Returning to the Real
RAYNOR, VIVIEN
On Art RETURNING TO THE REAL BY VIVIEN RAYNOR There is something quite biblical about the story of modern art. It is, essentially, an account of flagging patriarchal powers, with the enfeebled...
...Frequently outlined in blue, they are all assigned the same knobby, comic-strip hands and long narrow feet...
...A carpet measuring 12 by 13 feet, it is made of wool that was sheared, spun and dyed by Zeruah Higley Guernsey of Vermont...
...For Neel as for her 19th-century predecessors, character is concentrated in the face...
...Supposedly, modern art has done much to aid our appreciation of old art, but I would say modern deprivation has done even more...
...The joint portrait of the artist and her husband-to-be is outstanding, as is the study of one fat puppy leaning on another, both with bleary blue eyes...
...Yet it is a salutary exercise to take a close look at the portraits, because some of the faces give hints as to why things didn't quite work out...
...Despite the auspicious beginnings by the limners, it has not been held in high esteem here, being considered in this century at any rate an overly bourgeois manifestation...
...Whether floral or geometric in design, the variety is amazing, and these grand creations have none of the busyness than can afflict folk art...
...About seven feet long, it is shaped like an orange segment, curved side uppermost, and shows Eunice leaning forward like a cat whose attention has been riveted by something happening outside a window...
...Mainly an essay in rich browns and beiges, relieved by touches of pink and blue, the composition comes from the Metropolitan Museum...
...Nudes get longer shrift, as in a study of John Perrault, the Village Voice art critic, whose bodily hair and genitals are, maybe, too thoroughly explored...
...Intellectual or underprivileged, her subjects are all invested with a large-headed, large-eyed intensity as well as a kind of anxiety that one suspects not all of them harbor...
...It is, in fact, the joyous narrowness of their emotional range that makes their art so attractive...
...Though her figures are often quite interestingly placed in the canvas, they are usually dispatched rapidly and sometimes crudely...
...Neel is something of a New York institution...
...Apart from its obvious kinship with the Noble Savage school of thought, this theory is contradicted by the work itself...
...Still, one likes to think that esthetic hardship is not a prerequisite for admiring quilts, and that they were regarded as works of genius even by their makers and possessors...
...A more frightening group of zipper-mouthed, cold-eyed small businessmen would be hard to muster...
...By all accounts a vigorous and interesting personality, she has always specialized in portraits, even during the '50s, when figurative painting in general was in abeyance...
...Furthermore, given the full domestic load still being carried by women in the mid-19th century, when most of this needlework was done, the profusion of their sideline accomplishments is staggering...
...A less exotic but still important concubine for Europe was its own folk art, whose charms were also discovered toward the end of the 19th century...
...The whole composition is electrified by the way her head interrupts the molding along the top, while her left hand is extended sideways to rest on a book...
...he becomes engrossed in mapping the scene before him, aiming apparently for neatness and completeness with the calculating eye of a child...
...Yet, for all her avidity, she tends to deliver personalities that have been leveled somehow by her own democratic view of people...
...If one can resist their quaintness, it is not too hard to see these people as contemporaries of the crowd that slaughtered the buffalo and whole species of birds, denuded the land, and nearly exterminated the natives...
...Now almost all collected, its facsimiles have become a staple for department stores and decorators' showrooms...
...Though the folk art of white Americans was not "discovered" until the 1920s, again artists—notably Elie Nadelman, Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth—led the way for the collectors...
...But it is difficult to tell this from the exquisite objects they and their womenfolk made and the coziness overall...
...The show's installation was designed by the Whitney's architect, Marcel Breuer, and it functions as a maze, with objects displayed fairly close together in a suitably intimate way...
...So it seems pertinent to add a postscript about the Alice Neel retrospective on display at the Whitney during the folk art show...
...Hung as high as it would be on a boat, the scene is completed at both ends by flourishes of carved foliage...
...Perhaps it was the very emotional limitations of such work that delayed its admission to the higher realm of creativity...
...Perspective is the first frill to be shed by primitives, causing one to speculate on the possible unnaturalness of that accomplishment...
...The show is supplemented by a fully illustrated book that provides background for the art, most of it done in the northeastern states between 1776 and 1876...
...None of the numerous attempts to define the subject has been entirely satisfactory, least of all the proposition that the practitioners' lack of academic training made theirs an art of expression rather than description...
...Probably it is a measure more of realism's position than hers that she should have had her first museum retrospective at the age of 74...
...The sternboard of the Eunice H. Adams, a New Bedford whaler, is a masterpiece...
...It is, essentially, an account of flagging patriarchal powers, with the enfeebled West going in unto the "primitive" Negro and Polynesian cultures to beget 20th-century painting and sculpture...
...For if there is one thing the early Americans were obsessed with, it was describing people, property and the nature they had tamed—and in a spirit of pride in accomplishment...
...An exception is Stuart Mott, the millionaire philanthropist, who posed for her in a kilt...
...The Flowering of American Folk Art"?which, after closing at the Whitney March 24, is scheduled to travel to Richmond and San Francisco—does not so much establish a precedent as redirect attention, in a Bicentennial spirit, to the original work...
...Conversely, its failure to tell the whole truth is what makes it so popular today...
...Paradoxically, innocence of technique and pictorial devices preserves an artist from self-consciousness...
...It is a pretty fair cross-section—the Germanic contribution, especially that of the Men-nonites, is remarkable—but more Shaker work and more sensational examples of scrimshaw would have been welcome...
...Considering the whole gamut of world art, it seems hardly more than an Italian aberration of relatively limited influence and of only a few centuries' duration...
...Of course, only those who sew seriously can appreciate the expertise of the craftsmanship, but I was impressed by the near-invisibility of the quilting stitches and by the ingenuity that had gone into their complex spiral and serpentine formations...
...Excluding high seas pictures, where terror and engulfing waves were almost mandatory, the sun shone continuously on the colonists...
...It is an eloquent reminder of the time when the country represented a fresh start for the world, a chance—for Europeans at least—to reenter Eden, or so the public relations men of the time made it seem...
...Neel seizes ravenously on the significant details of a face, approaching caricature at times...
...Aside from a large selection of watercolors, drawings and oils, there are beautiful examples of embroidery, painted furniture, domestic utensils, trade signs and so forth, labeled where necessary with reference to their ethnic and religious origins...
...The idea of everyday objects being both beautiful and functional is virtually unimaginable for us, except when it comes to heavy industrial equipment, airplanes and modern weaponry, much of which is as esthetically satisfying as it is efficient...
...The drawing is weirdly accurate...
...Refreshing and interesting in themselves, these bright paintings made a nice historical complement to the folk art...
...We are apparently less complacent than our metaphorical forebears, but then we have even less to be complacent about...
...their livestock prospered and they enjoyed a lovely feeling of spaciousness...
...It must in any case be many years since 60 or so faces have glared from the walls of a major museum...
...Placed off-center and against a white ground, she is dressed in blue and wears a red flower in her smooth dark hair...
...Among the first to be inspired by it were Gauguin, before he retired to Polynesia, and Kandinsky a few years later...
...For me the stars were the carvers of bird decoys, weathervanes and figureheads, and the quilt makers...
...She then stitched the yarn to homespun squares in designs of leaves, flowers and animals...
...Interestingly, she paints black men more sedately and sensitively, and for some reason Andy Warhol brought out in her an awareness that is almost mystical...
...HAT PORTRAITURE supplies a special aspect of truth has not done much for its reputation as an art...
...For all its fashionableness, American folk art can still be a poignant experience...
...This pink and silvery figurehead of Pop sits, eyes closed and naked to the waist, exhibiting the stigmata on his midriff, where he was shot nearly to death back in the '60s...
...Described in the catalogue as "prejudiced in favor of bohemian-ism," the artist paints writers, other artists, intellectuals, and members of the counterculture and the third world...
...However leisured the author of the "Bayeux Tapestry of American needlework," the two years required to put it together is some record...
...and while the painters could not call upon the principles of perspective for floorboards, most of the time they had no trouble with the placement of features...
...Though now revered as charming manifestations of artistic naivete, these faces are much more impressive when approached as the social documents they really are...
Vol. 57 • March 1974 • No. 6
