Footnotes for Book American Visions the Epic History of Art in Americans

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American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America

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By ROBERT HUGHES

Alfred A. Knopf

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O MY AMERICA, MY NEW FOUNDE State

I accept lived and worked in the United States of America for a little more than a quarter of a century now, without becoming an American citizen. For reasons that take null (and everything) to practise with this book, I remain an Australian denizen, and thus have the condition of a resident alien, a green-carte holder. We resident aliens-the very term suggests a small Martian colony-have therefore missed out on one of the cadre American experiences, that of officially becoming someone else: becoming American, starting over, leaving behind what you one time were. Nearly anybody in America bears the marks of this in his or her witting life, and carries traces of it deep in ancestral lore and recollection. For anybody in America except American Indians, the mutual condition is being, at one'south near or far origins, from somewhere else: England or Ireland or Africa, Germany, Russian federation, Red china, Italy, Mexico, or whatever one of a hundred other places that accept contributed to the vast American mix. (And the anthropological evidence suggests that even the American Indians were immigrants besides, having made their manner across the Bering Strait from eastern Asia some 10,000 to 14,000 years ago-though this is vehemently disputed by the Indians themselves.)

It is this background which gives a item bandage to the encyclopedic museums of America, of which the greatest is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a place I have visited maybe thirty times a year for twenty-five years and still non come to the end of. One thinks of its nearest English language equivalent, the British Museum, as existence (at its origins) a vast repository of imperial plunder, brought from the four corners of the globe to confirm and expand the sense of Englishness. The conventional left-wing view of the Met, in the 1970s, was like: it was seen every bit the purple treasure-house into which the sacred and secular images of other cultures-European, African, South American, Oceanian, Japanese, Chinese, Middle Eastern-had been hoovered by the prodigious suction of American majuscule, to confirm American greatness. There is some truth in this, just not the whole truth. In its seventeen acres of exhibition space, let alone its storage, the Met keeps millions of objects, from New Guinean wooden totems to five-ton black basalt Egyptian sarcophagi, from Mantegna prints to carved human being femurs, from an entire Castilian Renaissance courtyard to Yoruba helmet-masks and George Stubbs horses. Anything fabricated with esthetic intentions by anyone, anywhere, at any time, falls within its purview. As a outcome, it is an extraordinary crystallization of the variety of American origins: there can exist few Americans who can't find some instance of the art of their ancestors in it. Somewhere within the American museum at that place is always a small buried image of the immigrant getting off the gunkhole with his baggage, a bit of the Old World entering the New: boots, a Bible-or twenty-vii Rembrandts. The fact of immigration lies behind America'due south intense piety nigh the past (which coexists, on other levels, with a dreadful and puzzling indifference to its lessons); in America the past becomes totemic, and is always in a hard human relationship to America'due south central myth of progress and renovation, unless it can be marshaled-as in the museum-equally proof of progress.

Along with this, considering the New Globe really was new (at least to its European conquerors and settlers), goes a passionate belief in reinvention and in the American ability to make things upward as yous get forth. Both are stiff urges, and they seem to grow out of a mutual root: the inextricably twined feelings of freedom and nostalgia which lie at the heart of the immigrant experience and are epitomized in America, to this mean solar day, as in no other country. A culture raised on immigration cannot escape feelings of alienness, and must transcend them in ii possible ways: by concentration on "identity," origins, and the past, or by faith in newness equally a value in itself. No Europeans felt well-nigh the Old in quite the same fashion Americans came to, and none believed as intensely in the New. Both are massively present in the story of American fine art, a story that begins weakly and derivatively in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and acquires such seemingly irrefutable power by the stop of the twentieth. In this way, the visual culture of America, oscillating betwixt dependence and invention, tells a part of the American story; it is a lens through which one can see in role some (not all) of the answers to Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur'due south well-known question, posed in the eighteenth century: "What, then, is the American, this new homo?"

* * * * *

The folk tradition in America only came to be valued when it was almost gone. Today, America has 260 million people merely almost no folk. The forms of folk art were diluted or destroyed-and then "revived" every bit tourist goods or nostalgic images-by the inexorable pressures of the tardily nineteenth and twentieth centuries: store-buying, industrial production, the impaction of cities, historical self-awareness. Today, the "high art" view of folk art is tinged with beneficial condescension: here it is, the innocent social birdsong of early on America. Merely some kinds of art made in Utopian immigrant communities were not like that at all. A remarkable example is the Amish quilt.

The beginning Amish arrived in Pennsylvania in 1737. They were a religious offshoot of the Swiss Anabaptists, and took their proper noun from their inspired leader, Jacob Amman. They believed in a complete separation of church and state, in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, and in the pacifist communism sketched in the Sermon on the Mount. They were "primitive," literal-minded in their approach to Scripture, and fiercely conservative. "The one-time is the best," an Amish saying went, "and the new is of the Devil." Their Ordnung, or codex of rules, covered an enormous range of detail and behavior, including the abstention of graven images, in accordance with Scripture. But although they shunned representation, they did have a practical art form, which they did non bring with them from Europe; it grew in America, produced its finest results in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and was entirely made by Amish women. This was the quilt.

To brand a quilt you take three pieces of cloth-top, lesser, and filling in between-and stitch them together to make a kind of padded blanket. This is a particularly, if non uniquely, American form, an art based on modular arrangements, intricate geometry, luscious colors-and salvage, not-wasting, "making exercise." This frugality grew out of religious belief, and the early conditions of American life, in which most cloth had to be imported and so was expensive. Every household worthy of the name had its scrap pocketbook: in 1651 a Boston shopkeeper listed in his inventory "black Turky tamet, linsie woolsie, broadcloth, tamy cheny, adretto, herico Italiano, distressing pilus coloured Italiano, say, cherry satinesco tufted The netherlands," and offcuts of these imports would end upwards under many a sewing table, the bit stuff of quilts to come up. But the finest American quilts, the designs done by the Lancaster Amish, belong to the fourth dimension of evidently American manufactured fabric. The Amish used no patterns or scraps with whatever preexisting design: they assembled blocks of store-bought, uniformly colored wool, bought past the yard, and from them created America'southward first major abstract art. They seem to prophesy the explicit geometry of some American art in the 1960s and 1970s-Sol Lewitt's grids, Frank Stella's concentric squares, and the blocks of muted, saturated color deployed by Brice Marden. A soft, swaddling Minimalism, in which one recognizes a spareness of design just pulled back from dogmatic rigor by its inventive quirks, a magnificent sobriety of color, and a truly human sense of calibration. The austerity of the Amish center-square and diamond-in-the-square designs (Effigy 28) is intensely conservative, but it also evokes the words of the patron saint of later American Minimalism, Advertizement Reinhardt:

The creative process is always an bookish routine and sacred procedure. Everything is prescribed and proscribed. Only in this way is in that location no grasping or clinging to anything. Only a standard class can be imageless, but a stereotyped image tin be formless, only a formulaized fine art tin can exist formulaless.

In 1774 another group of religious Utopians arrived in New York. It was tiny, consisting of a determined and charismatic leader, "Mother" Ann Lee, and eight followers. They would receive the nickname of "Shakers," from their shivering community dances that looked so odd to outside observers. They, however, called themselves the "United Society of Believers in Christ'due south Second Actualization." This miniature sect would ramify and increase over the next seventy-v years, only to go into a sharp turn down by the end of the nineteenth century; but at the high tide of the motility, around 1850, there were probably 150,000 practicing Shakers in America.

Past the end of the 1780s, their first customs near Albany had created missions, or "families," in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Though Female parent Ann died in 1784, the Shaker faith rode a wave of religious revivalism that followed the American Revolution. The northernmost Shaker community was founded in 1794, at Sabbathday Lake in Maine. Today, it is a museum unto itself-its meetinghouse and associated buildings even so stand up, but the community is down to eight people. Unlike the Quakers, they took no office in public life. They wished only to exist left lone. They were self-sufficient. Almost communities bought nada from "the world" except saccharide, common salt, molasses, and raw metal.

Some Shakers were excellent craftsmen, and through the medium of their handwork-mostly furniture-they came to influence American civilization more strongly than any grouping of Utopian religious "seekers" since the Puritans. Their issue, yet, was delayed. Shaker esthetic principles did not have much resonance exterior the circle of the "aware" until the twentieth century, when the purity and strict functional thought entailed in Shaker design was adopted, equally ancestors frequently are in America, as a precursor of modernist rationality. Why was it, over a long period during which "mainstream" American design looked to Chippendale and Sheraton and moved gradually into the florid and often congested exuberance of the 1850s, that Shaker article of furniture kept its bareness to the eye, its foursquare beauty? The answer has to be sought in the Shakers' divergence from other Americans-their religious beliefs.

Female parent Ann Lee, the daughter of a Lancashire blacksmith, had been caught up in the corking movement of working-form religious "enthusiasm" of mid-eighteenth-century England. Like hundreds of thousands of others, she believed in direct revelation, not the rites and formality of the Anglican Church building. Inspired past a vision, she believed the Kingdom of God was not to be plant in the official Church. It dwelled in each individual soul. The parousia, or Second Coming of Christ, would not happen with public grandeur and clouds of celebrity; information technology was immanent inside each believing man, woman, and child. When the millennium came, which Ann Lee'south followers expected it to exercise at whatever moment, it would be an internal event. Only it required the right weather: humility, community, and remoteness from the "worldly."

The rules of Shakerism included a strictly observed equality of the sexes, and an equally strict celibacy. The sect could simply expand by conversion. In the New Jerusalem there could exist no mine and thine, no masters or servants. Every particular of life in the communities was enlaced by rules, the so-called Millennial Laws, which governed an infinity of matters from how to finish a workbench top to the right fashion of climbing stairs in segregated society.

Once these conditions were met, the most ordinary life of work could fill up with spiritual meaning, equally the indwelling of Christ took hold. Hence the Shaker emphasis on the twin ideas of "unity and simplicity." One fostered the other: unity, because the cohesion of the sect discouraged vanity and zipper to the world, fostered simplicity, the willing detachment from egotism and ambition that left the soul clear to be occupied by Christ. This applied to all aspects of Shaker life, and is implicit in their craftwork. "Hands to work," said a Shaker motto, "and hearts to God."

The Shakers did not decline innovation-which made them very different from more conservative groups, like the Amish. They were remarkably ingenious, inventing a number of things so mutual by now that we tend to presume they have always been around: the clothespin, for example, the flat broom (which swept better than the traditional round besom), and the washing machine. Laborsaving devices freed the soul; they left more time for prayer. The Shakers were the first Americans to express a link between piety and technology. They would not exist the terminal. They were a bridge between early rural America, the America of the eighteenth century, and the future America of industry, process, and analysis. But industrialization doomed the movement: past pulling so many Americans off the farms and into the city, it dried upwards the Shakers' main source of futurity converts; and their feminist God, unlike the divine patriarch of the Amish and Hutterites, had forbidden them to beget new ones.

The nuances of Shaker beliefs were not, of course, self-evident to those outside their faith, who oftentimes viewed them as cranks. Charles Dickens, visiting the community at Mountain Lebanon in New York in 1842, saw only "such very wooden men," no more sympathetic than "figure-heads of ships." Their shaking dance he judged (without seeing it) to be "a preposterous sort of trot . . . unspeakably absurd." The blank interiors they lived in reminded him of the soul-killing nineteenth-century workhouses he loathed:

Nosotros walked into a grim room, where several grim hats were hanging on grim pegs, and the time was grimly told past a grim clock, which uttered every tick with a kind of struggle, as if information technology broke the grim silence reluctantly, and nether protestation. Ranged against the wall were six or eight potent, high-backed chairs, and they partook then strongly of the general grimness, that one would much rather have saturday on the floor than incurred the smallest obligation to any of them.

What would Dickens's reaction have been if the future sale price of those grim chairs had been revealed to him? Disbelief, no doubtfulness. Only he had arrived in Mount Lebanese republic at the apex of the Shaker fashion's development, a menses which lasted roughly from 1820 to 1850. Earlier Shaker work tends to exist painted (with milk-based pigment) and the colors were brighter than we think-mustard xanthous, leaf green, heaven blueish (which has darkened over time, robbing the woodwork of the Sabbathday Lake meeting hall of its heavenly symbolism) and a dense earthen red. But "high" Shaker furniture preferred the natural grain of the wood, and sometimes sought highly decorative contrasts just on the border of worldliness: some makers were particularly fond of tiger maple, with its flamboyant striped grain contrasting with clear chestnut, birch, or fruitwoods. Decoration is kept to the minimum: a discreet ogee molding or perhaps a cove to cease the top of a breast, an elegant taper to a turned leg. Turning, within limits, was much used; the slender sticks of a chair-dorsum may end in pointed finials, and the tapered mushroom-cap peg for hanging hats or chairs on is so much a hallmark of the style that mail-gild suppliers sell them to American do-information technology-yourselfers by the cartload. But in principle, in that location is no decoration in Shaker piece of work that does not arise from the integral nature of its planing and jointing. Everything depends on profile, proportion, and lightness, the latter quality reinforced in some chairs by openwork caning, which lets so much "air" into the frame that the piece seems nearly volatile. A "classic" Shaker chair of this type (Figure 29), capable of supporting a two-hundred-pound man, may weigh no more than iii or four pounds. The craftsmen and -women (for there was no gender sectionalisation in Shaker carpentry) shunned all carved ornament and all painted figures. They abhorred the kind of faux finishes (imitation wood grain and the similar) that figured and then prominently among the Pennsylvania Dutch. Merely movable furniture could be varnished. Only the oval boxes known every bit "nice boxes" could be stained red or yellow. All elements-except curved rockers and sometimes the back rail of chairs-were rectilinear, "on the foursquare," as a sign of probity. Furniture, a Quaker edict had declared, ought to be "apparently and of one color, without swelling works" (such every bit cabriole legs, curved splats, or bombé fronts); and no craftsmen carried this out more strictly than the Shakers.

1997 past Robert Hughes

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/hughes-visions.html?scp=104&sq=lens+moment&st=cse

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