mosphere functioned very specifically both to set off the painter’s own wares
and to create desire among potential clientele.”10
Given the autobiographical nature of The “Genius” and the fact that it was being written mid-career, it’s understandable that the conclusion might
be somewhat equivocal. From his position of power and prestige, Witla falls
precipitously as a result of his extra-marital affairs, and Dreiser punishes
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Witla with confusion, the loss of love, and a nervous breakdown; yet from
this position at the bottom, Dreiser allows him to climb back up again, this
time by returning to his art. Painting again, Witla finds his work in demand
and once again admired. Yet what’s most interesting, from the present per-
spective, is the kind of artist Eugene has become in the end. Witla seems fired by enthusiasm as he returns to his earlier urban subjects – “laborers, washer-women, drunkards”: “The paradox of a decaying drunkard placed against
the vivid persistence of life gripped his fancy. Somehow it suggested himself
hanging on, fighting on, accusing nature, and it gave him great courage to
do it. This picture eventually sold for eighteen thousand dollars, a record
price” ( Genius, 729). A record price! Witla’s portrayal of New York lowlife, a drunkard, earns him a handsome fortune. One would think this has – or
ought to have – an ironic edge to it; but Dreiser’s treatment of the character
otherwise doesn’t suggest any distance.
And his triumphs continue along these ambiguous lines. In the penultimate
chapter we learn that Witla’s work, upon M. Charles’s recommendation, will
decorate a new bank – “nine great panels in which he expressed deeply some
of his feeling for life.” Meanwhile, he paints more panels for two great
buildings in Washington and yet more for three state capitols – “glowing
panels also of his energetic dreaming, – a brooding suggestion of beauty
that never was on land or sea” ( Genius, 732). (They are vaguely inspired by his memory of his lost love, Suzanne.) In short, Eugene has become a
public artist, highly regarded and highly rewarded. But what has happened
to his powerful realism, to this supposed “strange fever for painting life as
he saw it”? ( Genius, 729) Are we to assume that Eugene has mutated into a kind of Maxfield Parrish, painter of public murals and idyllic scenes? Is
the difference between urban realism and brooding beauty so slight as to be
beneath notice? Or is Dreiser being ironic here, showing the price Eugene
must pay for success in the marketplace? It’s not entirely clear what Dreiser
means here, for Witla seems generally at the end to have achieved a kind of
inner peace.
Years before, in 1893, William Dean Howells had raised the issue of the
conflict between art and commerce in general terms in his essay, “The Man
of Letters as a Man of Business.” From his keen personal awareness of
the paradoxes of the situation, Howells analyzes the dilemma that places the
artist between the “masses” and the “classes,” between low and high culture
in America. The masses, he argues, have no knowledge or interest in artists,
while the classes likewise have no use for them, except in their work.
In so far as the artist is a man of the world, he is the less an artist, and if he fashions himself upon fashion, he deforms his art . . .
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Yet he has to be somewhere, poor fellow, and I think that he will do well
to regard himself as in a transition state. He is really of the masses, but they do not know it, and what is worse, they do not know him; as yet the common
people do not hear him gladly or hear him at all. He is apparently of the classes; they know him, and they listen to him; he often amuses them very much; but
he is not quite at ease among them; whether they know it or not, he knows
that he is not of their kind. Perhaps he will never be at home anywhere in the
world as long as there are masses whom he ought to consort with, and classes
whom he cannot consort with.11
This dilemma, so acutely portrayed (if not resolved) by Dreiser in The
“Genius” , would be examined from the opposite perspective in the great Frank Cowperwood trilogy, which features yet another genius, this time in
the form of a businessman, who is portrayed by Dreiser as himself something
of an artist, and most certainly as a patron of the arts.
The question of the reader’s sympathy for the main character is an in-
teresting one in the Cowperwood novels. We don’t, after all, want to read
a trilogy of over 1,300 pages about just another despicable robber baron,
and Cowperwood’s contempt for the people, or the “masses,” is evident at
many points in this long work. Yet Dreiser manages to gain our sympathy
by portraying Frank Cowperwood as a kind of artist-manqué. In fact, at
the very outset of the first volume, Dreiser establishes Cowperwood’s innate
aesthetic sensitivity: “During the years in which he had been growing into
manhood he had come instinctively into sound notions of what was artistic
and refined.” Viewing the homes of the wealthy in Philadelphia, he picks up
an appreciation for “bronzes, marbles, hangings, pictures, clocks, rugs.”12
And when Frank marries, the first thing he does is hire an artistic architect
and decorator, Ellsworth, who installs bronze sculptures, watercolors, and a
shocking marble Venus.13 As Cowperwood advances in wealth, he commis-
sions the same Ellsworth to design his home, and the outcome demonstrates
the domination of the European arts, fine and decorative, over American
taste. Ellsworth, ostensibly aiming for a “reserved, simple” effect, produces
a house filled with exotic woods, ormolu furniture, tapestry, carpets, cab-
inets, pedestals and étagères, gilt-framed pictures by English painters, and
“a head of David by Thorwaldsen,” a Danish sculptor. Ellsworth rules out
the American sculptors Powers and Hosmer, declaring them to be “not the
last word in sculpture” ( Financier, 107). Taste, for the financial elite, means European art.
Dreiser reiterates Cowperwood’s exceptional nature throughout the tril-
ogy, but in this respect at least, the latter is a typical plutocrat. Artists in the United States had been consciously, and with considerable success, struggling
to create an American art from the beginning of the nineteenth century; but
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only a few American businessmen were collecting them. To the immensely
affluent American, European art was the requisite sign of great wealth: Earl
Shinn’s immense catalogue of American collections, published in 1882, is, as
one historian puts it, “a monument to the astonishing uniformity of Ameri-
can taste in the era after the Civil War, particularly to the devotion to French academic and Barbizon painting.”14 In The Titan, when Cowperwood moves
to New York City, he fills his Manhattan mansion with Perugino, Luini,
Pinturrichio, candelabra from Venice, torcheras from Naples, to which he
later added (in The Stoic) a Watteau, a Joshua Reynolds, a Franz Hals.15 And, following the model set by his wealthy New York neighbors, Cowperwood
creates his own home in the form of a gallery.
But Dreiser is careful to let us know that Cowperwood is not acquiring
art for the mere purpose of display. At one point in The Titan, Stephanie Platow (soon to become yet another of Cowperwood’s romantic liaisons)
asks herself, as she strolls through the fabulous Cowperwood collection,
“Did he really like these things, or was he just buying them to be buying them?
She had heard much of the pseudo artistic – the people who made a show of
art” ( Titan, 204). Soon after the question is raised, Dreiser answers it, at least for the reader, when he tells us (as Cowperwood looks at some drawings by
Stephanie), “The man’s greatest love was for art. It was hypnotic to him”
( Titan, 211). And earlier we had learned that this would-be artist might have had yet another calling: “If he had not been a great financier and, above
all, a marvelous organizer he might have become a highly individualistic
philosopher” ( Titan, 11).
But Stephanie’s question – “Did he really like these things, or was he just
buying them to be buying them?” – might also apply to Cowperwood’s habit
of acquiring women, one after the other. There is, in any case, a connection
drawn between the businessman’s attraction to art objects and his attrac-
tion to a woman’s beauty. In The Financier, Cowperwood finds that Lillian Semple measures up “to his present sense of the artistic” ( Financier, 38).
When Cowperwood moves on to acquire a mistress (Aileen, who will be-
come his second wife), Dreiser makes the analogy to art even more explicit
as he reflects on the generosity of women, who will give themselves out of
love: “It appears to be related to that last word in art, that largeness of spirit which is the first characteristic of the great picture, the great building, the great sculpture, the great decoration – namely, a giving, freely and without stint, of itself, of beauty.”16 But Cowperwood is going in a dangerous