On Art

...Society had lost interest in the big themes of the previous century, so sculptors...

...Tom Armstrong, the museum's director, sees a unity in this lack of unity...

...is definable only in the most negative and wooliest of terms...

...Art is now less for its own sake than for the sake of the egos creating it and the written interpretations on which it depends...

...Even the gratification that art gives has become twisted: As the critic Walter Benjamin remarked back in the '30s, "Self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an esthetic pleasure of the first order...

...This critical doctrine is of course ideally suited to modernism, where democracy and the primacy of the individual imagination have been considered prerequisites...

...Confronting the limpness of 20th century esthetic imagery in surveys like the Whitney's, there is no missing the sense of a rug being pulled out from under civilization...

...Even as a concept, 200 Years of American Sculpture is a challenge...

...Sculpture had an altogether harder time than painting gaining the freedom to be seen in its own right...

...who, largely because of economics, have always been more closely tied to patrons' whims than painters...

...James Hampton, the artist, was a janitor for the General Services Administration in Washington and a very religious man, given to visions...

...But until native artists began training abroad, American sculpture was dominated by visitors like Houdon and a variety of Italians...

...The seven curators who mounted the show have provided labels...

...T URNing to the art of our own era is a greater letdown than might have been expected...

...The installation bears this out: The 20th century has been given most of the space, with the 18th and 19th centuries, including aboriginal and folk art, compressed into one floor...

...of movements waxing, waning, combining with or growing out of each other...

...Gaudens, Daniel Chester French, George Gray Barnard, Frederick MacMonnies, Frederic Remington and Charles Russell...

...Using a garage as a studio, he worked on the throne from 1950 until his death in 1964 at the age of 55, and held solitary services before it...

...The first group of expatriates, Horatio Greenough, Hiram Powers and Thomas Crawford, went to Italy in the 1820s and '30s, setting a precedent that was broken only by the later waves who went to France...

...coalesces into a frontal mass of squarish and winged shapes, and could be someone's dream of Aztec treasure...

...In his forward to the volume accompanying the exhibition and sharing its name (David Godine, 350 pp., $35.00, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection), he writes: "The exhibition and book represent the creative results of the vision and imagination of artists in a country whose strength has been based on respect for the contributions of each individual...

...As is usual with obsessive, untutored art, the impact of Hampton s glistening mass is both moving and vaguely alarming...

...But the show is more than an homage to individualism...

...Although the pioneering sculptors were still confined to wood at the beginning of the 19th century, that didn't deter them from abandoning the tradition of simplicity and mimicking the sophisticated effects of stone with odd, likeable results...

...One wonders if much of the Victorian excess that Americans subsequently produced can't be blamed on the virtuoso carvers of Italy who taught them...

...Small wonder that The Greek Slave made the artist internationally famous...

...Others refused to forsake art for design and tried to change the rules of the game by making studies of humble subjects, but starkness and severity hardly magnetized the big spenders...

...The display begins on the ground floor with The Hampton Throne, a room-filling assemblage of tables, pedestals and chairs, covered with small found items such as vases and light bulbs, and all encrusted with gold and silver foil...

...Both were Paris-trained and fine modelers...

...Dotty, cruel and hypocritical as the beliefs of the 19th century were, at least belief existed and it proved irreplaceable...

...The almost life-sized skeletal figure, symbolizing the momentary triumph, before the Resurrection, of death over life, sits in the handcart once used to pull it in Holy Week processions...

...Armstrong's statement suggests that what were formerly regarded merely as the circumstances for producing art...

...The show has rectified the neglect and, to some extent, made it understandable...

...No matter how conditioned one is to art for its own sake, it is impossible to ignore the aimlessness of modernism...

...However much it absorbs from the rest of the world, this contrariness results in the culture remaining as essentially separate spiritually as it is geographically...

...Paul Manship weathered the storm very successfully, by means of decorative stylization...

...tried to accommodate the new tastes...

...There is rarely a moment in the contemporary rooms of the Whitney show when one can forget the price paid for creative freedom...

...The common thread in American art is for him a kind of Whitmanian democratic individualism...

...The museum chose this medium to celebrate the nation's birthday presumably because it has been so neglected as a field of study...

...America, its sculpture seems to say, is a battleground for the robust against the ultra-refined, the earnest against the facetious, and so on through a parade of opposites...

...And modernism is really what the Whitney exhibition is about...

...No longer definable, since it can be anything from a line painted on the ground to a corridor of mirrors, sculpture has outstripped painting as an exercise in mystification...

...There is nothing childlike, though, about the carved wooden effigy by Jose Ines Herrera, who was active in New Mexico in the late 19th century...

...William Rush, the most "serious" of the lot, was amazingly deft at expressing classical drapery and was an accomplished portraitist...

...Also notable is the polychromed stern-board of a ship, circa 1785, carved in detailed high relief and featuring an Indian with bow, reclining between a living African lion and a dead deer...

...Sculpture trailed painting in its response to the New York Armory revelation of 1913, but it was already reflecting social change, as Daniel Robbins observes in his essay on the 1900-30 period (the best in the book, by the way...

...Unlike a similar span of, say, Gothic or Buddhist sculpture, no overall picture of this slice of the history of art comes to mind...

...Compared with other religious or regional oeuvres, the art of North America lacks a sense of organic development...

...Beside such "innocence," civilization could seem nothing but an overschooled bully...

...Perhaps there is no way of doing so, since what unites it...

...creativity, vision, etc.???should be used as premises for its appreciation and elevated into esthetic principle...

...This could be a recognition of the ever-expanding production of art objects, yet it is more likely a reflection of the Whitney's belief in progress and the show's modernist credo...

...The throne???more like a rambling altar...

...Too much has been jammed into its short life...

...The beautiful relief Arcadia, by Thomas Eakins, is on view too, as are samplings from the production of such stars as Augustus St...

...or finally disabled, depending upon one's view...

...but their useful commentaries still don't provide a handle for this tumultuous manifestation...

...A distraction of this kind unjustly tends to overshadow less sensational gropings toward integrity, especially in the bronzes by Way-land Bartlett and Edmund Steward-son...

...Powers' vision of milky Hellenic womanhood handcuffed is kinky enough, but it would have appeared much less so if it hadn't been so superbly executed, down to the marble manacles around the wrists...

...If the Whitney's effort makes this clear, it will surely turn out to be one of the most important of the Bicentennial inventories...

...Taken with Claes Oldenburg's huge blue Three-Way Plug, Scale A (Soft which menaces it from the lobby, it is a fitting overture to the tossing and turning to come...

...With the arrival of Surrealism, the medium of sculpture was released...

...to judge from its sculpture, American art is a collage of randomly selected elements, many of them distorted versions of European models...

...Together with the folk art and compared to the later outburst of Carrara marble and bronze, most of the native American work included here looks like the relic of national childhood it is usually treated as...

...The Indian collection, consisting chiefly of Northwestern pieces, is no more than a nod to history...

...visually, at least...

...Stewardson's The Bather (1890) is particularly noteworthy for his skill in capturing and expressing the movement of the female torso...

...Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Cubism, Surrealism???and labored to make sense of it all...