A Nation's Self-Image

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.