A nation tells its (well-heeled and elegant) story
Filed Under Shower Curtain | Posted on March 17, 2008
The Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, is an elite boarding school that has produced, among others, both Presidents Bush, Humphrey Bogart, Peter Sellars, Carl Andre, Frank Stella, photographer Walker Evans, chewing gum magnate Philip Wrigley ?and an outstanding collection of American art. Housed in the Addison Gallery, it is exceptional in quality, impressive in range and exquisite for its cohesive tone, which gives it the flavour of a distinguished personal collection.That is almost what it is: its connections to the school, and the many works gifted by alumni, determine a carefully calibrated taste that speaks of east coast refinement, historical awareness, measure, sobriety. The American greats line up, but often in rather solemn works, or in less radical form than is typical. Georgia Oæ©©eeffe ave, Night? for example, is all liquid splendour in its grey-white moonlit effects, but more severely abstracted, less subversively erotic than her characteristic flower and landscape close-ups.Jackson Pollock æ·§hosphorescence?is a raw, rough field of greys set off by spiky white poles and splurts of yellow ?a masterpiece of barely controlled chaos and richly nuanced colour, but at just 44 by 28 inches, unexpectedly small in scale, lyrical not monumental. Marsden Hartley æ·ªummer, Sea, Window, Red Curtain? a view of the Maine coast framed by crimson drapes and a vase of flowers, is a rare work of supreme hard-won serenity, resigned but consoling, the distillation of a lifetime turbulence and drama, painted the year before he died in 1943.From the 19th century, the emphasis is similarly against extravagance. rown and Silver: Old Battersea Bridge?is a gorgeous Whistler, calling to mind Henry James admiration for the artist hin empty lovely American beauty? but how meditative and low-key compared with the firework effects of other Whistler Thames pieces. And John Singer Sargent impressionist landscapes with figures such as æ·°al dæ©osta: A Man Fishing?are accomplished plays of light on water, but unremarkable versus his daring fin-de-si猫cle portraits.But if the US has more flamboyant collections, none so elegantly reflects well-heeled America view of its own cultural history. That is why the visit of some 70 highlights from Andover in Coming of Age: American Art 1850s to 1950s at Dulwich Picture Gallery is so illuminating. Its narrative is one we thought we knew: the emergence from 19th-century provincialism in the shadow of Europe to New York postwar leadership as world art capital. But here there is a twist because the influence of European exiles such as Arshile Gorky, Max Ernst, Piet Mondrian is absent: the Addison collects works only by Americans. As a result, the story is not one of before and after but of the continuity of American identity, told with new perspectives, fresh surprises, the confident pleasures of American art considered on its own terms.The leaders of 18th-century America dismissed art as an indulgence of the old world, irrelevant to a nation trying to find its economic footing. By the 1850s, though, the American landscape was the great theme of a nascent naturalism.Sometimes it was imbued with romantic ideas of transcendence, such as Frederic Church high-key ount Katahdin? sometimes the focus was on everyday detail, as in Asher Durand æ·ªtudy of a Wood Interior? a fragment of rotting logs and lichen-covered rocks on the forest floor shot through with moments of filtered sunlight.It reminded me less of anything in the western European canon than of the pine and birch forests painted by the 19th-century Russian ookkeeper of leaves?Ivan Shishkin, while Church eerie luminosity recalls Russia orchestrator of light effects on the Dnieper, Arkhip Kuindzhi. Were 19th-century America and Russia, both nations who looked to art for self-definition, too vast, with their prairies and steppes, to be grasped other than piece by piece?Each part, however, symbolised the moral spirit of the whole. o not abroad in search of material,?warned Durand, founder of the Hudson River realist school. æ·Ÿet me earnestly recommend one studio … which God gives to every true and faithful artist ?the studio of Nature.?That patriotic, ethical undercurrent also defines the giants of later 19th-century realism, Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer. Each studied in France but soon returned home to 減eer deeper into the heart of American life? as Eakins wrote. His empirical, searching approach is typified in the portrait of boxers ?all muscles and rippling flesh ?in æ·ªalutat? When Eakins sent such works to Paris, their harsh factuality looked so alien that one French critic mused 渨hether these are not specimens of a still secret industrial process?Eakins?vigorous style and Homer he West Wind?and æ·“ight Bells??lashing seascapes where embattled figures fling mind and soul against the elements ?share an obsession with the texture, density and physical presence of paint, pointing straight to Pollock and abstract expressionism.æ·Žmerican art can be said to have evolved from realism into a search for the real,?argues William Agee in the catalogue: Durand, Eakins and Winslow are thus ancestors of minimalism, earth art, multimedia installations and reality television.Certainly, when impressionism reached America, it became more naturalistic ?as in æ·°alley of the Seine?by Theodore Robinson, friend of Monet ?and more narrative in impetus than its French model ?thus the fluttering flags and banners in æ·“arly Morning on the Avenue in May 1917?by Childe Hassam, the most talented American impressionist after Sargent and Mary Cassatt.Certainly, too, the greatest American artist of the first half of the 20th century, Edward Hopper, bypassed cubism, fauvism and other modernisms for a gritty realism all his own. Broad and flat as a cinema screen, anhattan Bridge Loop? an industrial cityscape with a lone fl芒neur casting his long shadow on an empty sidewalk, is a sombre masterpiece: of America but no longer about it. Hopper moved the American landscape within, charging it with an interiority that shared something with Pollock assertion am nature?The second half of this show is a mesmerising account of how American artists of the 1920s and 1930s fought towards a new expressiveness at all costs. Patrick Henry Bruce æ·§einture/Nature Morte?(1924) is a clever, near-abstract updating of Czanne radically tilting tables and col-lapsing beams which nonetheless follows the American still life tradition of exacting depictions of common objects. Alfred Maurer æ·ªtill Life with Pears?(1930-31), derived from cubism, goes beyond it to fuse different surfaces through a dazzle of overlapping planes and sublime glazes. Each is a masterwork; each artist was so reviled and under-appreciated that he committed suicide in the 1930s.In the context here they are martyrs ?clear devotees of Matisse and Picasso but pioneers ahead of the influx of European exiles ?who paved the way for America artistic coming of age. Their abstract/figurative tension, deliciously but tormentingly un-resolved, suddenly becomes a breakthrough in the final room: in Frank Stella æ·“ast Broadway? a shimmer of yellow and black horizontals that is also a cityscape; in Alexander Calder soaring, biomorphic sculpture æ·—orizontal Spines? in David Smith æ·ªtructure of Arches? an abstraction that suggests a reclining nude ?provocatively made in steel. It is a beautiful, demonic piece, an icon for the postwar age that America now led, but also a work rooted ?in its openness to experience, optimism, and, especially, pungent realism ?in those qualities that dominated American art from the start, and are triumphantly and consistently showcased here.楥oming of Age: American Art 1850s to 1950s?is at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, until June 8, tel: +44 (0)20-8693 5254, and at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, June 27 to October 12Jackie Wullschlager is the FT chief visual arts critic
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