AtD and Chicago as "urban utopia"

[Paul Nightingale]

Margaretta M. Loell (1996) "Picturing 'a city for a single summer':
paintings of the World's Columbian Exposition" in The Art Bulletin (78/1, no
pagination). 

Loell describes the way visual artists constructed the Chicago Fair. Missing
were images that might undermine what she calls "a curious commentary on the
fair's utopic ideology". 

"By posing a new model of urban utopia, the Exposition seriously challenged
both 1890s' Chicago as urban reality and the model of Jeffersonian
pastoralism as the locus of ameliorative social mythology. Most chroniclers
of the fair collaborated in certain social aspects of this project,
remarking repeatedly on the civility, good humor, sobriety, and honesty of
the crowd, one in which, they assured their readers, even women and children
were quite safe, suggesting that this behavior was remarkable in
contemporary urban contexts and an applaudable evolutionary development.
That these millions of individuals were simultaneously "plain" and civil was
a point of distinction, an Americanness that the commentators eagerly
embraced."

[...]

" Virtually unpeopled, Welch's and Twachtman's cityscapes could be thought
situated in a subjunctive time eternal, simultaneously Roman antiquity,
Venetian republic, and American arrival at the peak of cultural evolution.
It is a that-which-will-have-been as a summer's event but also a
that-which-shall-be as an urban possibility. In the end, then, the painters
collaborate in this frank presentation of a stage set, a clean, finished
artifice, at once a cultural index and a cultural agent, inhabited, by and
large, in imagination rather than in reality."