As some of you already know, my doctoral dissertation was on soft-focus lenses, one aspect of Pictorialism. I spent six years mining archives for books, magazines, images, letters, ehemera, etc., reading more than 500,000 pages related to soft focus lenses in particular and Pictorialism more generally. In reading through the preceding discussion, there are a lot of loose ends left. Perhaps most importantly, the conflating of "fuzzy-wuzzy" (as bandied about by Adams and Weston et al) with Pictorialism stands out. Pictorialism was a broad church, the first 'art movement' in the history of photography, and as several of you point out, it continues well into the digital age. Moreover it began at different times in different geographic locals and played out differently as well. In all the prior verbage in this thread, no one has bothered to define what is being argued about: Pictorialism.
A systematic examination of WHO wrote/published photographic history in the United States might be revealing. Newhall is noted above but there were other key authors such as Helmut Gernsheim who wrote far more books (and of better quality) than Newhall. Gernsheim studied in the 1930s at the Bavarian School of Photography; the year he began there, a new director was hired who was heavily influenced by the Bauhaus movement, which shaped Gernsheim's views about contrast, sharpness, tonality, etc. Once he came to America, he linked up with Newhall (they first met in London, 1945) who encouraged those modernist views further. Between them, and their students, they rigidly controlled the doctrine of American photographic history until the 1990s. Here are three examples of how that occurred (1) when I proposed a book on pictorialism about 1980, the three publishers I queried all replied that "the history of photography had already been written" by Newhall and Gernsheim and thus no further book could be sold; (2) when it came to more modest articles in peer-reviewed journals, virtually everyone in those positions were students of Newhall/Gernsheim and detested the very thought of Pictorialism; (3) this same system prevented any major museum from showing Pictorail photography. Christian Petersen at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts was one of the first to break that strangle hold and he was extremely brave to make that step.
Lastly, the explanations for the demise of Pictorialism noted in this thread are unduly simplistic. Chapter 7 of my disseration, pages 251-319, is not comprehensive enough to thoroughly dissect all the root causes just in America & Britain, and again, they are wildly different in different countries. Its far too complex for me to write about here but "changing attitudes" is only a small contributor.
My apologies for typos and poor structure but I'm packing to leave for a fortnight long journey in 24 hours and my mind is rather distracted at this moment.
Russ
https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/handle/10023/505 dissertation link