The working American
Mills, Nicolaus
Art THE WORKING AMERICAN AN OVERLOOKED VISION IN AMERICAN CULTURE work has traditionally occupied a place of honor. For the Puritans work was, as John Cotton observed in his sermon,...
...Currently playing lunch breaks is a worker-created musical revue, Taking Care...
...Wyeth's The Scythers, in which two men hand-mow a field while a child (a daughter to judge by her dress and sunbonnet) stands beside them with a pitcher of water...
...Our visual perspective reflects the economic realities of the scene and shows the power a single factory-owner exercises over his far more numerous employees...
...So often in the nineteenth century the fact that industry was tucked away in the countryside allowed observers to portray it as no more than a disguised form of rural life...
...The same is true of American painting, especially in the nineteenth century...
...The smoke does not share space with the clouds but crowds them out of sight, and when we look at the lake below the mill, we see that it has nothing of nature to mirror back...
...In George Inness's The Lackawanna Valley a farmer watching a train cut through his field resembles a shepherd looking after his flock...
...We need to see not only American paintings, such as John Ferguson Weir's heroic, Forging the Shaft, that this show fails to include, we need photographs to put the whole turnof-the century movement towards social realism in balance, and beyond this, we need to have the perspective on labor that European painting offers...
...It also makes us hope that the questions about art and economics that Abigail Booth Gerdts, who collected the paintings from galleries and museums across the country, and Patricia Hills, who wrote the text for the catalogue, have raised in this exhibit will not be ignored once "The Working American" completes its national tour...
...By contrast, in American Iron Mill Cope has caught the unnatural and alienating aesthetic of industrialism...
...while in a long line that goes from the steps of the house to a distant factory are the workers themselves...
...Only the violets that the flower seller holds out show life in Weir's painting...
...Instead, she turns her pale face upward to an unpictured adult she hopes will buy her flow"The Working American" is part of "Bread and Roses"—District 1199's unique program of worksite exhibits, poetry readings, lectures, and employee discussions...
...Indeed, so powerful are the fires from the mill that they leave room for little else...
...While some confront the factory owner directly and one even stoops to pick up a rock, just as Commonweal: 184 many others talk among themselves and one man even gestures submissively before his wife, who appears to be cautioning him...
...In Henry Augustus Ferguson's Glen Falls, New York, for example, a paper mill seems as much a part of the landscape as the trees and mountains behind it...
...in urban and industrial America, children who went to work did not do so as helpers to adults but as miniature adults—cheap substitutes in factories and coal mines, more appealing beggars on the city streets...
...Weir's painting was literally cut by him from a larger painting, In the Park, in which a child offers flowers to passers-by on behalf of a blind figure behind her, who holds up a sign saying "please by...
...In this starkly rendered painting of a black mother and her two children working a tiny garden in the middle of the day, Anshutz provides a sense of how limited and tough rural work could be...
...Indeed, not until the 1930s did American culture as a whole begin to reflect a harsher, more questioning view of work...
...We are all animated with the spirit of an industry which is unfettered and unrestrained," he wrote, "because each person works for himself...
...The Strike by Robert Koehler...
...management confrontation that Philip Evergood would depict fifty years later in his American Tragedy...
...John de Crevecoeur noted in his Letters from an American Farmer, our eagerness to work was a sign of our independence...
...Rarely do we find in it the brutalizing European vision of rural labor that we see in Courbet's The Stone-breakers or Millet's The Gleaners, or the class consciousness that is reflected in the photography of Louis Hine and Jacob Riis, or the images of routine that dominate Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times...
...Making this painting even more telling in terms of "The Working American" is its placement (in the New York show) on the same wall as N.C...
...at the Birmingham Museum of Art, mid-July through August...
...We are not, as in Guy's painting, left with the illusion that such work is good for children and that they are happy doing it...
...The flower seller and the blind figure behind her are swaddled in drab brown clothes, and the flower seller herself does not even make eye contact with the viewer...
...For what the modest scale of "The Working American" suggests is not that the subject has been exhausted but that it needs more attention...
...and—with the aid of the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service—moving on to five other cities...
...The Cabbage Patch by Thomas Anshutz...
...By comparison with the larger painting with its contrasts of wealth and poverty, The Flower Seller is far less pointed economically and much more maudlin...
...and even in so 4oleful a painting as Winslow Homer's The Morning Bell, it is not the place of work (a cotton mill) that is shown to be the source of unhappiness so much as the inescapable obligation of work on a beautiful morning...
...As St...
...It can only reflect the fires shooting in the sky from the iron works' chimneys...
...and in Eastman Johnson's The Cranberry Harvest, men, women, and children perform the difficult task of cranberry picking in a spirit of classless harmony...
...American Iron Mill, Pennsylvania by George Cope...
...But the insight of The Strike does not end here...
...It is this painting that by its size (six feet by nine feet) and placement dominates "The Working American'' and sets the tone for what follows—a visual appreciation of the complexity and hardness of American working life...
...In American, painting down to the 1930s, work and industry primarily suggest a happy prosperity...
...The beauty of the'field (we can even see the clover in the foreground), its spaciousness, the muscular vigor of the men, their comfortable dress (they wear straw hats and white cotton shirts), all combine to present the idea that a farm of such dimension could be comfortably run by a family, and when we turn back to The Cabbage Patch we realize what Anshutz has done with his hot sun, his spare rows of vegetables, his unromanticized figures—convey a precise sense of all that rural labor could not do...
...The result is that, although in terms of the space they occupy, the workers dominate The Strike, in terms of where our point of view is focused, they share equal attention with the factoryowner...
...The show will be at the Chicago Historical Society, midMay through June...
...Koehler, whose father was a machinist, admitted that The Strike was in his "thoughts for years," and the tensions he reveals in it reflect his working-class background, pn the left side of the painting, in top hat and framed by the stone column of his elegant house, stands a factory-owner rigidly confronting his workers...
...The mother's hoe seems frozen in the ground, and from the grim look on her face and that of the one child who faces outward, we recognize that they are fulfilling an obligation rather than performing a task that brings them closer to nature or even the bright hollyhocks growing in the back of the garden...
...With its strategic use of a limited number of paintings, "The Working American" offers us a view of American art that has shamefully been ignored...
...For the Puritans work was, as John Cotton observed in his sermon, Christian Calling, a "heavenly business" that "serves Christ in serving of men...
...In William Sidney Mount's Cider Making, leisure rather than labor is the order of the day...
...NICOLAUS MILLS (Nicolaus Mills, who teaches English at Sarah Lawrence, is writing about the treatment of crowds in American art and literature...
...n.m...
...The Flower Seller by Julian Alden Weir...
...What makes "The Working American" so impressive an exhibition, however, is not simply that it has brought together a group of paintings whose vision of America has been overlooked but that it has brought them together in a particularly coherent way...
...We need to see how so class-conscious an artist as Ford Madox Brown sought to create a labororiented iconography in his Work, and how even so relatively conventional an artist as Hubert von Herkomer would in his Castle Garden-Pressing to the West offer a view of American immigrants (the country's new source of labor) that would make Charles Frederick Ulrich's grim, In the Land of Promise-Castle Garden, appear almost optimistic...
...It is this vision of work that we rarely see and that constitutes the heart of "The Working American," an exhibit sponsored by District 1199, National Union of Hospital and Health Care employees, already shown in New York and Detroit, currently to be seen at the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester (Rochester, N.Y...
...When we look at the workers themselves, we see that this is not the kind of labor vs...
...Art THE WORKING AMERICAN AN OVERLOOKED VISION IN AMERICAN CULTURE work has traditionally occupied a place of honor...
...We are thus left with not only a sense of the power of the factory-owner but with the feeling that for these men the first course of action must be to settle their own differences...
...ers...
...at the New Jersey Museum in Trenton from the third week of September through October, and at the Lexington Museum of Our National Heritage from the end of November till January 4, 1981...
...28 March 1980: 185...
...Yet despite his predilection for happy farmers rather than dull field hands, craftsmen instead of unskilled laborers, the American artist in the years before the 1930s did from time to time allow a vis* ion of work to surface that was not pleasing, indeed was likely to offend the bourgeois values of any patron...
...The workers themselves are by no means in agreement as to what they should do...
...Yet in the context of "The Working American" and juxtaposed as it is with Seymour Guy's The Little Sweeper, a romanticized view of a child street-cleaner getting a drink of water, the poignancy of The Flower Seller comes through...
...It is not the moon or stars that light this night sky but the fire and smoke pouring from a country iron mill...
...A century later in post-Revolutionary America, work was still a sacred calling...
...Even in the midst of the tawdry Gilded Age work was, in the minds of Americans, a glorified activity...
...What this means in specific terms becomes clear when we look in detail at four of the paintings in the show...
...There is no camaraderie here, as in his famous, Ironworkers-Noontime, nor do we get any sense that the mother and her two children enjoy being in the garden...
...As the Horatio Alger stories of that era make clear, work was seen as the key to personal success...
Vol. 107 • March 1980 • No. 6
