“Adjusting to modern life in New York circa 1900 meant learning to see skeptically. To function successfully, even to survive, every inhabitant of the modern city, every target of competitive marketing, every participant in the new mass culture, every beneficiary of modern science and technology, every believer in spiritual realms had to process visual experiences with some measure of suspicion, caution, and guile” (1). These bold and intriguing lines open Michael Leja’s recently published book, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp. Exhaustively researched and brimming with original and brilliant interpretations, Leja’s book proposes a provocative new way of thinking about the relationship between American modernity and its visual culture.

As Leja tells it, various developments in advertising, mass culture, science, technology, and psychology put into question the cognitive faculty of human vision. For instance, the frauds perpetrated by advertising and mass culture raised suspicions about surface illusions, and scientific explorations with such instruments as the X-ray revealed realities invisible to the naked eye. Artists participated in the radically changed conditions of visuality that emerged after the Civil War, both fostering a skeptical way of looking and responding to it.

Leja risks making some very broad, synthetic claims about American visual culture between 1865 and 1913, and even beyond that concluding date. This impulse, in a way, perpetuates a long-standing trend within the discipline. Almost half a century ago, the first generation of Americanist art historians adopted as its mission the definition of something quintessentially American about American art. For instance, a persistence of blunt forms and linearity in American art over the centuries was linked to a purportedly national character grounded in a Protestant worldview. Following that first generation of scholars, doubt about the possibility distinguishing national traits or indigenous artistic patterns has yielded studies that have broadened the geographic sweep of American art beyond the Northeast and even beyond U.S. borders to include Canadian and Mexican art as well as work by American citizens living abroad. Our view of American art has been nuanced by scholarship that has highlighted differences produced by the ethnicity, race, gender, or sexual orientation of artists, or that has expanded beyond the media of painting and sculpture to consider vernacular arts or the mass media. A growing awareness of the complexity and diversity of American art combined with a certain wariness about American exceptionalism has resulted in a reluctance to proffer broader claims about American art and culture.

Leja’s ambitious book suggests one way of drawing such larger conclusions about American art and culture by shifting our attention from the formal traits of artworks to modes of looking. “Looking askance,” he argues, “was … a way of looking and a way of thinking about looking…. Internalizing this practice and rationalizing it were part of the process of becoming a modern subject able to function in the modern world” (12). Exercising a degree of circumspection, Leja is careful to limit his claims to northeastern cities in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He also admits that he does not “imagine the theme of deception as the essence of the dominant visual culture of the period” (18). Even so, he ventures far-reaching conclusions at the end of his book, when he briefly traces the legacy of the culture of skepticism in post-1945 modern art: a division between, on the one hand, a line following the “Barnumizing” of modern art (readymades, the assemblages of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Pop art, and appropriation) and, on the other hand, a line espousing an “overheated rhetoric of honesty and authenticity” (247) best exemplified by the criticism of Clement Greenberg.

To focus on a mode of looking and a way of thinking about looking enables Leja to consider a remarkable array of images and cultural practices. He commences his tale in 1869 with the fascinating trial of William H. Mumler, a spirit photographer accused of producing fraudulent portraits of living subjects seen in conjunction with likenesses of “supernaturals.” Leja, challenging a widespread belief that the American public in the years after the Civil War accepted photographs as invincible documents, demonstrates that spirit photography raised questions about the truth of photography almost from its beginnings as a popular medium in the United States. He also establishes that spirit photographs were appreciated precisely as technological curiosities (even P. T. Barnum testified on Mumler’s behalf, to the immense pleasure of onlookers). Leja continues his story with chapters on Thomas Eakins’s realism, the reception of Impressionism in the United States, trompe l’oeil paintings by William Harnett, the illusionary spectacles of Henry Roltair at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, the hallucinatory automatic drawings of William James’s psychological subjects, and Marcel Duchamp’s reception at the Armory Show in 1913. Rather than discovering an emerging hierarchy between high and low or tracing a progression from a culture of imitation and fraud to one that valued authenticity and honesty, Leja keeps these various cultural tendencies in constant tension with one another. Often he finds more than parallels among different visual practices; for instance, he traces fascinating links among automatism, spiritualism, and symbolism, or, in the person of Albert Allis Hopkins, uncovers compatibility between an interest in magic and the history of art. In all cases, Leja shows how visual culture and viewers alike participated with great wit and enjoyment in a new modern mode of skeptical seeing.

Leja produces many insightful interpretations of individual artworks, especially in his chapters on Eakins, Harnett, and Duchamp. Delving into the complex scholarly debate between scholars who champion Eakins for his scientific realism and those who focus on tensions and disjunctures at the heart of his art, Leja argues that “knowledge systems jostled and displaced one another” (78). Eakins, responding to the culture of skepticism, attempted to restore reliability and truth to appearances. Yet the widening gulf between vision and knowledge, Leja points out, created startling visual dissonances in Eakins’s pictures. Ultimately, Leja suggests that Eakins’s realist paintings raised questions about the relation of picture to world in a way that aligns the works with the twentieth-century modernism of Cubism, Futurism, collage, and Dada.

A chapter on the reception of Duchamp in the United States concludes Leja’s extensive and nuanced analysis of the culture of skepticism. When Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 of 1912 was exhibited at the Armory Show (the exhibition of 1913 that introduced European modernism to a wide American public), it elicited many caricatures—most famously perhaps, a comparison to an “explosion in a shingle factory”—along with accusations that Duchamp was a charlatan. Leja’s account of skeptical proclamations about Duchamp’s painting as well as about the subsequent brouhaha around his readymade Fountain when it was rejected for exhibition by the Society of Independent Artists effectively resonates with tales told in previous chapters about the Mumler trial or about viewers confounded by trompe l’oeil paintings. From a Barnumized worldview in which social bonding is based on skeptical seeing and mutual recognition of irony, Duchamp’s reception suddenly makes perfect sense. Leja’s interpretation thereby challenges conventional knowledge about the Armory Show, according to which an audience of bumpkins, though living in the most modern city in the world, poked fun at Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 out of cultural naïveté and ignorance of European modernism. Leja reveals that Duchamp’s American audience was in fact quite savvy about modern visuality.

Leja enters into many heady debates, not the least of which concerns the relationship of visual culture to modernity. It is by now accepted wisdom that in the years following the Civil War the “incorporation” of the United States manifested itself, as Alan Trachtenberg has persuasively demonstrated, in the development of transportation and communication networks, the growth of a market economy and consumer culture, the expansion of industrial and business organizations, and the rise of the metropolis. “How could it be that the most rapidly modernizing country in the world did not generate a modern art but only imported one?” asks Leja (15). His answer: the “visual culture most significantly implicated in the pressures of modern life operated outside or at the periphery of high modernism” (15). Yet one wonders where Leja’s model of having all Americans looking askance leaves the artists such as those that constituted the Ash Can School, who represented the skyscrapers, commercial signage, and immigrant population of New York City in the early years of the twentieth century (albeit through the eyes of the newspaper reporter rather than those of either the skeptical viewer or the Cubist artist). And given that New York at the turn of the century was home to an extraordinarily heterogeneous society with fault lines along class, race, and ethnicity, one wonders if seeing skeptically and outsmarting others were skills valued and learned equally by everyone. Could one in fact survive perfectly well in the modern metropolis without the visual skill of looking askance? Did other, competing models of seeing develop, for instance, within the realm of film, that enabled working-class immigrants to succeed in their adopted city according to different social standards and visual practices?

In sum, Leja’s book is an illuminating study and will undoubtedly prompt many readers to reconsider American culture at the turn of the twentieth century in light of his manifold discoveries. Who knows? Readers might also find themselves thinking twice—thinking skeptically, viewing askance—about the tabloid headlines enjoyed surreptitiously in the supermarket line, or about the credibility of artists such as Jeff Koons, or about the rise of Internet fraud.

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