Handwerker Gallery Newsletter

Winter 2002 – Volume 3, Number 3

"What Painted Illusions Do"
A Talk with Michael Leja

Last spring Michael Leja gave a talk entitled "Touching Illusions: The Trompe l’Oeil Paintings of William Harnett." The Sewell C. Biggs Professor of American Art History at the University of Delaware, Leja is the author of Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (Yale University Press, 1993), and the yet-to-be-published Suspicious Eyes: Art, Modernity, and Deception in New York, 1871-1917. After his very well-received and well-attended talk, Leja commented on some of the issues that had been raised.

HANDWERKER GALLERY: In your talk you focused on William Harnett’s trompe l’oeil paintings of still life and the American public’s contemporary response to them. In what way would this particular artist’s modernist style and its appropriation of a very popular French 18th-century pictorial genre be symptomatic of late 19th-century American culture?

MICHAEL LEJA: My paper argued that Harnett’s trompe l’oeil paintings and the responses they elicited from contemporary audiences did indeed have much to do with concerns prominent in the contemporary culture. This claim is part of a larger argument about the character of modern life in New York in the late 19th century: that it was often perceived as a realm of deceptions and illusions. Harnett’s paintings relate to this cultural moment in various ways. They provided tests of perceptual acuity for viewers who increasingly needed such skills in their daily experience. They made a cultural anxiety --- widespread deception --- entertaining and amusing. At their best they were subtle explorations of the appeal and dynamics of deceptive visual illusions. And they helped individuals come to terms with a new identity: that of the consumer. To the extent that Harnett’s paintings produced a collection of desires in viewers --- desires for tactile gratification, entry into illusion, material fullness, human contact through objects, and so on fostered a kind of relationship with material things that became dominant in commodity culture. By persuading viewers of the deep and magical satisfactions that material objects could provide, the paintings helped to shape those viewers as consumers. At the same time, however, they warned viewers of the illusory character of such satisfactions.

So I would place Harnett’s paintings near the heart of some of the most significant cultural developments of a century ago. I should emphasize that this interpretation of the significance of Harnett’s work depends upon recognition of the incompleteness of their deceptions. Viewers were not simply and completely conned, as some historians have argued. Rather, the paintings allowed viewers to see through the illusion, yet still be subject to its power. This is the psychic state of the modern consumer economy.

HG: Your very influential study Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (Yale University Press, 1993) complements already existing models of American abstract expressionism with a very theoretically sophisticated model of a critical analysis framing the "modern man discourse." Why was it necessary and important to do that?

ML: In Reframing Abstract Expressionism and subsequent work, I have argued that the paintings of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and their associates in the New York School were part of a widespread cultural concern with the nature and condition of "modern man." Why was it important to make this argument? I suppose one reason is because I wanted to understand why and how this art had risen to grand canonical status. Some historians claimed that this was simply a matter of the transcendent quality of the work. Others argued that it was largely the result of political promotion by nationalist institutions during the cold war.

Neither answer was adequate, in my view. The latter was too conspiratorial. The former begged the question insofar as the perception of quality itself needs explanation. The premise of my study was that abstract expressionist paintings served necessary and desirable functions for the viewers who discussed, defended, and vilified them.