Manifest Destiny in Paint

By ROBERT HUGHES

In Washington, a superb survey of early American masterpieces

There is no tract of art history whose prestige has changed more quickly than pre-1900 American art. Not quite 20 years ago, the Fogg Museum at Harvard decided to rid its basement of a dusty landscape: lurid sunset over a forest-girt lake somewhere in the Northeast. Nobody wanted it. In the end Sherman Lee, the infallible pontiff (now retired) of the Cleveland Museum, bought it for $20,000. The picture was Twilight in the Wilderness, 1860, by Frederic Edwin Church, a work now thought to be one of the crucial American images, the very essence of Yankee emotion in the face of natural sublimity, the icon before which many people (up to a few months ago) would have sacrificed James Watt on a stake. No doubt it would make $3 million or more at auction today.

In those days, such paintings were hardly an issue for American scholars and collectors, let alone European ones. For every word written on Church, Martin Johnson Heade or John Singleton Copley, there were 100 on Pollock and 200 on Picasso. The track of pioneer scholars in this field, like John Baur and Lloyd Goodrich, was hardly more beaten than Lewis and Clark's. It was as though, by general consent, all American art had been sunk in earnest provinciality until the 1940s, when abstract expressionism unburdened itself upon the world stage. Nobody believes this today. In fact, the pendulum has gone so far in the other direction that a sea piece by any Boston dauber distantly connectable to Fitz Hugh Lane will command a price that not so long ago would have seemed too much for Turner. No vignette, however treacly, of apple-cheeked infants at the log schoolhouse or hirsute pioneers skinning the raccoon eludes the general resurrection. No grave of a deservedly buried name remains undug.

How is one to get a handle on all this? Leery as one may be of events that claim to be the hundred greatest somethings, they have their uses as introductions. One should start at the top and work down. The valleys of American painting are so marshy that it is better to lift one's eyes to the peaks. Last fall an exhibition that does just this opened at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where it was besieged by Tut-size crowds; it can now be seen at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, and will go to Paris in March. "A New World: Masterpieces of American Painting 1760-1910" may be the best survey show of its kind ever held. Certainly it will be the first time that this area of American art has been seen in proper concentration and strength in Europe.

The exhibition consists of 110 works, from Copley's youth to Winslow Homer's age. They were chosen by a committee headed by Boston Art Historian Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., with assistance from the Louvre's chief curator of paintings Pierre Rosenberg. There are some unavoidable absences and a few awkward or campy presences (like John Quidor, the corny illustrator of Washington Irving's tales, or Edward Ashton Goodes, whose excruciating Fishbowl Fantasy, 1867, is crammed with everything that was worst in the taste of Victorian America). Still, it is hard to see how the difficult task of presenting 18th and 19th century American painting to its home audience, as well as to the city of Ingres, Delacroix and Manet, could have been better done. What the French will make of it, of course, is an open question, since the only premodern American artists known in France are Whistler, Eakins and Cassatt.

The show sets out to tell the story of the professional artist in America. Its starting point is not the folk artist but the painter with academic training (or pretensions to it) whose gaze was fixed on largely European role models. These role models had to be theorized about, because they could not be seen. When Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827), painter and America's first museum founder, hopefully named his sons Rembrandt, Raphaelle and Rubens, not one work by these exalted names had yet crossed the Atlantic. The fact that 18th century America had few major artists is not news; the surprising thing, given the meagerness of taste and thin access to good art in Boston, Philadelphia and New York, was that it could support even one. That person, of course, was Copley, whose Boy with a Squirrel, sent to London in 1765, caused Sir Joshua Reynolds to advise its young author to get across the Atlantic "before your manner and taste were corrupted or fixed by working in your little way at Boston."

Copley never did master the grand manner as prescribed by Reynolds. His huge, ambitious history painting, Watson and the Shark, 1778, is a beloved American classic thanks to, not in spite of, its earnest potpourri of quotations from Titian, Raphael, the Borghese Gladiator and the Laocoon. But at the level of the portrait he was exact and forceful. The tight, heavy faces, didactic hands and subtly registered expressions of Copley's New Englanders read like indexes of American character, and his painting of Thomas and Sarah Mifflin (1773) is one of the great 18th century images of the enlightened bourgeois.

Lack of teachers to learn from and of great paintings to see: such problems crimped the style of American painters or sent them, like Benjamin West (the Pennsylvania prodigy who became the second president of the Royal Academy) into European careers. Often the homespun Doric is better than the mail-order Ionic. George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879) was no Poussin, but his groups of flatboatmen and river traders, leaning on crates with the air of Arcadian shepherds on a ruin whilst floating through the delicate silver haze of the Missouri, are often genuinely classical in their construction and repose.

But broadly speaking, two things created a major American art. The first was the Revolution, which fixed American neoclassicism as the speech of elevated visual discourse and gave American artists heroic themes from their own history and experience. The second was the discovery of great space and, within its vastness, of unique nature. To this we owe the lucid, entranced sea visions of such painters as Lane and Heade. Theirs was the distinctive language of American luminism, with the surface of sea and sky like a membrane of pure contemplation, every pebble and mast distinct, caught in a kind of sacramental hush.

In a more dramatic, oratorical way, this discovery is also the basic subject of the huge landscape "machines" produced by late 19th century artists who went West, such as Church and Albert Bierstadt, both exceptionally well represented in this show. Each image of waterfall and mountain, volcano and precipice becomes an act of appropriation, the pictorial equivalent to the myth of Manifest Destiny. Practically no French or English painting of the day presents such pre-Cinemascope prodigies with such coercive zeal; with them, the idea of American vision almost becomes a fetish.

But the exhibition opens all manner of tantalizing questions about the supposed isolation of American art, particularly after 1850, when it was almost taken for granted that the successful home artist would have to study either in Duesseldorf or, more likely, in Paris. It is true that some very good American art of this period could not plausibly have been done elsewhere; for example, John Haberle's trompe-l'oeil painting A Bachelor's Drawer, 1890-94, with its laconically joky collection of mementos signifying the past lusts and present debts of a minor artist's life. Yet for every apparent isolate like Homer, there were a dozen Americans beavering away in the teaching studios of Paris, especially those run by Jean-Leon Gerome, who was Thomas Eakins' teacher, and Thomas Couture, who trained Eastman Johnson.

These academics, once scorned by modernist taste but now almost as rehabilitated as their pupils, gave new American art its pedigree. At one point Gerome had 90 American students. As an American critic remarked in 1864, "We have not time to invent and study everything anew. The fast-flying 19th century would laugh us to scorn should we attempt it. No one dreams of it in science, ethics or physics. Why then propose it in art?" It may be that even the most "American" of Eakins' paintings--his rowing scenes on the Schuylkill River, so astute in their blending of lyrical responses with the nuts and bolts of anatomy and structure--were partly inspired by Gerome's exotic canvases of barges on the Nile.

Eakins' masterpiece, The Gross Clinic, 1875, certainly bridges two cultural worlds. On the one hand, one can read it as a very American icon of progress; it is a fervent, secular celebration of objective scientific knowledge, with the realism of paint serving that of science. Dr. Gross, light shining from his high forehead and glittering on his bloody hand and scalpel, is a pragmatic hero, and his skill is set before us as part of his American nature.

Yet at the same time it is a very "European" picture, full of the eye-grabbing devices that the 31-year-old Eakins, still fresh from Europe, knew would make it stand out in a crowded salon: blood and darkness, baroque composition, and the melodrama of the horrified wife on the left, shielding her eyes. One cannot imagine it being painted by someone ignorant of the art milieu in Paris. Such interactions are the real stuff of this show, and no one interested in American painting should miss it.

--By Robert Hughes