American Art, (The Pelican History of Art) by John WilmerdingReview by: James M. DennisThe Art Bulletin, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Mar., 1979), pp. 154-157Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3049883 .

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154 THE ART BULLETIN

nuances of watercolor. In this respect the old traditions of Phaidon have been carried on to Oxford from Italy where the

plates and text were printed. Canaletto's view of the Thames from Somerset House (pl. 3) has been reversed, which gives an interesting new slant to the Sandby above it, painted from the same viewpoint. The selection of illustrations is

always interesting and contains many watercolors not re-

produced before. As a general survey, this book is to be warmly recom-

mended. By his enthusiasm and careful choice of words, Wilton manages the difficult task of simplification without

being unfair to the artists' developments and interests. One must hope, however, that his book is the last general survey devoted solely to British watercolors and that any sub-

sequent illustrated volume on British art of the 18th and 19th centuries will consider patiently all the arts in depth, in order to do full justice to all aspects, sociological, literary, and historical, of what is a fascinating period in the history of the arts in Britain, when they were the equal of any in the world. Perhaps we may look forward to the Romantic Peli- can, stuffed and garnished but not too expensive.

MALCOLM CORMACK

Yale Center for British Art

JOHN WILMERDING, American Art, (The Pelican History of Art), New York, Penguin Books, 1976. Pp. 326; 299 black-and-white pls. $40

The inclusion of a history of American art in the Pelican

History of Art series is a sign of the relatively recent

legitimization of American art as ground for research and

writing. A steady improvement of scholarship in all areas of the field has been observable in theses, specialized articles, assorted monographs, book-length exhibition catalogues, and anthologies of contemporary art criticism. Scholars in the related fields of social and intellectual history have en- riched our knowledge of patronage, taste and literary paral- lels.

Consistently the Pelican editors have selected prominent scholars like John Wilmerding as contributors to the series. To American Art Wilmerding brings the craft and methods he has applied to the study of Fitz Hugh Lane, Robert Salmon, and Winslow Homer and of American marine painting. These works present thoroughly researched narratives of

biographical facts and patronage and descriptive analyses of the paintings. Brief comparisons with works by contem-

poraries and allusions to stylistic sources in paintings by past masters dominate the texts. Detailed checklists, notes, and appendixes provide well-organized reference tools for the researcher. In short, Wilmerding adheres to conventions of positivist history, with only occasional interludes of stan- dard stylistic interpretation and a minimum of concern for the relationships between the work of art and its cultural or historical context.

Conforming to these same conservative practices in his American Art, Wilmerding surveys the history of painting, sculpture, graphics, and photography from the earliest Col- onial period to the Bicentennial. Part I recounts develop- ments during the settlement and establishment of the American colonies, starting with illustrated charts and wa- tercolor records of the first encounters with the New World.

Wilmerding here also briefly assumes the role of interpreter to establish two themes that he considers formative in shap- ing the development of American art. A "sense of the practi-

cal" would prevail in America, its art from time to time

being wed to science. And, from the first settlers to the

present-day astronauts, "journeying to an unknown frontier came to be identified with the image and impulse of America." Technological progress and commercial growth and expansion have continued as the motivating forces of the United States.

Blanketed by this cultural characterization, the succeed-

ing chapters of Part I fall into a pattern of narratives of events, biographical notes, descriptive analyses, and stylis- tic projections. Isolated, sometimes insightful thematic

points are made infrequently. A concise factual account of native American arts at the time of colonization leads into a discussion of the original settler arts of carving and portrai- ture, these sharing a "decorative strength" that relieves their "austere flatness." From here portraiture becomes the focal point of Wilmerding's examination of the Colonial

period. Excessive attention is directed to the marginal de-

pendence of limning on the high art of portraiture in 17th-

century England, in the work of such immigrants from the Low Countries as Van Dyck, Lely, and Kneller. The Boston career of Copley and the accomplishments of Benjamin West abroad receive particular recognition.

Although these chapters on the Colonial period supply basic information, the author might have chosen an em-

phasis more sympathetic to the intriguing aspects of

primitivism. In contrast to Oskar Hagen's infatuation in The Birth of the American Tradition in Art with the absence of "civilized" European sophistication in Colonial portraiture, Wilmerding shows no appreciation for the positive charac- teristics of the provincial and primitive as such. The well- known portrait of the centenarian, Anne Pollard (1721), is described as crude in execution, "although the strong mod-

elling of the face and upper torso hint of later Baroque de-

velopments." The primitive abstraction of the ancient wom-

an's appearance is otherwise accounted for by the tenuous assertion that "only the pious Puritan temperament and the

rocky New England coast could have produced such an ex-

pression of endurance as this." The portraits by John Smibert are excused for their lack of penetration, rather than

being appreciated for their redeeming primitive traits, born of the artist's inability to differentiate the characters of indi- vidual sitters; and his figures' enlivening differences in

posture, placement, and relationship to the spectator are

emphasized. Citing unspecified paintings by Raphael and

Lely as sources, Wilmerding praises the portraits of "nota- ble Bostonians" as Smibert's most successful when they ap- proximate "the fresh brushwork and full modelling of the most up-to-date European styles."

Ironically, the more advanced achievements of Copley are not judged by European standards, in the chapter, "The Co- lonial Triumph." For the most part, Copley's Boston career is treated as a straightforward narrative, with conclusions about style drawn from passing references to his Colonial predecessors. Copley's ability to convey "familial affec- tion," in keeping with his sensitivity to "inner characters," is justly praised. But among the exiled Boston master's ambi- tious paintings in London, only Watson and the Shark was selected for consideration. Its bizarre subject and mispro- portioned forms disregard the conventions of history paint- ing in the Grand Manner, and it foretells the new fascination with the Terrible Sublime, a fact that Wilmerding registers all too laconically as "an unexpected first signal of the com- ing romantic movement."

Dramatizations of recent events occupy a prominent posi-

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BOOK REVIEWS 155

tion in Benjamin West's large production of paintings, be- tween the eclectic classicism of his early efforts in London and the Burkean sublimity of Death on the Pale Horse. Con- sequently, more attention might have been given to his early, near masterpiece, the Death of General Wolfe, which es- tablished a taste, thereupon acquired by Copley, for pictures of contemporary battles, and slighted the biblical and classi- cal themes sanctioned by the Academy. Commending West's "range and authority" as George III's court painter, and his guidance of many young American artists, Wilmerding closes Part I with no mention of West's rather embarrassing difficulties in drawing the figures that overcrowd his huge canvases.

The steady rhythm of uncritical accounts established in the chapters dealing with the Colonial period continues throughout those sections of the book devoted to 19th- century art, from artists of the Federal period to the urban realists of the early 20th century. In place of firmly estab- lished conclusions, generalizations dominate the discussion of Federal artists. John Trumbull's art is ambiguously charac- terized: he is said to have drawn on "the moral seriousness and clarity" of West's earlier work. Recognizing "the need for expressive romantic feeling," he realized it could better be fulfilled through "the vocabulary of the sublime." Thus his painting stood at "an interesting transitional moment between eighteenth-century classicism and nineteenth- century romanticism." Gilbert Stuart gains a highly debat- able accolade for "delineating psychological presences with sensitivity and an unrivaled perception." That his several versions of Washington seek "to peel away his sitter's iden- tity" might be questioned when they are compared with the more intimate, if less technically proficient, series of por- traits by Charles Willson Peale. John Vanderlyn fares better thematically in a brief interpretation that locates his Marius Amid the Ruins of Carthage in a specific context, by linking it with the tragic career of his patron and friend, Aaron Burr. At this isolated point Wilmerding digs deeper than usual. Vanderlyn's Marius would then seem to assert itself as an event in history as well as an aesthetic object, as part of a complex process of socio-aesthetic and psychological revela- tion.

Dealing with the Federal period, Wilmerding once more is occupied with stylistic problems, making a series of de- tached observations and missing the opportunity to reflect on concerns peculiar to the historic time and place. Among artists of the period, aspirations toward more ambitious his- tory paintings grew, fed by sojourns in Europe and the mis- guided encouragement of Benjamin West. Yet the United States had neither the means nor the facilities to support such projects at that time. In view of these conditions, the landscapes produced by Vanderlyn, Trumbull, Washington Allston, and Samuel E B. Morse could have been more fully appreciated as the expressive release from a melancholy brought about by the frustrating and impractical pursuit of academic heights in America.

Following an informative if digressive note on the sudden emergence of the daguerreotype, Wilmerding surveys the alternative subject of landscape with a diligently documented succession of biographical and stylistic vi- gnettes and accompanying observations on the artist's changing attitudes toward nature. Wilmerding observes that, as the wilderness gave way to the frontier and agrarian visions retreated in the wake of industrial urbanization, the landscape painters provided the nation with pictures evok- ing easy sentiments of harmony and order, morality and

spirituality, and didactic inspiration. Evaluation of these landscapes could have been elaborated, for the innovative among them evince increasingly individualistic points of view through their respective interpretations of physical na- ture. Therefore a thematically directed treatment might have delved beneath the readily observable elements of the Sub- lime to explore the relevance of Cole's Course of Empire to his fundamentalist, millenarian fears for the future of the United States. Moreover, to categorize this Anglo- American's imaginatively dramatic landscapes as idealistic views of nature, comparable to the nature of the Transcen- dentalists, is misleading. To the contrary, it is not the "awful wilderness" of Cole's art but the persistently detailed forest interiors of Asher B. Durand that parallel Emerson's "divine dream" of a nature permeated by the energy of the Supreme Being. In the first of ten letters on landscape painting pub- lished in The Crayon in the mid-1850's, Durand directly re- flects Emerson's convictions when he writes: "Let him scrupulously accept whatever she [nature] presents him, until he shall, in a degree, have become intimate with her infinity." Letting nature paint the greater part of the pic- ture, Durand makes his presence felt less than does Cole, whose stormy didacticism exposes the sin-ridden artist and viewer alike to the tangible forces of a vengeful nature.

Although Wilmerding acknowledges the landscapes of Frederick Edwin Church as records of New World nature at its most monumental, records inspired by Alexander von Humboldt, he predictably favors the innocuous coastal "luminism" of John Kensett, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Martin J. Heade as immanently America's own. The claim for this style as distinctly indigenous would falter if it was com- pared with the early Freilichtmalerei of such German painters as Karl Gustav Carus and Karl Friedrich Schinkel. In any event, spacious landscapes full of light and sharply focused details are made to qualify provisionally as expressions of

'"Jacksonian optimism and promise, the sense of national unity and expansion." This is the banner under which folk art, Horatio Greenough's heroic, Zeus-like marble Washington, genre painting, and Western mountain scenes are subsequently discussed.

At its best, the consideration of genre painting delivers insights drawn directly from representative works and iden- tifies general similarities with contemporaneous American literature. Greater attention might have been given to dis- tinguishing the varieties of genre, at the expense of some of the seemingly less productive search for precedents. A pro- nounced contrast exists between the academic anecdotalism of Richard Caton Woodville, or John Quidor's whimsical in- terpretations of Washington Irving, and the more genuine genre, a regionalism of subject matter, of William Mount of Setauket, Long Island, and George Caleb Bingham in Missouri. Mount and Bingham depicted local life as they themselves lived it, and that life serves as the basic impetus for their art regardless of their stylistic ancestry or "quota- tions," from painters of the Renaissance and 17th-century Holland, or Bingham's possible borrowings from Mount.

Relatively free of art-historical manipulations, the paired chapters that treat Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins situate their interpretations of human perseverance in a con- text of changing national mood. A new sobriety in the wake of the Civil War (Mumford's "Brown Decades") replaced the "celebratory optimism" that Wilmerding stresses in the light of luminism. After following Eastman Johnson from plein-air rural nostalgia indoors to the shadows of The Fund- ing Bill, he describes Homer's gradual maturation as an artist

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156 THE ART BULLETIN

who immersed himself in a struggle of survival against the

great forces of nature. Although Wilmerding has no diffi-

culty recognizing the epic proportions that Homer assigned to the challenge of nature and to the fisher folk who met it, his review of the formal devices and sources working to create this impression might have taken the attitudes con- veyed by the imagery into more thorough consideration. Without the aid of divine mercy or the comfort of religious morality, Homer's Grand Banks fisherman must rely on physical prowess and self-control to confront the sea. The monumental image for Homer, however, is a vision of woman in iconic conjunction with the sea, a universal life- source symbol, which evolved from his early fashion-fragile ladies. A male-female polarity, distinguishing the active life from the contemplative, might also be discerned in Eakins's studies of intelligence. It is not quite enough to write that Eakins records "a countenance of aching sadness and spiritual pain" as he isolates and ages his female subjects. From a socially critical perspective, he shows them brooding in brown interiors, seeking relief from doubt through their musings, as men confidently assert themselves in the roles of rowers, surgeons, and scientists.

The fashionable art of virtuoso brushwork imported from Munich by Frank Duveneck and William Merritt Chase, or practiced internationally in portraits by Cecilia Beaux and John Singer Sargent encourages a directly responsive, visual kind of appreciation. The eye does sometimes fail, and the author unaccountably sees "the powerful physical and

psychological realism of Velazquez" in Whistler's Arrange- ment in Grey and Black No. 1: The Artist's Mother and in No. 2: Thomas Carlyle. In the case of Mary Cassatt's impressions of women and children, "a subconsciously American strain" is identified by Wilmerding, and defined as a "hard realism and palpability of mass and space," a description more ap- propriate to the disciplined draftsmanship of a Degas group portrait of the 1860's, or that of a Fantin-Latour.

In the art of George Inness and Albert Ryder, the division of emphasis between spiritual content and form as content anticipates the future direction of 20th-century art. Al-

though he hints knowledgeably at the Swedenborgian mys- ticism reflected in the mature glaze technique and composi- tion of Inness's late landscapes, Wilmerding loses sight of Ryder's art, especially his nocturnal marines, as a precedent for later developments in American abstract painting. He refuses once more to adopt and develop a theme coherently through a large amount of interrelated material. Instead, a conventional summary of Ryder's career comes at the end of a succession of summaries labeled "The Inner Eye," on un- orthodox artists such as William Rimmer, William Page, Elihu Vedder, Ralph Blakelock, and Thomas Dewing. Wil- merding's hurried treatment of Ryder's enigmatic art fastens onto its literary allusions to the point of suggesting that we should compare even his moonlit sea abstractions with the "equally hermetic and symbolic poems of Emily Dickinson."

From here on, the remaining chapters of the book acceler- ate to become an increasingly erratic summary of American art in the 20th century. The painters who exhibited as The Eight in 1908, plus Robert Henri's prize student George Bel- lows, are presented under the title, "Approaches to Moder- nism." Yet nowhere in the chapter do their token attempts to come to terms with avant-garde painting appear. For in- stance, Glackens, Henri, and Luks adopted the triadic color chords of the Maratta system, while Sloan went a step further by combining this system with a cross-hatching screen technique for his disastrous, abstract nudes. The first

generation of American abstractionists is burdened with the label "Cubism," and the painter is made either to conform to its tenets or to suffer the accusation of misunderstanding the revolutionary changes that the art of Picasso, Braque, and Delaunay had instituted by 1912. It must be understood and respected that Marin, Hartley, Maurer, Joseph Stella, Demuth, O'Keeffe, and Stuart Davis assimilated techniques of Cubism and Futurism into their personal means of ex- pression. But to assume that they were attempting to dupli- cate the European modernists distorts their healthy eclecti- cism and robs them of their individualism in subject matter and content. They were, after all, working in the best American tradition of independent choice.

The multileveled interpretations of urban existence by Edward Hopper, "a descendant of Fitz Hugh Lane's earlier luminist canvases," are bypassed with a cursory stylistic note attached to a confusing chapter on the 1930's, a chapter that lists Ben Shahn as a Regionalist and Philip Evergood as moving much closer to "a style of pure surrealism" than Morris Graves or Mark Tobey. Chapter 25 rushes "Toward Abstraction" through a smattering of biographical sketches and fragmented stylistic generalizations that skim over the sculptors Nadelman, Lachaise, Flannagan, and Noguchi, while obscuring the vital contributions to the climactic stages of abstract painting in the late 1940's and 1950's of Arthur B. Dove, Milton Avery, Georgia O'Keeffe, Arshile Gorky, and Hans Hofmann.

Neither the pattern nor the pace changes throughout the pages covering the major painters and sculptors who brought about the triumph of abstract art in the United States. In rapid reference to Jackson Pollock's mature period from 1947 to 1951, Wilmerding writes, "in no sense is Pol- lock's painting any longer illustrational or representative: even more significant, it is also not figurative." When was Pollock's painting ever "illustrational"? To say it is not "rep- resentative" must be a typographical error. And to overlook the return of figurative elements in Pollock's stain paintings of the early fifties suggests that another glance need be ta- ken.

The essential dichotomy in theory and criticism created by Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg in the center of the Abstract Expressionist arena, if incorporated into a discussion of Pollock, De Kooning, Kline, Still, Rothko, and others, would assure us an immediate frame of reference. But the two critics enjoy no recognition here. Instead, the standard comparisons of Barnett Newman's expansive fields of color with the panoramic extensions of 19th-century land-

scapes come up once again, while Clyfford Still's jagged ver- ticalities must recall Frederick Church's erupting Cotopaxi. Other even more coincidental connections are made, as transitions grow weaker among the random thumbnail sketches of abstract sculptors in the fifties.

Individually, the descriptive characterizations of works by Louise Nevelson, Rauschenberg and Johns, Richard Lind- ner, Robert Indiana, and Richard Anuskiewicz, offer agree- able appreciations. But judged as essays, the chapters that contain them lack thematic structure. The significance of Johns's flags-in-the-abstract, divorced from emotional as- sociations, for the detached "object" art of the sixties, repre- sented by Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella, is clouded in the rush to finish. Pop Art as genre painting, rather than as urban realism or social commentary, Black Art, one Ameri- can Indian, Photo-Realism, Claes Oldenburg, George Segal, Albers and Kelly, Color Field, Earth Art and Body Art, all run out together as so many beads on a tangle of strings. The

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BOOK REVIEWS 157

sensation of expansive energy dear to the American's heart could be a redeeming characteristic of these last pages as

they suddenly end with Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. A statement quoted from Eva Hesse too might appropriately be applied as an approach to this mass of material: "Chaos can be as structured as non-chaos."

A comprehensive history of a nation's art should attempt some kind of synthetic overview of the whole, as well as

give creative appreciation of a work and its artist. Some moments do await the persevering reader of Wilmerding's American Art, especially in his widely separated discussions of photography, from the daguerreotype to Diane Arbus. Descriptive characterizations enriched with inspired in-

sights may simply embellish a text, however, and lend little to its progress. To avoid such ephemeral results, interpreta- tive themes or points of view are wanted, even if based on

hypotheses essayed within the larger framework of socio- cultural inquiry. Such an approach is especially desirable for the study of visual arts in the United States, considering the consistent need for evaluating them face to face with Euro-

pean art. Much of the satisfaction experienced in an Ameri- can work derives, actually, from its deviations from Old World norms. This independence merits emphasis, which too often suffers from the conventional art-historical preoccupation with sources and lines of direct stylistic in- fluence. One hoped that Wilmerding's American Art would have incorporated its rich variety of material into a

panoramic review of American art, as the expression of in- dividual cultural experiences. Instead, it is a compendium of chronologically arranged information and casual observa- tions, and fails to accomplish any more than did a half- dozen surveys before it. Occasionally specialized and more often generalized, its thirty short chapters not only lack bal- ance, but leave direct relationships between the works of art and their peculiarly American context to mere inference. Since the paperback revolution and its continued provision of reasonably priced monographs, anthologies, catalogues, and concentrated studies of periods and movements, a handbook such as this seems an overpriced anachronism.

JAMES M. DENNIS

University of Wisconsin, Madison

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