For more than fifty years, Royal Cortissoz (1869-1948) was one of the leading figures in American arts and letters. As the art critic for the respected New York Tribune, he had a wide audience and because he wrote from a position of obvious knowledge and sophistication, he enjoyed the respect and friendship of many of the nation's finest writers, painters, sculptors and collectors.

     For a man who became part of the New York establishment, Royal Cortissoz had an unusual background for a person of his era. His father, Francisco Emmanuel Cortissoz, was a British immigrant of Spanish descent and his mother, Julia de Costa Mauri was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique. Cortissoz was born in Brooklyn and though he did not come from a wealthy background, he was an autodidact and absorbed works of literature, art and music omnivorously. When he was sixteen, he went to work as an office boy at the legendary architectural firm McKim, Mead and White - great training for a man who would become a major figure in the American Renaissance, which sought to unify art, sculpture and architecture.

     Cortissoz' earliest efforts at journalism were reviews and articles on music which he submitted to a Kansas City newspaper while he was still a teenager. He joined the New York Commercial Advertiser at twenty and then went to work for the great New York Tribune at the precocious age of twenty-one. In that era, before the field of journalism was professionalized, many of the leading journalists were not members of the college educated elite, but "ink stained wretches" who worked their way up through the ranks. As a cub reporter and reviewer, Cortissoz wrote about art, literature, music and the theatre. In 1897, he was promoted to the position of literary editor of the Tribune.

     The 1890's were an exciting time in American art. Legions of European-trained artists were returning to New York, teaching at schools like the Art Students League and exhibiting their work at the National Academy of Design and the breakaway Society of American Artists. Dealers were still selling the work of the established academic and salon painters to American Industrialists and French Impressionism was just beginning to be discovered by more adventurous American collectors. America was beginning to flex its muscles as an economic and military power and New York was its cultural capital.
As the New York Tribune expanded its art coverage, Cortissoz became the main reviewer. As someone who had some artistic talent and a deep interest in art from childhood, he read voraciously and his relationships with the leading artists of the day added to his knowledge.

      The philosopical approach Cortissoz used for his criticism was built on his reading of influential writers like Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin along with a healthy dose of common sense. In "The Painters Craft" (1925) he states that "In the philosophizing of art it is the imponderables that prevail. That artist is unprofitable for consideration who does not have anything to say out of his mind or imagination. Technique, we are told, is "only a means to an end," and that end is an expression of an emotion, an idea, a vision of things to the individual using the brush."

     Cortissoz saw his role as championing the best andthe brightest of the arts, based on perceptive analysis and established standards. An elitist, he worried that democracies, with their masses of the less educated, would pull the level of art down. However, he felt that anyone could come to appreciate the arts if they had a native curiousity and insightful guide.

     Cortissoz married Ellen McKay Hutchinson, a fellow journalist, in 1897, which gave him a sense of stability. However, Cortissoz was prone to fits of anxiety, which seems to be an occupational hazard for writers facing endless deadlines. He took time off when he became exhausted from overwork and fits of depression.

     Early in his career, in the 1890s, Cortissoz and most other critics championed the French Barbizon School and the American Tonalists who were influenced by them. He was suspicious of Impressionism, which he saw as optical and instinctive, rather than as imaginative as the Baroque painters. Although Cortissoz perceived a lack of thought behind Impressionism, he eventually came to respect them and contrast them against the successive movements in which he found little merit.

     When the famous Armory show opened, Cortissoz welcomed the opportunity for the public to see all the current European movements. But the aggressiveness of the promotion of modernism and the departure of the Cubists, Futurists and the Fauves from adherence to established norms of illusion and perspective were too much for him. As one modern movement succeeded another, Cortissoz became a sober advocate for a continued linkage between art and realityand an aderence to a philosophy of beauty that was to be achieved through a knowledge of craft.

     In Cortissoz' examination of the Armory show, he welcomes the opportunity for American viewers to see what all the controversy over recent European art was about. He found little to like in Modernism: "Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gaugin and Matisse, each making a further drift away from the facts of the visible world, have yet confessed to the dominance of fact as to the extent of making a man, say, look more or less like a man. But I have warned the reader of how the plot thickens, and especially of the effect that 'cheek' has had on the process. When we bid farewell to Matisse, whose nudes, preposterous as they are, yet suggest the forms of men and women, we find ourselves in the company of 'revolutionaries' who are not dealing with form as we understand it at all."

     Cortissoz simply found no relation between the progressive styles such as Cubism and art of the Western tradition: "Are we to be at great pains to explain that a chunk of marble is not a statue? Are we elaborately to demonstrate that a battered tin can is not in the same category with a goblet fashioned by Cellini? Are we to accept these Cubists as painters of pictures because they have covered canvas with paint?" This in a nutshell is the traditionalists' critique of modernism. When Cubism arrived they simply saw it as a total break from the past.

     By 1923, the opinions of Cortissoz, a staunch traditionalist, had only hardened, and so he opened American Artists with a short dissertation on beauty titled "The Critic's Point of View," which is an articulate summation of what the proponents of traditional art feel - even today, nine decades after most of the essays in the book was written. This segues into a dialogue with Krehbiel, a like-minded critic, about modern stage sets for a performance of Ttristan and Isolte at the opera house. The opening section concludes with an all out attack on the successive modern movements that were invading the country from abroad titled "Ellis Island Art". Contemporary readers must recall that this book was written after a long period of mass emigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. New York's Ellis Island was the entry point for the emigrants and the city of New York the final destination for millions of them. Among political conservatives, among them Cortissoz, there was thus a concern that American values and its standard of living would be eroded by the tremendous influx of poor immigrants. "The United States is being invaded by aliens, thousands of whom constitute so many acute perils to the body politic. Modernism is of precisely the same heterogeneous alien origin and is imperiling the republic of art the same way."

     While this diatribe would be politically incorrect today, it was an expression of common sentiment at the time. The interesting thing about the essay is the linkage between the politics of the art world and the political issues of the day. It was Cortissoz' contention that while the Post-Impressionists - Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gaugin - had retained some of the traditional artistic conventions, the succeeding movements, especially Cubism, turned their back on all the great traditions of western art. The modern movements were eroding artistic values which had stood the test of time and replacing them with the merely fashionable. He saw traditional art as "art;" modernism was modernism and that was something else entirely.

     After the fireworks of the first section of the book, Cortissoz gets down to the task of reviewing the work of a number of significant American artists and art movements. This book is an important one to read because Cortissoz is an insightful critic, and through his even-handed examination of American artists and styles of painting the contemporary reader learns what the consensus of opinion was among the elite traditional painters of his era, as Cortissoz shared many of their opinions and had benefited from his friendship and interaction with them. He writes about Abbott Thayer (1849-1921), the figurative painter of the American Renaissance who unfortunately is an obscure name today - being recognized for the most part only for his paintintings of women endowed with wings, which gave them a symbolic and universal quality. Cortissoz then covers the Tonalist painters Thomas Wilmer Dewing (1851-1938), George Fuller (1822-1884), and George De Forrest Bush ( ), a painter who has not perhaps endured as well as some of his contemporaries because he adopted the unusual approach of taking the Neo-Greecian ideal that he learned from Gerome and applied it, to of all things, American Indian subjects.

    After the fireworks of the first section of the book, Cortissoz gets down to the task of reviewing the work of a number of significant American artists and art movements. This book is an important one to read because Cortissoz is an insightful critic, and through his even-handed examination of American artists and styles of painting the contemporary reader learns what the consensus of opinion was among the elite traditional painters of his era, as Cortissoz shared many of their opinions and had benefited from his friendship and interaction with them. He writes about Abbott Thayer (1849-1921), the figurative painter of the American Renaissance who unfortunately is an obscure name today - being recognized for the most part only for his paintintings of women endowed with wings, which gave them a symbolic and universal quality. Cortissoz then covers the Tonalist painters Thomas Wilmer Dewing (1851-1938), George Fuller (1822-1884), and George de Forrest Bush, a painter who has not perhaps endured as well as some of his contemporaries because he adopted the unusual approach of taking the Neo-Greecian ideal that he learned from Gerome and applied it, to of all things, American Indian subjects.

      Cortissoz was good friends with the muralist and fellow critic Kenyon Cox (1856-1919), and since this book was published after his comrade's passing there is a nice appreciation of Cox included. He then writes about the men he describes as "Poets in Paint" for their lyrical transcription of nature, Elihu Vedder (1836-1923), Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917) and Arthur B. Davies (1862-1928). The next section is titled "American Art Out-Of-Doors," and is a long section on the American landscape, beginning with a thoughtful reexamination of the Hudson River School, which was then out of favor. There is an excellent summary of the pivotal career of George Inness (1825-1894,) who made the transition from a Hudson River style of painting to a Barbizon-influenced Tonalist ideal that influenced dozens of other American painters. Cortissoz then writes about Winslow Homer (1836-1910), whom the critic felt was the most compelling and original American artist, and includes a short study of the now obscure William Gedney Bunce (1840-1916). The landscape section concludes with the subject of American Impressionism in which the author examines the group of American artists who combined their academic training with an emphasis on plein-air painting and the chromatic palette of French Impressionism, drawing subjects from their lives at home and abroad. He covers several of the major American Impressionists: Theodore Robinson (1852-1896), John H. Twachtman (1853-1902), Childe Hassam (1859-1935) and Willard L. Metcalf (1858-1925), and then concludes the landcape section with the unique Ralph Blakelock (1847-1919) and the poetic Tonalist J. Francis Murphy (1853-1921).

George de Forest Brush
"Indian and Lily"
21" x 20" Oil on Canvas
Courtesy Pierre Berge, Paris
1897