Everyday America

Nicolaus Mills: On the Art of Everyday America

IN 1976 the Museum of Modern Art celebrated the nation’s bicentennial with an exhibit it titled, “The Natural Paradise: Painting in America, 1800-1950.” At the core of the MoMA exhibit was the image of America as a modern Eden. The MoMA’s curators insisted that American landscape painting, with its emphasis on light and space, was at the root of what the country was about. Thirty-three years later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915” offers a far different vision. America, the curators argue, is defined by its day-to-day life.

At this point in history when the country is unsure over what to do about its high levels of unemployment, the growing gap between rich and poor, and the resegregation of its public schools, the new Met exhibit is particularly timely. In place of the spacious landscapes of “The Natural Paradise,” the Met’s “American Stories” asks us to focus on individual Americans in their private lives and work. There is no shared meeting point, no clearly defined overview in “American Stories.”

The result is a massive exhibit that is a feast for the eyes but often too big for its own good. “American Stories” fills nine Met galleries with 103 paintings and leaves the museumgoer with a chronicle of American art and history but with no special insight into it. The four principle sections of the exhibit, “Inventing American Stories, 1765-1830,” “Stories for the Public, 1830-1860,” “Stories of War and Reconciliation, 1860-1877,” and “Cosmopolitan and Candid Stories, 1877-1915” are so broadly conceived that all they have going for them is their chronology. There is, for example, no reason for an urban realist like John Sloan to be in the same gallery as the Western painter Frederic Remington except that some of their work occupies the same time period.

It is not, however, possible to complain for long about the lack of focus in “American Stories.” The exhibit is drawn from forty five museums across the country, and given the impact the recession has had on institutional endowments, we are not likely to see so many important American paintings in a single exhibit anytime soon. Previous exhibits, notably “The Painters’ America: Rural and Urban Life, 1810-1910,” which Patricia Hills organized for the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974, and “Domestic Bliss: Family Life in American Painting, 1840-1910,” which Lee Edwards organized for the Hudson River Museum in 1986, examined the same themes as “American Stories,” but these exhibits never had the funding to be so inclusive.

As if to make sure the museumgoer gets the point that the paintings in “American Stories” are iconic, the Met has frontloaded its exhibit with six instantly recognizable paintings that it has put in a room organized around the theme of peril and pleasure on the water. The water reference does not refer to the oceans separating the United States from the rest of the world or to the rivers that were so crucial to early American commerce. The reference is simply a contrivance for grouping disparate paintings with water in them.

Nonetheless, the paintings we are shown in this first room of “American Stories” do provide a wonderful summation of the exhibit. In John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark (1778), we see how one of America’s great Revolutionary-era artists–aided by the sponsorship of a powerful British merchant, Brook Watson–elevated narrative portraiture to prominence. In George Caleb Bingham’s Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845), we find that in the unsettled American West the sublime calm of the landscape still trumps the commercial, and in Thomas Eakins’s The Champion Single Sculls (1871), we observe a modern athletic hero, Max Schmitt, rowing on the pastoral Schuylkill River while a train–a harbinger of future industrialization–puffs its way across one of the two bridges that occupy the painting’s middle ground.

The irony is that the Met’s curators did not need to frontload “American Stories” in order to please their audience. The six paintings that occupy the show’s first gallery–the other three are William Sidney Mount’s Eel Spearing at Setauket (1845) and Winslow Homer’s Breezing Up (1873-76) and The Gulf Stream (1899)–might just as easily have gone where they belong chronologically. The paintings that we encounter in the next eight galleries more than justify their inclusion in the exhibit and give us much to admire. In Charles Wilson’s Peale’s massive, fifty-by-sixty-two inches The Exhumation of the Mastodon (1805-08), we are shown the country’s early fascination with prehistoric life and scientific knowledge. In Winslow Homer’s haunting Veteran in a New Field (1865), we see a Civil War veteran with a scythe (his Union Army jacket and canteen lie nearby on the ground) returning to his farm like an American Cincinnatus–an image that also evokes the grim reaper.

In Thomas Anshutz’s The Ironworkers’ Noontime (1880), a group of muscular metal workers, five of them stripped to the waist, strike a series of classical poses that suggest they have adapted to the factory world in which they earn their living and are unaffected by its routines or the labor strikes of America’s eighties, and in John Sloan’s Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair (1912), we get an intimate view of three working women on their day off, drying their hair on the roof of their tenement. At ease with their own physicality and unafraid of prying eyes, the women are a turn-of the-century, urban equivalent of the sensuous nudes of Renoir’s 1897 masterpiece, Three Bathers.

It is harder to think of four pictures that illustrate more fully the transformation of American life as well as the divisions within in it, and when “American Stories” takes on that most controversial of all American issues–race–it does equally well, avoiding the kind of tendentiousness that might easily have turned into political correctness. In William Sidney Mount’s The Power of Music (1847) two white men in a barn listen to a young white boy playing on his fiddle, while outside the barn a black man lays down his axe and jug to listen along. Has the power of music joined the four men? Or has the music kept the black man from finishing his work? It is impossible to know.

A similar ambiguity surrounds Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South (1859), set ironically in a backyard in Washington, D.C. The African Americans in Johnson’s painting appear as an idealized group of all ages living in harmony, but they are not alone. In the lower right corner of the picture, a well-dressed white woman enters through a doorway. Is she there to collect rent? Pay a visit? Spy? Again, it is impossible to know for sure. A third painting, Theodore Kaufmann’s On to Liberty (1867), is unambiguous about the harm done to blacks but ambiguous about their future. Kaufmann, a former Union soldier, shows a group of black women and their children fleeing to Northern lines during the Civil War. Freedom lies ahead, but the trail the women follow has a ledge of boulders before it, and what is to come is more uncertain because the women have no men with them (a sign that the retreating Confederate troops have taken their adult male slaves with them).

Given the distinctly American focus of these painting, it is not surprising that the catalogue for “American Stories”–which is edited by the exhibit’s curators H. Barbara Weinberg and Carrie Rebora Barratt–quotes with approval Emerson’s observation in his “American Scholar” address of 1837: “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests.” But equally relevant to “American Stories” is a letter that Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the Royal Academy of the Arts, wrote to John Singleton Copley from London after Copley sent him a portrait for exhibition at the Society of Artists. “If you are capable of producing such a Piece by the mere Efforts of your own Genius, with the advantages of the Example and Instruction, which you could have in Europe. You would be a valuable Acquisition to the Art, and one of the First Painters in the World.”

Copley took Reynolds’s advice to heart, leaving America for Europe in 1774, two years before the Revolution, and spending the next forty years as an English painter. But Copley was not alone in taking the European route to further his skills and career. American artists from James McNeill Whistler to John Singer Sargent to Mary Cassatt lived and studied in Europe, refining their technique abroad in ways they believed were impossible to do in the United States.

“American Stories” reminds us of the degree to which American art cannot be separated from its European roots. Indeed, if we want to talk about American exceptionalism in art, we need to do what we routinely do in discussing America’s political institutions–acknowledge how much of our originality stems from the way we have modified European forms to suit our situation.

Nicolaus Mills is professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower (John Wiley and Sons).

Painting: Thomas Anshutz, 1851–1912, The Ironworkers’ Noontime, 1880, Oil on canvas, Image Courtesy Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco