Power and Posterity

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction Writing History: A National Reckoning in Fairmount Park

Part 1 Artists: Shaping the Exhibition

Chapter 1 Confrontation in Philadelphia: Artists Create a Canon of American Art

Chapter 2 The American Art Exhibition: Arguments on the Walls

Part 2 Viewers and Critics: Responses to the Exhibition

Chapter 3 Experiencing the Nation’s First Blockbuster Exhibition

Chapter 4 Critics’ Responses: American Progress and Imaginary Exhibitions

Part 3 Buyers and Sellers: Defining a New Art Market

Chapter 5 The Foreign Exhibitors and the American “Taste Test”

Chapter 6 The Collectors’ Riposte: The New York Centennial Loan Exhibition

Conclusion Rewriting History: The Awards Controversy and the Afterlives of the Centennial Exhibition

Appendix: Committees and Awards

Notes

Bibliography

Credits

Index

“Power and Posterity is the first study to investigate in depth the planning and staging of the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, as well as the full range of official, popular, and private responses to this widely attended and well-publicized event. Orcutt has orchestrated these accounts into an absorbing analysis of the ongoing critical debate over nationalism versus internationalism that reflected changes in American taste and culture.”

—Linda Ferber, Senior Art Historian and Museum Director Emerita, New-York Historical Society