might say, “American” subjects, and Eugene doubts the world will be inter-
ested in them. Although he dreams of having a picture in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art (224), he asks, pessimistically, if the art world would not
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be far more likely to applaud “the form and spirit of classic beauty such as
that represented by Sir John Millais? Would it not prefer Rossetti’s ‘Blessed
Damozel’ to any street scene ever painted?” (224)5 Witla ventures to show
his work to the top gallery in New York, Kellner and Sons, where the pref-
erence is for European art. M. Anatole Charles, the French-born manager
of the gallery, “was convinced that there was practically nothing of value
in American art as yet – certainly not from the commercial point of view,
and very little from the artistic. Beyond a few canvases by Inness, Homer,
Sargent, Abbey, Whistler, men who were more foreign, or rather universal,
than American in their attitude, he considered that the American art spirit
was as yet young and raw and crude” (226). M. Charles recognizes, however,
the striking force of Witla’s work, as he looks at pictures of the East Side
crowd, of “Fifth Avenue in a snow storm, the battered, shabby bus pulled by
a team of lean, unkempt, bony horses . . .” He observes with appreciation
Witla’s renderings of the details of urban life, “piles of snow sifted on to
window sills and ledges and into doorways”(227); and he marvels at how
Witla has captured “the exact texture of seeping water on gray stones in the
glare of various electric lights” (228). Witla’s art is received as controversial, as shocking and brutal even, as it violates the serene idealism of the more
acceptable academic styles; but M. Charles is sold on the virtues of Witla
and will soon be selling Witla to his elite clientele.
In fashioning his genius, Dreiser has been careful to portray not just a
great painter, but a great “American” painter, who pictures the drama and
vitality of contemporary urban life, as opposed to the more conventionally
“beautiful,” the mannered European scenes and more “refined” romantic
aesthetic that is otherwise in favor in the salons. Witla is, we might say,
a realist. As such, Dreiser seems to be basing his artist on such innovative
painters of city life around the turn of the century as Robert Henri, Everett
Shinn, and especially John Sloan – painters of the so-called “Ashcan School,”
who favored the portrayal of the harsh realities of life in the city.6 The multi-talented Shinn was a good friend of Dreiser’s and is often taken as the author’s model for his genius, though Sloan’s urban scenes seem closer in spirit to
Witla’s. In addition, Dreiser may have been modeling Witla’s vision on the
work of two of Dreiser’s favorite artists – the illustrator and painter, W. L.
Sonntag and the photographer Alfred Stieglitz – both of whom he had written
about in the late 1890s. Along with the Ashcan group, they were responding
to the drama of urban life, and Dreiser’s language in writing about them
anticipates his portrayal of Witla’s work in The “Genius” , as in this record of a moment in 1901 with Sonntag, when they pause on a walk to observe
a scene in Manhattan near Herald Square, “with its huge theatrical sign of
fire and its measure of store lights and lamps of vehicles.”
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Dreiser, art, and the museum
It was, of course, an inspiring scene. The broad, converging walks were alive
with people. A perfect jam of vehicles marked the spot where the horse and
cable cars intersected. Overhead was the elevated station, its lights augmented every few minutes by long trains of brightly lighted cars filled with truly
metropolitan crowds.
And Sonntag calls Dreiser’s attention to the exact quality of the light as it
reflects off a pool of water in the street. The artist must capture these nuances, Sonntag says, and Dreiser agrees.7
The account of a visit with Alfred Stieglitz, published in 1902, builds
upon Dreiser’s earlier story about the Camera Club of New York (1899), in
which he had noted Stieglitz’s ambition to “do new things,” revealing “the
sentiment and tender beauty in subjects previously thought to be devoid of
charm.”8 By this time, Stieglitz was already photographing New York City’s
streets with an eye to the everyday, but noteworthy, moments of urban life –
a steaming horse at the end of its run, standing at the trolley terminal; a
horse-drawn carriage driving toward the camera through a snow storm;
lights reflecting off a rainy street before a hotel – subjects that paralleled the shift toward urban realism that was taking place in literature and painting as
well. Dreiser portrays Stieglitz, like Sonntag, as an artist alert to the pictorial nuances of city life, and he ends his profile with the two of them, Stieglitz
and Dreiser, in the rooftop studio of the Camera Club, looking out over the
city.
Dark clouds had clustered around the sun; gray tones were creeping over
the plateau of roofs; the roar of the city surged up tense, somber, and pitiless.
“If we could but picture that mood!” said Mr. Stieglitz, waving his hand
over the city. Then he led the way back to earth.9
Yet Dreiser stops short of characterizing Witla’s art as implacably realist.
During the 1890s, a common touchstone for realism was photography,
thought at the time to be a “literal” medium. Thus one of Witla’s critics,
as quoted by Dreiser, condemns the paintings for their low subject matter –
“beggars, panhandlers, sandwich men” – saying that we might as well “turn
to commonplace photography at once and be done with it.” That view is
countered, however, by another critic who praises Witla’s ability to “in-
dict life with its own grossness,” to endow color “with its higher spiritual
significance” and not its merely “photographic value” ( Genius, 237). For urban realism to be acceptable in the art world, it was necessary, as Dreiser
demonstrates, for it to have some “higher” value, going beyond what many
thought were the limitations of photography. Dreiser is accurately charac-
terizing the debate that centered on photography during the late nineteenth
century, wherein the camera stood for a literal recording of facts; actually, as 131
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Dreiser had shown in his sketch of Stieglitz, by 1899 at least the pictorialist movement was doing everything possible to demonstrate that photography
was not a mechanical medium but was instead a hand-made art, based on
the delicate manipulation of the print in the darkroom.
The early success of Eugene Witla is the apogee of his career, and it’s not
entirely clear what Dreiser thinks of him – and what we’re supposed to think
of him – as the rest of his life unfolds. (Dreiser’s placing quotation marks
around “genius” in the title suggests that that is what people call him, reflecting a consensus opinion; but it also implies a certain ironic distance from that appellation.) He goes to Europe, paints scenes of Paris that don’t sell very
well in New York; he seems to have lost contact with his art and, drifting
into depression, he experiences what we might call a nervous breakdown.
But Witla is resourceful and resilient, and he eventually rebounds from de-
spair, working his way back up the social and professional ladder, this time
through the commercial application of his artistic genius. Witla becomes an
advertising director, and subsequently the director of an entire publishing
program. At this point the transformation of Witla the artist into Witla the
editor/businessman is nearly complete. When his wife urges him to return
to his serious painting, he responds sardonically, “My art. My poor old art.
A lot I’ve done to develop my art” ( Genius, 518). Ironically, Witla’s early paintings keep increasing in market value, though by now the perquisites of
his steady high income have come to seem indispensable and a return to the
vicissitudes of the art market unthinkable.
And through this transformation into businessman, Witla has achieved
one of his early goals as an artist: to have a studio that looks like the
real thing, or even more than the real thing. Eugene chooses “green-brown
tapestries representing old Rhine Castles for his studio,” and he installs a dramatically lighted wooden cross, “ornamented with a figure of the bleeding
Christ.” A pair of candles glowing before the crucifix “cast a peculiar spell
of beauty over the gay throngs which sometimes assembled here” ( Genius, 474). Dreiser’s irony is crucial for us to observe: only by attaining wealth
can Witla come to play properly the role of the Bohemian artist. In a sense
the studio embodies the transformation from artist to businessman, for the
art studio at this time functioned, Sarah Burns has argued, as “in essence a
salesroom: an aesthetic boutique, where the carefully compounded art at-