Ever since Linda Nochlin published her groundbreaking article questioning “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (ArtNews [January 1971]: 22–39), scholars have sought to understand and to change the sociocultural forces that shaped an all-male history of art. One of the first steps in that process was to recover from obscurity the lives and art of creative women, an aspect of feminist scholarship that continues with the publication of Candace Wheeler: The Art and Enterprise of American Design, 1875–1900. While never entirely lost from sight, Wheeler’s place in art history has not previously been so well defined or so surely secured.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Candace Wheeler combines an extensive biography with a catalogue of some of Wheeler and her contemporaries’ art, a technical essay on her materials, and a concise chronology of her life. By placing her in the context of a late-nineteenth-century women’s art movement that sought to promote and professionalize women’s creative work, the biography not only explores Wheeler’s life, but also sheds light on women’s art education, the changing role of traditional women’s art forms—particularly needlework—and the rise of interior decoration as a profession. Wheeler provided leadership in all three of these areas without seriously overstepping the conventions that bound middle-class American women of her day. The catalogue’s authors, associate curator of American decorative arts, Amelia Peck, and research associate, Carol Irish, characterize Wheeler as a nonradical feminist who became the “acknowledged national expert in all things having to do with decorative textiles and interiors” (1).

The biography is meticulously researched using nineteenth-century sources. Although Peck and Irish rely heavily on Wheeler’s publications, they also expose the inaccuracies that permeate her autobiographical and historical writings. Particularly helpful is their chronology of the evolving business concerns in which Wheeler took part, an account that helps untangle the confusion surrounding Associated Artists.

The centerpiece and inspiration of this exhibition was a group of twenty-seven textiles given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1928 by Wheeler’s daughter, Dora Wheeler Keith. Some were designed or fabricated by Wheeler, some by Keith, and others resulted from collaborations among the men and women of Wheeler’s business circle, including Associated Artists and the Cheney Brothers textile manufacturers. In many of the textiles, Wheeler’s creative presence can only be inferred. In addition to fabrics, the catalogue includes greeting cards, portraits, interiors, bookbindings, wallpaper designs, and furniture. Less than half of the catalogued work is firmly attributed to Wheeler, creating a disjuncture between the entries and the biographical essay, between the exhibition and its title. But the authors have chosen this diversity and made excellent use of it in order to illustrate the collaborative nature of Wheeler’s artistic ventures.

Whenever work is brought together in an exhibition where scholars can make first-hand comparisons and scientific analysis can be applied, one anticipates that questions of attribution may be raised. This occurs in Candace Wheeler in relation to the thistle design, which Peck and Irish tentatively reattribute to Wheeler’s early business partner, Louis Comfort Tiffany. A short essay by textiles conservator Elena Phipps helps bring the material properties of the medium to life for readers who were not able to see the exhibition. This text details some of the methods and materials used, as well as their strengths and weaknesses concerning the preservation of the fabrics, and will help provide a basis for future attributions.

Feminist scholarship rapidly moved beyond the initial stage of recovering women artists and their work to develop theories about the nature of art institutions, power, and the canon; gender construction in regard to class, race, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality; and the relationships among art objects, subjects, makers, and viewers. Candace Wheeler takes some tentative steps into this realm, touching on numerous issues of art education, class, and gender. For example, as Peck and Irish consider Wheeler’s motivations, they note that her forays into the art business began as a charitable work of the type commonly considered the responsibility of nineteenth-century women. Wheeler saw the need for middle-class women left destitute after the Civil War to support themselves in some genteel manner and, inspired by British examples, created a place where women with decorative needle skills could sell their products and where those without such skills could learn them. Wheeler collaborated with wealthy socialites in order to bring her cause to fruition, but she preferred middle-class women to the affluent, according to Peck and Irish. She had a rich store of artist friends, but according to this biography, she preferred applied arts to fine arts. For Wheeler, the place of art remained in the service of survival.

There is rich material here for further consideration of the tensions between fine- and applied-art ideals within the American Arts and Crafts movement and for theoretical exploration of the upper- and middle-class interactions that brought about social change. Similarly, the fact that Wheeler began as a flower painter and based most of her aesthetic on American flower motifs deserves to be discussed more fully in relation to issues of gender and power. Nevertheless, one of the strengths of this book is the ease with which its authors meld diverse methods, from connoisseurship and biography to feminism and Marxism.

This well-illustrated book fills an important gap in the history of American art by focusing on some lesser-known forms of decorative art: textiles and needle arts, wallpaper, furniture, and the combination of such material culture in designed interiors. It joins other scholarship of the past twenty years in illuminating the popular period in American art that has been called American Arts and Crafts, the American Renaissance, and the Aesthetic Movement. Candace Wheeler also advances a feminist agenda by recovering an important woman artist without ascribing to her the individual genius of the master artist, instead recognizing the collaborative nature of much of her art. It also recognizes that Wheeler herself valued the practical results of her art enterprises in providing a livelihood for those who needed it over the aesthetic concerns that normally mark a great artist. As Nochlin pointed out so long ago, the real question is not one of greatness or relevance to a canon. In the case of Wheeler, it is a question of how one artist’s life, art, and ideals can help reveal the roles of women in art and society at the turn of the twentieth century.