606
DWIGHT MACDONALD
3,..
manufactured article as the cheaper cultural
goods
produced
for ...the masses. The difference is. that Academicism was
intr.an~.
sigently .opposed .to ·the.
avant~garde.
It mcluded .painters. like
B.ougereau, Alma Tadema, and .Rosa Bonheur; critics like
Edmund Gosse and Edmund Clarence Stedman; composers 'like
Sir. Edward Elgar; poets like Alfred Austin and Stephen Phil–
lips; novelists like Alphonse Daudet, John Galsworthy, Arnold
Bennett, and Joseph Hergesheimer.
6
Academicism in its own
dreary way was at least resisting Masscult.
It
had standards,
the old ones, and it educated the
nouveaux riches,
some of
~hom
became so well educated that they graduated to an ap–
preciation of the avant-garde, realizing that it was carrying on
the' spirit
.of
the tradition which the Academics were killing.
It is possible to see Academicism as the growing pains
.of
High
Culture, the· restrictive chrysalis from which something new
might emerge. That it was always destroyed after a few decades
carries out the simile-who looks at Tadema today, who reads
Hergesheimer?
Midcult is a more dangerous opponent of High Culture
be-Cause it incorporates so much of the avant-garde. The four
works noticed above were more advanced and sophisticated,
fot" their time, than were the novels of Jahn GaISworthy. They
are so to speak the products of lapsed avant-gardists who
know
6. A typical Academic victory over the avant-garde
was
that by ' the
"Beaux Arts" school of architecture, led hiy McKim, Mead
&
White,
over the Chicago school, led by Louis Sullivan and including Frank
. Lloyd Wright, at the turn of the century. A stroll down Park Avenue
illustrates the three styles. Academic: The Italian loggia of the Racquet
&
Tennis Club, the Corinthian extravagances of Warren Wheeler's
Grand Central Building. Avant-garde: the Seagram Building, by Mies
van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, and the Lever Building, by Skid·
more, Owings
&
Merrill. Midcult: the glass boxes imitating
as
cheaply
as ·possible the Lever and Seagram buildings that are going up as fast
'as
the old Academic·Renaissance apartment houses can be pulled down.
One can hardly regret the destruction of the latter on either aesthetic
or antiquarian grounds, but they did have a mild kind of "character"
.:.which their Midcult successors lack.
