MAKING IT STRAIGHT

I think it of very great importance,” wrote Gouverneur Morris to George Washington in 1790, advising him on how to furnish the presidential mansion, “to fix the taste of our country properly…everything about you should be substantially good and majestically plain, made to endure.” Modern Americans are taught to love luxury, to think of it as a reward for success. Those of the late 18th century were more apt to distrust it as a vice. They associated it with frivolity, decadence–colonial rule. Virtue showed itself in plainness, explicitness, pragmatism, “making do,” an unfussed directness of craftsmanship. There was, as the phrase went, an “American grain.”

Plainness ran deeper than taste. It sometimes grew out of religious conviction–formal severity was built into the Puritan creed, for instance. But it also sprang from the social necessities of American life: the need to make and mend things for oneself, to fit and adapt to local materials. And it acquired a political dimension as metaphor.

This godly plainness, the desire for which was embedded so deep in early American identity, runs through much folk art. It is in the fiercely conservative center-square and diamond-in-the-square Lancaster Amish quilts, with their magnificent sobriety of color–a soft, swaddling minimalism, America’s first major abstract art. And then, of course, there are the Shakers, who reached America in 1774 but whose celebrated furniture attained its apogee of design between 1820 and 1850. “Hands to work,” said a Shaker motto, “hearts to God.” Work was prayer, and nothing “worldly,” meaning ostentatious or decorative, was allowed, beyond a discreet molding to the top of a cabinet or an elegant taper to a turned leg.

The first really significant American portraitist, John Singleton Copley (1738-1815), appealed to these values. The hard, uningratiating realism of his portraits of Boston’s notables–not just the prosperous Tories but dissenters like Samuel Adams and Paul Revere–was more like some French neoclassical painting than like English portraiture of the time. His clients liked Copley in part because everything in his work, from a nailhead in a chair to the exact gleam on red mahogany, was earnestly weighed and measured. In his candor and curiosity, he refused to edit out the warts and wens, the pinched New England lips or even (as several portraits show) the pockmarks that were a common disfigurement in an age before vaccination. Eighteenth century America did not have today’s obsession with the cosmetic.

Copley’s sense of empirical realism would be carried forward by other painters. It wasn’t so long ago that people thought of John James Audubon (1785-1851) as a gifted illustrator, an “ornithological artist”–but he was far more than that. He was a great formal painter with (almost literally, one might say) an eagle eye. To create his great work The Birds of America, four volumes showing 497 species, life-size and engraved in full color on the largest sheets of paper then available, he would shoot each bird and wire up its corpse on a board in an attitude that seemed both aesthetically pleasing and full of information: the bird became a sketch for its own monument.

This steady passion for description and enumeration was shared by other artists very unlike Audubon. The Luminist painter Fitz Hugh Lane, for instance, put great effort into his homages to that complex machine the American ship–as in Boston Harbor, 1855-58. It continued in the uncompromising realism of Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), whose art was built on pragmatic rigor and whose pictures–especially the studies of rowers on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia–are marvels of perspective construction, down to the last ripple and reflection in the water. “A boat,” he remarked, “is the hardest thing I know to put into perspective. It is so much like the human figure, there is something alive about it. It requires a heap of thinking and calculating to build a boat.” Or to paint one, the act of painting being a sort of building.

Under the stress of industrialization and the movement of the center of American life from the country to the city, the presence of the American grain began to fade. It would reappear in art in two ways: as an object of nostalgia or by incorporation into the language of Modernism. The classic example of the first is one of the few pictures that practically every American knows, at least in reproduction: American Gothic, 1930, by the Regionalist painter Grant Wood (1892-1941).

As for the second, the ideal of spareness and plainness as representing something peculiarly American is reflected in some of the exquisitely poetic boxes made by Joseph Cornell (1903-73), such as The Hotel Eden, 1945–whose tiny strict architecture of white compartments suggests an unsullied purity, the spirit of an idealized New England. It exists strongly in some of the work of America’s greatest Modernist sculptor, David Smith (1906-65), particularly in his series of Cubi–welded stainless-steel boxes. One may see it very clearly in the work of a contemporary artist like Martin Puryear, created, at a very high level of craft, in wood.

But the most forceful recapitulation of the Shaker spirit of radical plainness is in the work of the sculptor Donald Judd (1928-94), particularly the polished-aluminum boxes he made in his last years. Judd was the doyen of “high” American Minimalism: inorganic materials, geometric rigidity, a don’t-touch address to the eye alone. His work’s denial of the sensuous is deeply American. Except that in its utter secularity, it represents only the husk of the impulses that lay behind earlier forms of American plainness.