In the American Grain
MELLOW, JAMES R.
ON ART By James R. Mellow In the American Grain Two paintings. One of them is hardly a masterpiece, however touching it remains as a personal statement. Nor is it by one of the few great...
...The lone, touchingly awkward figure of a songstress, her hands clasped genteelly before her, stands upon a stage...
...Eakins' painting has all the authority of a master, none of that accidental genius of the amateur...
...There is something a little surreal about the two of them, exposed in their parlor privacy to the broad daylight, with a grassy carpet underneath...
...It has been subjected to the strictest accounting: every blade of grass has been inventoried...
...Nor is it by one of the few great painters in American art...
...This is true, at least, of the sections devoted to painting and sculpture through the 19th century, where the works have been selected not only for historical relevance but for superb quality...
...The mother, her knitting idle in her lap, has been worn smooth and beautiful by grief...
...For all the ambivalence of their attitudes toward American themes, the Pop artists suggest that the tradition is still viable...
...As a realist, however, he is far removed from the simple recitation of fact that makes up a painting like Elmer's...
...It is this that makes Eakins a singular figure in the history of 19th century painting...
...It holds its ground like a determined symbol: the rewards of industry or American business taking its rightful possession of the American landscape...
...The Ashcan School discovered the city...
...Of course, there are exceptions-expatriates like Whistler and Cassati who sought their subject matter abroad, or the Abstract Expressionists who developed a pure abstraction at home...
...But it would be a mistake to say that Eakins eschewed the formal elements in his pursuit of fact...
...One might claim Eakins as the master of the ordinary, if it were possible to breathe into the pejorative meaning of the word a sense of Eakins' rigorous investigations of plain fact...
...There are also the trompe l'oeil painters, Harnett and Peto, emptying out the contents of their bureau drawers-ticket stubs, playing cards, unpaid bills-and tacking them to the walls to make paintings that even today compel Whitney visitors to surreptitiously touch them to see if they are real things...
...Elmer's picture, painted around 1889, is a valuable historic document, whatever other works might be brought forward to round out an appreciation of this New England genre painter, businessman and part-time inventor...
...The documentary painters-Catlin with his neon Indians, Audubon with his birds-form a respectable branch of the tradition...
...Nearby, a doll carriage with its expensive doll has been left next to a black straw hat flung carelessly down onto the lawn...
...the crumpled bouquet trailing off into another...
...To begin with, there is Copley and his portrait gallery of the American Establishment (in both its Tory and its Yankee factions), and the innumerable Peales with their eye-deceiving techniques...
...The bereaved parents, dressed in black, are located in middle ground, sitting on ornate, upholstered parlor chairs...
...A few stripling trees, recently planted about the lawn, barely soften the hard eminence of the house standing on its plot...
...The Concert Singer, however realistic its depiction of a scene from life, is an ingenious formal accomplishment, a balancing act of a few essential forms-the singer against an indeterminate gray-brown space...
...The father, in his black derby, looks stunned and thoughtful...
...Her gown, a heavy fabric in pale blush pink, hangs in crumpled folds, the lace panel at the front sags badly and looks as unkempt as the singer's hair...
...Her features are set down with such scrupulous attention to detail, she seems embalmed for posterity...
...the conductor's hand, clutching a baton, thrust up from one corner...
...If there is a single durable tendency in American art that one can ascribe to the 300 years that the Whitney's exhibition comprises, it is the genius for the factual...
...At the low ebb of realism in America, the regionalists of the '30s portrayed a plain-folks version of America the beautiful and not so beautiful...
...the few colorful assets in its broad green expanse-sprigs of clover, a buttercup, a frail butterfly-have been meticulously recorded...
...These objects look as if they had been just abandoned for only a moment that is now stretching into eternity...
...In the fourth floor installation of contemporary art, though, the need to recognize every current reputation and the imposing scale of the practitioners have resulted in serious overcrowding-even in one of the most spacious gallery areas in New York...
...A bouquet of pink roses, a wilting tribute, lies disordered at her feet...
...Called simply Mourning Picture, it is by Edwin Romanzo Elmer, a little-known 19th century artist rediscovered only 16 years ago...
...A young girl, the deceased, stands in the foreground petting a motionless lamb...
...The entire scene, in its eery stillness, its perfect clarity, embodies Emily Dickinson's line: "After great pain, a formal feeling comes...
...It must be a sad song, affecting her deeply, whether it moves her audience or not...
...Furthermore, it was exhibited framed within an actual door frame with a wooden step projecting from beneath-thus becoming the great-granddaddy of a whole series of contemporary American paintings that incorporate everything from stuffed goats to television sets...
...Every finicky detail of its gothic decoration is drawn in with firm, crisp lines...
...he needed to strip art of any specious glamor until it stood like a pathetic singer in wrinkled finery on a bare stage...
...The other is one of the great set-pieces of American realism, The Concert Singer by Thomas Eakins-a painting so vivid in its detail one might think the artist valued the camera above whole centuries of painterly expression...
...The analogy between the sprawling roses and the dishevelled state of the singer is one of the striking examples of Eakins' mastery...
...Breuer's efforts to provide the ideal conditions for viewing works of art have certainly proved successful in the lower galleries where everything is calm and collected...
...The commonplace and the actual were his defenses against the false values of high art-the grand manner, the operatic tradition in painting...
...The exhibition, handsomely installed in the new quarters designed by Marcel Breuer, is among the best the Museum has mounted in several years...
...The lawn is a miracle of fussiness...
...They are decent, God-fearing people and the loss has struck them suddenly out of a mild blue sky with puffs of white clouds and brilliant sunlight overhead...
...His newspaper has been put aside as he gazes off into the distance...
...In this sense, there is something basically anti-artistic about Eakins' approach...
...A large Larry Rivers, a sizable Al Held and a spread-eagled Robert Indiana, pressed together and bidding for attention along a single wall, defeat the careful planning of the architect...
...What the Whitney exhibition makes abundantly clear is that any future revival of realism in American art will have a long and varied tradition to support it and, in Eakins at least, a genuine master of the style...
...From the Colonial portraitists to the Pop artists there is a gift for reportage, for the documentation of American life, that endures each new wave of European style...
...One begins to wonder about the quality of her song as she stands there, lips parted, her head cocked to one side...
...In Eakins' best work, the formal composition is always an accompaniment to the drama but never the whole act...
...the pale green fronds of a palm leaf cut off in mid-air by the framing edge at the left...
...He is much more the dedicated realist than Courbet, for example, whose talents were better served by formalism than by any attempts at verisimilitude...
...Yet, the interaction of realism and the American scene has had a long and vital history and produced a significant body of work...
...A proud Victorian clapboard house, gun-metal brown, sits upon a trim lawn...
...Appropriately, both of these paintings-so solidly in the American grain-are included in the Whitney Museum's opening exhibition, an extensive survey of American art from the anonymous Colonial limners to the bright new names along Madison Avenue...
...but the room at the top is frenzied...
...He is the great nay-sayer of the modern trend toward the primacy of form and the autonomy of art...
...the Precisionists, American barns and factories...
...Dressed in her Sunday best with an elaborate lace collar, she appears larger than life...
...And there are those realists with a taste for the Romantic who roamed the American landscape: the Hudson River School awed by the grandeur of the Catskills, Bierstadt tackling the Rockies with Germanic precision...
...Even that most French of styles, Impressionism, was imported, duty-free, by artists-lohn Henry Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, Childe Hassam-and applied to the American scene...
...These provide the structural elements of the painting, and their precarious disposition underscores its meaning: the homeliness and frailty of art...
...Poking out from beneath the hem of her dress, her slippers, slightly soiled, turn up at the toes to give her a slightly comical posture...
...Charles Willson Peale's Staircase Group (unfortunately not included in the exhibition), a portrait of his sons Raphaelle and Titian ascending a staircase, was reputed to seem so real to General Washington that he tipped his hat in greeting...
Vol. 49 • November 1966 • No. 22
