Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

If their independence is so valuable a factor in both men’s work, there is also to be noted the heavy price that each paid for having been reared in a provincial school. With a boldness of character that recalls Courbet, Winslow Homer fails utterly to hold a place in art analogous to that of the French realist, because all the power and ability that went into his work were unequal to compensating for his lack of the knowledge of form, of structure, of optical effect that Ingres and Delacroix, among others, furnished ready to the hand of Courbet. Thus Homer’s painting goes on throughout his lifetime quite innocent of any real concern with the central problems of European picture-making and owes most of its strength to the second-rate quality of illustration. One hesitates to say that Ryder would have gone farther had he been born in France, yet the fact of his labouring for ten or fifteen years on many a small canvas, the very limited number of his works which has resulted from the difficulty he had in saying the thing that was in him, are marks of a bad training. His range is not a wide one, but the deep beauty he infused into his pictures is one of our chief reasons for confidence in the art-instinct that lies dormant in our people.

None of the men in the next group we must consider, the artists who enter fully into European painting, have the foundation of talent that Ryder had. Whistler is, of course, the painter to whom most Americans pin their faith in searching among their compatriots for an essential figure in 19th-century art. But take the first opportunity to see him with the great Frenchmen of his time: beside Degas his drawing is of a sickly weakness but slightly relieved by his sense of rhythm in line and form; beside Manet his colour and painting seem even more etiolated, and to save one’s feeling for him from utter demolition one hastens to the usual American refuge of the sentiment and—in the etchings—to the Yankee excellence of the craftsmanship. The nocturnes really do have a felicity in their rendering of the poetry of the night that would make us regret their loss, and when the unhappy Whistlerian school has been forgotten (an artist must take some responsibility for his followers) we shall have more satisfaction in the butterfly that Whistler knew himself to be, since he adopted it as his signature. It is merit of no such slightness that we love in Ryder, and yet when we reach Chase and Sargent we find even less of basic talent, for which their immersion in the current of European painting could have furnished a finely tempered instrument of expression. Both men show the natural bent for painting that is often a valuable asset and often—as in their case—a source of danger. They do not enrich our annals by any great works, but they do the country an immense service when they cause its students and collectors to take one of the final steps in the direction of the live tradition of Europe. They never appreciated what was greatest among their contemporaries, and failing to have this grasp of the creative impulse and of the new principles that were at work in Paris, they offered clever manipulations of the material as a substitute. Feeling the insufficience of this, Sargent has tried the grave style of the early Italians in his decorations at the Public Library in Boston. But his Biblical personages get him no nearer to the essentials of art than the society people of whom he has done so many likenesses. In Boston, it is Chavannes who shows which is the great tradition of the period and how it accords with the classic past. Sargent is perhaps most American in his unreadiness to perceive the immense things that Europe, modern and ancient, had to offer him.

Even so, with Chase and Sargent we find ourselves far nearer the period when American artists shall partake in art-ideas during their moment of full fertility. Our Impressionists are only a decade or two behind the Frenchman, and while one must not slip into a too easy trick of rating talent by the time of its appearance, one cannot fail to be struck by the fact that John H. Twachtman and J. Alden Weir approached the quality of their French preceptors with far greater closeness than that with which the Inness-Wyant group followed the Barbizon men. Much as there is of charm and sound pictorial knowledge in Twachtman’s work and Weir’s, one feels that they are not yet deep enough in the great tradition to go on to an art of their own creation, and we have to content ourselves with giving them a place among the Impressionists of secondary rank.

An interesting case among the Americans who made the serious study of European art that began soon after the middle of the 19th century, is that of John La Farge. We know the history of his seeking, his copying, his associations, speculations, and travels. All his life he is the man from the new country asking the dead and the living representatives of the classic tradition for help. How little we see of the man himself in the mosaic of charming things that make up his art. Winslow Homer exists as a personality, ill-educated and crude, but affirmative and arresting. La Farge disappears in the smoke of the incense that he burns before the various shrines to which his eclecticism led him.

If not to be admired as a great artist, he was a man of great gifts and a genuine appreciator of the masters. Therefore, he is not to be confused for a moment with the ignoble pasticheurs who achieve office and honours in the anæmic institutions with which we imitate the academies and salons of Europe. These are among the youthful errors I mentioned on an earlier page—depressing enough when one sees the acres of “decorative” abominations which fill our state-houses, courts, and libraries, but in reality of no great importance as a detriment to our culture. Like the soldiers’ monuments, the dead architecture, the tasteless manufactured articles of common use, they sink so far below any level of art that the public is scarcely affected by them. Only the persons trained in schools to admire the painting of a Mr. E. H. Blashfield or the sculpture of a Mr. Daniel C. French ever try to think of them as beautiful; the rest of the public takes them on faith as something that goes with the building, like the “frescoed” cupids to be found in the halls of apartment houses or the tin cupolas and minarets on the roof. The popular magazine-illustrators, poor as they are, have more power to mislead than our quasi-official nonentities.

Between the pseudo-classic decorators and the frankly “lowbrow” artists of the commercial publications, the posters, and the advertisements, there is the large class of men whose work is seen at the annual exhibitions, the dealers’ galleries, and the American sections of the museums. They partake of the vice of each of the other two classes: the easily learned formula for their product being a more or less thorough schooling in some style derived from the past, plus an optimistic or “red-blooded” or else gently melancholy attitude toward the subject. Velasquez has been the main victim of their caricature in the later years, but a little Chinese, Florentine, Impressionist, or even Cubist style will often be added to give a look of “modernity” to the work. As long as there is a recognizable proficiency in drawing and painting (it is of course only for the cheaper trade that the picture has to be guaranteed as done by hand), the erudite patron or museum trustee is assured of the seriousness of the artist’s intentions, while to make the thing take with the general buyer, the most important matter is judgment as to the type of American girl, the virile male, or the romantic or homely landscape that our public likes to live with.

The only excuse for mentioning such things in an essay on American art is that they help to define it by contrast—for these pictures are neither art nor American. The disease of which they are an outward sign infects Europe almost as much as it does our own country, and there is hardly a distinguishing mark to tell whether the Salon picture was done in Madrid, Berlin, or Indianapolis. A sentence from an eminent American critic, Russell Sturgis, gives the key to the situation. He said, “The power of abstract design is lost to the modern world,—we must paint pictures or carve expressional groups when we wish to adorn.” In the half generation that has passed since these words were spoken, the French have proven by several arts based entirely on abstract design that the power for it was not lost to the world and that men still know the difference between expression by form and colour and expression by concrete ideas.

Throughout this survey I have taken painting as the index to the art-instinct of America, and as we glance again at even our best painters we see that it is on concrete ideas that they have built: on character in portraiture with Copley, on romantic vision with Ryder, on observation of appearances with Homer. Precisely the reason for Whistler’s great success among his countrymen was the promise of release he afforded by his reaching out for the design and colour of the Orient, with which one associates also his spoken words, offering us “harmonies” and “symphonies” in place of the art built on intellectual elements that we had had before. The fact that Whistler himself was not strong enough in his grasp of tradition, or of a nature to achieve an important result along the lines he pointed to, does not change the issue. We had begun to be aware of the repression of instinct that was marking American life. We had recognized that the satisfaction of the senses, quite as much as intellectual pleasure, is to be demanded of art. Puritan morality and Quaker drabness had turned us away from any such conception, and when they took notice of art at all, it was for its educational value, either to inculcate religious or patriotic ideas, or for its connection with the classic past.

Add to this the utilitarian needs of a country that had to build rapidly, caring for cheapness more than for permanence (so little of the building, in fact, was intended to be permanent), and one has an explanation of the absence of architectural quality in the American houses of the last hundred years. The characteristic of building in the time is seen in the lifeless blocks of “brownstone fronts,” in the apartments that have so little of the home about them that in the restlessness of his search for a place to live satisfactorily, the American of the cities has earned the name of the “van-dweller,”—one sees the thing again in the abject monotony of farm-houses and country residences. Their spirit, or lack of it, is continued in furniture and decoration. One understands why Europe has been the magic word for countless thousands of Americans. Perhaps it was the palaces and museums that they set out to see and that they told about on their return, but more impressive to them—because more satisfying to their hunger for a beauty near to their daily lives—was the sight of an Italian village built with love for hillsides and with understanding of the forms of the hill and of the type of construction that would suit it. Or was it the cheeriness of the solid Dutch houses whose clear reds and blacks look out so robustly through the green of the trees that border the canals? The bright-coloured clothing of the peasants became delightful to the traveller, even if he still gave it a pitying smile when he saw it again on the immigrant here; and the humble foreigner, anxious to fit in to his new surroundings, hastened to tone down the vivacity of his native costume to the colourlessness of the American farmer’s or workman’s garb. In place of the gay pink or green stucco of his cottage at home, the immigrant got more or less of sanitary plumbing, higher wages, and other material benefits, to recompense him for the life he had left behind.

The life! That was the magic that Europe held for our visitors. They might return to the big enterprises, the big problems here, and feel that America was home because they had a share in its growth, but their nostalgia for the old countries continued to grow in the measure that they came to appreciate the wisdom with which life was ordered there—as they realized how the stable institutions, the old religions, festivals, traditions, all the things that flower into art, had resisted the terrific change that the industrial revolution had brought into the 19th century. Behind all questions of the coming of objects of art into this country or the appearance of new artists or new schools here, lies this most pivotal matter of the elements of art in American life. They need not be, they cannot be the same as those in European life, but it is futile to think of having an art here if we deny ourselves the ideas and feelings of which art has been made—the joy and awe of life that the Greek responded to in his marbles, the Italian in his frescoes, the Spaniard, the Fleming, the Dutchman, and the Frenchman in his canvases. Copying the externals of their work without again living their lives can result only in academism—bad sculpture and bad pictures.