Art
Americana
John McEwen
The title chosen for the exhibition `American Painting 1908-1935' (Hayward Gallery till 20 November) is `The Modern Spirit', and how modern indeed is the academic spirit that lies behind its selection and classification. Academics love to tidy things up and Professor Brown of the City University of New York Graduate School is obviously of this teutonic persuasion. He relies too much on dates. Dates, of course, can have significance but they can also have an insidious effect of encouraging art to be appreciated for didactic rather than emotional reasons. Because of its dependence on dates this long-awaited exhibition is less impressive than it should have been. The artists in question are not represented often enough by their best work, and an opportunity has been missed of showing all the greatest American painting up to that point when its character was so drastically changed by the influx of European artists exiled by Hitler at the end of the 'thirties.
Professor Brown even feels confident enough to open his catalogue essay with these foolhardy words; 'It is fairly clear by now that in the field of art, the United States has during the twentieth century moved from provincialism to world dominance'. Is it? Here it is only possible to list a few contrary facts. It takes no account of indigenous American culture, and more in keeping I think with the Professor's line of thought, is contemptuous of those nineteenth century masters, all the very reverse of provincialism (the academic painters like Sargent and Eakins would also deserve consideration, do not forget): Audubon, Ryder, Winslow Homer and Whistler. While it can hardly be denied that Picasso and Matisse have, so far, been easily the most dominating influences on twentieth century art, as Professor Brown, in his proximity to the American collections should know.
Some of the paintings on view undoubtedly betray the impact of the major European movements, but they do not bear out the tidy logic of a didactic progress. Edward Hopper, the best artist in the show (above all a master at painting different degrees and kinds of light), owes nothing to Picasso or Matisse. And it is the staunch resistance to European modes that informs the most interesting work of the period, that which mirrors America: its new skyscraping architecture and social problems, its indigenous features. Some of the photographs (though this section has apparently been reduced since the Edinburgh presentation) are among the best things on view for this reason, but elsewhere there are the three Hoppers; a superb Marsden Hartley 'Berlin Abstraction' done during his stay in the city through the opening year of the First War (an interesting reflection of US noninvolvement at that date); and the increasingly celebrated `Razor' by Gerald Murphy (only famous for many years as the dilettante to whom Fitzgerald dedicated Tender is the Night — 'Razor' is a most professional painting). A fine drawing of a barn by Sheeler interestingly points forward to certain preoccupations of Ellsworth Kelly, and there are enough good things by Dove and Demuth (though not of the too often sentimentally-inclined Georgia O'Keeffe) to show how much better their work looks in reproduction than reality. There is also John %San. Apart from a few oversights — Levine, Grant Wood, Edwin Dickinson, even early Tobey — it succeeds as an impression.
Downstairs there are some large recent canvases on cosmic themes by Matta. They fill the space majestically but their imagery and his cabbalistic signature over the door as you enter both verge on science-fictional banality. Unlike the other surrealists Matta's paintings were concerned with the future and not the past, with unknown and invisible forces rather than the known anthropoidal or primordial imagery of most of his confreres. That TV and films have now caught up with him is hardly his fault. The drawn studies for the finished works are better because of their greater vigour and' explicitness.
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