BREAKING THE MOLD

There are several ways in which the Puritan legacy has formed all modern Americans, no matter what the color of their skin or their ancestors’ place of origin. The Puritans implanted the American work ethic and the tenacious primacy of religion. They also invented American newness–the idea of newness as the prime creator of culture. They lived in expectation of something new and very big arising: Christ’s reign on earth, the Millennium. This newness (with ancient precedents that lay in the Old Testament) would bring about a new phase of world history. Newness was to Americans what antiquity was to Europeans–a sign of integrity, the mark of a special relationship to history and to God. It affirmed the idea of American exceptionalism. Puritanism, in this sense, underwrote the American Revolution with its promise of political renewal.

The arts in America did not bring forth anything much new at first, except for mid- to late-18th century furniture–and one work by Benjamin West. When he was 12, West (1738-1820) announced that his talent would make him the “companion of kings and emperors.” And as a matter of fact, it did: after he settled in England in 1763, he became George III’s favorite artist. His definitive work was The Death of General Wolfe, 1770. It was a history painting but recent history, recounting a British victory over the French at the Battle of Quebec only a decade earlier. And it was in “modern,” late-18th century dress. It changed the English sense of decorum in heroic commemoration, the idea of what history painting could do.

Nineteenth century Americans reveled in the twin myths of “discovery” and “progress,” which had been so vastly strengthened by the physical conquest of North America and the expansion of technology. Americans could make anything, solve any problem, produce a cataract of inventions. This applied everywhere but the visual arts, where taste was generally conservative. In art, people wanted visible links to the past, to established traditions that would redress the ebullient rawness of their culture. Hence the fierce objections they raised against their own more inventive artists, like Thomas Eakins. Eakins advised his students to “peer deeper into the heart of American life.” No American painter worked harder to make the human clay palpable and expose it to scrutiny. He identified with scientists, many of whom he knew, and in a portrait of a surgeon, he produced what many regard as America’s greatest 19th century painting, The Gross Clinic, 1875.

The big split in American taste revealed itself with the first impact of Modernist art–Cubist, Fauvist, Dada–at the scandalous Armory Show in New York in 1913. Conservatives decried Modernism as un-American, an imported madness, and connected it to the paranoia many Americans felt at the rapid change of their society under the pressure of immigration–“Ellis Island art.” But early American Modernists were concerned, sometimes obsessed, with rendering peculiarly American experience. Charles Demuth (1883-1935) was fascinated by the blaring contrasts of signs and numbers on the new urban surface; John Marin (1870-1953) believed that “you cannot create a work of art unless the things you behold respond to something within you…Thus the whole city is alive.” Of course, the greatest Modernist work of art in New York was the city itself: its impaction, strangeness, clamorous variety and scary dynamism–and rising from these, its magic. No Manhattan tower expressed all that better than the Chrysler Building, 1929, designed by William van Alen and, at more than 1,000 ft., briefly the tallest structure on earth.

The most radical departure in postwar American art was undoubtedly Jackson Pollock’s drip painting–those skeins and lashes of pigment falling on the canvas with uncanny grace and energy. But his fellow Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning (1904-97) brought into painting a new sense of the contradictions of American culture and made erotic poetry out of them. De Kooning, the “slipping glimpser,” as he called himself, was open to a constant stream of momentary impressions: smiles from Camel ads, shoulders from Ingres, pinups and Raphael–high and low, everywhere. In this way he became a bridge to a younger generation of painters, chiefly Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who carried forward his exploration of the American vernacular.

Like it or not, by 1965 Manhattan was the center of Western contemporary art in terms of collecting power, museum clout, promotional and dealing skills and, not least, the amount of talent stacked up in it. The old, genteel American suspicion of the new had vanished. The circuit with the worship of newness in the larger culture had closed. The first beneficiary of this situation was Pop Art, the first wholly accessible style of international Modernism–an art about consumption that sat up and begged to be consumed. Its epitome was Roy Lichtenstein, who emerged in the ’60s with his enormously stylish renderings of the least arty art within reach–romance and adventure comic strips.

After Pop and side by side with it came impersonality–Minimalism, conceptual art and a vanguardist belief in the death of painting. But the artist who did most to break the mold of late-Modernist formalism in the ’70s was a former Abstract Expressionist, Philip Guston (1913-80). His work over that decade redefined the terms of painting for a whole generation of young Americans, opening up the possibilities of the painted figure once more. In their time, Guston’s paintings seemed like a kind of treason to the high-minded refusals of late Modernism, but therein lay their newness–and their influence. They confirmed that in American art refutations exist to be themselves refuted.