Childe Hassam: patterns of appreciation

Magazine Antiques, July, 2004 by H. Barbara Weinberg

Hassam's later conversations were also punctuated by strident claims for the superiority of American art and reactionary tirades against modern art, which he equated with foreign art. He grumbled to an interviewer in 1934: "If modern art means the formless atrocities which are turned out by incompetents and sold under the guise of art by designing foreign dealers, then I have no use for it." (24) In the end he expressed his support of American art more positively by bequeathing to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City the contents of his studio--almost 450 oil paintings, watercolors, and pastels--and recommending that proceeds from their sale be used to purchase works by American and Canadian artists for presentation to American and Canadian museums. (25)

Although Hassam's increasingly old-fashioned style and sometimes indecipherable idealized subjects generated indifference or negative commentary into the 1920s, he was consistently praised by conservative critics like Elisabeth Luther Cary, Royal Cortissoz, Albert Eugene Gallatin, and Frederic Newlin Price.

Hassam's death at the age of seventy-five on August 27, 1935, provoked effusive obituaries. One writer even argued that his works echoed contemporary regionalism: "Long before the days when the American scene became popular, Hassam found his favorite themes in [New] England, New York, and Long Island." (26)

Adeline Adams (1859-1948) published an appreciative biography of Hassam in 1938, (27) but a more typical note had been struck the preceding year in the Brooklyn Museum's exhibition, Leaders of American Impressionism. The curator, John I. H. Baur (1909-1987), noted that Hassam, along with Weir, Twachtman, and Mary Cassatt, were the "pioneer Impressionists" who had "contributed most to the inauguration and development of Impressionism in America." Baur explained, however, that with Hassam's death "the movement is dead, for Hassam outlived it in this country just as Monet in France." (28)

During the 1940s and 1950s, modernism thrived and cultural nationalism nourished appreciation of colonial portraiture, Hudson River school landscape painting, and luminism. American impressionism was too traditional to interest modernists and too French to please cultural nationalists. In spring 1943 a large display of Hassam's oils and watercolors at Milch Galleries was deemed more successful than concurrent exhibitions of works by Ernest Lawson (1873-1939) and Theodore Robinson (1852-1896). (29) In March 1948, when Hassam's etchings were shown at Grand Central Art Galleries in New York City, he was called a "belated Impressionist" and demand and prices for his prints were said to be "down considerably." (30) The conservative journal American Artist kept Hassam's name alive during the 1950s with laudatory articles about his watercolors and prints, but by 1960 even its commentator ranked him among the "abandoned geniuses." (31) Art News panned a February 1958 exhibition of Hassam's Long Island paintings of 1932 and 1933, noting that they "represent[ed] his first, timid efforts to go beyond Impressionism" and mocking his attempt to Americanize the French style. (32) The critic for the New York Times was more generous, but concluded: "Hassam, as good an impressionist as America ever produced, cooled his fires in later years." (33)