The stated goal of Visions of the Industrial Age, 1830–1914: Modernity and the Anxiety of Representation in Europe is ambitious: “to make a significant contribution not only to the study of the cultural history of nineteenth-century Europe in the industrial period, but also to the examination of image’s dominance in modern culture and, ultimately, to the unending project of representing modernity” (xix). Editors Minsoo Kang and Amy Woodson-Boulton are to be commended for undertaking this challenging topic, and assembling a diverse group of authors whose scholarly disciplines range from art history to literature and the history of science. Although the essays all focus on the use of imagery in nineteenth-century Europe, fewer than half of the contributors are art historians, which results in an intriguing mix of perspectives on the subject of visual responses to the industrial age.

The book itself is a standard octavo size and printed on exceptionally high-quality paper, which lends a weight to the volume that is unusual today. Nonetheless, the size makes it comfortably portable. The black-and-white illustrations work well for the nineteenth-century advertisements from the Strand Magazine or the London Illustrated News, but fail to do justice to any of the paintings, especially those by Impressionists whose work depends on being able to see the color. From a scholar’s perspective, Visions of the Industrial Age includes a helpful list of figures at the beginning and an extensive bibliography at the back. It is also indexed, another feature that can be particularly useful for research.

One caveat about the title of the book should be noted at the outset; the subtitle Modernity and the Anxiety of Representation in Europe is a more accurate reflection of the content of the essays. The primary title, Visions of the Industrial Age, 1830–1914, implies that depictions of industrialization are the central theme of the book; in fact, most of the essays are concerned not with tangible images of industrialization but with the results of industrial capitalism—a very different subject, indeed. For example, Courtenay Raia-Grean’s essay, “Picturing the Supernatural: Spirit Photography, Radiant Matter, and the Spectacular Science of Sir William Crookes,” might be expected to include a discussion of “spirit images,” but instead it offers an evaluation of the chicanery that was enabled by photographic technology. Although fascinating, the two images of the presumed “spirit” Katie King are included only to illustrate the process of fooling the public.

Kang and Woodson-Boulton have organized the collection around four themes that they identify in the preface: “the efforts by nineteenth-century European writers, artists, scientists, and philosophers to grapple with modernity through the use of the visual; their attempts to make sense of the fate of humanity in a world changing at a breakneck speed; the apparent sense of anxiety that emerges from even the most hopeful visions of the industrial age; and the resulting hybridity and transformation of traditional forms” (xix). Within this framework, the book is divided into five sections, each containing several essays: Envisioning the Industrial; Photographing the (Un)real; Framing the Environment; Depicting the Scientific; and Exposing the Modern.

Kang opens the first section with his essay, “The Happy Marriage of Steam and Engine Produces Beautiful Daughters and Bloody Monsters: Descriptions of Locomotives as Living Creatures in Modernist Culture, 1875–1935.” In it, Kang provides an introduction to what is probably the most central image of the industrial age—the steam engine—and all that it came to imply about the simultaneous wonder and fear characterizing this technology. As the title suggests, he describes the occasionally bizarre—and sometimes charming—allegories used to explain the role of the steam engine in industrialization. The essay begins with an account of a celebratory toast delivered in January 1875 at a banquet honoring the centennial of the steam engine, at which Ernst Engel, director of the Prussian Statistics Office, proclaimed that the marriage of “steam” and “engine” was “one of the happiest on the face of the earth” (3). Kang then traces the evolution of the steam engine’s image through a variety of works, including Emile Zola’s novel La Bête Humaine (1890) and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), as well as films of early twentieth-century Germany such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927).

Subsequent essays in this section follow up on the subject of the railway, and in particular the representation of railway bridges in nineteenth-century landscape painting. Jane E. Boyd’s essay, “Adorning the Landscape: Images of Transportation in Nineteenth-Century France,” examines documentary photographs of the engineering accomplishments associated with viaducts and bridges as well as three 1872 paintings of suspension bridges by Alfred Sisley. Boyd touches all too briefly on the apparently common comparison between the suspension bridge and the ballet dancer, both of them cloaking extraordinary strength in the guise of delicacy and grace. More information on this captivating analogy, used frequently in the work of Alexandre Dumas, Alfred de Musset, and journalistic references to the prima ballerina Marie Taglioni, would have been welcome.

Moving from the specific imagery associated with the railway to the broader questions of how industrialization influenced architectural and urban contexts, “Framing the Environment” opens with Amy Woodson-Boulton’s essay, “A Window onto Nature: Visual Language, Aesthetic Ideology, and the Art of Social Transformation.” As might be expected from the all-encompassing title, this subject is very broad. She begins by reviewing the renowned debate between James Abbott McNeill Whistler and John Ruskin, which leads the reader to assume that more discussion of the controversy will be forthcoming. However, she immediately shifts into an exegesis only marginally related to the Whistler-Ruskin argument, stating her objective as follows: “I will argue in this chapter that the nineteenth-century aesthetic ideology of art as reform built on earlier traditions, particularly the links between beauty and moral sense developed by the Earl of Shaftsbury in the early eighteenth century, the connections the English Romantics made (often using German aesthetics) among beauty, nature, and divine unity, and a pervasive natural theology that understood nature as evidence of divine craftsmanship (even after the challenges to traditional religion presented by Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection)” (143). Any one of these connections might have served as an appropriate subject for this article.

By contrast, Amy Catania Kulper‘s essay, “From Will to Wallpaper: Imaging and Imagining the Natural in the Domestic Interiors of the Art Nouveau,” attempts to draw conclusions from too little evidence. The ostensible subject of designing art nouveau wallpaper becomes a discourse about how the use of natural motifs in wall coverings follows “two prominent trajectories,” both of which have a “Kantian foundation.” Kulper’s stated objective is to “examine these trajectories and their Kantian foundation, and compare them to the conceptualization of nature as capricious will embodied in the writings of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Riegl as well as in the murals of Horta’s domestic interiors” (164). What is missing here is any indication of whether or not Victor Horta, the architect in question, actually shared the philosophical beliefs attributed to him. The architect’s documented possession of a receipt for the purchase of English wallpaper by his rival, Henry van de Velde, simply does not offer an especially credible basis for making so many assumptions.

Katherine Hover-Smoot’s essay in this section analyzes three cityscapes by Camille Pissarro dating from the 1890s. Although more judicious editing would have strengthened the analysis, particularly in the long digressions about Walter Benjamin, it nonetheless contains several themes that bear further exploration. Hover-Smoot’s linking of Pissarro’s Mardi-gras cityscapes with the political anxiety of 1890s Paris is entirely consistent with both the artist’s worldview and the tenor of the times. By selecting these three paintings and exploring them in detail, she convincingly elucidates the tension between Pissarro’s social agenda and his aesthetic concerns. In addition, she touches on the ambiguous and awkward relationship between Pissarro and his art dealer, Durand-Ruel, highlighting both the personal discomfort of being indebted to a dealer and the larger question of how the developing gallery system functioned in the private art market of fin-de-siècle Paris.

“Exposing the Modern” contains two of the best essays in the book. First is Paula Young Lee’s carefully constructed and logically developed explication of Gustave Caillebotte’s 1883 painting of a veal carcass, Veau à l’étal. She introduces her topic with a clear statement of how troubling this image of butchered and dressed veal in a shop window may be, and poses the question of whether or not the “problem” is the “representation of an unconventional nude, or . . . the frank revelation of the animal origins of meat” (271). The simultaneous attraction and abhorrence that the image engenders is then related to similar responses to human bodies, and the multiplicity of sexual, political, medical, and social concerns surrounding the commodification of flesh in nineteenth-century Paris. With admirable scholarly precision in building her argument, Lee ultimately arrives at an analysis that encompasses the complexity of Caillebotte’s image without forcing an interpretation that overwhelms the painting. For example, in discussing the traditional use of garlands and roses to “decorate” a carcass of recently butchered veal, she acknowledges that the coded signs that may have been evident to those familiar with the purchase of human flesh would have been meaningless to a hungry worker gazing at a delectable slab of meat in a shop window. This willingness to explore the myriad levels of meaning within the image without insisting on an ideological interpretation is particularly refreshing. It allows the reader to evaluate the reasonableness of the argument rather than feeling forced to agree or disagree with a polemical position.

Similarly, Haejeong Hazel Hahn’s essay, “Puff Marries Advertising: Commercialization of Culture in Jean-Jacques Grandville’s Un Autre Monde (1844),” offers a thoughtful—and enjoyably well-written—interpretation of the role of advertising in nineteenth-century journalism and publishing. Her clear explanations of the structure of Un Autre Monde and its visual puns and political references, as well as the censorship controversies of the 1830s and 1840s, reveal the importance of the book as an indictment of the commercialization of culture—and as a precursor to the twentieth-century fascination with the disturbing interchange between human beings and mechanical objects. She also places Un Autre Monde securely in the social fabric of its time, referencing not only other journalists and caricaturists but also images from advertising. The public reception of this book was considerably less than favorable: “Critics and the public did not take to caricatures that dared to transgress the boundary between caricature and philosophy. It appears that the public was also baffled by the attempt to transgress the boundary between high and popular art” (311). For Hahn, it is precisely this “modernity” that makes Un Autre Monde relevant to an understanding of how industrialization changed European culture in the nineteenth century, and how the ways in which these changes were visualized continued to shape viewpoints well into the next century.

Unfortunately, what is often most challenging about Visions of the Industrial Age is the quality of the writing. Lengthy digressions that would have been better placed in the notes, circuitous reasoning that should have been excised, and a surprising lack of grammatical precision all contribute to a frustrating reading experience. Nevertheless, this collection of essays does indeed illustrate the “efforts by nineteenth-century European writers, artists, scientists, and philosophers to grapple with modernity through the use of the visual” (xix). In addition, the sense of anxiety associated with modernity is apparent in many of the works discussed, whether in Caillebotte’s Veau à l’étal, Pissarro’s Boulevard Montmartre, Mardi-gras (1897), or Grandville’s Un Autre Monde. There is less exploration of the transformation of traditional forms, while there is much discussion of the development of new media such as photography that are dependent on industrialized technology. The overarching theme of attempting “to make sense of the fate of humanity in a world changing at a breakneck speed” often serves as a subtext to the essays. The goal of making “a significant contribution not only to the study of the cultural history of nineteenth-century Europe in the industrial period, but also to the examination of image’s dominance in modern culture and, ultimately, to the unending project of representing modernity” remains open to discussion.