The Central Art Association of America 1893–1900

Introduction: A National Question with a Midwestern Answer

In the final decade of the nineteenth century, American cultural life was animated by a practical and ideological problem that artists, educators, journalists, and clubwomen all recognized in different ways: the United States had become wealthy and powerful with startling speed, yet it still appeared culturally dependent—especially in the fine arts—on European models, European reputations, and European institutions. At the same time, the nation’s internal geography was changing. Populations and capital were shifting westward; new urban centers were competing with older ones; and the Midwest—frequently caricatured by Eastern arbiters as commercially minded and artistically provincial—was insisting on its right to define, support, and enjoy a serious cultural life. Chicago, in particular, became the stage on which a project of “national art” could be imagined and attempted: the city’s civic confidence, its appetite for institutions, and its devotion to self-invention made it both the obvious headquarters for cultural organization and a target for cultural skepticism.

The Central Art Association of America (hereafter the CAA) arose from this moment as one of the most ambitious, distinctive, and geographically expansive experiments in art education and exhibition practice in the United States. It was, by design, a connective institution: a coordinating center that would link clubs, leagues, and dispersed audiences with living artists and original works; and it was, by necessity, an improvisational institution: it depended on volunteer leadership, modest fees, and an infrastructure that frequently consisted of whatever spaces a town could spare—an empty hotel, a library hall, a vacant storefront. Yet for several years it acted with the confidence of a national movement. It published a magazine, organized study courses, circulated exhibitions, sponsored lectures, and positioned Chicago and the Midwest as legitimate participants in the shaping of American artistic identity. Its success was real; its limits were equally instructive. The CAA’s short institutional lifespan (1894–1900) is a concentrated case study in how late nineteenth-century Americans tried to democratize art and build a public for original American work.

I. 1893: The World’s Columbian Exposition and the “Afterlife” of the Fair

The immediate prehistory of the Central Art Association is inseparable from the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Chicago, still conscious of its recent devastation by the Great Fire of 1871, used the exposition to project a new image of order, refinement, and artistic seriousness. Jackson Park’s transformation into the “White City” embodied the belief that cultural authority could be constructed through institutions—through architecture, educational programming, and the strategic staging of art as a public necessity rather than a private luxury. Visitors encountered art and design on a scale many had never experienced, and the fair’s cultural congresses created networks among educators and artists who now had a shared language for discussing art beyond elite circles.

The fair’s crucial effect on the CAA’s later work was not simply the visibility of art, but the visibility of audiences for art. Many Americans, especially women involved in clubs and study groups, responded to the fair as an invitation to sustained engagement: if art could be encountered at Jackson Park, why should it disappear when the gates closed? The fair thus produced what might be called a cultural “afterlife,” a period in which clubs multiplied and curricula circulated, yet original works remained scarce in most towns. The CAA aimed to convert fair-generated enthusiasm into durable habits of study, viewing, and collecting.

II. The Long Vision of Mrs. T. Vernette Morse: Founder, Secretary, Editor

Any accurate history of the CAA must begin with the person who conceived it: Mrs. T. Vernette Morse. Long before March 1894, Morse had been thinking institutionally. At least ten years earlier, while living in a Western state, she recognized that access to serious art was unevenly distributed, and she proposed to New York acquaintances an organization that would benefit Western people and, as she insisted, the East as well.[1] The proposal was, for many, implausible; Morse lacked the independent resources to carry it alone; and the plan was shelved. But it remained a persistent conviction.

Chicago provided Morse the environment and the opportunity that New York had not. She came to the city in the early 1890s and began not with an association but with a publication: a monthly illustrated magazine titled The Arts.[2] The fair gave her an opportunity to promote and expand the magazine, and the fair’s cultural congresses placed her in contact with leading art educators. She used the fair’s social infrastructure—its meetings, exhibitions, and personal introductions—to build credibility for her editorial project. The magazine, in turn, created an audience: clubs and individuals wrote with questions and requests that the printed page could not fully satisfy. Morse’s innovation was to interpret this correspondence not as mere readership but as an emerging constituency for an organization.

By March 1894, Morse judged the moment ripe.[3] She sought the endorsement of Professor Swing, whose quick approval supplied what every new institution needs: public legitimacy. “It is the right movement at the right time, in the right place, and you are the right person to have at the head of it,” Swing told her. He offered more than praise—his name and financial assistance—and although his death later that year was “a serious blow,” his early support helped Morse assemble councilors and then officers.[4]

III. 1894: Officers, Councilors, and Institutional Design

The CAA’s initial officer slate was carefully constructed. Hamlin Garland, offered the presidency, accepted. Lorado Taft was appointed first vice president. Josephine C. Locke became second vice president. Morse served as secretary. Franklin H. Head was named treasurer. This configuration reflected the CAA’s dual mission: Garland articulated its cultural philosophy, Taft shaped its educational and artistic programs, and Morse provided organizational continuity and editorial leadership. Head’s office, in a volunteer institution with minimal starting funds, was not ornamental; it was essential to keeping exhibitions moving and publications afloat.[5]

The CAA’s early years also depended on civic allies. Contemporary reporting noted that the public gave “a great deal of encouragement … but very little financial aid,” and that the Friday Club, for example, was among the first to assist in a practical way, sponsoring an entertainment that “opened the way for the first exhibition,” the Hoosier artists. This shows how local women’s organizations were not only audiences but institutional partners providing the fundraising and social coordination necessary to launch programs. The CAA’s reliance on low annual dues and gifts meant that every lecture, pamphlet, and crate depended on careful budgeting and continual persuasion.[6]

The CAA also formed a council. Contemporary reports describe the election of “four new councillors … Mesdames S. E. Gross, Linden W. Bates, Sumner Ellis, and Mr. John Vance Cheney.” Even the phrasing is revealing: the council blended women active in civic and club networks with male literary authority. Councilors were, in effect, the CAA’s connective tissue; they extended its legitimacy and helped organize local circuits of exhibitions and lectures.

From its inception, the CAA defined itself in opposition to commercial art ventures. It would pay no salaries. It would accept no commission on sales. Proceeds from sales would go directly to artists.[7] This stance was not merely moral; it was strategic. It protected the CAA from suspicion that it was trading on artists’ labor. It also aligned the institution with a democratic rhetoric: art would be presented as a civic good, not a speculative commodity.

IV. Publications and the Building of a Public: From The Arts to Arts for America

The CAA’s most consistent instrument was print. The Arts, founded by Morse, became both a pedagogical resource and a communications hub. It offered study courses and served as a semi-official organ of the CAA. Later, the magazine would be renamed Arts for America, signaling a broadened ambition: from a Chicago-based art journal to a national organ that could speak to the idea of American art itself.

The magazine did more than report; it organized. Study courses written by Taft and A. F. Van Laer circulated widely: they were used by more than 600 clubs, and in at least one season not less than 10,000 interested readers followed them. The magazine thus functioned as an early form of distance education. It also offered a shared vocabulary through which dispersed leagues could talk about Impressionism, American painting, architecture, interior decoration, and sculpture.[8]

In September 1894, the CAA’s leaders also used print to frame contemporary debates. The “Critical Triumvirate” of Garland, Taft, and Charles Francis Browne authored pamphlets—Impressions of Impressionism and The Hoosier Painters—addressing exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and promoting a set of evaluative principles. Pamphlets, by design, moved quickly through networks. They were portable criticism: a way to teach audiences how to look, not merely what to see.[9]

V. 1895: Annual Meeting, Lectures, and the Consolidation of the League System[10]

By May 1, 1895, the CAA was able to hold an annual meeting, space lent by the Art Institute, and to present itself as a functioning regional institution. Reports and letters from leagues in places as dispersed as Lima, Ohio; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Adrian, Michigan; Oshkosh, Wisconsin; Spokane, Washington; Kansas City; Kirkwood, Missouri; and Mount Carroll, Illinois testified to the network’s expansion.[11] The meeting also clarified the division of labor between Chicago as center and the leagues as local executors. The Art Institute’s field was inevitably limited by geography; the CAA’s field was spread all over the West. It would connect itself to towns through leagues formed in different cities and towns, and by lectures, literature, and exhibitions of American art it would cultivate interest not only in painting but in manufacturing and sculpture—a strikingly broad conception of the arts that included industrial design.

The CAA also sponsored a course of lectures at the Armour Institute of Technology (later the school merged into Northwestern University),[12] an educational partnership that mattered institutionally. It signaled that art education could be integrated into a technological and industrial setting—exactly the synthesis Chicago wished to represent. These lectures, combined with the magazine’s study courses, helped the CAA move from an enthusiastic movement to a structured program.

VI. Circulating Exhibitions: Logistics, Venues, and the Ethics of Direct Sale

The circulating exhibition program was the CAA’s most visible public work and its most radical intervention in the geography of American art. It attempted to solve a problem Garland articulated with unusual clarity: the typical American town had a library and a theater, but lacked a public gallery for sculpture and painting. In this absence, people could study art history and follow art debates without ever seeing the work of living artists. The result was a mismatch between knowledge and experience. Garland’s essay “Successful Efforts to Teach Art to the Masses” was a manifesto for the CAA precisely because it began with this civic diagnosis and ended with an operational plan.

Garland observed that the walls of American homes were usually filled with “pictures of the crudest sort,” and that reading alone had not raised taste. What the public needed was “contact with the actual work of the artist.” The CAA’s purpose, he wrote, was “For the promotion of good art and its dispersion among the people.” He listed the objects of the organization in a way that reads like a charter for modern museum outreach: to associate artists and lovers of art; to connect clubs into a central association; to arrange courses of study in American, French, and English art; to furnish exhibitions at the bare cost of moving and insuring; to encourage original American art through criticism and special exhibitions; to encourage sales to families so that artists would be rewarded and homes refined; and to supply lectures at special rates.[13]

Just as important as the goals were the safeguards. Garland emphasized that the CAA paid no salaries, took no commissions, and began with no money to start with. It would be supported by gifts and by membership fees of one dollar per year. Its credibility depended on staying “clear of all suspicion of money-making.” Therefore, checks for sales were made out directly to the artist. This policy both protected artists and reinforced the CAA’s democratic ethos: it was a mediator, not a dealer.

The logistics of circulating exhibitions required ingenuity. The CAA agreed to furnish an exhibit at cost to any town with an affiliated league of at least thirty members. It would send a man to oversee packing for large exhibits and provide lecturers if desired. Local leagues could charge a small fee for admission, but commissions on sales were prohibited. The CAA also organized circuits so that exhibitions could move at minimal expense. This was, in effect, a distribution system for art—one that treated the Midwest as a connected field rather than a set of isolated towns.

The documentary record provides vivid examples. Janesville, Wisconsin, held an exhibition of 150 canvases at an expense of less than fifty cents per canvas. The city had never hosted such an exhibition, and the effect was “very marked”; the people were “jubilant.” Lincoln, Nebraska, under a local league headed by Chancellor Canfield of the University, held an exhibition of over 100 canvases during the annual teachers’ convention; the hall was crowded, and the effect on teachers’ lives “cannot be estimated.” In La Crosse, Wisconsin, listeners said, “We need a permanent gallery.” In Peoria, Illinois, the league’s influence was concrete: plans for the new public library were altered to include a permanent exhibition gallery. These anecdotes matter because they show the CAA’s mechanism of change: temporary exhibitions were used to create permanent expectations.

The venues were often makeshift. Janesville used an empty hotel. Aurora, Illinois, used a store-building and hosted lectures by Taft and Morse. Minneapolis had to fit up a space at great trouble and expense. Other towns used library halls with poor light. Yet the very difficulty helped produce civic action; if the towns wanted art, they would eventually need proper spaces.

VII. Chicago Exhibitions, National Artists, and the Question of “Western” Art

While the CAA’s mission centered on Western dispersion, it did not advocate a narrow regionalism. It aimed to promote progressive American work wherever it originated and to help Western artists gain national reputations. In Chicago, the CAA organized special exhibitions to encourage new work and to demonstrate that the city could function as a national stage. Garland noted two such exhibitions: the Hoosier group (sixty pictures) and the work of Frank Reaugh, the “cowboy painter,” along with James Bolivar Needham’s pictures of shipping on the Chicago River. The choice is telling: the Hoosiers represented a coherent regional school; Reaugh represented Western subject matter; Needham industrial-urban landscape specific to Chicago.[14]

The CAA also attracted the participation of Eastern artists. Reports from 1895 note that many Eastern artists connected with these exhibitions, listing names such as William Merritt Chase, Dwight W. Tryon, R. Swain Gifford, and others.[15] This presence helped the CAA in two ways: it raised the prestige of exhibitions in small towns, and it positioned the Midwest as a legitimate market and audience for serious work.

At the same time, the CAA’s commitment to criticism and aesthetic debate produced friction. Some artists were not pleased and claimed the CAA had not benefited local art in Chicago. One artist called it “frivolous,” though the charge was aimed more at certain criticisms than at the entire enterprise. This tension is structural for any democratizing institution: the need to educate the public and to speak critically can alienate some practitioners even as it builds audiences. However, an 1897 exhibition of the CAA featured almost exclusively Chicago and Indiana artists, a possible response to the criticism.[16]

VIII. The Art Institute Relationship and Institutional Synergy

The CAA’s relationship with the Art Institute of Chicago was crucial. The Art Institute provided symbolic authority and practical resources; the CAA extended the Institute’s influence geographically. Shared directors created institutional synergy. The CAA used the Institute as a meeting place and as a reference point for exhibitions and critical discourse. The pamphlets Impressions of Impressionism and The Hoosier Painters, for example, were written about exhibitions at the Institute. In this sense, the CAA can be seen as an early extension program: an attempt to translate the resources of a major urban institution into a regional network.

This synergy also illustrates the CAA’s strategy of credibility. Chicago’s claim to cultural leadership depended on institutions that could rival those of the East. The CAA, by linking itself to the Art Institute, reinforced that claim. At the same time, it avoided direct competition by focusing on what the Institute could not easily do: circulate art to hundreds of smaller communities.

IX. 1898–1899: Expansion, Governance, and Signs of Strain

By the late 1890s, the CAA’s impact was substantial.[17] Arts for America reached a circulation of 15,000 by 1899, and the CAA counted over 300 affiliates from as far away as Nebraska and Mississippi. It also provided patronage through gold medals for artistic achievement, supporting a range of practitioners—decorators, China painters, and fine art painters. The CAA opened permanent exhibition space for fine and industrial arts in the Fine Arts Building in 1898, indicating a desire to stabilize its presence in Chicago even as it continued to circulate exhibitions outward.[18] In 1898, architect Frank Lloyd Wright lectured on the architecture in Chicago, that signaled the CAA’s broadened conception of “art” to include architecture and design as central to public taste.[19]

Yet those same years revealed institutional fragility. The CAA depended heavily on its founders and charismatic leaders. When leadership shifted—or withdrew—continuity was difficult. By 1899 the founders were largely gone, and the organization was increasingly run by women from various clubs. In one instance, former Vice President Lorado Taft issued a public renouncement of the use of his name in association with the CAA, obviously distancing himself from the organization, which he must have viewed had veered into areas he could not support:[20]

Within the last week the Central Art Association, with headquarters in the First Building, has been subjected to criticism because of pamphlets sent out seeking new patrons at $10 a year each. At the head of the prospectus are the names of James Lane Allen as President and Lorado Taft as one of the Executive committee. Incidentally there is the name of Mrs. Vernette Morse as secretary and general director. Writing to the TRIBUNE, Mr. Taft says: ‘I wish you would say that the use of my name on Mrs. Morse’s latest begging cards was not only unauthorized but made entirely without my knowledge. I am bracketed with two people whom I do not know, and with Mrs. Morse on an ‘Executive committee,’ of which I never heard until sometime after my formal withdrawal from the festival work. I don’t like it. The only reason that I ask for this publicity is that my name has been used publicly—to what extent I do not know—for the purpose of ‘working the public.’

Taft had been advised that his name was still on the executive committee, while he had in fact withdrawn from that in May 1899. Mrs. Morse for her part stated further:

The Central Art Association is the only one of many organizations after the World’s Fair that is alive today. I never said before, but I have kept it alive. Today I feel like letting it all fall to the ground. [emphasis added] I never have got a cent out of it in salary. The association never gave a dollar to the support of the magazine.

Women’s clubs had been essential from the beginning, but without sustained input from practicing artists, the CAA’s publications and programs risked drifting away from the artistic community whose expertise they needed. Contemporary accounts suggest the magazine lost its Midwestern and American focus and may have lost its base of interested parties as a result. Financial constraints, leadership transitions, and changing public interests combined to weaken the CAA’s original momentum. By March 1900, the last known issue of Arts for America appeared, and the institution faded from view.

Interlude: The CAA as Seen by Its Own President[21]

Because Hamlin Garland served not merely as a figurehead but as a working president—writing, lecturing, and interpreting the CAA’s purpose for a national readership—his own language deserves to be preserved at length. Garland framed the CAA as a response to a paradox he saw everywhere in American towns: an infrastructure for books and drama, but not for the visual arts. “Literature has a home in nearly every Northern town of the United States in a public library,” he wrote, “and no town is without its theatre …; but most of our towns, and even some of our cities, are without public galleries for sculpture and painting.” The result was a public that could become highly informed without becoming visually experienced. Women’s clubs, study clubs, and literary clubs had multiplied rapidly since the World’s Fair, yet “the chance to see, face to face, the artist and his work is for the most part denied these studious and appreciative people.” Garland did not dismiss study—he admired it—but insisted that study without looking could not produce taste. “Taste has not really been considerably raised by reading,” he concluded. “The thing most needed is contact with the actual work of the artist.”

That contact, he argued, was the CAA’s proper business. The CAA’s early ambition, Garland noted, resembled a Chautauqua system—structured adult education distributed across towns—but it quickly expanded to include exhibitions and the encouragement of collecting. In his enumeration of objects, the institutional design becomes vivid: connect clubs into a “central association for mutual aid”; circulate exhibitions at “the bare cost” of moving and insuring; supply lectures “of sound and progressive views” at special rates; and encourage sales in a way that benefited artists without turning the CAA into a merchant. However, he guaranteed that: “Checks are made out direct to the artist, for the CAA wishes to be clear of all suspicion of money-making.”

Garland also highlighted human infrastructure — people and roles — without which the CAA could not function. The work of circulating exhibitions and coordinating leagues depended, he wrote, “very largely through the enthusiasm, generosity and executive ability of Mr. Lorado Taft, whose fine studio was the distributing point for the CAA last year.” Taft’s vice presidency, in other words, was not ceremonial. It was administrative and logistical. Taft also supervised study courses and delivered lectures. Likewise, A. F. Van Laer, repeatedly identified as an experienced lecturer at the Art Institute, carried major responsibility for the study curriculum in American painting and for illustrated lectures that tied distant clubs to professional expertise.

Finally, Garland’s examples of local impact reveal a recurring pattern: exhibitions functioned as catalysts for permanent institution-building. In town after town, the response was the same—crowds, discussions, and the dawning recognition that art required space. “Why can’t we have such an exhibition made permanent?” audiences asked. The question points to the CAA’s most durable achievement: it did not merely transport art; it transported the idea that art belonged to public life, and that towns should build the architectural and civic structures necessary to keep it there.

X. Conclusion: What the Central Art CAA Made Possible

The Central Art Association of America existed for a short period, but it condensed into those years an unusually ambitious program: to democratize art through education, circulation, and connections between artists and the public. It treated art not as a public necessity. It assumed that taste could be cultivated through both study and direct contact with original works. It also assumed that the Midwest had a right to cultural leadership—not by imitating the East, but by building networks suited to its own geography and civic structures.

Perhaps the clearest measure of its success is the question audiences repeatedly asked at exhibitions: why can’t this be permanent? That question indicates a transformation in expectation. The CAA made it plausible for towns to imagine galleries, for libraries to include exhibition halls, for teachers to see original canvases, and for families to buy paintings directly from artists without the mediation of speculative commerce.

[1] Lucie Van Nevar, “Art In The West,” Sunday Inter Ocean, Vol. XXIII, No. 316, 2/3/1895, Part 3, p.27.

[2] The Arts was a continuation of the magazine published by the Art Institute of Chicago entitled Brush and Pencil, which discontinued its publication in October 1892, see: “The Editors,” Brush and Pencil, Vol. 1, No. 1, September 1897, p.20: We are indebted to the courtesy of Mrs. T. Vernette Morse, the editor of Arts for America, in allowing us the use of the name BRUSH AND PENCIL, the title of the former Art Institute magazine, which discontinued its publication in October, 1892, to become a part of Arts for America.

[3] For a good review of the association history see “Art In The West,” Sunday Inter Ocean, 2/3/1895, p.27.

[4] Op. cit., Van Nevar, Sunday Inter Ocean, 2/3/1895, Part 3, p.27.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] “Gossip Of The Art World,” Chicago Tribune, 5/5/1895, p.39.

[8] Ibid.

[9] A Critical Triumvirate, Impressions on Impressionism. Being a Discussion of the American Art Exhibit at the Art Institute, Chicago, (Chicago: Central Art Association, Autumn 1894). Op. cit., Chicago Tribune, 5/5/1895, p.39.

[10] Op. cit., Chicago Tribune, 5/5/1895, p.39.

[11] Ibid.

[12] “Boards Sign Armour-N. U. Merger Pact,” Chicago Herald-Examiner, 1/13/1926, in the Art Institute of Chicago scrapbooks, vol. 50, p.173.

[13] Op. cit., Chicago Tribune, 5/5/1895, p.39.

[14] Op. cit., Chicago Tribune, 5/5/1895, p.39.

[15] Op. cit., Chicago Tribune, 5/5/1895, p.39.

[16] Non-Chicagoans and those not from Indiana included: Louis F. Berneker; J. Wells Champney; Paul Connoyer; Edward Gay; Theodore Robinson; and George H. Smilie, from among the some sixty exhibitors. “List Of C. A. A. Exhibition,” Arts For America, Central Art Association, Vol. 6, No. 8, April 1897, p.262.

[17] After the organization was on sound footing, Garland resigned as President in March of 1896 as was announced in the March issue of the association’s magazine, Arts For America.

[18] “Museum Notes,” Brush and Pencil, Vol. 3, No. 2, November 1898, p.123.

[19] “Art,” Chicago Tribune, 3/20/1898, p.39.

[20] “Art Workers Talk Back: Lorado Taft and Mrs. T. Vernette Morse Criticize,” Chicago Tribune, 12/24/1899, p.8.

[21] This summary of Garland’s thinking, as well as other of Garland’s thoughts for action are found in Hamlin Garland, “Successful Efforts To Teach Art To The Masses,” The Forum, Vol. 19, July 1895, pp.606-609.