American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America

Magazine Antiques, March, 1998 by Alfred Mayor

Robert Hughes, an Australian, has lived in the United States since 1970 as a resident alien, holding a "green card." This has given him a self-professed degree of freedom that citizenship would have taken away. For a quarter of a century he has been the art critic for Time magazine, which has given him both an enviable facility with the English language and a broad perspective on world affairs. Both have stood him in good stead in his American Visions, a history of art in America and of its ideological foundations.

There are no footnotes and no bibliography, for Hughes addresses "that creature who, American academics often profess to believe, no longer exists: the general intelligent reader." The book grew out of an eight-part television series produced jointly by the BBC and Time Warner. Following the format of the series, the book is divided into thematic sections, although here nine rather than eight, tracing a chronological line from the seventeenth century to today's culture wars.

On nearly every page there are irresistible word bites that, while not "Time speak," certainly owe their genesis in part to the verbal gymnastics required of a Time writer. Thus the "Noble Savage mutated quite rapidly through the late 1830s and 1840s into the Demonic Indian, in whose fierce and phallocratic presence all talk about the brotherhood of man was wasted effort."

"The public's appetite for Wild West stories was insatiable by the 1890s, and [Frederic] Remington swiftly became their top illustrator. He fitted the Zeitgeist like a Colt sliding into a well-worn holster."

Regarding General William Tecumseh Sherman's pronouncement that "War is hell," Hughes writes: "It was a Greek moment, an utterance torn from the throat of an American Atreus. And so it was fitting that another quarter century later Saint-Gaudens should have chosen to cover the statue [of Sherman at the southeastern edge of Central Park, New York City] with gold, so that Sherman's face, with its deep lines and stubble, now gazes sightlessly at the Plaza Hotel like the gold mask of Atreus' son, King Agamemnon."

About the Southwest, which artists like Georgia O'Keeffe celebrated so long and eloquently, Hughes notes: "The Taos [New Mexico] of 1920 was not the Taos we have today. It had not yet become a high-sierra New Age theme park full of channelers, holistic healers, wanna-be witches, ethnic kitsch dealers, and matched blond lesbians in Jeep Cherokees."

The "general intelligent reader" may already know much of Hughes's factual narrative, but his opinions, for which he makes no apologies, are unfailingly stimulating. He feels, for example, that the geometric patchwork quilts of the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Amish were "America's first major abstract art. They seem to prophesy the explicit geometry of some American art in the 1960s and 1970s....A soft, swaddling Minimalism, in which one recognizes a spareness of design just pulled back from dogmatic rigor by its inventive quirks, a magnificent sobriety of color, and a truly human sense of scale."

This Australian's final summation profits from a gloomy breadth of vision that a citizen would be hard pressed either to formulate or countenance. Hughes notes the "deep anguish that descended on America after it won the Cold War - and found itself no better off without Communism, For forty years Americans had been living in a Manichaean universe, divided between right (them) and wrong (Russia). Now this scenario, so frightening and yet so consoling, dissolved. But the mindset it fostered remains, particularly since America is the only country in the developed Western world with a strong current of fundamentalist, apocalyptic religion. With the death of Communism new Antichrists and minor demons have to be found inside America....scholarship and the arts then become scapegoats, grotesquely politicized stereotypes in our 'culture wars'....A central myth, not only of American art but of America itself, was that of perpetual newness: the perpetual renovation which, from the moment of Puritan arrival in the seventeenth century, stood as the promise of God's contract with a chosen people in the New World.... In the arts at the end of the twentieth century, as in other fields of social life, this cherished belief is now falling apart....Cultures do decay; and the visual culture of American modernism, once so strong, bouyant, and inventive, and now so harrassed by its own sense of defeated expectations, may be no exception to that fact."