American Art

...It will be a return to the best in American art's splendid and truly native tradition...

...But on the whole in recent American shows, there has seemed to us too much concern with harsh realities—realities so harsh that they would be depressing things to live with...

...Although it is true that we owe much to what we might call the mother countries, our art has long achieved an independence that should be as well recognized as our national independence...

...The artists went to no foreign parts to study, and they were pleased with the native scene...

...Another was that there was an esprit de corps among artists...

...One was that living in the foreign art centres was relatively cheap...

...After the Revolution, we find a further growth in our art's national character...

...There was an art world in which, if one were an artist, one could live among companions vitally interested in the same thing that oneself was interested in...

...Beauty recognizable by the layman has been regarded by the trenchant young moderns as being mere prettiness or possibly the slightly senile sentimentality of academicians...

...There is little question that our industrial civilization has much to gain from arts and that this is recognized not only by the industrial leaders who have the means to patronize the artists, but also by that larger public that makes for a cheerful volume of applause, and in the end, through bequests and foundations, enjoys the finest collections...

...Every blade of grass, every rock, every tree on a distant hillside, and even small details of roots and snakes and butterflies that do not emerge, like hidden faces in picture puzzles, until on careful inspection one suddenly sees them—all these things were put down with a quite miraculous clearness of sight...

...Price relates of spending the summer in seeking to find dealers abroad who would show American works, and of not being able to find one who would undertake to keep and show one canvas...

...Having just completed travels that had taken him abroad over the land, he had marveled that any artist could leave this country with its wealth of natural beauty which has been comparatively little exploited artistically...

...There were reasons for this besides the reputation of the foreign masters...

...AMERICAN ART TX7TTH the opening of the Carnegie International * * Exhibition in Pittsburgh this week, at which some three hundred works by European artists and some hundred and thirty works of Americans will be shown, we are reminded of the recommendation of Henri Matisse, Europe's most distinguished and amusing master who has served on this year's selection committee, that American artists ought to stay in America...

...Another instance is the awarding of the leading prizes at the Carnegie show in recent years to Europeans...

...In this country where the term "arty" connotes contempt, there is an unfortunate habit of looking down on the community of artists...

...As a result, most of our artists became products of the foreign schools—William Morris Hunt, Innes, John La Farge, notably coming under the French, while Duveneck, Currie and Chase responded to the German Romanticism of the times...

...A further instance of this lack of appreciation is given by an incident Mr...

...Subsequently began the tendency of our artists to study abroad...

...If our men of wealth have been a little slow in recognizing the work of native artists, we believe the neglect can be explained by two factors which do not put the burden of blame on the soullessness of the business man...

...In the spirit of more confidence and less criticism, they will achieve again that good nature that will reaffirm the faith of our people in beauty and extend abroad a reputation of which we may be proud...

...As Mr...

...It is not now a characteristic of the work of Hassam or Jonas Lie...

...He urged this from sincere and gracious motives...

...The work was in keeping with the clear air and the absorbing interest in nature in this new world...

...Matisse also has said something of this sort, although naturally not in such sweeping terms...

...This is a proposition every American can enthusiastically endorse...

...A strictly American art has been developed, and the familiar insistence that it is something yet to be accomplished, slights what has been done...

...Frederic Price, president of the American Art Dealers' Association, recently asserted, American landscape art is the finest in the world...

...This joylessness was of course not a characteristic of the work of Whistler or Twachtman...

...Their work is the crowning perfection of European methods transplanted to the American scene, though Sargent always maintained a strong British accent, and Davies was a poet of the geographically undefinable land of fancy...

...And the fact, while not diminishing the wisdom of Matisse's counsel to American artists to develop a strictly American art, is an answer to it...

...They would be too constant reminders of things which normal persons, we imagine, would rather forget...

...As a sustained and selfconscious attitude it is apt to become truculence, which, whatever its virtue of independence, does not attract friendships...

...This art will not have far to look for appreciators either at home or abroad...

...Most of them were products of the engraver's school and their canvases are delightful in their naive minutiae...

...There is in their work, strength, simplicity, and an uncompromising honesty that well suits the time and place they lived in, and without their being bothered by the term or its technical restrictions, the harmony of their portraiture with the influences that created it is admirable impressionism...

...While in certain cases the justice of this has been beyond question, in others the decision has certainly been in favor of the visitors to such an extent that, while not wishing to be ungracious, we could desire a little more of that quality of self-assertiveness which is usually not lacking in Americans...

...With these records of accomplishment, there is every reason for American artists to remain in America and interpret the hope of our large and varied nation...

...The reasons are—and they are not paradoxical though superficially they may seem so— first, that there is a little too much modesty in advancing the merits of American artists and, second, that of recent years the prevailing character of their work has been too critical and lacking in that joyous apprecia596 THE COMMONWEAL October 15, 1930 tion and creativeness that the tired man of affairs naturally expects of art...

...one that is not now boldly enough recognized, from timidity, perhaps, in comparing it with foreign traditions that have been longer in the field, and from the transient critical phase we have noted, in which artists have been especially concerned with divorcing themselves from any tradition...

...Twachtman, Davies and Sargent are the flowers of this period...

...While in the North in colonial times we derived from transplanted English influences, and in the South and West, from French and Spanish, our very first America-born painters of note, Copley and Stuart, West and Peale, already showed a marked character peculiarly American...

...This may have been a brave attitude, this facing the worst and putting it down unvarnished, but bravery is not enough...

...The fact remains that this mutuality of interests and work is and always has been encouraging, as much to the artist as the same sort of thing is to the business man in his sphere...

...Yet all of them, with the exception of Whistler, returned to their native land, and their mature work is unquestionably American with the same characteristics that stamped the works of the earliest American artists...

...A new phase should follow—a flowering of an art beyond criticism, appreciative of the beauties and the possibilities of beauty in its world...