A Nation's Self-Image

By ROBERT HUGHES

It's an enormous, baggy subject--from the confidence of the gilded age to the imperial anxieties of the cold war; from a portrait by Thomas Eakins to a green humanoid by William Baziotes; from Stanford White's classicism to the democratic boxes of post- World War II Levittown; from Alfred Stieglitz's immigrants on shipboard to Robert Frank's visions of the underface of big-city America.

"The American Century," part one of which opened two weeks ago in New York City, is the biggest curatorial effort by the Whitney Museum of American Art in a long, long while--an ambitious and, for the most part, rewarding show. Its aim is to narrate the story of American art (mostly painting and photography, but some sculpture, design and architecture) over the past 100 years and to make sense--brief sense, inevitably--of the relations between that art and the changing society around it.

This first installment (on view through Aug. 22) takes us from 1900 to 1950, and the second (to open Sept. 26) will see the story through to the century's end. The show's curator is Barbara Haskell, the only reputable art historian the embattled Whitney had left on its staff when the scheme was launched three years ago, and she has produced a serviceable and often illuminating catalog, reinforced by scores of sidebars on dance, music, film and dozens of other subjects not amenable to gallery treatment, written by no fewer than 22 other contributors. Practically nowhere does this 400-page tome show a trace of the poxy French-colonial, theoretical jargon whose "discourse" has disfigured so many other museum publications (including the Whitney's) in the past 15 years, and that is a great mercy.

The theme is complicated somewhat by the fact that no century, and certainly not the 20th, starts or finishes neatly in culture or in politics when the zeroes click over. Ours, like Europe's, "began" among the slaughters of the trenches, say around 1914, and "finished" with the collapse of Soviet communism, say around 1989, thus becoming the shortest ever. The phrase the American Century comes, of course, from a wartime editorial written in LIFE by its founder, Henry Luce, expressing an updated view of the 19th century belief in Manifest Destiny: that it was the fate and duty of America to "lead the world" in all things--spiritual, political, cultural and economic.

This was plausible in 1941, with Nazism, Fascism and Japanese imperialism overrunning the world. Today its premise is expiring, with loud bangs and many whimpers, in a liar's presidency and on the ghastly fields of the former Yugoslavia. But it's almost impossible to exaggerate how deeply Americans felt this destiny in the period covered by this show, roughly from the Administration of Theodore Roosevelt to the outbreak of the cold war. And they had reason to believe it.

They did not, however, believe it about their own culture, especially in the field of "high" visual art. The American public, between 1900 and 1950, was distinctly timid about appreciating the work of American artists, and to modernist ones it could be quite hostile. What worked in favor of the art, in the end, was the insatiable appetite for the new that had been built into European America's social contract ever since the Puritans came to Massachusetts to create the New Jerusalem. To Americans between 1900 and 1950, however, the idea of an American Century in the arts--other than popular mass culture--would have made little sense.

Marvels have been created out of a sense of inferiority, as the history of American museums proves. But from the 1880s to the late 1950s, American museums--the Whitney itself being the lone exception--were less interested in fostering American artists than in acquiring, at warp speed, the cultural treasures of Europe. This applied to modernism as well as to the Renaissance, and it wouldn't change until the late '50s, when Abstract Expressionism began to be elevated into the Triumph of American Painting. Earlier 20th century American art took much longer to be appreciated by Americans (or anyone else). Names like John Marin, Marsden Hartley or Charles Demuth still mean nothing in Europe, and until quite recently the proposal that Stuart Davis was as fine a painter as Jackson Pollock would have struck most cognoscenti as barmy, even heretical.

The obsessive promotion of AbEx as the great American moment, the arrival of sudden maturity, is waning now (How could anyone keep it up?), but it has a slightly weird consequence for this show. The older works--the ones from the teens, '20s and '30s--look fresher than the younger ones. We are used to seeing endless reproductions of de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko--but not of Elie Nadelman, Arthur Dove or Joseph Stella. Because of this contrast, the top two floors of the show--it starts at the top and, taking advantage of gravity, goes downward--seem more interesting than the third. That's not the art's fault, but it goes a long way toward fixing the imbalance in Americans' views of their own past art--a bias summarized in the silly idea that American modernism was creeping around in larval form until after World War II, when Pollock, de Kooning et al. spread their redeeming wings.

The show is a straightforward trot through art and social history, aimed directly at a general, nonspecialist public--the kind of public the Whitney needs to reach if it is to recover from its long doldrums. Much is riding on the show's success or failure. Because it was underwritten by Intel, a great song and dance is made about the marvels of the websites and of getting people wired into art history. But it's the actual works of art, not their teensy digital clones, that count.

The exhibition itself is sober, clearly set out and--given some of the Whitney's embarrassing efforts in the past to swamp serious art with intrusive audiovisual aids like at the 1995 Edward Hopper show--fairly short on hoopla. It touches upon all the major American movements of the 20th century and does it with balance and care and, in general, a keen eye for the best examples. If you want a short account of the turn-of-the-century New York realist group known as the Ashcan School (Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Bellows and others), the selection here could hardly be bettered.

"The American Century" makes proper acknowledgments to minority artists without making excessive claims. There is, for instance, a small section on the art produced by the Harlem Renaissance in the '20s and '30s, but the show doesn't fall into the trap of pretending that the artists concerned have to be the equals, in their field, of great black writers like Langston Hughes. Nor does it indulge in the kind of sentimental feminism that would have you believe that Georgia O'Keeffe, say, was a sacrosanct culture heroine and as good a painter as others in the Stieglitz circle, such as Dove or Hartley.

In a country of immigrants, the question of who is and who is not an American artist is always a vexing one. In the early 20th century, modernism itself was attacked as an "alien," or immigrant, form. America has never been short of blood-in-the-eye nativists and cultural conservatives (not a few of them painters, like Thomas Hart Benton), who believed that the art of Jews, gays and anyone else they disliked couldn't be really American. Such primitivism is gone now--or, at any rate, nobody who cares about art would deploy it. Obviously, the question can't be answered by including everyone who lived for a time in the U.S. and influenced the art scene there, because that would make Max Ernst an American instead of a Franco-German surrealist and confer a sort of honorary American status on the Cuban Wilfredo Lam. It would also have made the show unmanageably large. Practically everyone in it, as it stands, was a U.S. citizen and resident, though expatriates like Patrick Henry Bruce (1881-1936), who left America early and came back only to commit suicide, are included.

Actually, the cultural xenophobes weren't entirely wrong. Modernism was an immigrant, and the anxiety that haunted American artists for most of the 50 years the show covers was that of provincialism. In some respects the moderns were less original than the great American figures of the 19th century: John James Audubon, Frederick Church, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer. You were likely to be running behind the tick of the big clocks in Paris and Berlin whether you were Childe Hassam doing Impressionist streetscapes 30 years after Monet or a New York abstractionist producing ideal geometries in the early 1940s. "We all steal," said Arshile Gorky to Ilya Bolotowsky. "You steal from Cahiers d'Art [a French art magazine of the '30s]; I steal from Cahiers d'Art. The only difference is I steal better than you, because I know French and you don't!" The very American twist on this story was that Gorky didn't actually know any more French than Bolotowsky.

Early American modernism is filled with European borrowings, from Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Picabia, Leger, etc., etc. Nothing characteristically American there, you might say. But the crux of the identity issue is not the stylistic sources the artists drew on but the experiences on which they used them. It was there that the American-ness of American art hove into view, and it showed itself in two enormous image fields.

The first of these was the idea of landscape as epic, spiritual and transcendental. The cluster of feelings surrounding American landscape had come directly into modern art from 19th century images of sacred wilderness--God's fingerprint, there in the Catskills or the Grand Canyon. This would be faithfully preserved by photographers, like Ansel Adams at Yosemite. But 20th century painters from Dove and Hartley through Pollock conveyed them into more modern idioms, often with great power and poignancy. Landscape, in fact, was the matrix in which most of the impulses of American abstract art, except for its weaker strand of purist geometry, unfolded. In no other country except England and Australia was the relation between abstraction and landscape so strong, but in America it had a special persistence because of its Transcendentalist roots and overtones of mysticism.

The second image field arose from a fascination with the power of the diametric opposite of nature--industrial imagery, seen as the essence of 20th century experience and as belonging more vividly to America than to any other place. If God was present in the mountain lake, he could also be uneasily satirized as a plumber's grease trap by the New York Dadaist Morton Schamberg; if sublimity was in the mountains, it was also in the skyscrapers of New York City and in the relentlessly massed geometric forms of the Ford auto plant at River Rouge, Mich., which Charles Sheeler, who painted and photographed them in 1927, saw as "our substitute for religious expression."

Some American artists and photographers were critical of Promethean technology. The image of the impersonal, overwhelming machine, successor to Blake's "satanic mills," flourished after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Others saw salvation in it. But certainly no culture responded so passionately to it as America's; and in doing so, it produced the complicated and morally fraught self-portrait whose outlines are traced in this exhibition. For once, the Whitney has come up with a show that nobody interested in America and its self-image can afford to miss.