A Curator's Morality Tale

...Spencer bi ought a heroic it eccentric, vitality to bear on domesticity Altogether, the first halt ot the exhibition is a disaster redeemed here and there by noteworthy painterly details and bits of historical information It is not until Thomas Eakins appears that one fully appreciates the artistic meagerness of what has gone before Eakins' modernistic simplicity was never more obvious than in his Will Schuster and Blackmail Going Shooting for Rail (1876) This is not just a magnificent canvas, it is a gigantic leap for the art of the nation Standing in the front of a small boat the hunter is about to shoot, while the black, aft, remains alert but at rest against his pole Despite their stark positioning against a background of wetlands painted m Barbizon green, the whole mood of the event is expressed in the placing and drawing of the figures Like performer and accompanist (another of Eakins' themes), they are perfectly attuned to each other Eakins was indeed the country's first great painter, though his older contemporaries Wmslow Homer and Eastman Johnson are not put to shame by him Yet Hills, in arranging the show so that these three are the first mature sensibilities to appear, does great injustice to 19th-century American art Moreover, one marvels at the exclusion of landscape, a major part of the painters' America Of the Hudson River School, only Asher Durand is present, and then in the form of a peddler picture There is no George Inness, and Thomas Moran is the lone exponent of the later Romantic style, with his Slaves Escaping Though the Swamp (1863) Also missing are the numerous painters ot Indian subjects, a curious omission given Hills' sensitivity to the subservient position of blacks in many of the pictures As tor the Civil War...

...Homer's study of bivouacked soldiers...

...Home Sweet Home (1863), does what it can to offset such visions as George Lambdm's maiden kissing her be-trothed's sword Leaving aside the mid-century proliferation of guns, especially in the hands of the inevitable pink boys, there is no mistaking the import of a people coming to its nationalistic, Victorian senses With the postwar boom in trade and industry, the focus shifts to the cities, and with increased wealth, furniture and clothes become very opulent Small wonder, then, that by the '80s American artists had turned to the new rich, whose women were, m their indolence, such natural models Hills contends artists chose to view them in this context, because the mood of a painting had become "more important than moralization or the representation of action " Even Mary Cassatt comes m for oblique censure for showing (in a picture not included in the exhibition) two women "passively' watching theatrical entertainment By the end of the century the upper classes have largely supplanted the common people as art subjects They are endlessly depicted taking tea, making ocean voyages and otherwise passing their leisure time A very swish academism has taken over, too, well exemplified by the large canvases of William Pax-ton and William Merritt Chase Consummate interpreters of the exquisitely bored and dressed, they and then contemporaries were the last of the Renaissance portraitists, dedicated to flattering their patrons That their output has not, on the whole, enjoyed the critical upgrading awarded other previously despised phases in art is due in part to its chilly slickness One suspects, however, that the primary reason is the avidity with which they celebrated the trappings of the rich The etiquette of displaying and coveting wealth has changed drastically, and the artist, now apotheosized, can no longer, even if he wants to, so overtly compliment the privileged All the same, Chase, a legend for speedy virtuosity, looks pretty good here, especially in an impressionistic sketch of children sailing toy boats in Central Park—all grays, greens and whites speckled with sunlight Painted at about the same time, and deriving impetus from Degas, is Stacey Tolman's The Muswale (1887) A modest picture, quiet in color, it is a most sensitive rendering ot musical rapport, heightened by the generous foreground space that leads up to the group playing under the skylight of a studio It makes an appropriate overture to Eakins' The Pathetic Song (1881), whose virtually lifesize singer, standing in a gray luffled dress, is beautifully ht from the side Her intent companions sit at their instruments, photographically out of focus in the shadow It is the last high point in the show The finale is played by the turn-of-the-century social realists, from whom American modernism so circuitously derived Though George Luks, John Sloan and Everett Shinn had their hearts in the right place, it's a shock to see how awful their painting could be Sloan's brushstroke in a 1908 beach scene is gross, and the most to be said of George Bellows' pugilists—m Stag at Sharkey's (1907)—is that he became a much better painter later on And the exclusion of Robert Henri's work makes no sense, because he was the driving force of the Ashcan School and the inheritor, by way of Thomas Anshutz (also missing), of Eakins' ideas on everyday subjects For all its faults, "The Painters' America" may have some value as immunization against Bicentennial boisterousness It gives notice, as well, that notions about the desirability of a people's art are making the rounds again...

...On Art A CURATOR'S MORALITY TALE BY VIVIEN RAYNOR NINETEENTH-century art gets its wrist slapped in "The Painters' America," a show that, after closing at the Whitney November 10, will travel to Houston and Oakland The 117 works were selected by Dr Patricia Hills, a guest curator ot the museum She seems convinced that this 100 years of art history is one vast generation gap, a view that enables her to point out how misguided most of the protagonists were Accordingly, she tells us in the exhibition's catalogue, the America presented by the artists ot the time is simply not the real thing How Hills knows this is not clear, yet she claims the majority dealt with "neither conditions nor events, neither the typical nor the specific [producing instead] an artful blend of tact and fantasy, of reality and dreams ' Their output—she has in mind the genre painting that comprises most of her show?constituted and perpetuated nationalistic and elitist attitudes which are with us still" Novel perspectives on art history are always welcome, even ones tinged with American Maoism Nonetheless, Hills' conception of 19th-century painters as, for all practical purposes, the forerunners of television programers, presupposes some extreme revisionist thinking She herself is not loath to manipulate, for the pictures have been carefully chosen to support her notions of artistic irresponsibility, hardly a difficult feat to perform m this period If all such shows are statements of curatorial bias, this one deserves to be labeled a morality tale", as it stands, the actual title is misleading But since painting continues to flourish both in spite of and because of its patrons, it should not be judged solely by moral standards The anecdotal variety has come and gone quite a few times in the last 300 years, and it has generally been linked with the emergence of a nouveau class—confortable rather than riche In the case of the US, this may have been as much the reflection ot the collective morale?high after deliverance from colonial domination and not yet tempered by a major war Deriving from Dutch and English antecedents, 19th-century American art is small m scale and full of expressive gestures and grimaces Storylines are crammed with extraneous detail and subplots, and the pictures are usually so absorbing that the eye has no time to notice the occasional weaknesses of drawing and composition While stylistically less polished than its European counterpart, American genre is noticeably more genteel, being tree of Hogarthjan chamberpot humor The Civil War is a chronological watershed in the exhibition, with a little less than half ot the included works done before 1861 The outbreak of fighting did bring changes in subject matter, accompanied by greater expertise, but these were by no means immediate For an eternity, it seems, people wanted to be diverted by the jocular view of life —heartwarming scenes ot peddlers unpacking their wares, porcine boys tickling sleeping blacks with straws and all the other country rituals Even the better painters like William Sidney Mount don't stand out in this mass, albeit George Caleb Bingham's Raftsmen Placing Cards (1847) shows a touch of grandeur in the handling of the riverscape Still, serious portrayals of the passing scene were being attempted as early as 1810-12, witness View of Center Square on the 4th July, by Joseph Krimmel, a Phila-delphian born and trained in Germany Yet apparently more typical of the time is the work ot Washington Ailston, the teacher of Samuel F B Morse Though he has been called one of the first painters of fantasy, he is represented here by The Poor Author and the Rich Bookseller (1811), a small study in humiliation that is totally realistic The satirical element in David Claypool Johnston's pictures caused him to be known as "the American Cruickshank," but his work in this show is rather more interesting as a throwback to Colonial primitivism, it displays, too, a nice feeling for color and paint quality The oeuvre of Lilly Martin Spencer, whose other claim to tame was producing 13 children, is unbearably facetious in outlook—Shake Hands' (1854) is the legend tor a picture of a young woman pausing in her cooking to extend a dough-covered hand Even so...