Kenyon Cox

In the first two decades of this century Kenyon Cox was among the best known cultural figures in the United States . This reputation rested on his activities as a painter and critic. After five years of rigorous training in Paris between 1877 and 1882, he returned to his native Ohio , and then settled in New York City . Like many other aspiring young painters, he earned a living drawing illustrations for magazines, teaching, and from the occasional sale of an easel work. He painted in a realistic manner and attained considerable reputation for landscapes, portraits, and genre studies. Kenyon Cox took all his art seriously and was always a conscientious craftsman and careful interpreter of his subjects. He enjoyed working in a variety of styles and subjects, but his natural bent was toward intellectual and emotional idealism, which he expressed in art through figure painting, especially of the idealized nude, and in murals with classical appearances and themes. This interest in ideals reflected both his high regard for the grand European art tradition and his belief that modern cultures could extend it without losing their own special qualities. He was ultimately able to paint murals that expressed these ideals about the roles of art in society and in expanding individual emotions.

Kenyon Cox's murals and easel pictures brought him reputation in the art world and a modest living, but his public stature rested chiefly on his criticism. Beginning in the 1880s, he became a well-known contributor of book and exhibition reviews and regular essays for such magazines as the Nation, Century, and Scribner's, which carried his views to influential tastemakers. He dealt with a wide range of both historical and contemporary art. He saw both art production and appreciation as expressions of personal ideals and emotional needs that had civic consequences. In due course, he became well known for holding that art could and must temper materialism in modern life, be a force for cohesive social ideals, and expand the individual imagination. He called this general attitude classicism, and expressed it best in a major book entitled The Classic Point of View ( 1911).

Kenyon Cox and his peers had returned from Paris in the 1870s with a sense that their generation would produce art that was technically better, intellectually broader, and less parochial than that of their predecessors. They were interested in depicting current life in an intimate and vigorous manner that employed skilled drawing and rich coloration. They were certain that a revitalized American art could both become a major national school and enrich the world tradition. Cox retained a lifelong belief in the future of American art, provided that it was thoughtful, expertly painted, and projected overtones of idealism, whatever its subject or style. He wanted art to become a major and accepted part of life, and for the artist to become a protagonist in the development of American culture.

Kenyon Cox was thus a logical opponent of the modernism that began to reshape contemporary art in the years before the Armory Show of 1913. He saw this modernism in all of current life, and especially in the arts, as a potentially anarchic romanticism that exalted the individual over the polity. He also disliked its apparent disregard for technical skill in painting and drawing. In the largest sense, he feared that the new approaches would undermine the role of art in American society and would separate artist and public, thus placing cultural matters on the margin of life and in the care of a self-serving elite. These general views doubtless expressed those of most art patrons. In his later years, Kenyon Cox both reflected and enhanced that mainstream opinion. Modernism in its various forms finally triumphed among those who dominated the debate over art, but Cox's views never entirely disappeared. His art and life thus deserve a reexamination.