The world in St Louis: Phillip Prodger surveys the extraordinary range of art shown in the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1904 World's Fair, perhaps the last gasp of the great nineteenth-century salon exhibitions

When Halsey Ives sat down to write the loam rules for the Palace of Fine Arts at St Louis's first and alone world's fail; idealism flowed from his indite with flourish. He was determined it would not be another international salon of the least for the use of all denominator. 'All art work', he wrote 'whether upon canvas, in marble, plaster, copse metal, glass, porcelain, textile or other material--in the creation of which the artist-producer had worked with conviction and knowledge--are recognized as equally deserving of think highly of in proportion as it is worthy from the standpoints of inspiration and technique.' (1) In other words, the Art Palace would house an exhibition driven through the highest standards of artistry and the greatest in quantity liberal interpretation of method. Works would be evaluated solely upon their effectiveness, and all media--including painting, plastic art drawing, ceramics, and photography--would be equally valued. floated by such progressive thinking, the official prospectus for the Fair assured readers that 'considerations of quality will take priority over those of quantity'. (2) In no time, Ives's invitation to potential exhibitors with its hopeful words was printed in nine languages, ready for distribution to the arts academies of the world in the summer of 1902 (3)

In re-survey the timing of lves's preparations should have been his first ball of thread that not everything would advance about as planned, as the Fair was postpon for a year to be paid to delays in finance and construction. It had been slated to make open in 1903, marking a hundr years since the purchase of the territories west of the Mississippi through President Thomas Jefferson. Instead, the centenary of Lewis and Clark's expedition to explore the territory from 1804-1806 was commemorated. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition, as it was to be known, had also been timed to offer exactly ten years after Chicago had held its be in possession of world's fair, the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 Inter-urban rivalry was a subtext of the couple fairs: in the late nineteenth hundred Chicago and St Louis still wrestl for the unofficial title of capital of the American midwest. Chicago's fair might have been first on the other hand St Louis's was to be grandest--the city reserv more than twice the acreage for its fair than Chicago had and prepared to upstage its northern neighbour in each conceivable way.

Ives, who was occupyed comfortably as a professor of art at Washington University in St Louis, was a logical choice to organise the displays of the Art Palace. Trained as an artist and military draughtsman, he had lived for a time in Mexico and was said to have an unusually international watch (4) He had also been the head of the art department at the Chicago Exposition, which was considered a logistical triumph if not a resounding aesthetic succes Armed with the experience of 1893 and recognising its shortcomings, Ives felt he could exhibit an art salon for the ages. Using the contacts he had disentangleed in Chicago, he set on the outside to find interesting, cutting-edge examples of contemporary art and to vet work more thoroughly than he land in Chicago. The St Louis Art Palace was to be unreservedly forward-looking and more selective than its predecessor.

Officially the emphasis in St Louis's Art Palace was to be contemporary art, which was defined for the intents of the exhibition as art of the previous ten years. The display (Fig 2) was housed in a arrangement designed by Cass Gilbert (1859-1934) occupying the highest promontory of the loams in Forest Park. It was laid without in three Grecian-inspired buildings: a central, permanent building made of stone and sum of two units connected, temporary buildings made of staff mixed with hemp and straw. The central building, which was intended ultimately to house the St Louis Art Museum, was dedicated to American art, while the adjoining buildings were given above to twenty-six other countries. (5) The largest spaces in these were dedicated to France, Germany and Britain, although greatest in quantity other European countries were exhibited In addition, smaller displays were high hilled by Argentina, Brazil Canada, Ceylon China, Cuba, Japan, Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru (6) The inclusion of a permanent, central building increased require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergones significantly. At nearly a million dollars, the Art Palace was roughly twice as expensive as comparable Fair palaces, similar as the Palace of Liberal Arts and the Palace of Varied Industries. (7) Consequently the building was smaller and more austere than it might have been. Perhaps as a follow of these compromises, Gilbert obscur the building completely during the course of the Fair by dint of placing his fantastical Festival Hall directly in brow of the Art Palace.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Although art of the previous decade was the centrepiece of the display, earlier works were also included in separate, limited sections. This was achieved through creating two special categories within the United States galleries. The first was a retrospective section dedicated to American art produc from the date of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 until 1893 The next to the first was a loan section of examples possessed by American public and private collections. by dint of adding these two sections, Ives and his colleagues effectively fashioned a way to include any work to their liking, although the official catalogue of the Art Palace made clear that the influence of a work upon American artists would be paramount. (8)