Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After by Jonah Siegel (review)

Reviewed by: Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After by Jonah Siegel Stefano Evangelista (bio) Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After, by Jonah Siegel; pp. xxviii + 373. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020, $66.00, £49.99. As art reached ever larger audiences over the course of the nineteenth century, there was a corresponding growth in debates about its public value. Practical and theoretical concerns were raised about where and how art works ought to be displayed. Writers, no less than experts and critics, engaged with the challenges of grasping art objects in their material existence—a challenge that generated complex emotions as it tended to make viewers conscious of their own bodies as organs of perception and desire. Starting from these premises, Jonah Siegel's fascinating new book explores how materiality affected both the lived experience of and critical discussions about art, focusing primarily on the second half of the century but frequently also stretching back to Romantic literature and right up to the present day. Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After charts a vast territory. Readers, however, are helpfully given some guiding threads: the reception of classical antiquity; responses to Raphael; the influence of artistic reproduction and display on categories of perception and art writing. At the heart of the book is a sustained analysis of the mediating role played by institutions, notably libraries and museums. These, Siegel explains, "came into their own in the nineteenth century as foils to the onslaught of change that characterized the period," becoming "ideal locations for reflection on the power of material things, especially when those things stand at an angle to the amnesiac drives of modern culture" (52, 53). Siegel is an expert on museum culture. Here, he writes compellingly about how the museum became an increasingly unsatisfactory, puzzling space, which struggled to accommodate the new ways of coming close to art that were facilitated by travel and transport technologies. For a middle-class public that had experienced seeing classical sculpture in sun-flooded archaeological sites and contemplating religious paintings in incense-suffused churches, encountering such objects in museums came across as an act of cultural deracination. Examples from George Eliot and Vernon Lee show how writers were sensitive [End Page 329] to this shift whereby the museum becomes a place not only to know the object but to problematize systems of values and forms of knowledge. The library, as the symbolic space of print culture, complicated responses in a similar fashion. Siegel pays particular attention to how engravings and illustrations mediated the circulation of classical objects, affecting the construction of their cultural value in determining ways. In this process, popular illustrated journals came to play a pivotal, though often overlooked, role in shaping the history of taste. Ranging from William Blake to John Ruskin, Siegel presents us with instances in which the lack of access to the physical original provided a powerful source of creative and literary inspiration. Material Inspirations is arranged thematically into three parts, but examples and ideas echo each other in suggestive ways across the book. The first, entitled "Interesting," introduces the argument on Raphael as a shaping figure for nineteenth-century debates about taste and artistic value. Siegel's key intervention here is that a sustained engagement with materiality should prompt us to reconsider the standard narrative that nineteenth-century art culture drove toward disinterestedness and formalism, a trajectory that finds its inevitable telos in the twentieth-century triumph of abstraction. Siegel finds evidence for this in, among others, Ruskin and Walter Pater's art writings, in which the pull of death and eros acts as a powerful counterforce to the drive toward aesthetic autonomy (an original reading of Pater's "Conclusion" to The Renaissance [1873] reveals a strand of scepticism about disinterestedness). "Remains," the second part, deals with the reception of classical antiquities. The focus is on how drawings, engravings, and printed works such as compendia mediated the reception and circulation of ancient sculpture and, in this process, endowed it with different forms of materiality. Recovering and highlighting such mediations...