Visions of Innocence

The American colonists were barely ashore before they began casting about for ways to make their new homes attractive. In Puritan New England, crude portraits were being limned by anonymous painters as early as 1641; in Pennsylvania, settlers from the Palatinate were soon decorating birth certificates and family records with elaborate Fraktur flowers and birds, a practice derived from Gothic manuscripts.

Occasionally a craftsman of exceptional talent--a Matthew Pratt or Charles Willson Peale--would take up painting as a career. But producing folk art remained largely a part-time occupation of the village cabinetmaker, sign painter, stonecutter or shipwright--or was carried on by the womenfolk at home. The practitioners were nearly always self-taught, untrained in technique or even perspective, and tended to thrive far from urban cultural centers. But they made up for their deficiencies with sharp-eyed observation, an infectious joyousness in their labor, and a remarkable freshness of vision (see color).

The Prime Decades. Primitive American painters have flourished from the time of the Quaker sign painter Edward Hicks (Peaceable Kingdom) to Grandma Moses, but their heyday was between those two great upheavals, the American Revolution, which released in a new nation the sense that "every man is a king," and the Civil War, which coincided with the steamroller uniformity of the industrial age. And even these prime decades went largely unnoticed and unappreciated until the 1920s. Their rediscovery was the work of American artists who recognized that in early American folk art there was a valid commentary on the American scene, full of abstract pattern and rhythms, startling color juxtapositions and forceful characterization.

Much of the most interesting American primitive art was done in watercolor. Some of the most representative --and also some of the best--is included in the traveling exhibition of "101 American Primitive Watercolors," collected by Edgar and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, which this week goes on view at the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts.

Death by Culture. In Man on Horseback, one anonymous watercolorist was ignorant of the rules of perspective, but he was uninhibited in his use of color, filled all the available space with decorative plants and boughs. To capture the clipper ship's surge through the mountainous seas, another anonymous painter resorted to ritualistic formality, reminiscent of a Japanese print. Ironically, what spelled the death of such original flights of fancy was the spread of culture. When the amateur artist was forced to compete with cheap lithographs and daguerreotypes, he copied them in all their banality, and thereby lost his own fresh vision. He Returns No More, for instance, is high-camp poster art, probably derived from a contemporary print by Paul Schnitzler.

In today's America, where television, movies and magazines bring the latest visual effects to the remotest community, naive vision has become a virtual impossibility. Even children, by the ages of nine and ten, begin to copy the exaggerated perspective and anatomical cliches they see in comic strips.

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