Book Reviews
"beauty culture," a "system of meaning that
helped [them] navigate the changing condi-
tions of modern social experience."
Peiss frames this chronology within several
ironic constants. First, the cosmetics industry
often is cited as a misogynist force, since it em-
phasizes women's appearance. However, "this
business . . . was largely built by women,"
from the marketing of kitchen preparations
to such megaempires as Mary Kay Cosmet-
ics. Second, "many of the most successful en-
trepreneurs were immigrant; working-class, or
black women." They not only had a hand in
defining modern concepts of beauty but also-
as Elizabeth Arden and Madam C. J. Walker
did-developed class- and ethnic-based mar-
keting strategies, created job opportunities for
women, or used company profits for commu-
nity development. Peiss argues that "the his-
tory of these businesswomen . . . contradicts
the view that the beauty industry worked only
against women's interests." Third, Peiss finds
evidence that female consumers made choices
based on their own sense of the appropriate,
even if necessity sometimes hedged those
choices. Finally, she notes the political search
for "authenticity" evidenced by the develop-
ment of niche markets; such as the 1970s
"black is beautiful" movement.
Peisss detailed chronology, extensive re-
search in corporate archives, and the sense she
gives of the topic's possibilities should stimu-
late further explorations. She bases her argu-
ment on women, for example, but includes
tantalizing suggestions (such as fragrances
with names like Macho and Score) that men's
relation to cosmetics could illuminate cultural
concerns about gender and power. Peiss touches
on gay culture's use of cosmetics to elaborate
gender codes; while noting that "the history of
gay men in [the beauty industry] remains to
be written." She' essentially defines as "cos-
metic" products used to alter the face and hair.
As a result, there is room for a history of the
body's more "corporate" transformations-
the attempts to eliminate body hair and odors
or to sculpt the shape of the body through
diet, exercise, and surgery. Research on an-
orexia, bulimia, and "cutting" suggests that those
debilitating and sometimes deadly practices-
like the mercury used in facial "bleaches" early
in the century-are a part of "beauty culture."
285
In all of these areas;the individual hope for self-
expression meets the material-cultural com-
plexes of the medical, publishing, advertising,
film, and talk-show industries. The urge to
shape ourselves seems to be greatly in need of
more of the sort of historical reconstruction
Peiss has so admirably accomplished.
Angel Kwolek-Folland
University ofKansas
Lawrence, Kansas
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Artists, Advertising, and the Borders ofArt. By
Michele H. Bogart. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995. xvi, 427 pp. Cloth,
$40.00; ISBN 0-226-06307-0. Paper, $19.95,
ISBN 0-226-06308-9.)
Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen's Advertising
Photography. By Patricia Johnston. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997. xxii, 351
pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-520-07020-8.)
When Aleksandr Rodchenko and other Rus-
sians left fine art for applied art, they felt that
they were carrying on the moral work of the
Revolution. They cast aside easel painting
without looking back, dedicating their arts to
what they hoped would bring a new, more
egalitarian, order; "art into life," Rodchenko
declared. In contrast, during the American
graphic art revolution from the 1890s into the
1930s, those who broughtart into public and
daily life intently looked back over their
shoulders at the fine arts for their standards
of legitimization.
Through their well-told histories of com-
mercial art in the United States, Michele H.
Bogart and Patricia Johnston explicate the
tensions that practitioners experienced. Bo-
gart provides a broad perspective, circa 1890
through 1960, balanced by detailed vignettes
of a dozen or so artists, such as Maxfield Par-
rish and Charles Dana Gibson, or other advo-
cates, especially the adman Earnest Elmo
Calkins, and their struggles to build a profes-
sion. The question always before them asked
if creating "art on demand" defined them as
artists or "hired hands." Commercial artists
faced conflicting criteria for success that some
of Bogart's subjects handled more readily than
others. She shows how artists reconciled-or
286 The Journal ofAmerican History
did not reconcile- their passions for aesthetic
creativity with the necessity for pleasing pa-
trons whose passions lay elsewhere.
Johnston trains her astute eye on Edward
Steichen, commercial photographer extraordi-
naire, whose success at magazine portraits and
advertisements in the 1920s and 1930s raised
his trade's prestige and income. As both au-
thors portray him, Steichen succeeded re-
markably. He attracted patrons and prospered
both as a "fine" artist, photographing elites
from J. P. Morgan to Auguste Rodin, and as a
commercial artist, sometimes still photograph-
ing elites. He worked constantly to develop his
consummate technical skills, learning to vary
textures, composition, and sharpness to alter
how patrons and other audiences would re-
spond to his images. His "strength," according
to Johnston, "lay in presenting the surface and
structure of things-rendering and interpret-
ing the people and objects he observed." Yet
Steichen's impact did not rest on his abilities as
a photographer alone but also on his success at
transferring "prestigefrom fine arts to commer-
cial art." He served his own career and the en-
tire field of commercial photography by using
his prestige to argue on behalf of fusing
"beauty and utility" for wide distribution.
Carefully and imaginatively, Bogart and
Johnston paint complex and complementary
pictures of commercial artists' struggles for le-
gitimacy and livelihood. Bogart focuses on de-
velopments in publishing and advertising that
"widened the confines of art" to include illus-
tration and more blatantly commercial activi-
ties in advertising. The growing sense after
1890 of the commodification of art and its
roles in commodifying life negatively colored
all artists producing for mass consumption.
Bogart presents many highly successful artists
as having experienced grave anxieties as they
wrestled with "the relationships between art
and life, painting and illustration, fine art and
popular culture, art and advertising, and the
identity of the artist." Even the much-beloved
Norman Rockwell felt a "debilitating sense of
inadequacy" that Bogart traces in part to his
having broken his youthful vow "never to pros-
titute our art, never to do advertising jobs."
As publishing and advertising became in-
creasingly institutionalized by the 1920s, com-
June 1999
mercial artists worked increasingly in environ-
ments that violated the fine arts' romantic
ideals of "originality, freedom, sincerity, and
experimentation." As in other areas of busi-
ness, specialization and bureaucratization re-
sulted in collaborative operations that gave art
directors-managers-control of artists' prod-
ucts. Bogart and Johnston weave the details of
these developments through their narratives.
Although Steichen eventually strained against
this system-"I'm tired of taking orders," he
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declared in 1938-he worked successfully
with publishers and agencies for decades. He
relished repeatedly challenging the stereotype
of the aloof fine artist by pointing out that
even "poor harassed" Michelangelo and other
great artists worked on commission, albeit for
elite patrons and not for mass distribution.
Steichen often proclaimed the merits of artists'
working for corporate patrons who dissemi-
nated a populist art that did not have to exist
for art's sake alone. He seems, however, to have
overlooked the nonpopulist consequences of
corporate suasion through sponsored art.
Bogart and Johnston attend well to the
larger contexts of modernism and the artists
who created the images and designs of popu-
lar American printed culture. They consider
gender, ethnicity and race, and classwith grace
and good judgment, aptly enriching their
analyses. Both authors are sensitive to linkages
with institutional and technological develop-
ments, especially printing and photography.
Johnston insightfully delves into advertising's
growing exploration of persuasion techniques,
including psychology,which almost yields an-
other book within the biography.
Each book is well illustrated, Johnston's es-
pecially abundantly. Both authors have dug
deeply into their sources, producing rich nar-
ratives.Johnston could well have brought into
the text some of her very useful and often ex-
tensive endnotes. Bogart's references outside of
her specialty are too often vague, and in some
cases she uses secondary sources rather too
freely, resulting in ill-focused laundry lists of
sources that do little to advance her argument.
I applaud the increasing use of pictorial ev-
idence in historical analysis; as exemplified by
the work of Bogart and Johnston, it can en-
hance historian's art. At the same time, I
 Book Reviews
would caution scholars exploring the bounds
of admissible evidence to be judicious in what
they conclude from analyzing the internal
composition of images-or of dress fashions,
car designs, or documents, for that matter.
Messages in any format tell us more clearly of
their creators,Bogan'sgoal, than they do of their
audiences, which Johnston adds to her inter-
pretive mix. Our understanding of Steichen
is not enhanced by Johnston's fascinating and
insightful, but generally unsubstantiated, in-
terpretations of how, for instance, audiences'
"attitudes and emotions toward their real roles
in life were manipulated to replicate the narra-
tive pattern established by the ads," so that "any
tensions and anxietieswomen felt overtheir cir-
cumscribed lives were raised enough to ac-
knowledge them, and then were neutralized."
With that single cautionary note, I heartily
recommend these books singly or, better, to-
gether; their subjects' arts have truly entered,
even shaped, our lives.
Pamela Walker Laird
University of Colorado
Denver, Colorado
BigBill Thompson, Chicago, and the Politics of
Image. By Douglas Bukowski. (Urbana: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 1998. x, 273 pp.
Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-252-02365-X. Paper,
$21.95, ISBN 0-252-06668-5.)
Most urban historians have viewed Chicago
mayor William Hale Thompson as a corrupt
windbag who provided some Jazz Age comic
relief for cynical observers of American poli-
tics. He was a buffoonish demagogue who, for
all his many faults, offered a respite from the
civic righteousness of good-government reform-
ers. In his new study of the Windy City execu-
tive, Douglas Bukowski recognizes Thompson's
ample limitations, but he also realizes the im-
portance of viewing him in the evolving con-
text of Chicago during the first three decades
of the twentieth century. Bukowski presents
Thompson not as a venal blowhard, but as a
political chameleon who changed colors in ac-
cord with Chicago's shifting cultural, ethnic,
and social complexion. In Bukowski's book
Thompson is not simply a molder of Chi-
287
cage's destiny; he is a reflection of the city's
evolving tensions, prejudices, and desires.
Bukowski begins his study with a summary
of early-twentieth-century Chicago politics
and Thompson's premayoral career. He then
discussesthe changing imagesThompson pro-
jected between 1915 and 1931. During his
first four-year term as the city's executive, he
was a pro-business temperance advocate who
appealed to middle-class WASP voters. He em-
braced an ambitious public works program,
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advertising it as the fulfillment of Daniel
Burnham's famous plan for Chicago. This
established his reputation as Big Bill the
Builder, one of the few images of the incon-
sistent mayor that remained relatively con-
stant throughout his three administrations.
Critical of the entry of the United States into
World War I, Thompson also acquired na-
tional notoriety as an isolationist, and "Amer-
ica First" would prove one of his favorite slo-
gans throughout the remainder of his career.
During the 1920s, however,Thompson re-
fashioned much of his image to take advan-
tage of the city's changing political culture.
According to Bukowski, Thompson recog-
nized the rising clout of working-class ethnics
and revisedhis rhetoric accordingly. The candi-
date who had formerly appealed to the middle-
class WASP now embraced labor and promised
thirsty ethnics that he would not enforce the
prohibition of alcohol. Yet in the end, Anton
Cermak was better able to take advantage of the
voting strength of working-class eastern and
southern Europeans, and in the electionof 1931
Cermak succeeded in ousting Thompson from
the mayor's office.
Prospective readers should be warned that
this is not a new biography of Thompson the
man but rather an insightful study of Thomp-
son as a product and a manipulator of public
opinion. Bukowski does not present much
fresh information about Thompson's personal
or political life. After reading the book, one
does not have a sense of what made Thomp-
son tick. Bukowski's book offers a mirror
rather than a window; it presents the changing
images of the mayor but not a revealing open-
ing into the life of Big Bill.
Throughout the book, however, Bukowski
says much about Chicago in the first half of