in American art-matters. It is unknown in any other country. The vast
majority of American men are engrossed in the drive of work, their
leisure goes to sport and to the forms of entertainment that call for
the smallest amount of mental effort. The women, with their quicker
sensibility and their recognition of art as one of the things that
mark the higher orders of life, take over the furnishing of the home
and through this and the study that their greater leisure permits
them, exert a strong influence on the purchase of art-works for
private collections and even museums. The production of the American
painter and sculptor is also much affected as a consequence, and in
the direction of conventionality. I do not claim that the level of art
in America would be greatly improved at present if it were the men
instead of the women who took the lead; perhaps, in view of the state
of appreciation in our people, it would be lowered; but I maintain that
the fact that art is so much in the hands of women and the suspicion
among men that it carries with it some implication of effeminacy are
among the indications of American immaturity in art-appreciation. We
cannot expect an art really representative of America until there is a
foundation of regard for his work that the artist can build on. In the
old civilizations the artist was meeting an active demand on the part
of his people; in America, he has to seek desperately for a living.
Albrecht Dürer summed up the difference between the two states of
civilization when he wrote from Venice to a friend in the young Germany
of his day: “Oh, how I shall freeze for this sun when I get home; here
I am a gentleman, at home a parasite.”
It will seem to many that even such famous words should not be repeated
in a country where art is so often mentioned in the papers, where
museums are springing up in large numbers, where unheard-of prices
are paid for the work of famous men, and where even those who take
no interest in art will accord it a sort of halo. But the very fact
that it is relegated to the class of Sunday things instead of entering
into everyday life shows that our colonial period--in the cultural
sense of the word--is not yet passed. This should not be looked on as
discouraging; it is natural that the formation of character and ideas
should require time and I shall endeavour to show that the development
is really a rapid and healthy one. The mistake Americans are most prone
to, that of imagining the country to have reached a mature character
and a valid expression, shows their eagerness to advance, and explains
their readiness to tear down or to build up.
In the presence of such a spirit, one must see the mistakes of
conservatism or of ignorance in due perspective. However trying to
those who suffer from them at the time, they cannot fatally warp the
growth that is going on. For years we retained a tariff that obstructed
the coming into the country of works of art. That is a thing of the
past, and as one of the reasons used to defend it was that it protected
American artists against the foreigner, so, with the abolition of the
tariff, there has been more of a tendency to judge works of art for
their own qualities, without question of their nationality and without
the puerile idea of nurturing the American product by keeping out work
from abroad. How far this mistake had gone may be judged from the
fact that in a certain city of our Far West a group of painters made
a protest against the attention given by a newspaper to an exhibition
sent out from New York, raising no question of the quality of the
work, but merely demanding that local men be spoken of when art was
discussed in the paper--which promptly acquiesced, and removed the
critic from his position. The case may seem an extreme one, yet it
illustrates the attitude of many of our collectors and even our museum
authorities who, in the name of Americanism, are “helping to fame many,
the sight of whose painting is a miseducation,” to use a phrase that
Mr. Berenson has applied to another matter.
There is no question to-day but that America must evolve along
the lines of contemporary thought throughout the civilized world.
There will be a local tang to our art. Certain enthusiasms and
characteristics, as we develop them, may give emphasis to special
phases of our production, but there is no longer the possibility of
an isolated, autochthonic growth, such as seemed to be forecast up to
about the time of the Revolution. The 18th century in America with its
beautiful architecture, its fine craftsmen, and its painting, is only
less far from the America of to-day than is the art of the Indians.
We still put up buildings and make furniture in what is called the
Colonial style, but so do we follow the even more remote Mission style
of architecture in our Western States, and attempt to use Indian
designs in decoration. The usual fate of attempted continuings of a
bygone style overtakes all these efforts. Our materials are different,
our needs are different, our time is different. A glance at two houses,
as one speeds by in an automobile, tells us which is the real Colonial
architecture, which the imitation. At the Jumel Mansion in New York
it is easy to see which are the old parts, which the restorations,
although enough time has passed since the latter were made to weather
them to the tone of the original places.
In painting, the change that occurred after we became a republic is
even more unmistakable. The English School underwent considerable
modification when its representatives here began to work for
themselves. Where Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Lawrence were consulting
the old masters with such studious solicitude, Sir Joshua especially
pursuing his enquiry into the processes of Titian, men like Copley
and Blackburn were thrown back on such technical resources as they
could find here and had to depend for progress on tightening their
hold on character. Copley has the true note of the primitive in the
intensity with which he studies his people, and must be reckoned with
portraitists of almost the highest order.
What a change in the next generation! The more independent we are
politically the more we come out of the isolation that gave us quiet
and freedom to build up the admirable style of pre-Revolutionary days.
And then there was so much to be done in getting our new institutions
to work and our new land under cultivation, there was so much money
to be made and so much to import from Europe. It is significant that
the best painter of the period is John Vanderlyn, who had been sent
to Paris to study under Ingres. Fine artist that Vanderlyn was, and
informed by a greater tradition than Copley knew, he never reached the
impressiveness of the latter.
I shall not attempt to describe at any length the various steps
by which we rose from the artistic poverty which was ours in the
earlier decades of the 19th century. My purpose is not to write even
a short history of American art, but to enquire into its character
and accomplishment. The test of these is evidently not what each
period or school meant to the American artists before or after it,
but how it compares with the rest of the world’s art at its time. The
thought occurs to one forcibly on hearing of the wildly exaggerated
esteem--whether measured by words or by money--in which the more
celebrated of American artists are held; one asks oneself how the given
work would be considered in Europe by competent men. Few indeed are
the reputations that will stand the test; and we do not need to go
abroad to apply it, for the galleries of our large cities supply ample
opportunity for the comparison.
Beginning with the landscape artists who are the earliest of the modern
Americans to be looked on as our possible contribution to art, one’s
most impersonal observation is that in point of time, they, like their
successors in this country, follow the Europeans of the school to which
they belong by something like a generation. Now, art-ideas moved very
rapidly in the 19th century, and--however mechanical an indication
it may appear at first sight--it is almost a sure condemnation of
a European painter to find him in one period trying to work with
the formula of the generation before him. In America this test does
not apply so well, for we must allow for the effect of distance and
compare the American with his immediate contemporaries abroad only
in proportion to the advance of time--which is to say in proportion
to the convenience of travel to Europe and the possibility of seeing
contemporary work here.
Thus when we consider that Inness, Wyant, and Martin were born about
a generation after the Barbizon men and very nearly at the time of
the French Impressionists, we shall not say that it was to the latter
school that the Americans should have belonged. Whereas the European
followers of Corot and Rousseau were merely _retardataires_ who had
not the intellectual power to seize on the ideas of their own day,
the Americans could feel a little of the joy of discoverers through
having themselves worked out some of the ideas of naturalism in their
evolution from the earlier landscape painting in this country. And
so if they add nothing to what the Frenchmen had done already--with
an incomparably greater tradition to uphold them--our trio of
nature-lovers expressed genuine sentiment, and Homer Martin pushed on
to a quality of painting that often places him within hailing distance
of the classic line which, in France, kept out of the swamps of
sentimentality that engulfed the followers of Wyant and Inness here.
The cases of Winslow Homer and Albert P. Ryder have an interest aside
from the actual works of the two painters. They are doubtless the
strongest Americans of their time--and the ones who owe the least to
Europe. It must be men of such a breed who will make real American art
when we are ready to produce it. In any case their work must rank among
our permanently valuable achievements: Homer’s for the renewal of the
sturdy self-reliance that we noted in Copley, Ryder’s for the really
noble design he so often obtained and for the grand and moving fidelity
to a vision.
If their independence is so valuable a factor in both men’s work,
there is also to be noted the heavy price that each paid for having
been reared in a provincial school. With a boldness of character that
recalls Courbet, Winslow Homer fails utterly to hold a place in art
analogous to that of the French realist, because all the power and
ability that went into his work were unequal to compensating for his
lack of the knowledge of form, of structure, of optical effect that
Ingres and Delacroix, among others, furnished ready to the hand of
Courbet. Thus Homer’s painting goes on throughout his lifetime quite
innocent of any real concern with the central problems of European
picture-making and owes most of its strength to the second-rate quality
of illustration. One hesitates to say that Ryder would have gone
farther had he been born in France, yet the fact of his labouring for
ten or fifteen years on many a small canvas, the very limited number of
his works which has resulted from the difficulty he had in saying the
thing that was in him, are marks of a bad training. His range is not a
wide one, but the deep beauty he infused into his pictures is one of
our chief reasons for confidence in the art-instinct that lies dormant
in our people.
None of the men in the next group we must consider, the artists who
enter fully into European painting, have the foundation of talent that
Ryder had. Whistler is, of course, the painter to whom most Americans
pin their faith in searching among their compatriots for an essential
figure in 19th-century art. But take the first opportunity to see him
with the great Frenchmen of his time: beside Degas his drawing is of
a sickly weakness but slightly relieved by his sense of rhythm in
line and form; beside Manet his colour and painting seem even more
etiolated, and to save one’s feeling for him from utter demolition
one hastens to the usual American refuge of the sentiment and--in the
etchings--to the Yankee excellence of the craftsmanship. The nocturnes
really do have a felicity in their rendering of the poetry of the night
that would make us regret their loss, and when the unhappy Whistlerian
school has been forgotten (an artist must take _some_ responsibility
for his followers) we shall have more satisfaction in the butterfly
that Whistler knew himself to be, since he adopted it as his signature.
It is merit of no such slightness that we love in Ryder, and yet
when we reach Chase and Sargent we find even less of basic talent,
for which their immersion in the current of European painting could
have furnished a finely tempered instrument of expression. Both men
show the natural bent for painting that is often a valuable asset and
often--as in their case--a source of danger. They do not enrich our
annals by any great works, but they do the country an immense service
when they cause its students and collectors to take one of the final
steps in the direction of the live tradition of Europe. They never
appreciated what was greatest among their contemporaries, and failing
to have this grasp of the creative impulse and of the new principles
that were at work in Paris, they offered clever manipulations of the
material as a substitute. Feeling the insufficience of this, Sargent
has tried the grave style of the early Italians in his decorations at
the Public Library in Boston. But his Biblical personages get him no
nearer to the essentials of art than the society people of whom he has
done so many likenesses. In Boston, it is Chavannes who shows which is
the great tradition of the period and how it accords with the classic
past. Sargent is perhaps most American in his unreadiness to perceive
the immense things that Europe, modern and ancient, had to offer him.
Even so, with Chase and Sargent we find ourselves far nearer the period
when American artists shall partake in art-ideas during their moment
of full fertility. Our Impressionists are only a decade or two behind
the Frenchman, and while one must not slip into a too easy trick of
rating talent by the time of its appearance, one cannot fail to be
struck by the fact that John H. Twachtman and J. Alden Weir approached
the quality of their French preceptors with far greater closeness than
that with which the Inness-Wyant group followed the Barbizon men. Much
as there is of charm and sound pictorial knowledge in Twachtman’s work
and Weir’s, one feels that they are not yet deep enough in the great
tradition to go on to an art of their own creation, and we have to
content ourselves with giving them a place among the Impressionists of
secondary rank.
An interesting case among the Americans who made the serious study of
European art that began soon after the middle of the 19th century, is
that of John La Farge. We know the history of his seeking, his copying,
his associations, speculations, and travels. All his life he is the man
from the new country asking the dead and the living representatives of
the classic tradition for help. How little we see of the man himself
in the mosaic of charming things that make up his art. Winslow Homer
exists as a personality, ill-educated and crude, but affirmative and
arresting. La Farge disappears in the smoke of the incense that he
burns before the various shrines to which his eclecticism led him.
If not to be admired as a great artist, he was a man of great gifts
and a genuine appreciator of the masters. Therefore, he is not to
be confused for a moment with the ignoble _pasticheurs_ who achieve
office and honours in the anæmic institutions with which we imitate the
academies and salons of Europe. These are among the youthful errors I
mentioned on an earlier page--depressing enough when one sees the acres
of “decorative” abominations which fill our state-houses, courts, and
libraries, but in reality of no great importance as a detriment to
our culture. Like the soldiers’ monuments, the dead architecture, the
tasteless manufactured articles of common use, they sink so far below
any level of art that the public is scarcely affected by them. Only
the persons trained in schools to admire the painting of a Mr. E. H.
Blashfield or the sculpture of a Mr. Daniel C. French ever try to think
of them as beautiful; the rest of the public takes them on faith as
something that goes with the building, like the “frescoed” cupids to be
found in the halls of apartment houses or the tin cupolas and minarets
on the roof. The popular magazine-illustrators, poor as they are, have
more power to mislead than our quasi-official nonentities.
Between the pseudo-classic decorators and the frankly “lowbrow” artists
of the commercial publications, the posters, and the advertisements,
there is the large class of men whose work is seen at the annual
exhibitions, the dealers’ galleries, and the American sections of the
museums. They partake of the vice of each of the other two classes: the
easily learned formula for their product being a more or less thorough
schooling in some style derived from the past, plus an optimistic or
“red-blooded” or else gently melancholy attitude toward the subject.
Velasquez has been the main victim of their caricature in the later
years, but a little Chinese, Florentine, Impressionist, or even Cubist
style will often be added to give a look of “modernity” to the work.
As long as there is a recognizable proficiency in drawing and painting
(it is of course only for the cheaper trade that the picture has to
be guaranteed as done by hand), the erudite patron or museum trustee
is assured of the seriousness of the artist’s intentions, while to
make the thing take with the general buyer, the most important matter
is judgment as to the type of American girl, the virile male, or the
romantic or homely landscape that our public likes to live with.
The only excuse for mentioning such things in an essay on American art
is that they help to define it by contrast--for these pictures are
neither art nor American. The disease of which they are an outward sign
infects Europe almost as much as it does our own country, and there is
hardly a distinguishing mark to tell whether the Salon picture was done
in Madrid, Berlin, or Indianapolis. A sentence from an eminent American
critic, Russell Sturgis, gives the key to the situation. He said, “The
power of abstract design is lost to the modern world,--we must paint
pictures or carve expressional groups when we wish to adorn.” In the
half generation that has passed since these words were spoken, the
French have proven by several arts based entirely on abstract design
that the power for it was not lost to the world and that men still know
the difference between expression by form and colour and expression by
concrete ideas.
Throughout this survey I have taken painting as the index to the
art-instinct of America, and as we glance again at even our best
painters we see that it is on concrete ideas that they have built: on
character in portraiture with Copley, on romantic vision with Ryder,
on observation of appearances with Homer. Precisely the reason for
Whistler’s great success among his countrymen was the promise of
release he afforded by his reaching out for the design and colour
of the Orient, with which one associates also his spoken words,
offering us “harmonies” and “symphonies” in place of the art built on
intellectual elements that we had had before. The fact that Whistler
himself was not strong enough in his grasp of tradition, or of a nature
to achieve an important result along the lines he pointed to, does
not change the issue. We had begun to be aware of the repression of
instinct that was marking American life. We had recognized that the
satisfaction of the senses, quite as much as intellectual pleasure, is
to be demanded of art. Puritan morality and Quaker drabness had turned
us away from any such conception, and when they took notice of art at
all, it was for its educational value, either to inculcate religious or
patriotic ideas, or for its connection with the classic past.
Add to this the utilitarian needs of a country that had to build
rapidly, caring for cheapness more than for permanence (so little of
the building, in fact, was intended to be permanent), and one has an
explanation of the absence of architectural quality in the American
houses of the last hundred years. The characteristic of building in
the time is seen in the lifeless blocks of “brownstone fronts,” in
the apartments that have so little of the home about them that in the
restlessness of his search for a place to live satisfactorily, the
American of the cities has earned the name of the “van-dweller,”--one
sees the thing again in the abject monotony of farm-houses and country
residences. Their spirit, or lack of it, is continued in furniture
and decoration. One understands why Europe has been the magic word
for countless thousands of Americans. Perhaps it was the palaces and
museums that they set out to see and that they told about on their
return, but more impressive to them--because more satisfying to their
hunger for a beauty near to their daily lives--was the sight of an
Italian village built with love for hillsides and with understanding of
the forms of the hill and of the type of construction that would suit
it. Or was it the cheeriness of the solid Dutch houses whose clear reds
and blacks look out so robustly through the green of the trees that
border the canals? The bright-coloured clothing of the peasants became
delightful to the traveller, even if he still gave it a pitying smile
when he saw it again on the immigrant here; and the humble foreigner,
anxious to fit in to his new surroundings, hastened to tone down the
vivacity of his native costume to the colourlessness of the American
farmer’s or workman’s garb. In place of the gay pink or green stucco
of his cottage at home, the immigrant got more or less of sanitary
plumbing, higher wages, and other material benefits, to recompense him
for the life he had left behind.
The life! That was the magic that Europe held for our visitors. They
might return to the big enterprises, the big problems here, and feel
that America was home because they had a share in its growth, but
their nostalgia for the old countries continued to grow in the measure
that they came to appreciate the wisdom with which life was ordered
there--as they realized how the stable institutions, the old religions,
festivals, traditions, all the things that flower into art, had
resisted the terrific change that the industrial revolution had brought
into the 19th century. Behind all questions of the coming of objects of
art into this country or the appearance of new artists or new schools
here, lies this most pivotal matter of the elements of art in American
life. They need not be, they cannot be the same as those in European
life, but it is futile to think of having an art here if we deny
ourselves the ideas and feelings of which art has been made--the joy
and awe of life that the Greek responded to in his marbles, the Italian
in his frescoes, the Spaniard, the Fleming, the Dutchman, and the
Frenchman in his canvases. Copying the externals of their work without
again living their lives can result only in academism--bad sculpture
and bad pictures.