ART

...With millions to spend on a Rembrandt, the museum has been anything but spendthrift on American art-even where an artist of Eakins' stature is concerned...

...This paucity of critical literature is reflected in the fact that there now exist no comprehensive and readily available studies of our major artists -Copley, Eakins, Ryder, to name only the most obvious-which can be given serious credence...

...Some loans from private collectors and other museums have helped fill the gaps, but the exhibition relies mainly on the Met's own happenstance resources-and clearly shows it...

...In lieu of an intelligible policy, the Met has instead long sequestered the bulk of the collection in its apparently bottomless storage vaults...

...Rare are the artists-and rarer still the individual paintings-that capture the public imagination and impose themselves as a familiar and meaningful symbol...

...The exhibition currently at the Metropolitan Museum would seem to boast an ambition almost immoderate to judge from its title-"Three Centuries of American Painting"-but it turns out to be, in all but physical terms, a fairly modest and conventional survey...

...No catalogue of the show itself has been issued...

...I want, in a subsequent article, to deal with these catalogues, and with the esthetic and museological principles on which they are based, and will therefore leave the discussion of particular pictures for that occasion...

...And such specialized, mainly academic studies as do exist are rarely, if ever, subjected to the kind of critical scrutiny that yields a useful clarification of esthetic values...

...Even a masterpiece on the order of Mobv Dick has been recovered as such only in our own century...

...But that is always the trouble: Along with the delights, which are, in the nature of things, relatively few, are the plethora of banalities and mis-directed aspirations, the historical curiosities which tend-because of their size and number-to distract us from real achievements...

...A good case can be made for the view that the greatest American paintings are, in fact, portraits...

...A culture like our own, devoid of longstanding esthetic traditions and profoundly suspicious of them, is constantly absorbing artistic devices, ideas and strategerns from every available source, and pitting them against the hard, resistant surface of native experience...

...This sad state of affairs has little or nothing to do with the actual merit of the pictures in question...

...The chief obstacle, certainly, to a just appreciation of this painting has been the assumption that it could rightfully be evaluated in terms of its European counterparts...

...the often preposterous overvaluation-now accorded even the most indifferent works of Hawthorne, Melville and James is a phenomenon of recent decades...

...This will come as a shock to frequenters of the museum who for years have been starved of anything but a token representation of this collection...

...In practice this has meant judging American painting by French standards...

...From the moment that modernism breached the American imagination, however, this tendency to give priority to life over art met with a really powerful antagonist for the first time...

...One is therefore afforded an absorbing historical spectacle even where the esthetic quotient is not in the ascendancy, and American exhibitions tend to capitalize on this possibility-often to their detriment...

...Even lesser artists like Bierstadt and Church seem, in their vast panoramic landscapes, to have wanted to compete less with the landscape genre than with the land itself in all its physical glories...

...Hence one's pleasure in this event is real but constantly under threat of erosion from pictures that are little more than indifferently executed documents...

...To be sure, such shows can often be great fun for the extra-artistic attractions they hold...

...One's impression of this embarrassment, which at times borders on outright indifference, has been reinforced by observing the number of important pictures by first-rate artists that have come on the market in recent years and toward which the curatorial staff of the Met has scarcely cast a glance...

...If not the largest single holder of American painting, the Met is certainly one of the few institutions to collect it on an immense scale...

...It is the kind of exhibition that places the spectator in the position of a bird-watcher...

...And it is well to remember that our writers once suffered a similar neglect...

...The veneration-indeed...

...In other words, the American artist has characteristically sought to measure his art against life, rather than other art, and his work often bears witness to the doubts and defeats which such an heroic, if at times foolhardy, aspiration brings in its wake...

...For the moment, however, it might be useful to dwell on some of the features of American painting itself, and particularly on the ways in which its involvement with American life has given it a character somewhat different from art of comparable quality in the principal European schools...

...Even an artist as well-grounded in European traditions as Eakins staked everything on his ability to penetrate this obdurate surface, and thereby produce an art that was sufficiently tough-minded to hold its own amidst the very realities it sought to encompass...

...That few American painters can survive such a test is not, however, the wholesale condemnation that it is sometimes taken to be...

...For it was the strength of modernism to insist on the reversal of these priorities...

...In the process a quite different amalgam is formed, and to examine it for evidences of French taste is as misleading as it would be to look for traces of Zola in James or Crane...

...Small wonder, then, that this survey of "Three Centuries of American Painting" is, though quantitatively immense, a rather patchy affair in artistic quality...

...Our painters still await not only a Matthiessen, an Arvin or a Bewley to bring their special qualities to light but also-and perhaps of even greater importance at this stage of our ignorance-a Van Wyck Brooks who could vividly project an entire history of what remains for most of us a world of shadows and half-glimpsed events...

...Until recent decades, our painting had been much occupied with the depiction of manners, custom and dress, with the discovery and glorification of the American landscape, and with portraiture...

...His attention must be continuously alert to his avowed interest, presuming that interest to be an artistic one, while his energies are often dissipated in the minutiae that impinge from every side...

...It contains some delightful things, and a scrupulous eye can carve out of this mountain of pictures a small jewel of an exhibition...

...One has had the impression all along that its American collection has been a distinct embarrassment to a museum which acquired it by virtue of certain social accidents in its past history and which has never really known what to make of it...

...Votaries of current modes strut their hour upon the stage of the mass media, and thus catch our eye for the duration of their passing fame, but they are soon eclipsed by their successors-hostages to fashion rather than beneficiaries of genuine appreciation...

...Moreover, the exact point of the exhibition is somewhat obscure...

...Everything that had thitherto remained implicit and assumed in the European tradition was made explicit and self-conscious, and the American artist was thereby required, virtually for the first time, to recognize that art, no less than life, exerted its own inner necessities...

...ON ART By Hilton Kramer A World of Shadows Taken in its entire historical sweep, from Colonial times down, say, to the day before yesterday, American painting cannot be said to have lodged itself, even in the minds of those who pay attention to such matters, as a vital image in our native consciousness...

...It is thus in keeping with the museum's generally muddled policy in this department that its first major effort in years should be overshadowed by incongruities of this sort...

...But the critical movement which has restored the classics of American literature to their rightful position in our national culture has had no counterpart in the visual arts...

...One could find them perhaps, but they would tell us very little about the object at hand...

...last month's Bulletin reports holdings in excess of l,250 pictures...

...For the conventions of French art, even where they play an explicit role in the development of a particular American painter, are usually only one term in a dialectic that seeks to draw upon American experience as well...

...The result of this murky critical atmosphere can be seen in any moderately ambitious exhibition which undertakes to show us what, exactly, American painting consists of: Good painters co-exist with the bad in a kind of easy-going cultural fraternity whose principles of admission are anything but esthetic...

...If this lack of differentiation seems more appropriate to nature than to a museum, it must be said that it is nothing new to the Metropolitan so far as American painting is concerned...

...What have been published are, at long last, the first installments of the Met's own catalogues of its American collection-publications made possible by a grant from the Ford Foundation...

...Presumably the exhibition has been mounted to publicize these catalogues, which are sure to have a lively sale, but owing to the borrowed pictures in the show and the greater comprehensiveness of these new publications, there is no exact correspondence between the volumes at hand and the pictures on the walls...