The Tile Club: Camaraderie and American Plein-Air Painting The Tile Club | Page 13

DECORATIVE AGE
OR
DECORATIVE CRAZE?
The Art and Antics of the Tile Club (1877–1887)
By Ronald G. Pisano
n 1877, a year after the United
States had celebrated its one-hun-
dredth anniversary as a nation, and
twelve years after the close of the
Civil War, America embarked confi-
dently on the journey into its second
century. It was a period of consolidating wealth and a
society noted for what the sociologist Thorstein Veblen
would come to define as “conspicuous consumption.” 1
The collecting of art, objets d’art, or anything else
relatively expensive and serving little practical purpose
became a means of signaling social status. New York
City had become the art capital of the country, and
the Hudson River School, with its romantic vision of
America had almost run its course. Gradually tastes
were changing. In the fine arts, the dictates of these
new standards were being established in the dominant
European art centers of Paris and Munich, and those
American artists returning from their studies in these
cities might have expected a warm welcome. However,
they found American collectors surprisingly unsym-
pathetic to their work, preferring, instead, the prestige
that came with purchasing artwork produced by their
European counterparts. This state of affairs was further
complicated by the fact that the well established, and
comparatively conservative, artists who governed the
only major professional art organization and exhibition
space in New York, the National Academy of Design,
protected their domain against any serious infiltration
by newcomers.
As a means of supplementing their income, Amer-
ican artists were obliged to take up teaching or illus-
trating. Teaching positions had opened up at the newly
formed Art Students League (1875), and publishing
firms, such as Harper’s and Scribner’s, hired illustrators.
Still other fledgling artists turned to the decorative
arts, responding to the collecting frenzy that bad been
sparked by the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia
in 1876 and fueled by the prosperity in post-Civil War
America. Although America’s presentation of decora-
tive wares at the Centennial Exposition was compara-
tively paltry, those of other nations, particularly Great
Britain, were both impressive and popular. The result
was what has been termed the “Aesthetic Movement,”
a period which roughly spanned a decade from the
mid-1870s to the mid-1880s and was characterized by
Decorative Age or Decorative Craze? 7