Both books concern periods of transition between differing cultural and intellectual formations, and both deploy interdisciplinary perspectives combining history, literary studies, and art history. In his study of the Philadelphia painter Thomas Eakins, Allan Braddock explores the difference between a dominant “social evolutionary discourse” and an emergent “modern culture concept.” The former placed a rigid, hierarchical division between Euro-American “civilization” and “primitive,” non-Western societies, using a vocabulary of innate racial divisions. The latter, developed by anthropologist Franz Boas, saw “group-based differences” as “social constructs of language, custom and tradition” subject to diffusion, or the “global circulation of objects, customs, and people in modernity” (3). John Fagg's On the Cusp positions George Bellows and Stephen Crane at a another late nineteenth-century moment of “transitions, uncertainties, and possibilities,” when the conventions of both genre painting and literary realism were modulating into a heightened concern with form and language, a testing and disrupting of the aesthetic properties of the artwork and the literary text (3).

Braddock argues that Eakins saw through the prism of the social-evolutionary discourse, and that his depiction of a trio of African American musicians in The Dancing Lesson (1878) is informed by “folkloric plantation nostalgia” (35). For Braddock, the painting is not a celebration of cultural difference, but part of the nineteenth-century search for taxonomic order, for a regional character and a national identity which would stabilize and resist the “increasing dislocations of modernity” (13). The argument has a powerfully revisionary purpose, challenging the image of Eakins as the proponent of “documentary truth,” the arch-empiricist whose forensic vision was allied with modern science and technological progress. Instead, a more reactionary, even racist, Eakins emerges from these pages. The first chapter finds Eakins “recycl[ing] orientalist stereotypes” during his period of training as an artist in Paris under the tutelage of Jean-Léon Gérôme (55). A superbly detailed contextual reading of Female Model (A Negress) (1867–69) shows how Eakins confined his sitters to an “unchanging subaltern space,” as well as illuminating the tensions and compromises involved as real people in specific settings morph into “picturesque emblems” (90, 77). The second chapter situates Eakins's Philadelphia paintings of the 1870s and 1880s in the context of the popular “local color” genre, showing how Eakins edited out some uncomfortable truths of modernity (political corruption, social injustice, industrial pollution) in order to construct, in his famous portrait of the rower Max Schmitt, an image of “heroic middle-class whiteness” (113). In the final chapter, Braddock shows how Eakins's western paintings articulate the “social evolutionary message” of Euro-American “civilization” superseding Native American “savagery” (163). With his portrait of the Philadelphia anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing (1895), self-consciously adorned in the artifacts of the Zuni Pueblo culture, Eakins is “led to the brink” of a “modern cultural perception” of diffusion and difference, but remains trapped in a reifying and expropriating discourse (192).

Three criticisms might be leveled against this absorbing, deeply researched book. First, the dislocations of modernity might have been specified in more historical detail: as it so often does, “modernity” tends to become a catch-all term for any kind of social change. The pressures of, for example, class-formation and class identity are therefore slighted in Braddock's treatment of Eakins's career. While attentive to “signs of technical struggle” in the paintings, Braddock's formal analysis is also rather abbreviated (37). It requires more a detailed reading to fully substantiate the argument that Antiquated Music (Portrait of Sarah Sagerhorn Frishmuth) “models contemporary American expansionism” (184), while the “spatial incoherence[s]” of Frank Hamilton Cushing need probing in order to fully disclose the painting's covert violence and haunting strangeness (206). Finally, there is a problem with claiming that Eakins provides the “visual epitaph to an obsolescent paradigm” while proclaiming him the harbinger of the “modern culture concept” (154). Here, we tend to see not how an artist “negotiate[s] and transform[s]” an inherited epistemological framework, but how he unerringly reproduces it (231).

John Fagg provides a rather more nuanced analysis of cultural change at the turn of the century. He shows how Crane began his career, in the Sullivan County sketches, by subjecting material derived from dime novels and local histories to a detached, ironic treatment, omitting details and truncating narrative development, so as to heighten their latent absurdity. Examining Bellows's New York City paintings, Fagg analyzes the tension between their focus on the anecdotal depiction of specified individuals and incidents, and their attempt to capture the “grand sweep of urban life,” with its “complexity,” “scale,” and “instability” (35, 37). In detailed, illuminating readings of passages in Forty-Two Kids (1907) and New York (1911), he shows how Bellows's loose handling of paint registers the “potential illegibility” of his subjects (43). The same tension is tracked through readings of Crane's early city sketches, where a “distrust of moral, causal, and narrative frameworks” exists uneasily alongside a journalistic need for precisely such frameworks (63). The discussion of Bellows continues with his apparent move towards painterly abstraction in the riverside landscapes, which shift from “narrative detail” to “textural complexity” (103). But Fagg points out that these paintings retain representational elements amid their highly schematized compositions, showing how, in The Lone Tenement (1909), this schematization is the mark of the “cataclysmic” reshaping of Manhattan by urban developers, the violent uprooting of communities registered in the painting's hauntingly forlorn and depopulated spaces. The discussion of Crane concludes with detailed discussions of two late works, “London Impressions” and “The Open Boat,” focussing on Crane's need to make the kind of lofty, aphoristic statements favored by “travel guides, gentleman's clubs, and sententious Victorian poetry,” while at the same time pursuing the hard, empirical truth of the “impression” (145). Fagg addresses the question which occurs to any reader sensitive to Crane's wildly shifting and inconsistent tone, namely, is he being ironic or serious? The answer he provides is that Crane can have no “stable worldview” because he is writing at a transitional moment, poised uncertainly between “popular romance and nascent modernism” (152, 154). Fagg shows how the same instability affects Bellows's later work, which adopts and assimilates popular newspaper caricature, even as the ingredients of his earlier “Ash Can” style themselves become clichéd.

The signal virtue of Fagg's study is the patient, exacting attention he pays to form as the vital locus of historical contradiction. Since modernity tested the limits of representation, artwork and text cannot be understood simply by reference to their historical or intellectual contexts, and Fagg's vocabulary of ellipsis, anecdote, frame, schema, aphorism, and cliché is flexibly and productively employed. It is a shame that the economics of academic publishing prevented the inclusion of the color plates which would have done justice to Fagg's consistently probing and intelligent analysis. And the argument could do with some more contextual detail at key points: the reading of The Lonely Tenement demands a more extended analysis of the specific circumstances surrounding the building of the Queensborough Bridge, fleshing out the concept of modernity through more attention to the modernizing process. Nevertheless, Fagg's study greatly complicates and enhances our understanding of the origins of modernism. To be on the cusp, Fagg convincingly shows, is not to be faced with polarized choices between modernist “purity” and “degraded” popular taste, but forced into a complex and conflicted engagement with both.