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Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art. By Michele H. Bogart. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. xvi, 427 pp. Cloth, $40.00, ISBN 0-226-06307-0. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-226-06308-9.)
Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen's Advertising Photography. By Patricia Johnston. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xxii, 351 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-520-07020-8.)
When Aleksandr Rodchenko and other Russians left fine art for applied art, they felt that they were carrying on the moral work of the Revolution. They cast aside easel painting without looking back, dedicating their arts to what they hoped would bring a new, more egalitarian, order; "art into life," Rodchenko declared. In contrast, during the American graphic art revolution from the 1890s into the 1930s, those who brought art into public and daily life intently looked back over their shoulders at the fine arts for their standards of legitimization.
Through their well-told histories of commercial art in the United States, Michele H. Bogart and Patricia Johnston explicate the tensions that practitioners experienced. Bogart provides a broad perspective, circa 1890 through 1960, balanced by detailed vignettes of a dozen or so artists, such as Maxfield Parrish and Charles Dana Gibson, or other advocates, especially the adman Earnest Elmo Calkins, and their struggles to build a profession. The question always before them asked if creating "art on demand" defined them as artists or "hired hands." Commercial artists faced conflicting criteria for success that some of Bogart's subjects handled more readily than others. She shows how artists reconciled-or did not reconcile-their passions for aesthetic creativity with the necessity for pleasing patrons whose passions lay elsewhere.
Johnston trains her...