New York Art Worlds, 1870–1890

After the American Civil War, a vibrant modern art world emerged in New York City, laying the groundwork for one of today’s global cultural capitals. This era of rapid socioeconomic transformation, known as the Gilded Age, was a foundational moment for an aspiring group of New Movement artists, who pursued aesthetic innovations and collaborated on production across a range of mediums. They strategically exhibited and marketed themselves and their works to ambitious patrons from the elite to the expanding middle class. Through their individual, social, and institutional affiliations, these artists functioned as tastemakers and organizers, creating an international cultural infrastructure.

Drawing largely from the American Wing’s collections, New York Art Worlds explores aspects of the lived experience of artists in the city during the 1870s and 1880s. The Union Square area, with its web of studios, schools, museums, clubs, and commercial establishments, created a nexus of creative and social activity that enriched urban life. This cosmopolitan environment—which constituted, in effect, multiple art worlds—drew people of diverse backgrounds and training opportunities, from those schooled in Europe to those who studied in local academies, including an emerging generation of professional women and artists of color.

By the late 1870s, younger, more progressive artists—many trained in Europe in the most up-to-date techniques—had established themselves in New York, promoting the city as a vital environment for their professional success. Moving beyond what they perceived as entrenched traditionalism, these artists pursued a broad range of subjects, prioritizing figure painting and scenes of everyday life. They valued subjectivity, experimentation, and expansive thinking about what constituted finished artworks. Their fresh creative force in painting, drawing, and sculpture became known as the New Movement. 

This generational pivot was also reflected in the collaborative founding of alternative teaching and exhibition venues, namely the Art Students League in 1875 and the Society of American Artists in 1877. These organizations created social and economic opportunities for some outside the established National Academy of Design. In particular, they enabled women and artists of color to achieve enhanced professional stature.

The New Movement artists sought fellowship in communal living and working spaces—notably the salons hosted by Helena de Kay and Richard Watson Gilder at their home on East Fifteenth Street. They also engaged in intentional self-fashioning, forming alliances with like-minded cultural figures and exchanging works of art with each other as evidence of friendship and shared artistic values.

In the years after the country’s centennial, professional artists across the United States explored new approaches to artmaking. Embracing the tenets of the American Aesthetic Movement—experimentation, collaboration, and a marriage of the beautiful and useful—these practitioners challenged traditional artistic hierarchies and the mythic image of the artist as solitary genius. The flourishing cooperative spirit that imbued New York’s art worlds led to the founding of numerous organizations, including the Tile Club (1877–87). Responding to the growing public taste for Aestheticism that encompassed the revival of the so-called minor arts, including watercolor and tile painting, members pursued market-driven artistic opportunities. 

The all-White and male Tile Club approached Aesthetic production largely through camaraderie. While the association’s name derived from its initial activity—the decoration of 8-inch glazed tiles—weekly club meetings focused on artistic experimentation in a variety of media as well as discussions of market trends. Members also produced magazine articles and a lavish artists’ book documenting their playful innovations. “Tilers” featured in this section include Edwin Austin Abbey, William Merritt Chase, Winslow Homer, Francis Davis Millet, William O’Donovan, and Elihu Vedder. Artists excluded from such an organization due to their gender and race, such as Cecilia Beaux and Charles Ethan Porter, pursued decorative projects independently.  

Late nineteenth-century artists looked to New York as the center of the American art world, using the city’s reputation to burnish their own. Promotional strategies included developing bonds with sympathetic art critics, whose writings in newspapers and journals introduced artworks to national audiences.

The burgeoning art market was at the center of New York’s rapidly expanding commercial infrastructure. Artists exhibited and sold their work through influential venues to foster patronage and satisfy the cultural ambitions of an expanding clientele. A robust, professional network of galleries—some satellites of European ventures—linked buyers and sellers. Most New Movement painters and sculptors participated in exhibitions at both the established National Academy of Design and the avant-garde Society of American Artists.

Other organizations, including the American Watercolor Society, were more focused, legitimizing specific media and offering a more diverse group access to the market. While an older generation of American artists played a role in the founding of The Met in 1870, younger progressives were involved with the Museum as well, strategically weaving themselves into its institutional fabric through donations of artwork and participation in exhibitions.

The popular taste for artistic production and consumption underwent remarkable growth in the decade after the 1876 Centennial International Exhibition, the first major world’s fair in the United States, held in Philadelphia. This section examines key purveyors of decorative designs for the elite during the age of the Aesthetic Movement: Louis Comfort Tiffany, Candace Wheeler (his early business partner and a specialist in textiles at Associated Artists, the pioneering interior design firm), Dora Wheeler (Candace’s daughter), and John La Farge (Tiffany’s main competitor in the development of stained-glass work). These multitalented artists played important roles as tastemakers and creative producers for upper- and middle-class consumers in search of artistic counsel and decorative goods. In addition to their innovative approaches to designing both domestic and public spaces, these influential figures called on their broad networks of New York cultural connections. This collaborative practice accounted for their success in the new role of professional decorators who orchestrated the myriad details of interiors into a harmonious whole.