In Washington, a superb survey of early American masterpieces
There is no tract of art history whose prestige has changed more quickly than pre-1900 American art. Not quite 20 years ago, the Fogg Museum at Harvard decided to rid its basement of a dusty landscape: lurid sunset over a forest-girt lake somewhere in the Northeast. Nobody wanted it. In the end Sherman Lee, the infallible pontiff (now retired) of the Cleveland Museum, bought it for $20,000. The picture was Twilight in the Wilderness, 1860, by Frederic Edwin Church, a work now thought to be one of the crucial American images, the very essence of Yankee emotion in the face of natural sublimity, the icon before which many people (up to a few months ago) would have sacrificed James Watt on a stake. No doubt it would make $3 million or more at auction today.
In those days, such paintings were hardly an issue for American scholars and collectors, let alone European ones. For every word written on Church, Martin Johnson Heade or John Singleton Copley, there were 100 on Pollock and 200 on Picasso. The track of pioneer scholars in this field, like John Baur and Lloyd Goodrich, was hardly more beaten than Lewis and Clark's. It was as though, by general consent, all American art had been sunk in earnest provinciality until the 1940s, when abstract expressionism unburdened itself upon the world stage. Nobody believes this today. In fact, the pendulum has gone so far in the other direction that a sea piece by any Boston dauber distantly connectable to Fitz Hugh Lane will command a price that not so long ago would have seemed too much for Turner. No vignette, however treacly, of apple-cheeked infants at the log schoolhouse or hirsute pioneers skinning the raccoon eludes the general resurrection. No grave of a deservedly buried name remains undug.
How is one to get a handle on all this? Leery as one may be of events that claim to be the hundred greatest somethings, they have their uses as introductions. One should start at the top and work down. The valleys of American painting are so marshy that it is better to lift one's eyes to the peaks. Last fall an exhibition that does just this opened at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where it was besieged by Tut-size crowds; it can now be seen at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, and will go to Paris in March. "A New World: Masterpieces of American Painting 1760-1910" may be the best survey show of its kind ever held. Certainly it will be the first time that this area of American art has been seen in proper concentration and strength in Europe.