Huntington Highlight:'Taxing Visions'

On Friday, I went to to see “Taxing Visions: Financial Episodes in Late 19th-Century American Art.”

Coincidentally, Friday was also the day when it looked like the United States was on the verge of a complete government shutdown. As if to belabor the point that we are experiencing a financial episode of our own, a news story about wealth distribution and inequality came on the radio just as I was driving into The Huntington’s parking lot. It occurred to me that my visit to “Taxing Visions” could not have been better timed.

The exhibit, on view in the Chandler wing of the Virginia Steele Scott Gallery until May 30, features 27 paintings and seven works on paper and was organized in partnership with the Palmer Museum of Art at Pennsylvania University. As the exhibit brochure explains, “A series of equity and commodity crashes—‘panics’—in 1857, 1869, 1873, and 1893 helped to produce financial catastrophes both national and personal.” Those catastrophes had consequences and implications for people in every stratum of society, and the paintings and drawings in “Taxing Visions” look at subjects in the upper echelons as well as the lower classes.

Take, for example, Panic of 1869 (1869) by Charles Knoll. In this painting, a well-to-do family is reeling from the discovery that the husband has been financially ruined. He sits with a newspaper fallen to the floor at his feet, one hand covering his unnaturally pale face, the other held by his wife. Everything about their lifestyle is about to change, and the artist has captured that heart-sinking moment of realization. 

Of course, among the financial upheavals of the time came the four-year crisis that was the American Civil War. In The Pension Claim Agent (1867) by Eastman Johnson, a Civil War amputee has to verify his claim to compensation to a visiting agent, whose face is illuminated by a cold, wintry light coming through the window. Nearly everyone else in the painting is mostly in shadow. Outside the window, we can see the leafless branches of a barren tree. The painting makes clear that the cost of the war was not measured merely in dollars as it invites us to meditate on both the necessity and absurdity of the whole concept of “compensation”—how, after all, does one quantify the loss of a limb? Or the trauma experienced amidst the horrors of a war?

Others on the margins of society endured economic problems that were compounded by their ethnicity or race. Alfred Kappes’ Tattered and Torn (1886), which is also on the cover of the exhibit catalog, depicts an old African-American woman, dressed in rags, trying to light her pipe. Her poverty is inescapably, and movingly, evident, not only in the state of her disintegrating attire but also in her dismal surroundings.

But different classes have different definitions of the word “poverty,” as the painting My Dear Kate, You Have No Idea How Hard Put to It I Am to Make Ends Meet. I Am So Poor It Is a Scandal (1899) by Henry Hutt makes clear. This piece, which illustrated a scene from a short story published in Ladies’ Home Journal, shows two well-dressed young women having tea in what appears to be a high-society parlor or sitting room. One of the women is bemoaning the fact that she has so little income, and says to her friend that if her aunt had not willed to her the flat where she was now living, she would be forced into far less pleasant circumstances. The fact that this painting is located just on the other side of the same wall on which hangs Tattered and Torn is an ironic commentary in itself.

Artists, too, had their struggles and a painting by John Harrison Mills called Artist Painting a Satirical Painting (ca. 1870s–1880s) wittily illustrates their difficulties. Harrison shows us a painter seated before his canvas, on which he has composed a medieval battle scene. On the right corner of the canvas the viewer can read the words “Class 2. No Bids”, which, as the wall plaque informs us, “[suggests] that it went to exhibition or auction but was not purchased.” So the painting didn’t sell, and now the artist has drawn the words “Rent”, “Bills” and “Taxes” over the enemies of a fighting, red-caped knight. This act of graffiti might be emotionally satisfying in the moment, and amusing to the artist and the friend who sits beside him, but in the end he’s still stuck with his painting—and presumably all of his bills.

A more sobering look at the artist’s plight is Albert Pinkham Ryder’s The Poor Artist (not dated). At first glance, this strange little painting appears barely decipherable. Shapes of people can be seen, but as if through an oily mist. I had to stop and stare at the painting for a bit before I could see much in it, which is when I understood that my initial impulse to rush by was exactly the problem facing the artist in the painting. The other people in the painting ignore him and the art he carries in his hands as they hurry past to look through a shop window at other goods.

The works in "Taxing Visions" are powerful by virtue of their energetic engagement with the economic and social realities of their time. The exhibit confronts us with art that is as relevant to the issues of today as it was to those of more than a hundred years ago. And frankly, it begs the question: What, if anything, have we learned?