Artistic Captivity
A Short History of How American Art Lost Its Identity
By guest author Benjamin Wilson.
Recalling his time in a preparatory school, Thomas Hoving shows us a picture of the general attitude that the Europeans have had toward America and her art for generations:
My teacher, cleverly mixing up French with art history, was extolling the “soaring” innovations of Monet, Manet, Braque, and Picasso. We all soaked it up. Then, to show us teenagers the other side to the French mastery of painting, he showed us a life-sized poster of Grant Wood’s American Gothic. He launched into an entertaining slash-and-burn of this “triste” example of Midwestern American provincial art and the banality of realism.
– American Gothic: The Biography of Grant Wood’s American Masterpiece, Thomas Hoving, p. 13
Provincial and realistic are just two words that describe the heritage of American art. America never cared much for “isms” and only occasionally gave birth to movements. It wasn’t until the 1960s, and at the behest of the CIA, that America allowed Abstract Expressionism to become its new identity and export. Europe had gone through a myriad of artistic movements and style changes. Their progressivism caused them to look at America with a pretentious ego as a superior looks at an inferior. That same ego was crushed with the outbreak of World War I, and all artistic theory was essentially abandoned. Then the ego morphed into an arrogance of ignorance. To be unsure and tolerant of everything was a sign of superiority. Modern Europeans never seem to learn. America always held on to a sort of medieval artistic thought. Progress should be tempered, reality respected, order maintained, knowledge built into the system of truth.
America did not hold on to her artistic traditions out of indifference or ignorance, but out of a love for real things and a rejection of so-called “progress.” The regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton studied art in Europe for a time. He attempted to be the modernist that everyone else wanted to be. Disillusioned with the world of abstract painting, he returned to the Midwest and took up a type of contemporary realism. Working within the same style as American Gothic, Benton and the regionalists were the prime example at the time of a folk art that was not left behind. It was thoroughly modern while also being thoroughly American and provincial. They did not take up anything which would cancel the American spirit for a sense of belonging to a larger world artistic movement.
The reason why America had continually held an identity in and through its art was that they believed in that identity and it was open for all to see. Through the rights and the wrongs, the Americans became a people, and as a people developed an art wholly their own. The characteristics of this art were due to the traits of these new people. To try to read early American art, and its formal trajectory, as concerning anything other than the people and the land is to misunderstand severely the American project. In fact, if the question should arise whether America was an idea or a people and place, American art stands as a secondary source of proof for the latter. The history of American art can be traced from the earliest folk art, through its first artistic movement, to the regionalist artists, into the Deco empire, and then the vintage aesthetics of the 1950s. Even though Abstract Expressionism dominated in the ’50s and ’60s with painters like Jackson Pollock, the line of American art continued with Norman Rockwell and on to Thomas Kinkade. The disdain toward Kinkade is fundamentally not due to his art being kitsch, but that he was both the final result of the American artistic tradition and its downfall due to consumerism and managerialism. His kitsch style is but the result of the loss of the Christian ethos in America.
So it is this that American art is identified by: the people and the place. The people were Protestant Anglo-Saxons on a land that was like a new Eden.
Reformation can easily become restoration. Many of the sects that were enticed by the New World were in some sense restorationists who considered themselves to be the rebirth of the early church and therefore destined to be the ones to bring this vitality to earth in their social experiments. As for their art, they were iconoclasts. This does not mean that they disliked art, but that they maintained an anti-Catholic attitude. Art could be used for educational purposes, beautifying, symbols of social status, and so forth, but to use them in ritual veneration was forbidden.
Their use of art therefore had to be in line with what they expected the viewer to learn or appreciate. For the Puritans, it remained a tool of social status and explanation. Their education was driven by lengthy sermons, and it is their word-focused idealism that is brought forward in America. Roadside signs that quote the Bible or phrases like “Jesus Saves” are the result of the expectation of earth transformation through the Word.
Their artistic bent can be seen in one of the earliest works of Puritan painting, Elizabeth Clarke Freake and Baby Mary. This painting shows two major factors in early American art. First, that it is a mix of styles and is out of date. The flat lighting is medieval, but the dark background calls to a Dutch influence. This painting was produced long after the likes of Dutch painters like Rubens or Van Dyck, indicating a lack of training but conversely indicating a true folk mentality. Early American art was folk-directed. This means that the method of its production and appearance is different from fine art. It is organic. It originates in homes and workshops. Influence is passed on by subtle appreciation of decorations. Fine art is imposed on the world. Critics talk about it so that they can get paid.
The Freake portrait indicates its folk nature in another way. It has been augmented. Originally, the painting contained just Elizabeth. Three years later, the baby was added, and the colors on her dress were changed. When displayed in her home, it would have functioned in the manner similar to how we today update our family Easter photos. It was an ongoing account of her and her life. When people say that art was a sign of social status, they want you to think about financial affordability and who gets to have the luxury of art in their homes. The difference lies in the distinction between fine art and folk art. In Puritan New England, social hierarchy still existed, and those with money were able to afford many things, but folk art was not a thing withheld from anyone in principle.
Considering that republican virtues dominated and were generally agreed upon by the various sects, from Puritan to Quaker, the ideal of social harmony in the New World was paramount. Even if not everyone could afford certain works of art, they did after all believe in a curse on laziness, and every man had a right to his estate as his own kingdom:
…in New England and New York, seemed to accelerate the rising cult of the common man. In small communities where every man was — in some dimensions — a king, it was his right to have his likeness taken.
– American Folk Painting, Black and Lipman
The image of this social harmony was already thoroughly Protestant in its hailing of the kingship of all believers, and by now we know that the reformers had social theologies that explain this concept contrary to the ways we think they were inconsistent, but America offered an opportunity and a conundrum. The question remained whether the biblical prototype upon which to base this new social harmony would be a rural Eden or an urban New Jerusalem. Up to the discovery and organizing of the New World, the Protestant social theology did not have to consider the aesthetics of an unorganized land. They were concerned with reformation of existing social settings. So when confronted with a choice between a New Eden or a New Jerusalem, they had to choose.
They did not choose so much as accept the paradigm. For rural communities, they chose Eden, hoping to live in republican harmony with nature, without a king. The choice they made for the cities is imprinted on the land itself. To look at the American frontier in the 19th century is to find a radius of Greek-named cities: Syracuse, Ithaca, Troy, Athens. Athens, not Jerusalem, influenced their concepts of the city. The fact that it is Greek is important for later artistic movements.
Neoclassicism was a project of virtue. Still influenced by the Puritan necessity of a society of virtue to produce harmony, the artists looked to what they considered to be aesthetically virtuous. Greek formal purity was the visual counterpart to moral purity. The new Grand Manner style was the moral response to the frivolity of the Rococo era art. Originally bursting with energy and creativity, the Neoclassical artists were smart enough not just to mimic ancient Greek style but also to adapt it to their culture and land. The interest in wood for architecture rather than stone, combined with Greek forms, birthed the Federal Style. Painters like Benjamin West used the same concepts of combination to create his masterful works of history genre paintings, saying: “The classic dress is certainly picturesque, but by using it I shall lose in sentiment what I gain in external grace. I want to mark the time, the place, and the people, and to do this I must abide by the truth” (American Art and Architecture, Lewis, p. 44).
The relation of Greek art to politics was also not lost. Americans felt great sympathy for the Greek War of Independence and the preservation of democratic forms. This only further inspired the revival of Greek art, especially sculpture. Works like Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave were monuments to the ideals of human dignity and beauty and moral virtue in the face of slave conditions. Her nakedness is not a shame to her; it is rather her single tool to emanate virtue. The portrayal is of a Greek Christian woman captured by Turkish pirates and being sold at the slave market. Her nakedness is her enemy’s attempt to show her usefulness to the buyer, but the Unitarian minister Orville Dewey called her nakedness the express image of her impeccable virtue: “I would fain assemble all the licentiousness in the world around this statue, to be instructed, rebuked, disarmed, converted to purity by it!” (American Art and Architecture, Lewis, p. 79). This was an almost total displacement of the Puritan conception of virtue. Theirs was the covering of the human body for the sake of the social order, while this was the promotion of images of embodied virtues such as Lady Liberty.
The rural utopian project of American artists did not go the way they planned, aesthetically speaking. Paintings like Peaceable Kingdom by Edward Hicks had a social commentary behind it, aimed at elucidating an image of a Christian society within nature. But that painting was only possible so long as the Christians were Trinitarians. Even Quakers like Penn and Hicks were Trinitarians of some stripe. The Puritans would have been horrified at the heresies embraced by their ancestors. It is hard to explain why America has a soft spot for unitarian heresies, but it is usually due to the expulsion of Greek thought from Christian theology. The rise of Romanticism in America and the exodus from cities was a flight from trinitarian social order and toward a unitarian oneness with nature. The paintings depicting the course of an empire by Thomas Cole were a concentrated attack on the failure of Classical culture to produce anything of lasting value. Compared to nature, that is. And his series Voyage of Life is the image of a person’s beautiful life as an individual unencumbered by culture. Albert Bierstadt’s Last of the Buffalo was a more poignant critique of the conquest of nature by civilization. The difference in style and subject matter was a rejection of the forms which produced William Rush’s The Schuylkill Chained, itself a commentary on technology, mythology, and human control of the environment.
The movement away from a social ideal imposed by proper authority was replaced with the new direct inspiration from God. The cat that the Quakers had let out of the bag could not be put back in again. Mary Ann Willson, one of America’s earliest watercolorists and an enigma to history, left a letter where she talks about the Hudson River School artists. She was aware of this idea of a direct link to the divine that the transcendentalists were so fond of. Her handling of colors and form in The Prodigal Son Reclaimed are a starting point in the obsession with minimalism that goes so hand-in-hand with millenarianism. The unmediated spiritual connection between art and the spirit world is seen as early as the Shakers and continued into the future with theosophy and abstract art, along with Precisionist artists like Charles Sheeler. The connection between modernist utopianism, simplified forms, and immediate spiritual presence is not far off from being established.
Back in the cities, under the influence of the most prominent art critic of the time John Ruskin (1819–1900), artists started to adapt his theories on “truth to nature,” and movements such as Aestheticism were building momentum. The post-Civil War years were difficult on the American artistic scene, since the war, like all wars, had suspended belief in the themes of goodness and beauty and ultimate truth. All the painter could muster was an accurate representation of the social situation at the time. Prisoners from the Front by Winslow Homer is an example of such a move where no lessons were to be taught through the work.
Artists like William Morris Hunt followed in their own way, removing the didactic element of painting and rejecting whatever latent German Romantic influence could be traced. Instead, he turned to the French and English and lambasted any sense of mechanistic perfection in art, probably taking cues from Ruskin and setting up the stage for Impressionism’s love for forms of color. Hunt’s personal decision to study art in Paris would have lasting influence on the artist’s image of Paris as the epicenter of real art. The center of the art world would not come to New York until post-World War II. Unsuccessful in his life, Hunt longed to change the face of American art. The French taught that the highest form of art was large-scale, public murals. A step in the direction of socialist art. The American folk art tradition had slowly morphed into updated portraiture, such as Sargant, but the new improvement on mere folk art was the idea of “the folk” in socialist terms. But in Hunt’s only large mural commission, he steered away from any concept of American social history and instead created allegories based on concepts of duality, such as Night and Day, Masculine and Feminine, Eastern and Western. The Americans were taking their artistic commands from a land that was both modernizing and de-Christianizing, entranced by theories of more esoteric human spirituality and losing a perception of national identity.
The Gothic Revival stream of influence did not last long in America. What seemed to be an attempt to retain the American identity as a sort of European stock folk could not compete with the coming domination of modernism. Nor was it a broad revival, as it seemed only to affect American architecture. Architects like Alexander Jackson Davis wrote and created a style termed “Collegiate Gothic.” This movement was the cause of the construction and transformation of college campuses around America to become havens of Gothic architecture, Princeton and Bryn Mawr being primary examples. The alternative was Carpenter Gothic. Houses and small churches in the rural areas of America adopted Gothic motifs such as pointed-arch windows and steep gables (see the window in American Gothic below). The eventual conquering of any Gothic identity in America by modernism is exemplified by the Woolworth Building in New York City. It was an architectural essay and polemic against both the Gothic and the Classical.
Modern Paris continued to be the lead influence. Thomas Eakins was one such artist who studied in Paris under the tutelage of Jean-Leon Gerome. But as a metropolitan, he also added the influence of Spanish moody painting. For him, the new concern with the social situation of the American people under the influence of French and Spanish art came bursting forth in The Gross Clinic. American expatriates were able to move and study between London and France, and American artists were some of the first to be invested in an artistic internationalism.
If one is able to follow the plot of people and place through the mire of these artistic movements, one can see two streams: the social artists and the aesthetic artists. Ruskin himself hated the prime example of the Aesthetic Movement, i.e., James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Symphony in White. In a lawsuit between the two, Whistler was able to summarize and establish the trajectory of art toward pure painting and abstraction.
Robert Henri would be an example of those artists who were involved in the social concerns of art. As a leading figure of the AshCan School, he not only painted modern social scenes, in modern palettes and paint application, but also wrote about his insights on the artistic fervor he saw. Henri extolled the virtues of being an internationalist and how the primary identity of American art was being abandoned again. Henri even went on to say:
[T]he great artist is a man who has freed himself from his family, his nation, his race. Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a universal without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere, a man whom all the world recognizes, accepts, whether he speaks through music, painting, words or form.
– The Art Spirit, Henri
Neither movement could maintain a focus on America and her people. They were not being allowed to cultivate their own artistic identity, and the metropolitan artists imported new ideas from abroad, doing experiments with abstraction or wishing that the American people would be more like the rest of the world.
The general internationalism of the art world in America was being steadily transcribed into a synthesis for an empire. The connection between the Columbian Exposition and architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and the emergence of the American Art Deco style is fluid. Aesthetically, they are connected by modernism, but socially, they are connected by empire. One way to see the empire’s existence was The Armory Show. The Armory Show was a grand display of all the various modernisms coming from Europe. It showcased the American artists’ ability to digest and reproduce. But the fault was in the reproduction. Everything was a discount of the original European radical movements. America wasn’t trying to accept one direction for the future; instead, it sought a rejection of the past and the assimilation of modernisms in order to fight that past.
If Americans wanted to become the leading front of artistic ingenuity, they would have to take their own traditions seriously, which meant a focus on “some of the perennial themes of American art; recognizable objects, the natural landscape, and a certain vague religious longing” (American Art and Architecture, Lewis, p. 212).
Each theme of American art can be seen in the modernists who attempted to be American. Joseph Stella painted Futurist-inspired images of tangible objects like the Brooklyn Bridge. He also ascribes to modernist futurism a sort of divine character: “Many nights I stood on the bridge…deeply moved, as if on the threshold of a new religion or in the presence of a new divinity.” Characters like Charles Demuth developed a Cubism based not on European trailblazing but on observation of his Pennsylvania Dutch heritage from Lancaster. The Anabaptist heritage in the Lancaster area was not only in the architecture and the quilts; spiritually, it had developed a mysticism of its own. The Ephrata Cloisters are now a museum dedicated to the preservation of Anabaptist monasticism, eucharistic adoration, and mystical art describing the baptism of Christ or the soul’s journey after death. And John Martin took up the mantle of landscape romanticism that Thomas Cole had put down.
The first avant-garde movement in America, though short-lived, was Synchronism. The premise of Synchronism was the ability to produce a symphony of colors in which the colors related to each other in the way musical notes did. Despite having similar tendencies to Kandinsky, who associated colors with notes, they were not the same movement, albeit being developed almost simultaneously.
Thomas Hart Benton originally trained in the Synchronism style but found himself unable to “paint George Washington as a rainbow” (American Art and Architecture, Lewis, p. 234). This did not stop him from being a modernist, and he would go on to train the inventor of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock. Regionalist artists like Benton and Grant Wood had a social dedication to the people of the regions they called home. They were not internationalist socialists, but they were socialists in that they participated in New Deal endeavors to uplift the working class and rural America. But they were mostly apolitical when compared to their counterpart the Social Realists.
The Social Realists were, in short, internationalist socialists who were deeply involved with New Deal programs like the Public Works of Art Project, later renamed the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Social Realist artists were very concerned with the effects of the Great Depression in American cities. In a style reminiscent of the AshCan school and influenced by the Soviet Realists, most of the artists focused on themes of unemployment and immigration. Many were immigrants themselves or children of immigrants, mostly coming from Eastern Europe.
While showing concern for the people of the cities, the Social Realist artists betray their lack of love for the American heritage by practically inventing the narrative of the socially isolated and marginalized immigrant. The artist Ben Shahn exemplified this in a painting as a mythological statement. The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti is a visual narrative of the trial of two immigrant workers sentenced to death for the murder of a shoe company paymaster and for armed robbery. What evidence they did or didn’t do these things is unimportant today. The symbolism is the same and was seen as recently as 2020. The words for the description of the artwork from the Whitney Museum of American Art seem as though they were just written:
[M]any believed that they were the victims of ethnic discrimination, right-wing politics, and a corrupt police investigation. Their execution provoked international riots and protest demonstrations. In this large-scale canvas, Shahn vividly portrays all the characters: Sacco and Vanzetti lying dead in their coffins; the unsympathetic commissioners who upheld the death sentence after years of appeal; and Judge Webster Thayer, who presided over the trial and passed sentence, taking an oath in the courthouse. Two members of the committee proffer lilies, a fraudulent mourning gesture in light of their decision. As a well-known symbol of the crucified Christ, the lilies also suggest that Sacco and Vanzetti are martyrs, punished for sins they did not commit.
In terms of art and the American people, it seems to have ended. The concern and artistic heritage of the people who built America and who were Americans was put away, and in its place was a steady rise of art concerned with international artistic fads from Europe and an uplifting of the plight of the immigrant. This was done, of course, at the expense of the American people and their rights and privileges as Americans in America. From here on out, no purely American art could be made that did not concern itself with one or more of the pet social issues of socialist revolutions.
I hope that one can see and trace, though it fluctuated and changed with different movements, how American art was always concerned in some way with the people and place that is America. It was often overshadowed by international sentiments or heretical ideas of God, but the thin golden line is there. It lasts now in the memory and work of the people outside of the art world of New York and with those who have decided not to believe that American art must change to fit the ideals of multiculturalism. The accusation that Thomas Kinkade — whatever his talent level, personal life, or lack of deeper meaning — is a bad artist inevitably came down to the accusation that his paintings of New England felt too English.
All this history is to show how American art became captive to the Post-War Consensus. In official capacity, the New Deal artists and administration allied themselves to internationalist sympathies, declared right-wing themes in art to be illegal, and then opened the door to a reign of artistic terror in the form of the promotion of ugliness, individualism, chaos, and anti-nationalism.
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The influence of “The Painted Word” is obvious, and welcome.
As Tom Wolfe said about America’s temporary dalliance with Abstract Expression: it didn’t sell well. That tells you much about American folk art, and the American ruling class.
The author of this text likely sees themselves as a defender of a threatened cultural heritage. They exhibit strong traditionalist and moral absolutist tendencies, with a worldview shaped by cultural pessimism and suspicion of modern cosmopolitan values. Their text combines genuine art-historical knowledge with ideological selectivity, framing the history of American art as a tragic betrayal of its Protestant Anglo-Saxon folk roots. Their polemical style and sweeping generalizations suggest a person who interprets cultural history as a moral struggle, seeing themselves on the side of order, rootedness, and authenticity against perceived forces of chaos, foreign influence, and moral decline.