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"An American Aesthetic and Its Travails" - Part I of One True Theory & the Quest for an American Aesthetic.
Martha Banta, Professor Emeritus of English, UCLA
February 16, 2006

Part I introduces the first of three testing-grounds used to analyze the efforts made throughout the nineteenth century to provide a "sustaining atmosphere" for artistic expression in the United States. It picks up in the 1850s at the time when the status of the plastic arts (painting and sculpture) prompted either indifference or shame. The Crayon, America's first acting art-journal, tried to encourage interest in forming ab nova a set of indigenous aesthetic theories for the young nation (known only for its material success) and to provide necessary institutions to support its views (art schools, exhibition galleries, professional art criticism). Two among many obstacles were (1) the prestige of the new sciences and technologies whose principles of objective inquiry were viewed as being far superior to the loose modes of thought practiced by artists, authors, and (above all) university dilettantes; (2) the overpowering achievements of the Italian Old Masters that threatened to make it impossible for the jejune American culture ever to make its own artistic mark. Lying ahead of Part I is the section devoted to the material creation of Washington, D. C. complete with an iconography ready to assert nationalistic superiority, as well as the final section that looks at the efforts of authors such as James, Norris, and Dreiser to codify a working literary aesthetic, through novels that center on artists' lives and the muses who inspire or destroy them. But it is Part I that sets down the essential question: Can there be a national aesthetic that joins with the principles of scientific inquiry to fulfill the challenge posed by Emerson for the "one true theory" that enfolds the secrets of the origin of all creative life?