Looking at America

...sympathizers, is only making the community divisions deeper and perpetuating them for another generation or two...

...When in the late 1940s American Commonweal: 503 painting became the center of world painting in 'the work of artists like Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko and the others of the so-called New York School, the self-creating seeking for a "religious" sentiment endured...

...Commenting on the landscapes of Claude, Ruskin voiced the aim of much American "factual" art: "Multitudes will laud the composition, and depart with the praise of Claude on their lips-not one will feel as if it were no composition, and depart with the praise of God in his heart...

...Richard Estes, Canadian Club, details Times Square with the fidelity Frederick Church lavished on Study of a Rock in 1845...

...that survives judgment day in and day out as when two persons (or nations) long pledged to each other in marriage or friendship learn to move freely together forever achieving their balance...

...5 August 1977:504...

...If meaning in art connects to reference, "what is this painting about?," then there is a peculiar sense in which American painting lacks reference...

...Trollope, "When I am tn my painting, I'm not aware of what I am doing . . . the painting has a life of its own...

...The city is to be pure, God's very kingdom...

...Curry's baptismal folk have taken a few hard-earned moments of relaxation from the over-sized barn and plain house set in the flat Kansas landscape...

...Both exceptions prove the rule...

...If the Indian Princess's ,~ornucopia runneth over, so doth the shopping bag, the lunch, the clothes, the figure of the Lady at Table...

...On all the topics he has something interesting to say and the book can be read as an essay on arts or general intellectual and cultural history...

...The Yankee cousin does not become an onlooker at longago, ever-present sacred events but remains resolutely sharpening his scythe, smoking his pipe, reading the papers...

...Again the exceptions are interesting: George Caleb Bingham paints Daniel Boone leading settlers to the wilderness on the unmistakable model of the Flight into Egypt and there are various apotheoses of Washington and Lincoln based on traditional iconography of the Assumption...

...With hearts as with bodies it is grace that wins every contest...

...While it is seemingly impossible to discover a theme which runs through the image of America chronicled by its artists--and Taylor does not attempt the synopsis there seem to me to be two themes which repeat themselves so consistently that they are worth noting...

...We do not discourse with rocks, or metaphysical sunsets anymore than with the Lady at Table...

...DESMOND FISHER J oshua C. Taylor's elegantly presented and richly insightful study of the image Americanus is bracketed by the figures of two women: the first never was, the last "is" too much...

...The rest of the objects at the Philadelphia museum were careful burgherly portraits, elegant highboys, anatomical sketches, detailed city plans and the complexly crafted abstractions of yesterday (quilts) and today...

...I prudently took a few moments before I answered...

...The painter need not be learned and refer to holy events (Biblical stories or the Ramayana) because the holy is everpresent if one will open his eyes to nature at-hand or to the painter's own act of creation at-hand...

...Of course when one thinks about the absence of traditional religious painting in America it is no surprise...

...tury which celebrated nature plain would seem a million icons distant from the world of pop and photo art, yet the continuity is easily seen...

...In the one case a conventional plaster crucifix (salvaged from some liturgical update...

...Instead of seventeenth century engraved symbol (a small sheet of paper with multiple copies to be distributed for edification, enchantment or to entice colonists), we have the life-size, utterly life-like figure of an overweight woman sitting at an actual table, in actual clothes, reading the National Enquirer...

...What does it mean to be confronted by Warhol's soup can or a gigantic Kline calligraph...

...In America as Art, there is virtually no religious iconography...

...Her pocketbook rests against the cheap chair, her market bag leans uncertainly against the pedestal of the table...

...De Kooning could declare in an echo of Ruskin, "Style is a fraud, I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns...

...Not all the periods are equally rich in extant visual images and Taylor has been free in extending his analysis to literary material...

...John Branigan has given an admirably succinct and, in my view, correct statement of the Northern Ireland problem...

...Interwoven with the belief in the secular Kingdom of God is the vision of America, the American landscape, the American city, the American painter as a New Man, self-creating as the direct work of Nature or Nature's God...

...Taylor, Director of the National Collection of Fine Arts, has written in America as Art a series of studies on the way in which America has been seen and symbolized by visual artists from the first European guesses at American fauna to the last observed fallout of the present age...

...The separation of church and state prohibited religious image to one great patron...

...ment of Truth in Art 1863 proclaimed: " W e believe that all nature being the perfected work of the Creator should be treated with the reverence due its Author, and by nature they do not mean only the great mountains . . . but also every dear weed that daily gives forth its life unheeded...

...Trollope is appropriately European and horrified when she tells the following tale in her Domestic Manners of Americans (1832) : At length he named an American artist . . . and after declaring him equal to Lawrence . . . he added, "and what is more, madam, he is perfectly self-taught...

...If a lost cause in Vietnam was abandoned, whether because of the nature of the television reportage or otherwise, why not one in Northern Ireland...

...It must say something about the selfunderstanding of a culture which presents to Rself public images related to a religious story whether it is a great golden reclining Buddha or Tintoretto's vast program of biblical paintings in Venice...

...The Society for the Advance...

...To the American painters, painting does not depict religious events at second hand, it is a religious event...

...America and its painters spring from nature, self-taught, without culture, without the cultivated craft of the masters, outside the r clesial establishment and its timeblessed icons so that nature and nature's God may be expressed in immediacy...

...fluid, enduring...

...A moderately dark young woman clad in feathers and tobacco leaves, she appears to be standing on the lip of a cornucopia scattering gold to an ill-assorted group of Indians, Europeans and goats...

...In between the symbolic savage and Hanson's simple salvage, Taylor studies seven images of America: the American Cousin, the virtue of American landscape, the frontier (a chapter written by John Cawleti), optimistic urban images, folk and mass art, the world art of the New York school of abstractionists and, finally, pop and photo realism...

...Those blackclothed dissenters who were bold enough to settle the landscape with towns from the Holy Land: Salem, Jericho, Zion, would understand the austere rejection of image and the desire not to reflect upon New Jerusalem, but to create it here and now...

...It has been pointed out that landscape art is a late development in Western painting and that it is the first "abstract" a r t - - p u r e landscape (Turner not Claude) tells no story...

...There is an unvarnished facticity to the dominant objects of American art (or, a highly varnished "thinginess" to the chests, presentation urns and pottery of the "useful arts...

...An Annunciation in any style is about that event, but Hanson's Lady 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 SISTER ELLEN MURPHY is just there and refers to nothing...

...The "meaning" of modern art is a perennial problem and this is hardly the place to discuss such a weighty question, but "meaning" in American art has a special twist...

...The question I was raising was whether a continuation of the IRA's shootings and bombings would bring that justice nearer or whether their campaign, supported as it is by arms and money from U.S...

...I try to let it come through...

...Instead of culture handed along or revealed religion remembered ( " I n that time . . ."), America chooses direct religion (revelation here, miracle now...

...Curry so carefully avoided style that the work can transcend neither toward urban culture (which he despised) nor heavenly thoughts...

...The final image in Taylor's study is called Lady at Table 1971 by Duane Hanson...

...However, this very facticity of image and object turns itself into a kind of religious sentiment...

...For many years an outstanding teacher at the University of Chicago, Taylor brings to these essays the clarity of exposition and subtlety of interpretation which his pupils (including this one) well remember...

...The aim of this rejection of style, academic technique and comfortable symbol was to liberate the imagination not for fantasy but, as Taylor remarks about Clifford Still's work, to discover "the reflection of that mystic source that is home to the soul...

...Mark Rothko said, "Pictures must be miraculous...

...Among the many paradoxes which mark this long trajectory of images, is that the non-existent symbol clearly conveys a message, while the confrontation with the eternally polyeuruthaned sloven sitting in our space yet incapable of discourse forbids communication...

...Painting followed philosophy in the lusciously detailed nature studies of Aaron Draper Shattuck, Fidelia Bridges and Charles Herbert Moore...

...But again, the bulk of the book is devoted to Yankee farmers, skyscrapers, meticulous nature studies, and Warhol's Brillo Box...

...To the extent that American painters eschew style or historical theme (a favorite topic of much of world art), there is no reference...

...for the equalling our immortal Lawrence to a vile dauber stuck in my throat _9 . . at last I remarked on the frequency with which I heard the phrase of self-taught used, not as an apology, but as positive praise...

...To say that American painting is secular, however, is only a half-truth...

...DENNIS O'BRIEN LOOKING AT AMERICA Amertea As A r t JOSHUA C. TAYLOR National Collection o/Fine Arts/ Smithsonian Press, $25 The initial symbolic promise of so much has become the actual reality of too much...

...Well, madam, can there he a higher praise7 . . . Is it not attributing genius to the author and what is teaching compared to that...

...He does not seek only the masterpiece but is interested also in uncultivated art as a figure for a type of American sensibility...

...It is not surprising, therefore, that Ruskin's views in Modern Painters (1844) were deeply appreciated...

...In the exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia: Three Centuries of American Art, to take an example, there were only two pieces which could be regarded as directly religious...

...These themes are secularism and self-creation...

...Catholics brought their souvenirs of the old world, but that is not part of the American image...

...This rather extraordinary turn in history may be noted for its accomplishments (in deed and art) or for its hubris, but if certain souls seek salvain American galleries rather than American churches, no American should be surprised...

...the painting is to be purged, a present miracle...

...If the weed will have its life recorded, why not the Creator's creatures' creatures: soup cans and advertising signs...

...As Taylor says, "We are so dose to these characters physically and psychologically, and yet there is no possibility of communication . . . a consciousness of a simple 'is-hess' . . . stop(s) us cold . . . . " If the Indian Princess formed a message for America, the Lady at Table seems to say that American life has no message, it simply exists utterly resisting meaningful direction and statement...

...The "non-art" of the nineteenth cen...

...She is probably right, too, in her other views except for the "silliness" of abandoning a lost cause...

...Pollock proclaims a rejection of selfconscious art which would have horrified Mrs...

...The Indian Princess was virtuous by nature, not by culture, and the American painter would be grand without dependence on the Beaux Arts tradition...

...The image is a symbol, not a portrait of actuality...

...The figure that never was is the so-called "Indian Princess" exemplified in a print by Jacob van Meurs of 1671...

...the other called "God" was a Dadaist work by Morton Shamberg well enough described by the catalogue: wooden miter box and castiron plumbing trap, height 10ý89 A put-down crucifix and a send-up on God...

...Insofar as plain-style Protestantism dominated the ecclesial life of America there was no theology for religious images...

...DENNIS O'BRIEN i,~ the President o/ Bucknell University in Pennsylvania...

...If one can tease out any thin and tattered moral from America as art, it is that many American painters accept as fully as the Pilgrim fathers or the Captains of Industry, the view that the Heavenly City is at hand in this country...

...appeared upside down under a scaffold...

...Frederick Church's Rock just "is," Rothko's horizons of Promise have no theology...

...The American experience (in deed and in art) might well be seen as a contrast to traditional European experience...

...5 August 1977:502 An examination of Taylor's book or several of the exhibits and catalogues of American art and craft fostered by our bicentennial year, should strike anyone knowing the scope of western painting with the secular cast of the assembled materials...

...John Stewart Curry paints a baptism, but it is Baptism in Kansas (1929) and despite hovering doves the painting is resolutely down to earth and unlikely, as Taylor remarks, "to inspire a flight of fancy...

...There is no Revelation in the foreground, no sages under the trees, to point a moral...

...How far is it from the "dear weed that daily gives forth its life unheeded" to Hartson's consummately unimportant Lady who daily gives out her life unheeded...

...To that end, Still will justify his great splashes of somber black on somber brown by quoting Blake: The Vision of Christ that thou dost see Is my Vision's Greatest Enemy: Thine is the friend of all Mankind Mine speaks in parables to the Blind . , . It may seem a far cry from the dour Pilgrims who formed the Plymouth settlement to the fashionable chic of the New York art world, but the Puritan sentiment remains...

...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 WATCHING THE OLYMPICS They show us in slow motion how in the perfect action each movement is ever righting itself in respect to the other, in respect to the earth and the space and their laws from balance to point of balance the enduring bones leap, the muscles remember the rules of flexible elegance, integrity, grace...

...Using the titles of two of his other books, this colleclection of pieces on Americana is an exercise in Learning to Look and proof that To See Is To Think...

...They are not caught in a mystical past or an eternal reality, they are about to go back to business...

...The new painting rejects the figurative with as much emotion as the naturalists yearned for it, but the underlying rationale is similar...

...One of the repeated themes of America and the American artist is the "self-taught" character of the people and its painters...

...If Rembrandt's pharisees and saints are so many Dutch burghers in costume, that role is not acted out by American subjects...

...I did not intend to make the arms issue the mainspring of that problem: justice is the core of it and without justice there will be no peace, or, at least, no lasting peace...

...Not exactly the thing-itself but so carefully crafted as to seem the very thing n o t a sign of the thing...