The Death of the Victorian Art Periodical

This article investigates the profound shift that occurred in turn‐of‐the‐last‐century art criticism with the death of the mass‐audience Victorian periodical and the rise of little magazines. While scholarly attention has frequently focused on the latter phenomenon, the demise of key art journals from the nineteenth century, such as the Art Journal and Magazine of Art, has received far less scholarly attention. This essay seeks to rectify this situation and offers an innovative methodological approach inspired by the work of Helene Roberts, namely, analyzing the relationships between art periodical publishing and the art market. Understanding this dynamic affiliation, I argue, is crucial to deepening our understanding of the conditions of modernist art discourse in Great Britain.