Archives - Fine Art: Page 12
Author: paul carson (Tue Oct 24, 2006 3:50 pm)
Title: fine arts
“Americans in Paris: 1860 to 1900” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art goes a little way toward reversing this fall’s trend of big, surveyish shows concocted from splashy objects and bland ideas. In this case the ideas, though undeveloped, are inherently interesting, and the art, with a few exceptions, distinctly unfabulous.
“Americans in Paris: 1860 to 1900” continues through Jan. 28 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (212) 535-7710; metmuseum.org.
Basically, the exhibition tells the story of American high art and how it grew, inside and outside the country, between the Civil War and World War I.
Nowadays, the Americanization of the entire world is a done deal. But not so long ago the United States was a buyer rather than a seller of cultural influence, and that’s what we’re looking at here.
Actually, during the first half of the 19th century, Americans preferred to think of themselves as neither borrowers nor lenders. They were just different from everyone else and cooked up a customized genre of New World landscape painting as proof: wilderness vistas with stoned-out colors and moralizing messages so blatant they might as well have been written in thought balloons: God’s Country, Chosen People, Paradise Now.
Not far below the sanctimonious surface, though, was a worried sense of inferiority. As decadent and dwindling as Old World culture might be, it was still the yardstick for aesthetic refinement and for the kind of social gentility and political prestige that came with it. With their technological know-how growing at an unnerving pace, Americans wanted some of that gentility and some of that prestige, which meant creating art on European terms.
And what were those terms? Learning to paint figures, for one thing, and keeping up with market fashions for another. The only way to catch up was to go to the source, Europe itself, and to Paris, the city of choice in the years after the Civil War.
Paris had many attractions. Art schools were plentiful, as were juried competitions. A spot of Yankee cash and a smattering of decent French would take you far. And once there you had the option, if you were bold enough to take it, to change your life. For artists who felt under the thumb of puritan values at home, the Parisian vie de bohème was a psychic vacation, a place for experimenting with new attitudes and personalities.
In a gallery of portraits near the start of the exhibition, you see experiments under way. In an 1875 self-portrait, the Irish-American Thomas Hovenden is slumming in his Paris studio, sprawled out in shirtsleeves, cigarette dangling from his lips, a rogue, a reprobate, or rather play-acting one. Only a few years earlier in another self-portrait, that one done in New York, he was a buttoned-up neatnik poised to get down to work.
Other portraits are of artists by fellow artists. A 20-something Robert Vonnoh paints John Severinus Conway, an aspiring sculptor from Akron, Ohio, as a glowering Mephistophelean masher. And in a portrait by Charles Sprague Pearce, Paul Wayland Bartlett, another sculptor, strikes an attitude so lofty that it appears to have turned his nose pink. In both cases urbane self-confidence is overplayed. But the sitters and artists alike are young. They’re trying life on for size.
Most American artists returned to the United States after a sojourn abroad, but some made Europe their home. Pearce did. So did such august figures as Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler. Cassatt is given a room of her own at the Met, which she deserves, even if the pictures are overly familiar ones. But in the exhibition context, she becomes especially intriguing in her role as an art adviser who used her many trans-Atlantic connections to steer advanced Parisian painting into American hands.
“In these days of commercial supremacy,” she wrote, “artists need a ‘middleman’ who can explain the merits of a picture to a possible buyer, and who can point to the fact that there is no better investment.” Several of the artists she promoted were represented by her own dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel. Whether she took a cut for her efforts is not on record, but there is no question that she was conscientiously shaping the future of a modern American art from afar.
Most of her own paintings in the show date from the 1880’s and 90’s, by which time Sargent and Whistler, sophisticates down to their pinkie rings, had long been stars. This was the era when the immense, rivalrous gatherings of commerce and culture known as international expositions were popping up in city after city, like art fairs today. In this climate Sargent and Whistler were in great demand.
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