Humbug!

Wendy Katz is Professor of Art History at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. The most recent of her books are Humbug! The Politics of Art Criticism in New York City’s Penny Press (Fordham University Press) and The Trans Mississippi and International Exposition of 1898: Art, Anthropology, and Popular Culture at the Fin de Siècle.Wendy Jean Katz is Professor of Art History at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She has explored distinctive regional networks for supporting art in The Trans-Mississippi and International Expositions of 1898–99: Art, Anthropology and Popular Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle and Regionalism & Reform: Art and Class Formation in Antebellum Cincinnati.

Humbug is a well-researched and readable book that brings together art, journalism, and political history and would work well for both undergraduate and graduate courses. Katz has thoroughly mined a large number of newspapers to provide a detailed overview of art criticism and the contentious relationships between papers over culture and politics that is evident from the reviews. The book also includes well chosen visual examples of paintings and statues that help the viewer understand specific points about the nature of artworks’ connection to politics. Overall, the book provides much needed research on an understudied topic. There is room for more work in the field of Antebellum art criticism in the press, and especially the penny press. Katz’s contribution serves as a solid foundation for future studies.

[Katz''s] study opens the door for future investigations of the intimacies between print and visual culture and the ways that each used the other as levers of power.

Katz’s absorbing story features both familiar and lesser-known artists while upending conventional approaches to nineteenth-century visual culture. Instead of showing how painting and sculpture reflected the affairs of the day, she shows how the kaleidoscopic politics of Jacksonian America were shaped and re-shaped by the near-obsession of editors and journalists with visual art and its meaning.---Peter Betjemann, Oregon State University,

Wendy Katz’s Humbug! immerses readers within the democratic cacophony of New York City’s penny press and the hotly contested space of the antebellum American art world. This highly readable book documents the shifting politics and cultural economy of the penny press’s art criticism, which spoke in irreverent, patriotic opposition to aristocratic “loafers,” cliquish art institutions, and auction-house purveyors of spurious European “Old Masters”. Katz explores a wealth of little-known material and ranges widely over a large cast of previously obscure artists, editors, publishers and critics, while also throwing new light on the conflicted critical reception of more renowned artists such as Thomas Cole. Katz’s book breaks new ground in seriously, insightfully analyzing the art and cultural criticism of mass-media newspapers, each rivalling its competitors amidst multiple, conflicting claims to represent “the people,” or that white public sphere receptive to the nationalist credo of America’s “Manifest Destiny.”---David Bjelajac, George Washington University,