Hamlin Garland's Detour into Art Criticism: Forecasting the Triumph of Popular Culture over Populism...

Hamlin Garland’s Detour into Art

Criticism: Forecasting the Triumph

of Popular Culture over Populism

at the End of the FrontierMatt Johnston

In the July 1895 issue of McClure’s Magazine,the rising champion of American vernacular litera-ture, Hamlin Garland, singled out the sculptorEdward Kemeys (mostly known for his depictionsof Western subjects such as wild animals andNative Americans) as an example of “the true gen-ius of American art” (130). Just a year earlier, Gar-land had articulated his definition of nationalcreative excellence inCrumbling Idols, a collectionof polemical essays on the current state of Ameri-can arts and letters. Focusing primarily on litera-ture, he had called for a distinctly native voice, oneimmediately responsive to the languages, customs,and concerns of the emerging nation outside of theconvention-bound urban centers of the East(whose literature he regarded as essentially deriva-tive of European tradition). As he put it, “Theblight upon the literature of the West, like that ofall provinces, has been its timidity, its tendency towork in acceptedmodes, its childish desire towritefor applause of its masters in the East” (121). Infollowing Eastern expectations about literature,the Western writer misses the “infinite drama […]going on in these wide spaces of theWest” (13–14).For Garland, Kemeys’ “genius” resided in hisembodiment of this native ideal, not within the

field of writing but within the visual arts (andwithin sculpture in particular).

Despite the lofty ambitions for native geniusexpressed in Crumbling Idols, however, Garlandhimself as a writer has steadily drifted to the mar-gins of the American literary canon (a passage intoinconsequence only surpassed by Kemeys withinaccounts of American art history). Much has beenwritten about Garland’s contributions to vernacu-lar literature, but over time this attention has grav-itated toward his problematic status given hiseventual abandonment of gritty realism and popu-list causes in favor of increasingly anodyne andtoothless mainstream fiction. More recently,though, in “Locating Hamlin Garland,” BillBrown argues for a re-assessment of the writer’scareer as especially illustrative (for our postmod-ernist perspective) of the challenges attending aneffort to write something like “serious fiction”that would both appeal to a wider audience andfacilitate that audience’s more active political par-ticipation. Although for Garland such a projectultimately failed, Brown draws attention to auniquely late nineteenth-century moment whenone “could imagine a cultural field that wouldbe modernist … yet popular, nationalist and

Matt Johnston is an assistant professor of art history at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, specializing in American print cul-ture and popular culture in the nineteenth century.

The Journal of American Culture, 34:4© 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

346 The Journal of American Culture � Volume 34, Number 4 �December 2011

populist,” as opposed to the actual history ofmodernist fiction in the twentieth century, inwhich an “institutionalized antagonism between[‘high’ and ‘low’ culture] is precisely whatobscure[d] populist culture from the aestheticimagination” (99, 104–05). In an arguably alliedfashion, Mark Storey attempts in “Country Mat-ters” to reverse the earlier tendency of modernistcritics to regard “regionalist” writers like Garlandas merely “quaintly anachronistic” by recoveringthose moments in their novels that register socialand political conflict, “buried but still-glowingembers of the clamorous and transformative socialworld from which the novel emerges” (192). It isas though Storey adopts a perspective that activelylooks for and thereby supplies the socially pro-gressive bite otherwise missing in such fiction, akind of critical salvage operation that Brown seesas an only marginally effective strategy of con-temporary “politicized criticism” (even as it seemsto be one of its only options), which tries to“recuperate ‘popular literature’ and ‘low culture’for its subversive potential” (91).1

Garland’s ideas about success in the visual arts,exemplified by Kemeys, point to similar dilem-mas. More particularly, his characterization of thesculptor’s vernacular strengths through a deploy-ment of specifically frontier associations makeshim more popularly accessible yet blunts his pop-ulist potential. That is to say, Garland’s portrayalof Kemeys as an artist prefigures his turn topopular romantic fiction, with its sentimental,nostalgic (and de-politicized) construction ofWestern subjects, even as he strives to character-ize the sculptor’s untutored, untainted practice asideally suited for contemporary themes. Moreimportantly, though, this double action in charac-terizing Kemeys’ work clarifies how the difficul-ties of Garland’s literary project are not justspatial (the local versus the national) but also fun-damentally historical in character. In “LocatingHamlin Garland,” Brown understands the popu-list potential of Garland’s conception of a trulynational literature to reside in an imperative that“the nation must read the region as itself, in areverse mirror stage, where America achieves self-recognition only by seeing itself in fragments”

(104). While Brown sees this vision as essentiallyutopian and future-oriented, what Garland’s dis-cussion of Kemeys underlines is a kind of populistatrophy or obsolescence that results from the ele-vation of a “Western” artist’s work to nationalsignificance, in which Kemey’s frontier creden-tials make him vulnerable to being historicizedand de-politicized at the same time that it makes itpossible for him to speak to a national audience.

The potential difficulties involved in definingnative genius via Kemeys’ work is suggested bythe display of Western sculptures at the World’sColumbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893(two years before Garland’s McClure’s Magazinearticle), captured in photographs showing thecrowds milling about the so-called White City(Figure 1). Kemeys was one of the artists hired toproduce the sculptures of Western wild animalsthat adorned the various walkways and exhibitionhalls. He was also later commissioned to sculpt theguardian lions that grace the entrance to the ArtInstitute of Chicago, which was conceived as akind of permanent version of the Exposition’s Pal-ace of Fine Arts (Figure 2).2 Yet the visitors to theExposition typically seem to ignore these suppos-edly ferocious predators. Emblems of physicalpotency and immediate danger, they are irrelevantto the primary business of the crowds, whopass them by on their way to see the presentproductions of American industry housed in theexhibition halls. The Art Institute’s lions follow an

Figure 1. View of the Court of Honor, World’sColumbian Exposition, Chicago (1893).

Hamlin Garland’s Detour into Art Criticism � Matt Johnston 347

ancient tradition of flanking entrances with per-manent guardian figures (the lion supposedlynever sleeps), but like the Exposition sculpturesthey too are peripheral, they are not themselvesthe artwork that visitors to the museum have cometo see (if anything they tend to be “demeaned” bychildren climbing on top of them and pretendingto ride them). Sculpted in white marble, the Expo-sition’s animal sculptures take their positionalongside the fair’s neoclassical structures, ostensi-bly suggesting an equivalent classical timelessness,that the America embodied by these creatures hasassumed an equivalent status as a civilization, fit-ting in with the Exposition’s celebration of Amer-ica’s ascension as a first-tier industrial andimperial power.3 That is to say, they are primarilyahistoric and symbolic, quite aside from any vis-ceral qualities such creatures might be thought topossess, a status that facilitates ignoring them(after all, who ever really looks at a symbol of theAmerican eagle?). Only generally evocative ofAmerica, they seem scarcely suitable as models forthe kind of particularity demanded by Garland’sinterest in vernacular art forms.

It is telling that in hisMcClure’s Magazine arti-cle Garland actually has little to say about specificworks by Kemeys; his appeal for the writer seemsto derive largely from his biography. If, in

Crumbing Idols, Garland railed against the perni-cious influence of Eastern literary standards, hisdescription of the sculptor emphasizes hisuniquely untainted, almost raw identity as an art-ist, as untamed as his bears and panthers. Heapparently received no formal training andGarland dwells on the miraculous story of the dis-covery of his artistic talent. As Garland writes,while looking for his professional calling as ayoung man, “He happened to see an old sculptormodelling the head of a wolf. Quick as lightningcame the thought to him, ‘I can do that!’” (123).The subsequent proof of his aptitude also drawsattention to qualities of immediacy and universalrecognition that are connectible to Garland’s ver-nacular ideals. After seeing the old sculptor atwork, Kemeys returns home and works throughthe night on his own wolf head. In a kind ofupdated version of the Apelles myth he thenshows it to his family: “I said, ‘Now, I’ve gotsomething to show you. If you recognize it say soquick, don’t hesitate.’ Then I jerked the handker-chief away. ‘It’s a wolf,’ they said” (124). Recog-nition is the sum of interpretation, echoing asimilar moment of naıve engagement that Garlanddescribes in his assessment of Impressionist paint-ing in Crumbling Idols. Here Garland asks aviewer, “who knew nothing about painting,” “tostand before these pictures and tell me just whathe thought of them”; the viewer “then turnedwith an enthusiastic light in his eyes [and said]‘That is June grass under sunlight’” (101). Inas-much as Garland discusses the merits of Kemeys’sculptures in his article, they have to do with simi-lar aspects of immediacy; indeed he portrays thesculptor’s work as strangely animated and lifelike(Figure 3). Entering the artist’s studio at thebeginning of the article, Garland notes how thefloors and walls are lined with sculptures of wildanimals that seem strangely alive: “A miniaturebronze grizzly paced across a pedestal … A buf-falo calmly regarded some distant object from aheight” (120). On the following page, after Gar-land accidentally knocks down a plaster cast of amountain sheep, Kemeys good-naturedly remarks“‘The old fellow wanted to be noticed … I nevercan go by him without hearing from him’” (121).

Figure 2. Edward Kemeys, guardian lions, mainentrance, Art Institute, Chicago (1894).


This emphasis on immediate recognition, onthe in fact intrusive character of Kemeys’ sculp-tures (demanding attention), not only deviatesfrom the symbolic but undemanding quality ofhis Exposition pieces, but is also a key theme incomparisons between his work and the work oflater American sculptors of wild animals, artistswho were also more invested in a modernist aes-thetic. Thus, in “The Dark Cat,” AlexanderNemerov’s characterization of the (albeit “mor-bidly critical”) modernist qualities of works bythe California sculptor Arthur Putnam residesprecisely in their being instantly recognizeable(52). Quoting the contemporary critic Lucy BakerJerome, Nemerov writes that “Putnam’s works…demonstrate a stark simplicity, a ‘daring of elimi-nation,’ that makes the whole immediately appre-hensible” and draws out the constitutive elementsof this “stark simplicity” through a comparison ofPutnam’s Puma on Guard (1907–1911) with thework of his teacher, namely Kemeys (52,Figure 4). Indeed, while in Crumbling Idols Gar-land praises Kemeys in his otherwise limitedreview of American sculptors exhibiting at theColumbian Exposition, here too he has relativelylittle to say about the formal qualities of his sculp-tures (that the subjects Kemeys depicts are “spirit-edly handled” is about as concrete as he gets),

even though, like Jerome, he too singles outinstantaneous unity as a key modernist quality ofspecifically Impressionist painting: “a pictureshould be a unified impression … a complete andof course momentary concept of the sense ofsight” (97).

For Nemerov, Putnam’s allegiance with a mod-ernist sensibility prevents his work from becom-ing (like Kemeys’ Exposition sculptures arguablydo) merely “another ornament of civic self-congratulation” (51). Nemerov’s assessment ofPutnam as a modernist sculptor notably empha-sizes a pessimistic outlook on modern social pro-gress, in which the “dark power [of Puma onGuard] is most decisive when we see that it cri-tiques not just the ideals of the ‘land of sunshine’but also the era’s rationalist desire to illuminatethe night [via electric lighting]” (47). In otherwords, it is less a matter of the relative presence ofimmediacy that differentiates the work of teacherand student, but the critical perspective investedin that value. However, this shift in the connota-tions of immediacy also parallels a movementfrom a more popular to a more marginalized audi-ence, from the everyman identified in Garland’svarious accounts of naıve encounters with worksof art (Kemeys’ family, the viewer of the Exposi-tion’s Impressionist collection “who knewnothing about painting”) to the now familiar

Figure 3. Edward Kemeys,Deer and Panther, 1896,bronze, 7 × 13 1/2 × 6 1/2 in., Gift of Margaret S.Watson, 1899.39, The Art Institute of Chicago.

Figure 4. Arthur Putnam, Puma on Guard, ca.1899-1911, bronze, 19 × 27 1/2 × 11 3/4 in., Gift ofAlma de Bretteville Spreckels, 1924.169, Fine ArtsMuseums of San Francisco.


counter-cultural figure of the avant-garde artist,whose essential traits were later described inClement Greenberg’s seminal 1939 essay,“Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” While it is primarilythrough the writing of later critics continuing in theGreenbergian tradition that immediacy or instan-taneity emerges as a key modernist aesthetic value(most especially in the work of Michael Fried),Greenberg himself deployed the avant-garde artistexpressly in opposition to popular culture, in theproduction of art increasingly challenging or “dif-ficult” as it becomes more self-reflectively focusedon the tools of representation themselves (as inso-called “art for art’s sake”). In other words,however much immediacy may be prized as aquality of modernist art, it no longer partakes ofthe meaning of “readily accessible” present inGarland’s sense of the term. At the same time,although Nemerov may see the outlines of socialcriticism in Putnam’s dark animal statues, Green-berg’s essay is well-known as an attempt to justifycultural elitism, in which the self-reflective con-centration of avant-garde artists on the “imitationof imitating” was seen to alienate “a great many ofthose who were capable formerly of enjoying andappreciating ambitious art and literature, but whoare now unwilling or unable to acquire an initia-tion into their craft secrets” (10).

In his article on Kemeys, Garland connects theimmediacy of the artist’s work with the genuine-ness of his passion for and knowledge about theWest. Although born in Georgia, the sculptor isapparently a Westerner at heart; in Kemeys’words: “‘All I saw in the West seemed native tome, as if I had returned to it from a strange land’”(122). More than merely visiting the West, Kem-eys was initiated into its mysteries through thetutelage of trappers and Native Americans withwhom he lived. Although his work compels himto live in an urban center, he yearns to return tothat wilderness space that was so decisive in hisartistic development. He is even Indian-like him-self and Garland notes right at the beginning how“His figure, thin but sinewy, was active as anIndian’s” (120). In fact, Garland almost seems tocollapse the artist with his subject matter toomuch, asserting his Western genuineness to the

point where his artistic work seems superfluous,to the point where Kemeys himself becomes theobject on display, but in a manner that threatensto transform an authentic subject into a familiar(and almost comical) popular subject. As in hisvernacular fiction, Garland is careful to preserveKemeys’ apparently Western figures of speech, somuch so that Garland has to caution the readerthat “his picturesque freedom of diction must notbe allowed to belie him. He is in deadly earnest”;in other words, despite his colorful (or, more pre-cisely, “entertaining”) turns of phrase, he shouldbe taken seriously (130). In making this warning,Garland seems to anticipate a reader reaction to amarker of cultural difference (frontier dialect)whose amusing qualities register its in fact long-standing familiarity, something like the “popularexotic.” Unlike the almost shocking veristic quali-ties of some of the Midwestern or Middle Bordercharacters in his recent fictional works (discussedbelow), his portrayal of Kemeys points to thekind of romanticized Western figures characteris-tic of his later fiction.

Recurring references are also made to his skillas a banjo player and his knowledge of the oldfrontier songs, while the paradigmatic image ofKemeys in the article’s illustrations is less of asculptor than a Western type, an almost genre-likebanjo player (Figures 5 and 6). The first illustra-tion privileges his Western artistry as a banjoplayer over his practice as a sculptor. Althoughwell-dressed, his relaxed cross-legged pose, sittingon a rustic chair complete with armrests, connectshim with a genre tradition of rural banjo playersand fiddlers going back to paintings by WilliamSidney Mount and George Caleb Bingham.4

Moreover, the appearance of the frame suggeststhe edges of a printing surface, further positioninghim as a subject for art (the fact that the framecalls to mind the edges of a lithographic stone inparticular ambiguously registers both a popularand a fine art print medium). The second illustra-tion shows Kemeys as just one more element ofquaint Western memorabilia in his parlor. Indeed,given the premium placed on simulation in thevarious ethnographic displays located on the Mid-way Plaisance adjacent to the Columbian


Exposition’s White City (separating entertain-ment from education), this image of “Kemeys atHome” risks the kind of “ethnographic alterity”that Brown identifies in “Locating Hamlin Gar-land” as an unavoidable consequence of Garland’sfictional treatment of Western subjects through alens however partially informed by more sophisti-cated Eastern literary standards (99). Less a roomin the artist’s house, that is, the spectrum of levelsof representation (from paintings and sculptures,to artifacts on display, to artifacts useable as furni-ture, to Kemeys himself) transforms this domesticinterior into a Midway-like ethnographic exhibit.5

As in his enlistment of Kemeys’ vernacular

dialect, a concern to preserve the artist’s Western-ness positions him outside of a “high” culturecontext (not artistic discourse here, but an artisticspace, the studio or atelier), but also threatens toposition him within a popular entertainmentcontext that mitigates against the potential forpopulist shock value.

This equation between artist and frontier sub-ject is even further reinforced by the way Garlandcharacterizes Kemeys’ artmaking and his art asWestern activities and objects. Kemeys’ artmak-ing seems inextricably bound up with associationsof the hunt, so that “capturing” a subject in hiswork assumes a distinctly predatory character. Ashe boasts to Garland, he is not just that rare artistto have seen the buffalo, he has also slain them.Recounting his first visit to the West as an aspir-ing artist, Kemeys describes an interdependentartistic/hunting education, whereby he observedanimal behavior closely to the extent that hewas able to track and ultimately dispatch them. Ina particularly compact passage of Garland’s arti-cle, Kemeys recalls that “‘Every night I had all theanimals I could use for dissection and posing.I used to sit around on a roll of hides after supperand sing [and play the banjo]’” (126). Not only isthe artistic value of precise anatomical knowledgeacquired in a context of hunting camaraderie, hisdissection of Western subjects enables him tobecome more recognizeable as a Western genre

Figure 6. “Kemeys at Home,”McClure’s Magazine(July 1895).

Figure 5. “Kemeys and His Banjo,”McClure’sMagazine (July 1895).


type, sitting on a “roll of hides” and playing thebanjo at dusk. At the same time, his sculpturesbecome less works of art and more like huntingtrophies; Garland describes how sculptures ofwild animals share space on his studio walls withthe heads of animals he has slain, a juxtapositionthat confers an eerie trophy-like quality to thenumerous illustrations of plaster sketches ofIndian braves and chiefs within the article(Figure 7). In an earlier review of Kemeys’ workin Century Magazine, Julian Hawthorne illus-trates Kemeys’ personal relationship with hisWestern subjects by noting that a statue of a griz-zly bear in his studio depicts the very bear theartist killed in a life-or-death struggle, uponwhose skin that statue now rests. This linking ofartmaking with hunting, art object with trophy,actually builds up so much over the course of thearticle that the reader might become alarmedwhen the two begin to talk of Kemeys turning to

modern human subjects. Riding in a trolley fromhis studio to his house, they observe “A mountedlamp-lighter [who] came dashing up to the corner,and lighted the lamp, almost at a gallop,” as if theywere assessing a wild animal’s behavior; Kemeysstates ominously “‘I watch for him every night.I’ll do him sometime’” (130).

The figure of the Western artist as hunter, ofthe art object as trophy, are fairly establishedtropes in nineteenth-century American art. Theyare present in the writings and paintings ofGeorge Catlin at a time when the trans-MississippiWest was just being opened for exploration andsettlement. These tropes essentially endow thedepiction of individual Western subjects withwide-reaching implications: making art as hunt-ing imitates the larger process of conquering thewilderness, while as trophy the work of artmemorializes, commemorating that larger pro-cess as now a part of history, specificallynational history.6 However, while Catlin isanticipating the end of the frontier, it has comeand gone in the lifetimes of Kemeys andGarland. Reminiscing about old frontier days,Garland states “‘And it is all passing, this splen-did life’”; Kemeys replies, “‘All going, allgoing,’” with “the same strange sadness” (127).It is during the Chicago Exposition that the his-torian Frederick Jackson Turner delivered hislecture on the formative role played by the fron-tier in shaping the nation’s identity, but he alsonoted its passing, now that the frontier was nolonger a valid land category of the U.S. LandSurvey. So Kemeys’ frontier credentials are akind of double-edged sword: they accord hiswork genuineness as being uniquely, even consti-tutively American, but they also make it obsolete(recalling the Exposition’s statues of wild ani-mals, national symbols but also easy to ignore).

If Kemeys “looks back” while Catlin “looksforward” to the end of the frontier, Catlin’s ownimage as an artist suggests this mirrored relation-ship (and “mirrored” in a precise sense, not as acopy but as an inversion). In particular, WilliamFisk’s 1849 portrait of Catlin seems to invertmany of the salient features of “Kemeys atHome” (Figure 8). Instead of a Western banjo

Figure 7. “A Sketch in Clay by Kemeys,”McClure’s Magazine (July 1895).


player trying to assume the identity of a sculp-tor, we see an evidently cultured, Eastern artist“playing Indian.” Despite the sculptor’s smock,Kemeys’ pose again connects him with that ruralgenre figure, just as Catlin’s upright posture,carefully parted hair, and collared and beltedtunic connect him with an image of genteelrespectability within a history of American por-traiture. Similarly, instead of a domestic interiorsimulating a frontier scene, we see a Mandantepee functioning as an artist’s atelier. The visibletent flap and the glimpse of the larger Mandanencampment beyond it establish an Indian spatialcontext, but only marginally, so that the easelshown on the right (and the absence of detail inthe interior space) can equally attest to Catlin’sartistic status in spatial terms (as an artist’sworking space). This ambiguity is likewiserepeated in the conflation between Catlin and hissubject (the dimly seen figures of Mandan chiefsstanding behind and to the left of Catlin who are

evidently admiring his work). In a similar way,Kemeys as Western banjo player takes up hisposition among the scattered artifacts and artisticrepresentations of wild animals and (wild)human figures.

In terms of Garland’s ideas about vernacularliterature, this association of Kemeys and thefrontier ultimately draws attention to an underly-ing dilemma confronting Garland as an aspiringserious writer, namely that the moment his workis recognized as somehow specifically, forma-tively American, however true to local languageand customs it may be it becomes less contempo-rary, less currently relevant, becoming insteadmonolithic. Many of his stories from this periodfeature a Western writer, educated in the East,who tries to return to his home but who is alwaysfrustrated in this attempt. In “Up the Coule,”published in 1891 in Main-Travelled Roads (hismost well-known collection of short stories),Garland repeatedly contrasts the Eastern-inspiredidealism of the narrator, Howard McClane, withthe harsh realities of prairie life. Where Howardas spectator looks for a picturesque view of hisfamily’s farm, his brother Grant as workingfarmer “went to milk the cow––on whose legs theflies and mosquitoes swarmed, bloated withblood—to sit by the hot side of the cow and belashed with her tail as she tried frantically to keepthe savage insects from eating her raw” (78).7

Similarly, Howard’s memory of a picturesquepainting of “a farm in the valley” that hung in hisNew York apartment, which had largely displacedhis childhood recollections of his home, is starklycontradicted by his first view of the family farm onhis return: “Instantly, the beautiful, peaceful valleywas forgotten … The longer he stood absorbingthis farm-scene, with all its sordidness, dullness,triviality, and its endless drudgeries, the lower hisheart sank” (79). By highlighting such contrastsand by keeping the narrator from being ultimatelyaccepted back into his family, Garland tries to holdopen the populist potential of the story. TheEastern reader might recognize his or her ownblindness to the realities of Western farm life,might be awakened to the unjustness of the landspeculation that aggravated these conditions,

Figure 8. William Fisk, Portrait of Catlin, 1849, oilon canvas, 50 ×40 in., National Portrait Gallery,Smithsonian Institution.


might ultimately take action in such reform effortsas Henry George’s push for deprivatizing landownership and imposing a single land tax. Con-versely, though, theymight perceive these difficul-ties within a larger historical perspective, as part ofsome great struggle to make the nation what it isdestined to be, so that the short story shifts from apopulist call to action to a memorial of the inevita-ble conflicts attending national progress. Thispotential shift in perspective is especially relevantin the context of the Chicago Exposition, whichopened only two years later, celebrating as it didthe nation-building achievements of private enter-prise and industry.

Such contrasts between Eastern spectator andWestern subject, of detached and aestheticizedengagement versus strictly utilitarian immersion,would be repeated as a strategy for jolting thereader’s complacency in later realist or “natural-ist” fiction. To take a familiar example, FrankNorris’ The Octopus: A Story of California(1901) similarly dramatizes the conflict betweenfarmers in the San Joaquin Valley and the Paci-fic and Southwestern railroad, in which the rail-road company leased unimproved land to thosefarmers with promises to sell it to them later atits initial, minimal value, only to demand itssubsequently much-improved value (that is,through the farmers’ investments of time andlabor working the land to make it agriculturallyproductive) at the end of the lease. Here thesophisticated outsider, Presley (a writer likeHoward), likewise contemplates a vista of farm-scape early on in the novel, which for him is astarting point in the development of a new kindof socially progressive poetry. These initialencounters (by thinly-veiled stand-ins for theauthors) with the landscape as subject are thensucceeded by increasingly vivid confrontationswith the harshness of social reality, culminatingfor Presley in a shoot-out between the farmersand the federal agents sent to forcibly removethem from their farms.8 If anything, what dis-tinguishes Norris’ novel from Garland’s shortstories of a decade earlier is both a higherdegree of ironic fatalism (just as, in the realm ofpictorial art, Nemerov foregrounds a morbid

fascination with darkness on the part of Kem-eys’ former student Putnam) as well as a moreevidently self-conscious effort to create a trulynational epic (whether in terms of Presley’s newpoetry or Norris’ own novel, which was envi-sioned as the first part of a projected Epic ofWheat).

Finally, if Garland’s largely biographical treat-ment of Kemeys foreshadows the challenges hehimself faces as a writer (to create a national liter-ature without losing a local and socially progres-sive instrumentality), this subtext is also presentin the loaded significance of sculptural projectionwithin his article, even if he largely eschews anydiscussion of specific formal qualities in Kemeys’work. As a three-dimensional medium, sculpturetakes up space, it can obtrude into the space of theviewer (as in the case of the plaster cast of a moun-tain sheep that Garland knocks over and Kemeys’remark that “I can never go by without hearingfrom him”). In discussing the physiognomic dif-ferences between Eastern and Western Indians,Kemeys notes of the “woods Indian” that “‘Hisjaw is less prominent, his forehead recedes more… His eyes are not so deeply sunk’”; in otherwords, his facial features do not project as muchand it is not unreasonable given the connectionbetween the frontier and history deployed withinGarland’s article to connect this lack of projectionwith a sense that, more than the “prairie Indian,”the “woods Indian” has faded away into the past(129). Looking at the illustration of Kemeys asbanjo-player, this historical connotation of pro-jection might account for the particularly severe,sculpture-like treatment of his face, in particularhis “deeply-sunk” eyes. Also notable is the waythe sculpted bust in the lower right vignette pro-jects from an easel-like armature (just as the vari-ous busts of Native Americans project from thewalls of his studio). In Illustrations of the Man-ners, Customs, and Condition of the North Ameri-can Indians, Catlin famously described how hispaintings might enable the supposedly doomedIndian to “rise … phoenix-like … from the ‘stainon a painter’s palette,’ and live again upon can-vass”; such a re-birth seems to be taking place inthe representation of the emerging head of


Kemeys’ sculpture, assuming now three-dimen-sional form as a body in a process of sculpturalcreation (16).

This recurrence of sculptural projection withinGarland’s article poignantly dramatizes his con-cern that his vernacular stories also not fade away(that, in keeping with their populist intentions,they might literally, as it were, get in the reader’sface). What Garland’s article also suggests,though, is that this salutary dissolution of the bar-rier between artist/viewer and subject can just aseasily drift into an equally distanced state of simu-lated closeness. Just as Garland struggled to pre-vent his written account of Kemeys as a man ofthe people from becoming a popular culturefigure of comic entertainment value (“his pictur-esque freedom of speech must not be allowed tobelie him”), so the illustrations of Kemeys as anartist could likewise slip into the mode of simu-lated experience found in the Midway Plaisanceethnographic exhibits (especially “Kemeys atHome”). The artistic expression, whether as “fineart” or popular culture, national epic or mass-audience entertainment, remains incomplete if theviewer does not assume his or her share of respon-sibility for taking action.

Notes

1. Other “recuperating” projects include Donald Pizer’s empha-sis on Garland’s relationship with progressive politics in his recentre-evaluation of the writer’s oeuvre in the 1890s, Hamlin Garland:Prairie Radical. Pizer’s much earlier monograph on Garland,HamlinGarland’s Early Work and Career (1960), is still considered the mostcompelling characterization of the writer’s early fiction.

2. Jane Clarke (1988) has carefully detailed Kemeys’ involve-ment with the Exposition’s organizers and specifically how hiswork was seen to characterize the nationalistic ambitions of theExposition and to act as a suitable connection between it and thenew Art Institute.

3. The imperialistic program of the Exposition’s displays andtheir architectural and sculptural framing are detailed by (among oth-ers) Robert Rydell in All the World’s a Fair (1984). What I want topoint to here is that their neoclassical context and therefore symbolicmeaning mitigates their visceral impact.

4. Kemeys’ noticeably dour expression also further connects thisrepresentation of the artist with a photograph of a banjo-playing Put-nam in Nemerov’s article, which is seen here to be less evocative ofan earlier rural stereotype but instead displays the “customary slouchof bohemian disaffection” (46).

5. The strategies of simulation used in late nineteenth-centuryethnographic exhibits, such as utilizing multiple levels of representa-tion, are discussed in Robert Bogdan’s Freak Show (1988).

6. A standard discussion of Catlin’s ambitions to memorialize asupposedly doomed Native American culture through his sketchesand paintings and his collection of Native American artifacts (takentogether, what comprised his “Indian Gallery”) is William Truett-ner’s The Natural Man Observed (1979). Truettner also notes Cat-lin’s interest specifically in Native American hunting methods.

7. This kind of contrast between a cultured Eastern perspectiveand a harsh Western (or rather “Middle Border”) reality is discussedby Pizer in his monograph on Garland, as well as by other scholarsseeking to emphasize Garland’s populist intentions, such as BonneyMacDonald (1992) and EdwardWatts (1992).

8. Norris’s novel was based in part on the so-called MusselSlough Tragedy of 1880, but most of the principal farmers in thenovel are slain in the gunfight (unlike what actually transpired) andNorris avoids the potential issue of miscarried justice suggested bythe light sentences that were imposed by a largely sympathetic juryon the farmers who were convicted of murder.

Works cited

Bogdan, Robert. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities forAmusement and Profit. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. Print.

Brown, Bill. “The Popular, the Populist, and the Populace—LocatingHamlin Garland in the Politics of Culture.” Arizona Quarterly50.3 (Autumn 1994): 89–110. Print.

Catlin, George. Illustrations of the Manners, Customs, and Condi-tion of the North American Indians. London: Henry G. Bohn,1851. Print.

Clarke, Jane H. “The Art Institute’s Lions.” Art Institute of ChicagoMuseum Studies 14.1 (1988), 46–55. Print.

Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Art and Objecthood: Essaysand Reviews. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. Print.

Garland, Hamilin. Crumbling Idols: Twelve Essays on Art DealingChiefly with Literature, Painting, and Drama. Cambridge:Harvard UP, 1960. Print.

——. “Edward Kemeys: A Sculptor of Frontier Life and Wild Ani-mals.”McClure’s Magazine 5 (July 1895): 120–31. Print.

——. “Up the Coule.” Main-Travelled Roads: Six Mississippi ValleyStories. New York: Rinehart & Co., 1957. Print.

Greenberg, Clement. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Clement Green-berg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1. Ed. JohnO’Brian. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. Print.

Hawthorne, Julian. “American Wild in Animals in Art.” CenturyMagazine 6 (1884): 213–20. Print.

MacDonald, Bonney. “Eastern Imaginings of the West in HamlinGarland’s ‘Up the Coolly’ and ‘God’s Raven’s’.”Western Ameri-can Literature 28 (1992): 209–30. Print.

Nemerov, Alexander. “The Dark Cat: Arthur Putnam and a Frag-ment of the Night.” American Art 16.1 (Spring 2002): 36–59.Print.

Norris, Frank. The Octopus: A Story of California. Port Washington:Kennikat Press, 1960.

Pizer, Donald, ed. Hamlin Garland: Prairie Radical, Writings fromthe 1890s. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2010. Print.


——.Hamlin Garland’s Early Work and Career. Berkeley: U of Cal-ifornia P, 1960. Print.

Rydell, Robert. All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at AmericanInternational Expositions, 1876–1916. Chicago: U of Chicago P,1984. Print.

Storey, Mark. “Country Matters: Rural Fiction, Urban Modernity,and the Problem of American Regionalism.”Nineteenth-CenturyLiterature 65.2 (September 2010): 192–213. Print.

Truettner, William. The Natural Man Observed: A Study of Catlin’sIndian Gallery. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979.Print.

Watts, Edward. “Margin or Middle Border: Hamlin Garland, HenryLawson, and Post-Colonialism.” The Old Northwest 16.2 (1992):154–63. Print.


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