Up America

By Robert Hughes

Up America

In 1951, a collector bought a painting for $2,700. He kept it for some 15 years and then sold it to Dr. Irving F. Burton, a Detroit pediatrician, for approximately $37,000. Five years later Dr. Burton sent it to Sotheby Parke Bernet, where it was auctioned with the rest of his collection last month. It was knocked down for $250,000. Thus far the script looks banal--"Impressionism for Fun and Profit." But the painting was not by an Impressionist, nor even by a European. It was Steelworkers --Noontime, by Thomas Anshutz, and its price established an auction record for any picture by an American artist, living or dead. Eccentric as this one sale was, it reflects a massive price movement in Americana that has become the most interesting event in American art dealing. Americans have discovered in their own artistic ancestry a quality of observation less sophisticated but as socially informative as that of their European counterparts. Anshutz, for instance, was one of the first artists, American or European, who perceived that steelworkers at their lunch might be interesting.

The obscurity of Thomas Pollock Anshutz (1851-1912) does not, even now, seem a great injustice of art history. He lived in Philadelphia and was Thomas Eakins' teaching assistant. Though a number of his students developed into remarkable painters (Marin and Sloan among them). Anshutz did not, and Steelworkers --Noontime (1880-82) is the one painting by which he is known: a solidly composed, tight, rather dry performance, closely observed, small in scale (17 in. by 24 in.). It is a terse comment on the nature of work, and. by implication, on the artist's role as a worker. Fifty of his contemporaries in France, England or Germany had the skill to paint it, but undoubtedly would not have chosen such a subject--their tastes ran to peasants, beach scenes, and high society.

The Anshutz was not the only record. A cast of Frederic Remington's bronze Coming Through the Rye--a typical example of the vulgar, illustrative fist that Remington, artist laureate to the Wild West, brought to everything he touched--became the most expensive American sculpture in history, at $125,000. The previous record for an American watercolor ($36,000 for an Edward Hopper in 1970) was broken three times--by another Hopper, Light at Two Lights, at $50,000; a Winslow Homer, Adirondack Catch, at $37,500; and Charles Burchfield's Black Iron, which brought $65,000. That same week, another and very fine Homer--Gallows Island (Bermuda)--also went for $65,000. And the price of every sort of "Americana" --that tract of once largely ignored painting, sculpture and craft that stretches from colonial America to the 20th century--is inexorably spiraling: it affects every type of object from embroidered samplers to John Singleton Copleys, from decoy ducks and Windsor chairs to Hudson River School landscapes, and especially for fine antique furniture (a Goddard-Townsend kneehole desk that fetched $12,000 in 1957 recently sold for $120,000). The scramble for Americana is on. But only in America; there are no transatlantic clients.

This was perhaps inevitable. The Impressionist market has narrowed because so little is available. The boom years of postwar American abstraction (let alone Pop art and its variants) are over, except for a dozen or so artists. It took the Abstract Expressionists to convince American buyers that American painting could be of value.

But the act of faith in modernism as a principle was hard; moreover, it seemed to involve a general rejection of what had been painted here before. Despite its accumulated prestige, modern painting is a thin skin tightly stretched, and the Americana market is evidence that somewhere out there, the desire for local certitude and for one's own history remains. The Remington on the wall suggests to its owner that the old dreamtime West is not dead; the gilt American eagle above the mantelpiece squawks its political message of reassurance; the portrait of George Washington is a canvas hatchway back to the spirit of the Constitution, and the epic paradises of the Hudson River painters evoke, for a span of generations, a lost world of clear water and unfelled trees.

For years the art of middle-aged America has been denied its due historical attention. There are, for instance, very few courses in American art history taught at universities. Connoisseurship lags far behind the market. One can only hope that the dealers do not promote the art beyond its credibility, so that the rediscovery degenerates into a chauvinistic scramble. Nineteenth century America produced some exceptional paintings (by Eakins, Harnett, Eastman Johnson, Inness, Bingham, Church and Homer, among others) and many good ones. Since the established European masters have been largely bought up, the avid new collectors are all too likely to confuse quality with the mere fact that it is American.

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