THE ARTS | Reshaping ideas, expressing identity
30 May 2008
John Updike Explores How Art Mirrors America’s Soul
Author examines artworks that illuminate U.S. culture, history, character
Washington -- John Updike, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose prolific output of novels, short stories, poems and essays has made him one of the most celebrated American writers now living, is perhaps best known as a chronicler of life in America’s small towns and affluent suburbs. As such, he is a longtime observer of his nation’s quirks, customs and tribal rituals, and an interpreter of a broad cultural landscape that defines the United States as surely as its geography does.
So when Updike arrived in Washington to deliver the 2008 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, an event sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) on May 22, it seemed only logical that he would structure his remarks around the question “What is American about American art?”
The question, he said, “has often arisen,” but it is less fashionable than it used to be, since any comprehensive survey of American achievement in the arts “inevitably gravitate[s] … to that least hip of demographic groups, white Protestant males of northern European descent.”
The question, he said, came to mind as he contemplated a new program -- “Picturing America” -- that will bring poster reproductions of 40 significant American artworks to classrooms and public libraries throughout the United States. Launched by the NEH in partnership with the American Library Association, the program aims to introduce U.S. students to their country’s artistic heritage through paintings, sculpture, architecture, fine crafts and photography that help illuminate the nation’s character, ideals and aspirations.
“Picturing America” features works as varied as Alexander Gardner’s haunting photograph of a war-weary President Abraham Lincoln, sitting for the camera just three months before his assassination in 1865; Mary Cassatt’s 1893-1894 oil painting The Boating Party, depicting a tranquil family group enjoying an outing on a lake; Italian immigrant Joseph Stella’s painting Brooklyn Bridge (circa 1919-1920), a tribute to the dynamism of modern life and the machine age; Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural masterpiece Fallingwater (1935-1939), a boldly contemporary dwelling suspended above a waterfall; and Romare Bearden’s collage The Dove (1964), a bustling cityscape that explores the urban African-American experience.
While tipping his hat to the “sensitively diverse set of 40 artworks” included in “Picturing America,” Updike said his lecture -- titled “The Clarity of Things” -- would focus on the much-derided “dead white males” whose contributions to the U.S. artistic canon have profoundly shaped the public’s understanding of America’s history and cultural traditions. Despite having fallen out of favor “in this age of diversity and historical revision,” these “thin-lipped patriarchal persons” cannot be ignored by anyone who seeks to appreciate how artists have shaped the United States, from Colonial times to the present day, said Updike.
AN EMERGING NATION AND ITS ARTISTS
According to Updike, the first great American painter was John Singleton Copley (1738-1815), born in Boston to Irish immigrant parents. Copley began his career in Boston as a teenage prodigy, painting oil portraits that captured a subject’s likeness with virtuosic realism. Copley’s attention to detail, and his “preternatural skill in rendering fabrics” (an important quality, since a sitter’s clothing was an indicator of social rank), soon established him as “the supreme portraitist not only in New England but in all the Colonies,” Updike said.
The “Picturing America” series includes Copley’s 1768 portrait “of a successful Boston silversmith, Paul Revere, whose name, thanks to an 1861 poem by [Henry Wadsworth] Longfellow, would come to reverberate in the legend of the American Revolution,” said Updike. “It is Copley’s only portrait of a craftsman in shirt sleeves, and … [w]hatever Revere is thinking about, it is most probably not the midnight ride he will undertake in eight years’ time but the job he will undertake tomorrow morning, its meticulous graving and polishing.”
Copley eventually moved to London so he could master the English artistic style, and though his work was admired in England, he never duplicated the success he attained in his birthplace. As Updike put it, Copley “had left behind the land that had rewarded him with unchallenged eminence … for an England where he always struggled to prove himself.” Art historian Lloyd Goodrich, said Updike, “puts it bluntly: ‘America lost her greatest artist, to add another good painter to the British school.’”
Winslow Homer (1836-1910), born 98 years after Copley, was another Bostonian whose approach to painting was powerfully direct -- and recognizably American, in his rendering of rugged landscapes and maritime scenes, as well as his unsentimental depictions of working men and women who demonstrated a quiet stoicism bordering on the heroic. “Picturing America” has selected a painting by Homer -- The Veteran in a New Field (1865) -- that served as the basis of a woodcut used to illustrate an 1867 newspaper article “celebrating the widespread return of [U.S. Civil War] armies from the fields of battles as a triumph of a democratic society,” said Updike.
Homer was not immune to outside influences, but he explicitly rejected certain artistic trends, such as the popular English Pre-Raphaelite movement, which relied on stylized figures and a jewel-toned color palette. Homer adopted a fairly muted color scheme, employing loose, vigorous brushwork to create dynamic tension. His maritime scenes in particular “are images of primal wildness and power,” with an “almost carefree” application of paint that makes no attempt to hide the artist’s labor, Updike said.
Through Homer’s “palette-knife slatherings” of white paint, “smeared into place in imitation of the water’s tumultuous action, we simultaneously witness both the ocean and the painter at work,” Updike added. “These arduous passages of tumbling foam and exploding spray are at once representations of natural phenomena and examples of painterly artifice,” merging seamlessly on canvas.
CONSTRUCTING AN IDENTITY: THE PAST AS PROLOGUE
Updike also cited several other notable artists from the “Picturing America” series, such as Grant Wood, whose oil painting The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1931) offers an aerial view of Revere’s famous exploit, portrayed “with a flavor of parody; the village is toylike, … [and] Revere’s steed is stretched out in the position of a hobbyhorse.” A similar folksiness informs Thomas Hart Benton’s 1975 mural Origins of Country Music, “limned in Benton’s usually wiry, restless lines.” In Updike’s view, “such cartoonishness genially asks for a suspension of disbelief while it presents not so much an American scene as a rendering of America’s self-image,” an affectionate nod to national myths and tall tales.
Walker Evans’ 1919 photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge, shown as an engineering marvel whose lines “gracefully resist the downward pull of gravity, as the pointed arches of a Gothic cathedral do,” records the industrialization of America, said Updike. Not so the homespun scenes painted by Norman Rockwell, whose works appeared on the covers of the Saturday Evening Post for decades. Rockwell came to be regarded as a beloved national treasure for his pictorial representations of core American values; most of his paintings are wholesome vignettes that reveal the warmth, integrity and humor of Americans from all walks of life.
Updike gives Rockwell his due, pointing to the artist’s oil painting Freedom of Speech (1943), “rendered without visible brushwork, the hallmark of a painterly manner.” In this iconic painting, conceived as a tribute to democracy in action, “attention is focused from all sides” on the central figure, a man who rises to speak at a town meeting.
Rockwell, “like Copley before him,” gave good value to his clients, “principally the Post and its millions of readers, always exceeding the necessary with an extra caricatural vitality or, in his late works, with lovingly observed detail,” said Updike.
Turning once more to the 18th century, Updike praised Gilbert Stuart’s robust Lansdowne Portrait (1796) of George Washington, which the first U.S. president posed for in the flesh. Washington is garbed, unassumingly, in the black frock coat and breeches of a country gentleman, but his stately bearing leaves no doubt that he is a man of considerable stature among his peers. A majestic full-length depiction of the man who served as father of his country, “the Lansdowne Portrait in its dignifying, eloquent painterliness would befit a king,” said Updike.
These artworks, along with so many others featured in “Picturing America,” are linked by a New World sensibility articulated by Colonial theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), whose writings provided the title for Updike’s Jefferson Lecture. Edwards “sought a link with the divine in the beautiful ‘clarity of things,’” Updike concluded. “The American artist, first born into a continent without museums and art schools, took Nature as his only instructor, and ‘things’ as his principal study.”
In such an environment, where settlers had to create their own institutions as they built a nation from scratch, there always has been “a bias toward the empirical,” said Updike, “as the artist intently maps the visible in a New World that feels surrounded by chaos and emptiness.”
More information about the “Picturing America” program is available on the NEH Web site.
