At

Old America

John McEwen At one point this summer the omnipresent Islamic Festival, symbolic in its scale and wealth of the desperate actuality of our financial dependence on the Arabs, seemed cynically to expose our more disparate and frugal 'special relationship' celebrations of America's bicentenary as mere diplomatic foppery. Now, however, with the major Islamic shows finished and the holidays almost over, you can find in American Art: 1750-1800 (V & A till 26 Sept), as exquisite and autumnally appropriate an expression of that 'special relationship' as you could hope to find. Because, of course, there is a 'special relationship' between America and this country, and its depth is what this most urbane exhibition reveals.

Several excellent introductory essays in the catalogue—invaluable for a proper appreciation of the show and very cheap at Et—list the facts: the importance of the English influence on the American pattern of local government, on the legal system and the Constitution itself. Ironically much of this influence—the grand jury, separation of powers, two senators per state regardless of population, the Presidency—reflects many concepts of eighteenth-century England rejected here long ago but thriving in America today. More important still, of course, is the language. It seems that at all times in its history both as colony and republic English predominated in the

dealings of even the most recalcitrant immigrants as soon as they arrived. If therefore there remains a surprisingly rich strain of English influence, albeit eighteenth century, in American life today, it can be imagined how total it was 200 years ago.

The ideas of the Revolution were a conglo merate of the ideas of the opposition elements in eighteenth-century English

politics, and it was Tom Paine's Common Sense—a political tract written by an Englishman)—which proved to be the Most . powerful instigator of American rebellion.

American eighteenth-century culture was no less subordinate to Europe, indeed much of it was imported piecemeal or, as the next best thing, copied in varying degrees of fidelity from engravings or English pattern books. There were few artists in colonial America, and art in general was required only to soften bourgeois existence. It did not express ideals of its own. The Revolution produced a change in iconography but not in attitude. In the years previous to the War taste inclined to a puritanical reflection of rococo; afterwards the fashion was for the appropriately republican though no less , European style of neo-classicism: rococo, a personal and sensual style, inviting touch; neo-classicism, civic and abstract, inviting thought. None of this particularly altered the role of the American artist. Neo classicism was an ideological style inspired by the enlightened periods of antiquity, but in America its adoption also expressed the renewal of contact with Europe. It was not

till the nineteenth century that an overwhelming need to assert its own nation hood drove America on the one hand to civil war and on the other to cultural selfexpression.

Seen in this light the exhibition is of great interest. The preponderance of furniture and silverware, much of it sturdier and more simple than the English work from which it mostly derives, proclaims the comfortable

tastes of the merchants and their predilec

tion for craft. Ironically the eighteenth century as a physical presence is infinitelY more remote in America than here, and something of its true historical distance is maintained by the deference of the spacious lay-out and the breathless reverence of the

girl narrating the slides. Copley and West were the best American painters of the

period, but are so Europeanised (see West's 'The Artist's Family') as hardly to count. It is interesting though that even at that date an American, West, could introduce a new

mode of picture to Europe: the contemP0r. ary historical drama with the protagonists wearing contemporary, not allegoriol, clothes. Realist painters could also learn a.. trick from Raphaelle Peale's trompe-r °ea

'A Deception'. Print is something they scent

incapable of imitating. No, it is a pleasant. show, delicately revealing that America ana England are still closer together than anY other two independent nations of today'! world, something which may be obvious btu is too often forgotten.