vigorous realism; Robert Henri, George Luks, John Sloan, and William Glackens would soon follow.

This was an art that, in A History of American Art, Hartmann equated to Walt Whitman's thundering American dictum:

Others may praise what they like,
  but I, from the banks of the running Missouri,
praise
  nothing in art or else,
  til it has well inhaled the atmosphere of this river,
also
  the Western prairie scent,
  and exudes it all again.

Citing these lines in A History, Hartmann called Whitman a "voice in the wilderness. The artists have taken no heed of it. Only men like Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins have endorsed it to a certain extent with their work in the art of painting, and at the same time have strong, frank, and decided ways of expressing something American" (A History 1:193).

The importance of this passage (which is a transposed elaboration of Hartmann's 1895 praise of Homer and Eakins) is twofold: Whitman's poetry is used as a quint-essential American reference point, and the paintings of the relatively unknown Eakins are equated with those of the famous Homer for their American veracity.

Homer had been praised for years for distilling the American experience. As early as 1880, his art was seen by the sensitive eye of Benjamin as establishing "an original form of art speech. The freshness, the crudity, and the solid worth of American civilization are well typified in the thoroughly native art of Mr. Homer."

During the twenty years that had passed between the writing of Benjamin's book and the writing of Hartmann's book, Homer's national reputation had steadily increased. Eakins, on the other hand, whose life was always centered in Philadelphia, was known only to painters and patrons of the academy there and to a small audience in New York, including Hartmann (who dedicated a small book, Conversations With Walt Whitman, to Eakins in 1895 and wrote early, important criticism about the artist). To write of the art of the two men as existing on the same level of quality and acceptance was an act of critical daring on Hartmann's part.

Vigorous realism provided an expression of national values. During the late century, Homer's paintings of plain folk in nature and Eakins's portraits of intense individualism formed a revitalized extension of the iconography of American realism that still shapes our image of the components of the American character. Although full explication of this style is not possible in the limited confines of this essay, Hartmann's identification of Eakins with Homer as establishing a vigorous, realistic style is a matter of fundamental importance.

In contrast, a less dominant but far more pervasive stylistic force emerged as the century wore on. "The men of 1878" who established the Society of American Artists and formed the nexus of the New School were painters trained in Europe in "fine draughtsmanship, bold and fluent execution of the brush, and careful observation," in Hartmann's words. Under the leadership of William Merritt Chase and Walter Shirlaw, they broke away from the American academy group and its darkly finished painting style after "a most violent controversy."

Chase, above all, stood for technical bravura and, in Hartmann's opinion, remained the best of the "technical innovators"; in this regard, Hartmann laments the many American artists who carried a technical prowess with them on their return to the United States from France, only to lose their ability "to advance our native art." He mentions here Kenyon Cox, Carroll Beckwith, W.H. Lowe, Walter Shirlaw, Frank Duveneck, and Frank Benson.

In discussing long lists of New School painters, Hartmann, in his usual manner, arranges their (mostly forgotten) number into such academic categories as still life, genre and animal paintings, and portraits. Generalizations of style center around a few names of significance: Chase, for his technical genius; Abbott Thayer, for his modern classical style; and Thomas Dewing, for his imaginative paintings in a style that is poetic and, above all, "suggestive." It is in this quality that Hartmann finds a new artistic expression developing during the nineties in opposition to the vigorous realism of Eakins and Homer, and it is in discussing this quality that he employs his symbolist sensibility.

In summarizing the Old and New Schools, Hartmann comes to a noteworthy conclusion. He declares that there is one artist who "represents both schools, the old in his technique and the new in his ideas": Albert Pinkham Ryder. Hartmann had visited Ryder in his studio a number of years before; his description of that encounter, especially the clutter and jumblé of Ryder's studio, has become one of the enduring elements in the legend that surrounds the reclusive artist. As with any good writer, Hartmann expresses himself most eloquently in the presence of greatness. Here is his description of what makes Ryder a sublime artist:

It is Ryder's overflow of sentiment, curbed (sometimes even surpassed for the moment) by a sturdy awkwardness, which also now and then appears on the apparently so mild surface of his character; this patient waiting (running away from his studio to absorb November skies at all times of the day and night whenever a new idea suggests itself) until he can condense all the manifold inspirations, of which a picture is created, into the most perfect one at his command, makes his art so great that it can hold its ground, even in the company of illustrious masterpieces. (A History 1:317)

As a conclusion to A History of American Art, Hartmann discusses "latest phases" in American art, decrying the hard times of the previous decade when there had been too little patronage of American art and too many artists, "3000 in New York, Boston and Philadelphia alone." In spite of these gloomy circumstances, activity abounds, Hartmann says, and although the results have been largely unsatisfactory, the art of mural painting has been revived; only John Singer Sargent's murals for the Boston Public Library, however, receive Hartmann's accolades in this 1902 account.

New technical innovations, adapted from the painting of Degas and the impressionists, are said by Hartmann to have taken place as well. Hartmann sees their influence most directly expressed by the Boston painters, whom he dubs "The Tarbellites" after their leader Edmund C. Tarbell. (Hartmann has Frank Benson and Joseph DeCamp particularly in mind as "Tarbellites.") Hartmann calls their subject matter pleasing—lamp and fire-light effects, mothers and children, many figures of women—and praises their taste in color and their command of technique, but ultimately, he denounces them for their facile cleverness and lack of feeling. Hartmann's resounding criticism, which he voiced on other occasions about American artists who tried to adapt the impressionist style, was this:

They are, first of all, technicians. It is delightful to find painters at last who can paint. … On leaving such an exhibition, however, the delight is over. All one remembers is clever brush work and paint, and beneath the canvas nothing to satisfy one's soul. (A History 2:238-239)

And therein lay the problem for this American critic with the Tarbellites and other American painters who took up impressionist technique: lack of feeling. Hartmann was not the only American writer who complained of the coldness of impressionism; although today's audience considers impressionism an almost trite signification of beautiful painting, the majority of American critics during the eighties and early nineties viewed it as a scientific experiment that sacrificed poetic, beautiful expression for the sake of color theory. To the American eye, impressionist technique employed color that was luminous but often garish, subject matter that was merely an everyday scene instead of a "poetic" circumstance, and a sketchy mode of depicting form that created "optical sensation" rather than the beautiful ideal.

Hartmann sought poetry and feeling in art as a necessary adjunct to the beautiful; he found that expression in the art of Dewing, Davies, and Twachtman, all of whom he discusses in "Latest Phases," and all of whom demonstrate what we may call, at Hartmann's instigation, "the suggestive style." Hartmann does not articulate a particular entity that is labeled a "suggestive style," but he alludes to "suggestiveness" again and again in his description of certain painters of the 1890s who followed the direction of the work of Whistler. Like the vigorous realism of Homer and Eakins, suggestivism was very much an American art, and it, too, was concerned with a vision of the ideal.

The suggestive style was one of poetic mysticism and psychological intensity; Hartmann characterized it as embodying the poetic idea, imaginative subject matter, delicate colors, and sketchy form; above all, he emphasized that the art of suggestiveness rested on canons of ancient oriental art that called for a repetition of both subject and image painted with "slight variations," as opposed to the Western classical tradition which resulted in a "craze for originality."

Whistler was the earliest American practitioner of this way of painting; Thomas Dewing and Childe Hassam were New School painters of the style; Arthur B. Davies and John Twachtman each contributed a particularly significant segment of definition to suggestive style development in the 1890s.

The technique to create suggestive art was gleaned in foreign ateliers, but New School painters who merged their ideas in suggestivism had American precedents. Hartmann states that as far back as the landscape paintings of the Old School, John F. Kensett and Sanford R. Gifford painted with "tenderness and suggestivism rare at that period of our art." Hartmann reports that these two artists.

were the first to strive for more pleasing colour harmonies and a more careful observation of atmospheric changes, the play of sunlight in the clouds and misty distances. They lacked firmness of drawing, and their love for niggling details and the brown tonality of their pictures disturbs us, although their lyrical attempts were really fore-runners of the modern school, as it was not so much things as feelings that they tried to suggest. (A History 1:55-56)

Hartmann's own artistic nature empathized with suggestivism, for he yearned to gain literary recognition as a poet. As a symbolist writer of both plays and poetry, he adhered to the dreamlike metaphorical approach of painters who adapted new techniques of painting to produce the suggestive style. Interestingly, the two suggestive artists to whom Hartmann devotes a great deal of attention, Thomas Dewing and Arthur B. Davies, he praised for their intellectualisai. If the vigorous realists were the proponents of "strong, frank and decided ways of expressing something American," the suggestive painters attempted, at their best, a poetic, subtle, and metaphorical American expression, an intellectual refinement of the American experience that embodied the "other aims and ideals" of the New School.

Without question, Hartmann was finding a new "ideal of beauty" in the suggestive style of the very late century, as were the artists who were painting with new techniques. Hartmann proposed that American painters had taken the French Barbizon painters' plein air techniques and the impressionists' palettes, the German naturalism of Karl Piloty, and the realistic techniques of Ludwig Lofftz and brought them all to American shores to do service to the American ideal of beauty. Technique in the service of the ideal was the American program; that the ideal could be embodied within the technique was perceived only by those whom Hartmann described as the most intellectual: Davies and Twachtman, and earlier, Whistler.

This ideal was born of intellectual meditation and interior vision, as opposed to the sensitive observation of the natural world that engendered vigorous realism; it was imagined by an artistic mind rather than seen by an artistic eye. To Hartmann and the American milieu, this suggestive ideal was the way of modernism.

By using the word suggestive to describe the new painting style, Hartmann chose a term of rich connotation. Suggestive implies both idea and process; ambiguity of intention and image is the immediate message. In addition to calling up an associated idea or image by means of a first idea, suggestive art may also (or instead) be an art that is more than it seems or possibly an art that is not what it seems. Hartmann edged closer to modernist terminology here than he probably intended or, indeed, would have been comfortable with.

Very likely, Hartmann did not wish to imply as much uncertainty as the word suggestive may fairly be said to hold; he intended to contrast suggestive art with traditional illusionist art of the West. Modern American scholars have described the art of this period in terms similar to Hartmann's: E. P. Richardson has written of quietism; John Wilmerding, William Gerdts, Wanda Corn, and others have discussed tonalism; Charles Eldredge has described the symbolist background and mood of American paintings of the decades surrounding the turn of the century; Henry Adams chooses Hartmann's term "evocative" to categorize the draftsmanship of the poetic style of the period.

As stated earlier, Hartmann's concept of art always was fastened to an ideal of the beautiful; the beautiful in the case of the suggestive style being based on ancient oriental canons of beauty rather than on occidental classicism. ("Suggestivism is one of the leading characteristics of Japanese art," Hartmann wrote.)

Hartmann found oriental content especially evident, for example, in the art of Arthur B. Dow. This description of Dow's work reveals Hartmann's notions of the Japanese essence:

Look at his discriminative construction of lines, angles and spaces, his firm but exceedingly simple technique, the bold selection of harmonious colours, the blending of flat tints, the willful emptiness and lack of depth in certain parts, that is all Japanese. (A History 2:270)

Oriental ideals were not unknown to American writers; Hartmann, however, was one of very few critics to recognize the sometimes subtle uses of orientalism.

Suggestivism carried more general implications as well: metaphor was necessarily present, for the "poetic idea," the subject matter, had to be presented in an ethereal or dreamlike setting in order to represent the imaginative reference point from which it emerged, and figures (especially) had to be painted with a light palette and/or softly diffused form. With those stipulations of technique in mind, one is not surprised to learn that the great modern hero for American suggestive painters was Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, whose elegiac, pastoral scenes of dream like classicism were acclaimed by American artists and writers and whose work was described so eloquently by Hartmann in The Art Critic.

The American poet-hero of this segment of the American ideal of the beautiful was not Whitman but Edgar Allan Poe, poet of the sublime, whose writing inspired the French symbolists. Poe was Hartmann's alterhero to Whitman; in fact, Hartmann idolized Poe in many ways. Not only did he lecture on Poe's life and poetry nearly as often as on American art but he even took Poe's middle name for his own pseudonym, "Sidney Allan."

A painter of the new, poetic style of suggestivism might use the technique of the impressionists (or the "dottists," as Hartmann and others called the impressionists and pointillists like Georges Seurat). He might introduce the content of Millet, as did the early W. M. Hunt and the later Horatio Walker, or use the techniques of all the European masters as did the brilliant Chase, whom Hartmann calls a "suggestive story-teller." If he were a very great painter, however, he would invent his own impressionist technique, as Hartmann describes Twachtman as doing, or he would introduce into his art the psychological interpretation of love, maternity, and childhood in ways so individual as to be "absolutely meaningless" to all except the artist—in this case, Arthur B. Davies. Hartmann described Davies as "a symbolist in the true sense of the word"; and, in actuality, suggestive art was the American strain of symbolism.

The following passage about Davies and Twachtman brilliantly demonstrates the strength of Hartmann's instinct for the true in art, even when opposed by his love for the ideal:

Davies and Twachtman, two of our most intelligent artists, whom you should highly respect—it is your duty, whoever you are—have already reached this suggestive ultra-individual art.… All this is highly fascinating, but it is at the same time insipid, vainglorious, morbid, badly nourished, and absolutely unworthy of what occidental mankind has hitherto called art. And yet men like Davies are the indispensable pathfinders and roadbuilders of our new American art. (The Daily Tatler, 18 November 1896)

That Hartmann suffered vague apprehensions about the possible direction of this "ultra-individual" style is evident from his worried, but accurate, prophecy that art might be reduced in the future to "a few slips of differently colored paper … with a few lines and dots and some cross hatching." In spite of these misgivings, Hartmann was firm in his opinion that this, indeed, was an American style. He confirmed as much in the text of his "Art Wrangler's Aftermath" in a new edition of A History in 1932. When a German critic in the 1920s stated that American art depended on imitation and that only Winslow Homer and John Marin were original artists, Hartmann scoffed at the idea:

I could just as well assume that the finest essence of American art was contained in the landscapes which Twachtman draws with morose green chalk on dark grey paper, and the orange and lilac drawings of Arthur B. Davies on wall or packing paper. (A History 2:327-328)

Hartmann's own favorite painter (at least at the time of the 1902 publication of A History) was an artist who is little known today, George Fuller, who romantically came into prominence with a single painting and then retreated into seclusion for seventeen years. He emerged once again at the age of fifty-six and painted quiet, dreamlike scenes that have, in Hartmann's words, "a misty vagueness of effect" and "are idealized visions of shadowy outlines and soft rich colours, rising from vague backgrounds." Hartmann asks if Fuller is not our fore-most painter because of the "powerful melancholy sentiment of his poetic temperament" (a parallel to Hartmann's own poetic temperament). Fuller's art was the epitome of the early suggestive style and he, like later proponents, related his work to the subject matter of Millet and the effects of the Barbizon School. To many American critics, his was the most poetic imagery.

To summarize A History of American Art: the plagiarized historical data renders it of little more use than Benjamin's earlier work; for a view of Hartmann's own time, however, the book is invaluable. Hartmann's critical judgment of his age is inevitably dated, prejudiced, and inaccurate (by our own standards) to some degree. Still, of any of the critics of the nineties, Hartmann perceived changes in art with the most powerful mix of sensitivity, daring, and certainty. Very likely, his sensibility was born of circumstance as much as talent. Hartmann's exotic background served him well in the field of art: his oriental heritage and continental upbringing heightened his response to these enormously potent directives to American art. Hartmann's intellectual commitment and the personal deprivation he had suffered further worked to fire his ambition to interpret the art of his age.

A History of American Art is important for the times it reflects rather than for being a great literary exercise, but Hartmann's comments on those times are worth careful consideration. As choppy as A History of American Art certainly is, clues abound to an age that is lost to us. Hartmann's analysis of American art, especially that which has just been discussed as vigorous realism and suggestivism, is not as finely drawn as my interpretation of his writing might indicate. Other approaches are possible, perhaps necessary; yet a reading of Hartmann's perceptive commentary (especially as it first appeared), when balanced by sensitivity to his convictions, gives one a clearer view of the era than can be found in any other single writer and opens a window onto the diffuse period of American art in the late nineteenth century. At the very least, the contemporary popularity and acclamation of a number of American artists becomes understandable in the context of suggestive art; at the most, Hartmann's criticism offers a view of indigenous modernist origins which tends to be ignored today because the aesthetic of the style is little understood and generally denigrated for its sentimentality.

Clearly, suggestive art seemed to presage a poetic, even gentle, future. The clashing advent of European modernism is more easily understood as the "brutal" assault that Hartmann declared it to be when one realizes that American critics (and artists) were forced to redefine their sense of modernism quite apart from their experiments with suggestivism. The glorification of Puvis as a modernist hero then seemed but a cruel joke; the art of the American "race" was headed not for the refinement that Hartmann saw in symbolist poetry but for the fragmented dissonance of symbolism instead.

"An Art Wrangler's Aftermath" in the 1932 edition of A History gives an interesting hint to Hartmann's perception of how the modern movement happened. He speaks of the "advent of Cubism":

This is how it came about.

Pictorial photography under the leadership of Alfred Stieglitz had asserted itself.… Photography was so universally convincing that the public raised no objection, and Stieglitz, assuming that the ease of photographic reproduction would replace and render futile many things which we admired in art processes heretofore, like an autocrat announced that Art had to change. And Art was changing. The very same thing was happening all over the world, old ideals crumbled, the younger artists looked for a new medium and method of expression. Van Gogh had set them free and Alfred Stieglitz in his Little Gallery became the sponsor of the ultra-modern movement. (A History 1:303-304)

Written as an obvious oversimplification, the passage nonetheless telescopes Hartmann's view of how modernism happened; in a certain sense, he has correctly abbreviated the events of the American reception of modernist art. Between 1907 and the Armory Show of 1913, Alfred Stieglitz was indeed the autocrat of modernism in the United States. Just as he had managed the photographers of the Photo-Secession, he now decided which modern painters' work to show; his journal Camera Work reviewed the exhibition, and it was he who personally defended the art to all visitors to the gallery.

Hartmann reached his highest plateau of modernist understanding through writing about photography; that is to say, he reached an acceptable accommodation to modernist tenets through photography writing. In his own interesting observation, he directly links the "advent of Cubism" with earlier pictorial photography. Writing about the black and white medium practiced by mechanical means forced him to describe art in abstract terminology; he was necessarily required to apply broader concepts to the making and meaning of the work, although he was able to extend his term suggestive to photographic elements as well as painting and sculpture, thus giving continuity to his modernist theories. It was in this way that Hartmann inevitably arrived at the analysis of formal elements demanded by modernism. He was able finally to deal objectively with the reality of modern art through his viewing of photographs because photography did not hold his heart captive to an ideal of beauty as did painting.

His early photography essays, especially those in Camera Notes, set forth Hartmann's critical principles for artistic photography. From the title of his first appearance in the journal in October 1898, Hartmann's authority within the Stieglitz hierarchy is apparent. "A Few Reflections on Amateur and Artistic Photography" gives the reader notice that an expert is sharing his thoughts. From this beginning essay forward, Hartmann assumes the position of a wise man offering criticism and advice. Photography is praised for its availability, for its rich promise for "keeping alive the artistic potential" of mankind; Hartmann fore-sees the day when photography will be used for illustration and when artistic photographs will replace paintings as popular decoration. He advises photographers, above all, to cultivate their taste, to study the principles of composition and works of art. He warns sternly against the retouched, "dodged," or manipulated negative. All of these principles—die necessity of acquiring artistic knowledge, the fundamental sameness of artistic rules for photographic composition, and the formal value and integrity of the "straight negative"—were principles to guide photographers aiming to be artists.

Hartmann's insistence on art standards for photography is especially evident through his use of painterly comparison in "Color and Texture in Photography" (Camera Notes, July 1900). He praises the work of Frank Eugene (painter turned photographer) for its harmonies and contrasts of tones. Through looking at Eugene's work, Hartmann comes to the conclusion that "color" in black and white photography is nothing but "contrast and arrangement of values" with every part of the photograph suggesting its local color. A true artist can invoke color in the viewer's eye by juxtaposing light and dark values.

Texture is a more complex issue, and one on which Hartmann is willing to reverse himself for the sake of the true artist, for Eugene is a photographer who manipulates the negative. There are, Hartmann says, two representations of texture in the photograph: the photographed image of material texture and the physical surface of the photograph.

For the first, Hartmann brings us to his modernist term suggestive once again; the photographer will photograph material texture (i.e., silk, wood, skin) in an artistic manner only if he utilizes the camera to modify and suppress the too-accurate record of detail that can be the result of the photographic process. His aim should be an image suggesting material texture by exaggerating or scorning details with his camera in order to better render the effect produced by texture. Sensitive handling of textural detail, in the hands of the best artist, can evoke strong and subtle mood.

The textural effect of the physical surface of the work is quite another matter. Hartmann allows that, given Eugene's artistry, retouched or daubed negatives do have artistic validity, for Eugene (in some instances) managed to etch a negative and daub/color the image in such a manner as to rough the flat surface of the work to produce a painterly effect.

Hartmann's important conclusion on the use of texture is that any artist-photographer of note will incorporate one of the foregoing methods of injecting texture in his work because "an attractive brushwork, a certain peculiar way of laying on the colors different from the conventional academic ways," is the way an artist asserts his individuality. And photographers, to be artists, must also assert their individuality, for "individuality alone gives any art its value for this age or for ages to come." For Hartmann, individuality in photography is impossible without a unique means of depicting texture or physically manipulating the flat surface of a photograph to produce texture. (Later, Hartmann refined his argument to decry rampant overuse of physical manipulation of the photograph in his essay "A Plea for Straight Photography" of 1904.)

The subject of composition was one that occupied Hartmann in many essays; the first for photographers appeared in Camera Notes in April 1901. Citing knowledge of artistic principles of composition as a necessary requirement for the artistic photographer, Hartmann evaluates the progress of photographers in assimilating those principles. In this very basic discussion of compositional types, Hartmann defines four devices of composition as being of use to the modern artist: line, light and shade, space, and tone. The first three are used in lesser degrees of excellence by photographers, partly through mechanical difficulty, but largely through ignorance.

Alfred Stieglitz, Frank Eugene, and Gertrude Kasebier are praised for their attempts; Joseph Keiley is singled out for particular commendation for studying A. W. Dow's theoretical treatise on composition ("whenever he fails at least he knows why"). Tone composition marks the artistic photographer's greatest success: Clarence White and F. Holland Day have produced commendable work. In essence, Hartmann conceives of artistic photographers as reluctant but obligated students of artistic rules.

The most advanced of his essays on composition suggest that photography, like all art, depends on the selective process for its compositional principles. In an unpublished essay, undoubtedly intended for Camera Work, Hartmann extends that idea by declaring that the photographer, simply by virtue of his need to choose subject, placement, and light, participates in the aesthetic process as much as any artist. This concept is an extrapolation of his contention in the first essay he wrote on Alfred Stieglitz in 1899. Artistic genius, which Hartmann declared Stieglitz possesses, is composed of three elements: first, the power of selection, in which technical accomplishments find their expression; second, the depth of emotion, which formulates the conception of the idea to be portrayed; and third, perseverance largely dependent on temperament and constitution.

What is needed to establish the selective process as sovereign, Hartmann declares, is for the photographer to disregard "all pictorial standards":

I mean by this those laws of composition which have been hitherto considered essential for the making [of] a picture.… [The photographer must] stride out on a new path and create a new method of [reproducing] life and nature in a way similar to the Impressionists who have introduced a new analysis of vision; photography would become almost solely dependent on selection for it would naturally do away with all that striving for the so-called painter-like effects of this present day.

Clearly, this much later article reflects the experience of a critic exposed to the tenets of modern art. The date of its writing is uncertain; the essay was contained in the papers of Alfred Stieglitz. In this regard, it is interesting to speculate about the influence Hartmann's ideas may have exerted on Stieglitz. The following lament is part of the essay:

Of course it is futile—as futile as cloud shadows on a summer day—to talk of conditions that do not exist, and what is worse, can, perhaps, never exist. Photography is necessarily a more or less modified pictorial recorder of facts, and to assume that it might exercise this vocation without adhering to the pictorial viewpoint from which the artist looks at life, seems well-nigh ridiculous.

Assuming the article was submitted for Camera Work in the early teens, one recalls the cloud studies that Alfred Stieglitz produced in 1918, an obvious corollary to Hartmann's earlier thesis of composition without pictorial composition.

Hartmann's final wish in the article is that photography would continue to represent "virility and motion," at which it excels over painting:

Virility and motion would undoubtedly create new laws of composition, or rather a lawlessness in defiance of present conditions. In the ordinary [i.e., nonpictorial] photograph there is a delightful absence of composition, but it affords new esthetical gratification.

And the sensuous pleasure of form and color, of which I dream, although it would turn pictorialism upside down, stand it on its head, as it were—would not be so much a negation as a complement of Art.

Stieglitz may have planned to publish this article; the fact that he did not is entirely in keeping with his own prejudice against theoretical writing. He and Hartmann battled over this subject on other occasions—most notably in an exchange of letters in 1915 that also contains a withering appraisal by Hartmann of Camera Work no. 47, a special issue of the journal that printed solicited evaluations of the "291" Gallery. Stieglitz's reply to the criticism was equally disdainful; thus the following dialogue on theory is somewhat tainted by their angry exchange:

HARTMANN: You ought to give me an order to write on the New Color theory as brought out by color photography, upsetting Goethe's, Newton's and Chevreuil's or a real critical review of Kandinsky's book [Concerning the Spiritual in Art]. (May 30, 1915)

STIEGLITZ: What's this about giving you an order to write on the New Color Theory … or a real critical review of Kandinsky's book? You amuse me. Why should I be interested in anything as serious as that? You do talk like a hayseed. (May 25, 1915)

To return once again to Hartmann's critical tenets in Camera Notes, "Subject and Treatment" of January 1902 is another article which sets forth a premise for photographers: it extolls the value of the activity of the modern metropolis as subject. Having now grown weary of pictorial photographers' efforts at individuality, Hartmann declares that only tone quality is successfully individualized, at least for the majority of those who engage in the "faddism of pictorial resemblance." In a manner similar to his much earlier cry for localism in the subject matter of the painter, Hartmann admonishes the photographers:

All the subjects to which spontaneity of expression would do fullest justice—like the ceaseless ever-shifting stream of humanity in the shopping districts, the Saturday afternoon parade on Broadway after the matinees are over, the bustle on the piers at the arrival or departure of an ocean steamer—are as if created for the camera.

Hartmann, finally, tells the photographers they must heed his words to expand their subject matter, for the medium cannot be taken seriously until they, like the painters, record the activity of their times.

Shortly after this article appeared in Camera Notes in January 1902, disruption occurred in the offices of the magazine. Alfred Stieglitz resigned as editor; by July Hartmann was using the pseudonym "Sidney Allan." I give that sequence of events because I believe that Hartmann's adoption of the "Allan" sobriquet was a direct result of his feeling abandoned by Stieglitz, the man who had endowed him with a considerable status and rank at Camera Notes.

To digress here for a moment, Hartmann was a person of obvious psychological distinction. Freudian theory grants insight to many of his bizarre habits and outrageous acts when applied to his mother-deprived, father-rejected life; even so, cultural, indeed racial, bias was inevitably a part of his existence. Status and rank were rare commodities. (Shunned by Germans in his youth for being Japanese and excluded by Americans for being exotically "Eurasian," Hartmann would suffer even more humiliation at the end of his life when the FBI hounded his family in California in an unsuccessful attempt to confine them to internment camps.)

If one wonders at the difficulties Hartmann overcame, one marvels at his often ingenious way of doing so. "Sidney Allan" was born out of the desperation Hartmann surely felt after Stieglitz's "desertion" of him. As "Sidney Allan," Hartmann became (or tried to become) the proper gentleman Sadakichi Hartmann simply never was. He wore a monocle, donned a subdued derby hat, and was clothed in a serious three-piece suit complete with watch chain. When "Sidney Allan" lectured to photographers, the speech was usually a variation of his un-Hartmann-like staple, "Good Taste and Common Sense."

For the scholar, Hartmann's new pseudonym is of special importance (there were other pseudonyms he used less often, but none complete with persona like "Allan"). The signature "Sidney Allan" serves as a genuinely useful research tool because nearly all of the articles signed that way deal with prosaic, practical subjects; those retaining the real name of the author are almost always about art topics of a broad application. The distinction in print merely amplifies the personality division that "Sidney Allan" represented in Hartmann. After he moved to California, Hartmann no longer used the "Sidney Allan" signature; in fact, he did not refer to his use of it in later chronologies of his work.

Hartmann's early articles on photography established critical principles that would serve him in his writing after 1900 on modern painting. The power of selection as a means for composition, the need for individuality through achieving a textural effect in painting, and the alteration of form to bring forth the suggestive image all applied to painting as well as photography, and the writer did bend his knee to the new modernist gods before taking flight from New York.

Most notably, Hartmann wrote an article on cubism which he submitted to Stieglitz in 1913 after the "International Exhibition of Modern Art," often referred to as "The Armory Show" (there is no evidence that Hartmann saw the show). Stieglitz returned the manuscript and Hartmann's work finally appeared in print on 3 April 1914 in the interesting Reedy's Mirror of St. Louis (the sheet of another of the more colorful members of the American publishing world of Hartmann's acquaintance, William Reedy). The essay was entitled "The Esthetic Value of Cubism"; coincidentally, the most comprehensive critical attempt at evaluating the new art appeared the same month in The Century Magazine under the title "This Transitional Age in Art."

Of the writers who contributed to that effort, Walter Pach offered a view most similar to the Hartmann analysis in its relating the aim of the cubists to that of the impressionists: while the impressionists, translating nature by means of a scientific method, sought to paint the sensations they received from color, the cubists were seeking to "take the same liberty" with form. Pach structured his discussion around the opposing poles of Cézanne and Redon (as Hartmann does around the entire impressionist group) as evolving a way to paint an aesthetic of thought from the volumes of nature.

Pach was the facilitator for gathering the works of art for the great "International Exhibition of Modern Art." His and Arthur B. Davies's fascination with Redon resulted in that artist being featured in the exhibition with thirtytwo oils, seven pastels, and many lithographs. It is worth noting here that several years before, Hartmann had contacted Redon in an attempt to publish illustrations of his works in the American press.

In discussing the cubists, Hartmann compares their method to the antinaturalist stage designs of theater genius Gordon Craig; most importantly, Hartmann (seemingly alone at this time) notes that the ultimate aim of the cubists was to capture "the development of a thought or actual motion, by a medium that bars motion … to produce a mentally perceived unit from its actual compounds, not unlike the combination of several colors which call forth a tone of reflection which in turn becomes the dominating one."

Hartmann's earlier, important review of Marsden Hartley in 1909, "Unphotographic Paint: The Texture of Impressionism," and his further exploration of cubism in a 1911 discussion of Max Weber's art entitled "Structural Units" fully demonstrate the emergence of Hartmann's modernist acuity. Marveling over the intense effect that Hartley's work exerts on the eye, Hartmann muses on the modern painter's use of the texture of the paint, "the plastic aspect of color":

The Old Masters tried to create an illusion, to reproduce the actual roundness of things and the esthetic possibilities of the three dimensions, and did not wish to interfere with the produced impression by any violence of texture. The main object of the impressionist, on the other hand, is to create an impression by suggestion and he asks assistance from the very medium he employs. The plastic aspect of color, no matter whether executed in the commas of Monet, the dots of Pissaro [sic], the irregular patches of Sisley, the cross hatching of Degas or the stitches of Segantini, have to help physically to construct the image in the eye.

One is brought, at last, to Hartmann's evolution of modernist thinking from pictorial photography, for the pictorialist seeks to retain the illusionism of the Old Masters. It is partially to escape their smoothly finished, artistic effect that the artist has sought an un photographic technique through the physical surface of his art.

Hartmann's most graceful prose on modern painting was probably contained in an article he wrote for Camera Work to review "The Younger American Painters" exhibition in 1910. Hartmann seems to regain hope in looking at the brilliant color of artists B. Putnam Brinley, Arthur B. Carles, Arthur Dove, Laurence Fellows, Eduard Steichen, Marsden Hartley, Max Weber, John Marin, and Alfred Maurer; he finds that these men have gone beyond the impressionistic aim of scientifically defining form with color to find a new sensuous meaning in the relationships of color, form, and motion. Through his sensitive eye, Hartmann seems finally to accept the new painting as an extension of the painterly tradition that he has loved for so long, even while regretting the loss of the "older arts that, alas, are ingrained an inch deep in all of us." Though Hartmann sees firebrands and violence in the new art, he recognizes that this art is the future on view:

And the painters naturally turn to color. They realize fully that their palettes will pour forth a stream so rich and many colored that the death of the art of painting alone could dam it. For color is the soul of painting.…

This is the war cry. And time will show that it is the most candid, the sanest, and most logical, if not only, way of solving the vital problems of modern art.

As if giving yet another battle signal, the old art warrior seemed to come to grips with the inevitable future of art. In spite of that year of 1910 being a remarkably productive one for Hartmann with the publication of The Stylus, Landscape and Figure Composition, and The Whistler Book, the end of the marvelous New York years was at hand. Declining health, a failed marriage, a changed relationship with the Stieglitz circle—for these reasons and others, Hartmann would soon choose to live in the West with his new love Lillian Bonham, an artist whom he had met at the Roycrofters' colony in Aurora, New York.

Contemporary art criticism was generally not a goal of Hartmann's in the Southern California years. Only briefly did he reach the heights of old; a few insightful comments on Chaplin and an effort to evaluate American art in the thirties were nearly the sum of any significant contribution. One brilliant exception is an incisive short essay on Sergei Eisenstein, the great Russian filmmaker; it was written in 1930 on the occasion of Eisenstein's visit to Hollywood to learn technical methods.

In his commentary praising Eisenstein, Hartmann postulated that Russian films in general and Eisenstein's films in particular were of greater aesthetic merit than American films because they were constructed within the boundaries, purposes, and "laws" of an ideal; even if that ideal might be contemptuous in Western eyes, the very presence of its defining force was bound to predetermine greater film creativity. Perhaps fittingly, Hartmann's last essay of note sounds the continuous theme of his lifelong love of art: dedication to the ideal.

In 1887, the fourteen-year-old Sadakichi Hartmann had stepped onto American shores, alone, with three dollars in his pocket. From that moment until he died in 1944, after one of his innumerable cross-country bus trips, the critic-poet-playwright lived an erratic, impassioned life dedicated to art and literature and the people who made art and literature happen. Of all the unforgettable men of his age, few were more extravagantly experienced, seriously dedicated, or bizarrely gifted than Hartmann. His life spun a connecting thread between Walt Whitman's nativist ethic, Stéphane Mallarmé's continental symbolism, and the historical tradition of American art. Hartmann was a unique and compelling figure in the age in which he lived. American art and photography in the United States simply could not have become what they are today without his remarkable presence.…

Hartmann was able to foresee modernist issues better than any other American critic—the nature of originality, the importance of "the inaccurate and meaningless," the relentless emphasis on intellectualisai, the primary emphasis on texture—yet he lost heart in the American art world by the mid-teens of the new century. Did this happen because Stieglitz was unconditionally opposed, on principle, to publishing Hartmann's more theoretical pieces, or was Hartmann's diminished involvement more directly due to the defeat of the supremacy of his beloved suggestive style of American modernist painting by the "brutal" European cubists and early expressionists? The weight of his later essays so convincingly argues for Hartmann's lucid engagement with modernism that one has to speculate that needs of the heart and health, not needs of the mind, took him away from New York.

Very likely, if all of these writings had appeared in accessible print in their own day, or had been published in their entirety, the name of Sadakichi Hartmann would be recorded with greater celebration in American art annals that it is today, for as an art critic, Hartmann would seem to have been indispensable to his era.…