The Body in the Reservoir

like Tanner, who belonged to the African Methodist Episcopal Church, stressed not theological understanding but actual human experience of the divine (as in Annunciation, 1898).He developed his own "visual theology" (p.49) that emphasized the individual's active response to God's presence.And like Eakins, Tanner found religious subjects and realism entirely compatible.As Tanner turned from depiction of contemporary African Americans (such as the grandfather and boy in prayer in The Thankful Poor, 1894) to ecumenical Biblical subjects, he strove for historical and ethnographic accuracy.As Schwain explains, individual experience became a key component of American Christianity in this period.This meant religious themes resounded deeply and personally in American culture.It did not excuse religious art from controversy, however.Day staged tableaux vivants of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection in order to create a photographic series.Critics questioned Day's aesthetic, pictorial interest in the subject, and whether any model could completely represent the sacred figure of Christ.(In this case, Day himself was the model.)Larger debates swirled over whether photography should be documentary or aesthetic, and even whether art (and religion) should cultivate communal or individual responses.Throughout the individual studies, Schwain explores such theories of perception and spectatorship and how these filtered the production and reception of religious subjects in Gilded Age American art.This slim, subtly argued volume accords some notable issues less consideration than they merit.Schwain boldly claims this body of Gilded Age art as modern, but she gives evidence of how it looked backwards as well as forwards.Thayer shares much with his forerunners John Ruskin and William Morris (p. 128); furthermore, his "Madonnas" of ideal womanhood were conservative in the face of the New Woman.Some earlier American art-neoclassicism in sculpture and the ideal of "the sublime" in landscape paintings-aimed to have an individual (and moral) effect on the viewer, just like Schwain's Gilded Age examples.Yes, academic art privileged narrativity, moralism, and didacticism; but these did not preclude transcendent emotion, as testified the many weeping viewers of Hiram Powers's sculpture The Greek Slave in the 1840s and 1850s.Historians will want more social context, including details about how religious practice changed in the United States at this same time, and some discussion of the increasing access to art study in Europe that would have exposed Americans to the strong tradition of religious art there.Most disappointingly, no conclusion brings the diverse case studies together or explains the selection of these four particular representatives.Still, this is a refreshing and thought-provoking study of a topic that has been marginalized for too long.Schwain's book deserves a broad readership for its keen core insight: that religious sensibility has a close affinity to the modernist way of seeing.This is because both religious and modernist perceptions regard the image

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