Finding Ways to Talk About American Art

Exhibits That Look at the “1940s” and “Now” Offer Approaches

Is there such a thing as “American art?”

            Obviously, art produced by Americans within the continental United States can fall under that heading. But what about the deeper question: is there an essence to what makes art American? Our best way out of this potential labyrinth has been to define American art in segments: by its periods, groups, or styles.
            That is the solution proposed by the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum in its new exhibit on painters in the 1940s, focused on George Ault, who did a series of scenes of a crossroad in Woodstock, NY. According to the show’s curator, Yale University art historian Alexander Nemerov, the stark and lonely Ault paintings epitomize what 22 other 1940s artists in the show also were feeling, and that is why there is similarity in their styles and their subject matter, typically bleak scenes of ordinary American life.
            What unites the sixty or so drawings and paintings in the exhibit, Nemerov suggests, is a common lament over the war. He includes paintings by Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth to show a similar mood of the times, the mood shared by Ault.
            As might be expected, some critics have questioned whether the exhibit, titled, “To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s” (soon to be traveling to Missouri and Georgia) proves that these 22 artists felt the same thing. In effect, the curator is grouping the paintings in order to point to an essence that emerged at one time in American art.
            When it comes to defining American art, this has proven one of our best approaches. Even biologists, uncertain about the exact evolutionary origins of species, group them together by similarities and with not a little speculation. It is only natural to group American art by its shared moments. If we are lucky, there was even a “school” of artists who said why they produced that particular art as part of their shared American experience. What is more, such groupings transport viewers to a different world, part of the thrill of looking at art.
            Attempts to define American art often provoke criticism. A few decades ago, Irving Sandler wrote a book, The Triumph of American Painting, which was soon attacked as favoring New York’s Abstract Expressionism. Sandler denies that, and today will say, “There’s no such thing as an ‘American art.’” Even the triumphs in America art borrow from Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, or from earlier times in U.S. history.
            In any case, by consensus, we have segmented the periods of American art. It began with British imports and colonial folk art. Then came patriotic academic art to celebrate the new nation. The next topics were the vast scope of American nature and the Western frontier. With the rise of mass newspapers, illustration art boomed alongside art academies (imitating Europe). Both produced the best post-Civil War, Gilded Age draftsmen, sculptors, and painters, from Winslow Homer to John Singer Sargent, and the idyllic beaux arts as well.
            After the turn of the century, the so-called Ashcan School of gritty realist painters rejected prettiness with their urban street themes. As the Armory Show of 1913 spurred interest in Fauvism, abstraction and Cubism, Art Deco would begin to shape architecture. Between the wars Socialist politics, the Federal Arts Programs, and migration produced “regionalist” painters, urban muralists and the Harlem Renaissance. The muralists became Abstract Expressionists, seeded by wartime European immigration.
            As always, a reaction was in the wings. America’s neo-Dada and Pop artists challenged the abstract painters by 1960, and the way was open for an American pluralism that mushroomed after 1970.
            One thing is for sure about this method of defining American art in its segments. The more recent the period, the harder it is to define. The leading textbook History of Modern Art has gone through six editions since 1969, and in each, the examples of “important” contemporary art have dropped out in later editions. Our segmenting of art history probably works best with 30 to 40 years of hindsight, when all the dust has settled.
            Indeed, as art historian Nemerov surely realized, that makes the 1940s a fair target to try to present the essence of American art at a time or place. As the painter Ault’s wife later said, he went to paint his precise, austere, and eerie rural scenes to “bring order out of chaos” in his wartime and personally-troubled world. The same order-seeking applies to doing American art history in general, but it takes some passage of time to look back and gain a true perspective.
            Still, we try mightily to define America art as it is today. In the past few years, the painter Eric Fischl has recruited 150 living artists for a major traveling exhibit, “America: Now and Here.” When it is in full swing (awaiting full funding), the exhibit will seek to capture the essence of the present in American art. This will be worth seeing, but according to the test of time, it may not be until 2041 that we can truly define American art in this current decade.