The Entrance to the Tautira River, Tahiti. Fisherman Spearing a Fish

The campaign to neutralize and Americanize aestheticism extended beyond prescriptions for wholesomeness and manly discipline in art. Those seeking normalization also undertook to restructure the very concept of artistic vision. At the core of this enterprise was the remodeling of “morbid” egotism into healthy and specialized subjectivity. This newly legitimized subjectivity in turn helped create a dynamic role for art as a form of therapy couched in a purely visual language, acting directly on …