SEEKING THE SPIRIT

The U.S. is in many ways the most pious and morally obsessed of nations outside the Islamic world. Recent polls suggest that 96% of Americans believe in a personal God and that 78% of them think their consciousness will survive death and go, after judgment, to heaven or hell. Its earliest colonists in the Northeast–Pilgrims, Puritans, Quakers, “Pennsylvania Dutch”–were all seeking to flee European persecution and corruption (as they saw it) and trying to set up various kinds of religious Utopias. The main tool of Catholic Spain’s colonization in the Southwest was the Franciscan mission. And yet the paradoxical fact is that the U.S. has never produced a substantial body of formal religious art: many churches, many sects, many cults, but pitifully few images of enduring aesthetic value.

Puritanism produced nothing in the way of religious art except some tombstones and a few peculiar carvings, known as spirit stones, meant to repel devils. This wasn’t because the Puritans hated art in principle–they didn’t, as their portraiture, decorated furniture and other artifacts show–but because they disapproved of images of God and the prophets as “popish,” too close to the idolatry they associated with the hated religion of Rome. They were, after all, the direct descendants of the iconoclasts who had destroyed nearly all the medieval art of England. The early New Englanders were people of the Word, not the Image. Truth lived in the Word, but the Image could betray and deceive. Hence, no religious art. There would be religious folk art–of a muted kind. But it is practically impossible to find the face of God the Father anywhere in Anglo-American painting or sculpture before 1900. So the American tendency was for transcendental urges to appear in nondoctrinal ways, linked not to iconography or biblical narrative but to individual visions–which were, of course, often steeped in religious imagery.

The Puritans weren’t alone in their suspicion of the icon. The next wave of settlers in the Northeast, the Quakers, led by William Penn, despised most arts. Music was a distraction, poetry (beyond the simplest hymns) a snare. So the lack of Quaker painting is hardly a surprise, though some artists–most conspicuously Benjamin West–came from Quaker families and left the faith. The only painter who lived and died a Quaker was the Philadelphia “primitive” Edward Hicks (1780-1849), and he felt moral qualms about it.

Folk art, outsider art, call it what you will, has always been one of the traditional American homes of the visionary. Perhaps its single most intense expression in American sculpture–or environment making–was the three-dimensional work assembled between 1950 and 1964 by a Washington janitor named James Hampton, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly. The visionary urge appeared less often in professional art, until Modernism arrived. There are elements of it in the work of Thomas Cole and in the dark, brooding landscapes of Ralph Blakelock (1847-1919), who was to suffer a depressive breakdown and spend the last 20 years of his life in a mental hospital. But the exemplar of the visionary state was Blakelock’s exact contemporary, Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917).

Ryder was an erratic painter, and his reputation rests on perhaps a dozen works, most of which are his famous “marines”–dark, concentrated images of the fishing smacks of his New England coastal youth, pitted against wind and wave. They concentrate the Romantic terrors of seascape; in them Ryder showed he was the Samuel Palmer of Ishmael’s “watery part of the world.” Some of his work, particularly the figure paintings, verged on kitsch, but that only made him seem more like another American visionary, Edgar Allan Poe–so overwrought, yet so influential. Though Ryder was never (in his own view) a Modernist, a succession of American artists from Marsden Hartley to Jackson Pollock and beyond would look up to him as an emblem of aesthetic purity, a holy sage.

Other early American Modernists, like Arthur Dove, explored this landscape mysticism too. This is not surprising, since one of the great influences on Dove, Hartley and others was the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, whose tract Concerning the Spiritual in Art was published in 1912.

Abstract Expressionism, the movement that set American art on the world map after World War II, was to a large extent the product of this deeply implanted instinct for the spiritual and the visionary. Sometimes it was drenched in a yearning for nature as a source of metaphor, as in the pantheistic paintings of Arshile Gorky; sometimes its sources lay hidden in the unconscious, as with Pollock. Except for de Kooning and Franz Kline, most of the Abexers–Gorky, Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Clyfford Still–saw the socially grounded activist art of the 1930s, whether Nativist like the Regionalism of Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton or left-wing Social Realist, as provincial, shallow and irrelevant. “Poor art for poor people,” sniffed Gorky. They wanted to dive deeper. They valued the primordial, the spiritual, the primitive and the archetypal as sources of inspiration.

“I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” boasts Glendower in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, to which Hotspur sensibly replies, “Why, so can I, or so can any man: But will they come when you do call for them?” Not always, certainly. But often enough to endow American art with the means of expressing something that lies deep under the traditional materialism of American life.