Coming of Age: American Art 1850s to 1950s
'Roll up, roll up'
By Brian Sewell, Evening Standard
28.03.08
Punter is a graceless word, but we all know what we mean by it —
a victim of the grifter, the quack or the man with a dead horse. It
came into my mind on seeing Coming of Age: American Art 1850s to
1950s in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, for the sane man is made
punter by this boot sale of paintings if his memory retains
anything of Americans in Paris at the National Gallery two years
ago, of American Sublime at Tate Britain in 2002, and of American
Art in the 20th Century at the Royal Academy in 1993.
In those exhibitions he saw many of the grandest paintings in
the history of American art, indeed, a few of the grandest in art’s
whole history, and from them he must have expectations of kindred
quality. What Dulwich gives him, however, is a modest private
collection of modest pictures, most by modest painters who deserve
their parochial obscurity, and a handful of well-known names —
Eakins, Sargent, O’Keefe, Bellows, Homer, Church — that are
represented, if not by the sweepings of their studios, then by
flawed and inferior examples of their work.
The collection from which these come is the Addison Gallery of
American Art. This belongs to the Phillips Academy in Andover,
Massachusetts, “unique among secondary schools in that it
established an art museum before such an aid to education was a
gleam in the eye of many a university president”. Given and endowed
in 1931 by a former student, it has since done what it can “in the
spirit of quest and adventure” to acquire works by such now
important artists as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Frank Stella
“before they attained broad demand and prices beyond most museum
budgets” — but the impression it gives with its more modern
exhibits is very much monkey see, monkey do, with too little cash
and never enough connoisseurship.
The exhibition is undone by the boastfulness of its title. Had
it been presented as the far-sighted enterprise of a school
inspired to teach not only the history of art but the far less
precise and measurable skills of art appreciation, then it might
have been wholly laudable, for these are largely paintings in which
the adolescent can examine the activity of the brush, can see its
separate marks, the drag of bristles in paint, the pressure of its
application, the points of first contact with the canvas, the
points where, still loaded with paint, it was lifted away, the
points at which the paint ran dry. In them we can see how little,
or how much, drawing was done with the brush, how the paint was
thin and fluid or substantial and resistant. In them we can see how
artists were seduced by colour and stylistic quirk, how they
approached the contrasts of light and shade, struggled to make
tonal sense of them and, as in the big Thomas Eakins portrait of
Elizabeth at the Piano, absolutely lost the battle in a black
morass. We can see how Childe Hassam might flood with light even
the grey-blue shadows of a townscape, Early Morning on the Avenue
in May 1917, and devotees of Winslow Homer, recalling his
exhibition in this very gallery two years ago, can see how, in
setting his West Wind so much against the light, he not only
achieved a dingy view of the Atlantic dunes but applied to it the
sensibility of Sturm and Drab that he had cultivated in the year
that he had spent in Cullercoats a decade earlier.
Here there are paintings that demonstrate how much and for how
long Americans looked to Europe for example, with little landscapes
that fit perfectly with traditions that were the second-hand stuff
of sub-Turner and sub-Constable in England, but have nothing of the
romantic grandeurs of Bierstadt (the last of the Claudians) and
Church (both are represented, but by wretched little things). They
looked to France for inspiration and idea, from Cézanne and Braque
to the feebler painters of the School of Paris in the 1940s. They
looked too at Mondrian, Constructivism, German Expressionism and
the Bauhaus. In drawing on such sources there are inevitably
intriguing curiosities, of which the worst is the ghastly Light in
Gold of 1951 by Irene Pereira, a sloppy horror of a kind much done
in Paris at the time, and the best is Man Ray’s Ridgefield, of
1913, when he was only 23, intelligently responding, long before he
became the stalwart of Dada and Surrealism, to the influence of
Cézanne, German Expressionism and things seen in the (for America)
ground-breaking exhibition of (in part) European contemporary art
at the New York Armory that year. This was indeed an inspired
purchase, for it is good in its own right as well as an important
curiosity, but it leads me to the criticism that from the
exhibition catalogue we learn nothing of Thomas Cochran, “class of
1890”, who donated the original core of the collection. This Man
Ray was bought, to someone else’s taste, in 1947.
The catalogue is, however, not a catalogue. It sets out to be a
book explaining and demonstrating with 72 examples (some of them
sculptures fit only for the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy,
so dreadful are they) the progress of American art from the vast
Sublimities of the 1850s to the outbreak of American Abstract
Expressionism a century later, but the collection simply does not
have the weight to support this Bed of Procrustes and the boastful
authors write with the naivety of unsophisticated sophomores — they
mimic the jabber wocky of such books but appear to lack all
understanding. As the collection cannot do the job imposed on it,
the panjandrums of the Addison Gallery would have been much wiser
to fall back on the traditional form of the exhibition catalogue
and given us a conventional extended entry on each exhibit and some
discussion of each contributing artist; few English punters have
ready access to reference books on Oscar Bluemner, Jasper Cropsey
and Walt Kuhn.
Perhaps, on too many paintings in this exhibition, too
contemptible, there is too little to be said, but the authors could
surely have offered some explanation for what appears to have been
a massive alteration and repainting job on Frank Stella’s East
Broadway. To the punter it would have been helpful had they made
some comment on the difficulties that Eakins obviously had when
painting Salutat, particularly with the much revised body of the
boxer — am I in error or has this smudgy business become more
evident, perhaps through over-cleaning, since I first saw it more
than 40 years ago? This canvas is one of his boxing subjects —
Between Rounds in Philadelphia the most celebrated — in which
Eakins, late in life, after some years returned to painting the
male nude, his first and longest love.
In these he incorporated portraits of casual visitors to the
studio — “Stay awhile and I’ll put you in,” he is reputed to have
said to innumerable knockers at his door, always preferring to work
from a real model rather than invent a face. But was there ever a
real model, a drawing or a photograph for the emaciated victor
whose absurdly scrawny right arm is almost as long as his even
scrawnier right leg, his upper torso astonishingly ill-drawn by a
painter who constantly stressed the importance of studying the
whole nude? Eakins more than once provoked serious trouble for
himself by whipping away the loincloth of a male model when female
students were present.
I would have liked some more perceptive comment on The Circus by
George Bellows than “energised brushwork ... spontaneity belying
the deliberate internal structure”. Though brilliantly observed and
realised around the core of the composition, the core itself, a
woman acrobat standing on a bareback horse, is unconvincing to such
an inescapably obvious degree that it wrecks the punter’s pleasure;
she has stiff stumps for legs and the horse has been so broadened
by multiple corrections that, had it eight legs, it would be easy
to understand as a matched pair — that would at least explain her
awkward stance. With Bellows, such other painters of quotidian
subjects as George Luks, Robert Henri, John Sloan and William
Merritt Chase are all examples of a genuinely American genre — the
worker, the sportsman, the urban slave — and these so-called Ashcan
Artists, all but lost in this mixed company, would have made a more
instructive and coherent exhibition on their own.
This exhibition is too much of a muddled rag-bag to serve
anyone’s purpose and in the one thing it set out to do, it fails
utterly, for no one in England could gain from it any clear
understanding of American art between 1850 and 1950. If the Addison
Gallery felt an overwhelming need to expose itself to English
scrutiny, then we should have been told more about its history and
purposes and more about those who formed it over three-quarters of
a century, for it might then have seemed an inspired example to
schools here. The selection should have been based on quality,
rarity and activity more or less exclusively American — we see
enough of Gabo and Moholy-Nagy not to see them as in any way
American, Calder is internationally commonplace, Pollock tediously
familiar, and Sargent and Whistler are perceived as more British
than American.
Let me suggest to the American friends of Dulwich Picture
Gallery that they have far better fish to fry. Send us a
comprehensive Eakins show and we shall relish it. Send us all the
Ashcan group and we shall see something spirited and not matched by
any English painters. Send us Remington and Childe Hassam. Extend
our knowledge, fill our gaps, but do not patronise us with mere
pots-pourris, for we are not half-ass uncritical punters who will
swallow anything.
Read Brian Sewells' art reviews in the Evening
Standard every Friday.