Art: Recognition of a Heritage

After three centuries in the shadow of European art, American painting is at last coming to the center of its own stage. Last year in New York City alone there were an estimated 500 exhibitions of paintings by Americans. This fall’s season is opening with a widespread and impressive array of U.S. interest. The Cincinnati Art Museum is featuring an exhibition of 20th century U.S. realism which it calls “An American Viewpoint”; Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute has hung 121 works in its “American Classics of the 19th Century”; Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum is about to inaugurate an enlarged American wing; the Brooklyn Museum is preparing “The Face of America,” an exhibition of portraits from all periods. This week Manhattan’s Wildenstein gallery opened an exhibition called “The American Vision,” a show based on and selected from TIME’S new book, Three Hundred Years of American Painting, which contains 250 reproductions of paintings in full color, an unprecedented presentation of U.S. art in book form.

From the bullfrog severity of Robert Feke’s The Reverend Thomas Hiscox, painted in 1745, to Loren Maclver’s dew-gentle The Street, done last year, the Wildenstein exhibition is a succession of triumphs. No fewer than 28 major museums in 16 states contributed to the exhibition, and of its 54 canvases more than half are outright masterpieces. Seen in a body, they bring home with tremendous impact the vast and varied achievements of American painting. Said Harris K. Prior, director of the American Federation of Arts, in a foreword to the Wildenstein show: “Americans are finally accepting their art at its face value, as a valid part of a mature culture.”

Subject & Self. American painting is primarily a recurring harvest, not of art traditions but of human endeavors.”Nothing is so poor and melancholy,” Santayana wrote, “as an art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.” American painters in general have turned not to themselves but to the nation, embracing and mirroring its thousand aspects. Charles Willson Peale fought at Princeton and Trenton and wintered at Valley Forge. John James Audubon killed birds in the wilderness not only for models but also to feed his children. Frederic Remington actually rode the Wild West as ranch hand, cook and cavalryman. Grant Wood said that all his best ideas “came while milking a cow.”

The season’s major exhibitions of American art show that American painting, like the country itself, has had its several ages. The 18th century, which gave birth to the nation, was Protestant, pragmatic, rationalistic. Once when a customer complained that Portraitist Gilbert Stuart had failed to capture his wife’s elusive beauty, the artist flushed and grated: “What damned business is this of a portrait painter? You bring him a potato and expect he will paint a peach!” Then the romantic spirit of the 19th century added its profound effect. Toward the end of that century, Albert Pinkham Ryder remarked that an artist “should strive to express his thought and not the surface of it. What avails a storm cloud accurate in form and color if the storm is not therein?” Extending that subjective spirit, Arthur Dove was painting abstractions on a Connecticut farm before the first abstract canvas was done by Wassily Kandinsky in Europe.

Space & Meaning. At midcentury, American art has reached a sort of delta. The leading painters follow a dozen different channels, and each naturally insists that his particular channel is the main one. Fortunately, there is controversy. When two of the nation’s most admired painters can hold and express views as diametrically opposed as those of Mark Tobey and Andrew Wyeth, a healthy state of tension exists. “Multiple space bounded by white lines,” Abstractionist Tobey tells the world without a wink, “symbolizes higher states of consciousness.” And Realist Wyeth replies: “What the subject means is the most important thing.”

Granting that American art stands firmly on its own, how does it compare with Europe’s? National Gallery Director John Walker tackles that question in his introduction to Three Hundred Years of American Painting. “We have produced a school of painting,” he asserts, “which in the past hundred years has been second only to France; today it is challenging even that country for leadership.” This season’s magnificent American exhibitions bid fair to make 1957 a turning point in the nation’s appreciation of that heritage.