Antiques

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1998 by Wendell Garrett

I shall remember [Raphael's] the Transfiguration partly because it was placed in a room almost by itself; partly because it is acknowledged by all to be the first oil painting in the world and partly because it was wonderfully beautiful. The colors are fresh and rich, the "expression," I am told, is fine, the "feeling" is lively, the "tone" is good, the "depth" is profound, and the width is about four and a half feet, I should judge.

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, 1869

The Americanness of American art has long been reflected in a desire for directness and simplicity. Yet landscapes, for example, could not be rendered on canvas simply for their own sake, but had to have an educational bias, and be justified on moral or religious grounds. Landscape paintings were, so to speak, reproductions of God's handiwork, and to contemplate them was considered morally and spiritually ennobling.

In his approach to the landscape, the American artist attempted to resolve the contradiction between romanticism and realism, creating a tension that is one of the major characteristics of the genre from the Hudson River school of the 1820s to the American impressionists in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Then, as the country became more industrialized, American painters had to face the intrusion of the machine and rationalize industrial progress with the prevailing image of the American wilderness as the new Eden. For the most part they rejected the noisy intrusion of the machine for a nostalgic and always romantic concept of nature. The resulting paintings are scenes of harmony and solitude as several isolated figures quietly contemplate prolonged and timeless silence. Some European critics found this sense of isolation an evocative device that was singularly American.

There exists in American art an ambivalent attitude to the western European cultural tradition. Colonial dependence in the eighteenth century gave way to the bumptious chauvinism of the young nation in the early nineteenth century. The reliance on things European in the aftermath of the Civil War changed again with the isolationism of the 1930s that celebrated the American scene.

The cohesiveness of American life became fragmented during the second half of the nineteenth century. American artists traveled to Europe in greater numbers than ever before to study in Dusseldorf, Munich, Rome, Florence, and Venice before eventually flocking to Pads, which became the artistic capital of the world. As a result, between the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia and the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, American art became complex and eclectic.

As Americans became more aware of themselves as distinct from Europeans, they realized that their culture in general and art in particular had come to be peculiar to the United States. European visitors were quick to point this out, rarely with admiration. The diversity of American art today has evolved from the realization that this does not signify cultural weakness. There is no single scale on which to measure its values as it has come to mean more diverse things to an ever-expanding public.