One of the options for a course project is to visit the Chrysler Museum in downtown Norfolk, view the collections of American art (sculpture, painting, photography), and focus on a couple of objects in order to discuss how they reflect historical and cultural issues related to American literature. (To get information on the Chrysler Museum, its hours of operation, and its location, point and click here.)
I will offer a tour for students, although students are also welcome to visit the museum on their own. These notes should be useful afterward. Students should read carefully the labels supplied with each gallery or object.
Relevant collections are all located on the second floor of the museum. Students who visit the museum on their own should secure a map and may want to take the listening device that the museum provides.
Students should be alert to the ways in which American visual art has frequently created an idealized "usable past." Romantic or sentimentalizing depictions of the past were typical in the 19th century. American impressionism, likewise, tended to "prettify" the present. Modern art of the 20th and 21st centuries, however, tends to be far more realistic and gritty. You may seem some similar trends in literature.
Additionally, you might note the dominance of European influences in American art until the 20th century. The capital of Western art in the 18th century was London; in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Paris. However, after World War II, New York became the center of Western art, a dominance it still holds to some extent today. Writers of the early republic (late 18th and early 19th centuries) resisted European dominance; however, by the end of the 19th century many were fleeing to Europe from America's cultural provincialism and anti-intellectualism. Not until after World War II did the United States come to dominate Western literature.
We begin in a gallery devoted to English and American art of the late 1700s and early 1800s.
In the narrow second-floor gallery leading to the 18th-century gallery, you will find American portraits from the late Colonial period and the early republic. In addition, you will find the Norfolk mace, which reminds us of our colonial origins in a royal charter.
John Singleton Copley (1738-1815), "Portrait of Miles Sherbrook": Unlike English portrait paintings (glance around this gallery at Shee's "Portrait of Mrs. Farthing" and Beechey's "Portrait of Sir Thomas Livingstone Mitchell"), Copley's offers a formal portrait without lavish dress or furnishings. The subject is a no-nonsense Yankee, caught in the intellectual work of writing, calling to mind the high literacy rates of New England as compared to the relatively low rates in the South.
Thomas Cole (1801-1848), "The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds": This scene is one of the most popular in all of Western religious art (behind depictions of the Crucifixion, the Madonna and Child, or the Nativity). However, Cole brings an distinctly American inflection to this genre since the enormity of the landscape seems to overwhelm the traditional subjects, as if to communicate that the landscape is the sacred event. The humans figures are dwarfed by the monumental landscape in a way that is typical of American Romantic nature painting (see Cropsey and Bierstadt below), a reflection of the immensity of the American terrain.
Portraits: All the portraits are painted in flat, primitive style, almost like that of folk art. In fact, the visual arts in the early republic took several decades to develop, usually only when artists studied in Europe. Although some of these portraits are attributed (Badger, Field, Phillips, Marling), several are anonymous, indicating a low value placed on art in the early republic.
"The Last Supper" of Erastus Field (1805-1900) is a derivative imitation of the DaVinci fresco and reminiscent of "black velvet" paintings today.
Just as literature became less derivative and more original in the early to mid-nineteenth century, so did visual art rely less on English models.
Jasper Cropsey (1823-1900), "The Old Mill": A Luminist painter and a founder of the Hudson River School of painting, Cropsey demonstrates a Romantic interest in nature faced with human encroachment, an occupied nature, whose intensity of light suggests the spiritual quality that transcendental Romantics saw in nature.
Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), "The Emerald Pool": In contrast to the Cropsey painting, Bierstadt's canvas represents a wilderness devoid of human presence, a monumental vastness that similarly evokes the Romantic worship of nature.
Peter Stephenson (1823-ca. 1860), "Wounded Indian": This pose or composition comes straight out of the fallen-warrior genre of Greco-Roman Classical sculpture with a Romantic subject, namely the vanishing Indian. Americans of the early republic imagined themselves as the heirs of democratic Athens and republican Rome with indigenous subject matter. As soon as white Americans had successfully pushed Native American populations to the furthest frontiers and eradicated their culture, whites began to romanticize the Indian nostalgically.
George Cabet Bingham (1811-1879), "Washington Crossing the Delaware": This is a heroic painting derivative from the form of European models of monumental military painting. [During 2004 and 2005, this painting is on loan to a traveling exhibit and is not displayed in the museum.]
Daniel Ridgway Knight (1839-1924) "Harvest Repast" is less a realistic portrait of sweaty, exhausting, dirty agricultural labor and more a Romantic idealizing of rural life, depicted as a Sunday picnic. (Contrast it with the grittier "Shepherd and His Flock" beside it.) American culture tends to romanticize rural life, believing it to be more wholesome, pure, genuine, as is evident in our "return-to-nature" movements, our flight from urban life into suburbs and small towns (why so many people are moving to Suffolk), and our federal farm subsidies.
Winslow Homer (1836-1910) "Song of the Lark"--noted for his seascapes, Homer here turned to a romanticized view of agricultural life.
Francis Edmonds (1806-1863), "Facing the Enemy": This painting is an example of sentimental moralizing about alcohol, a harbinger of the temperance movement that would result in Prohibition in the early 20th century. The figure faces a temperance meeting poster and a bottle of an alcoholic beverage. The messy carpenter's workshop, the figure's torn clothing, and the broken window panes (some stuffed with rags) suggest a disordered life. This subject reminds us that many of the forms of cultural production in 19th-century American were primarily for didactic purposes, that is, to teach a moral lesson or to use art as a morally uplifting medium (which we will see in the sentimental novels and their offspring, including slave narratives).
With this gallery, we remain in the 19th century. American artists, sculptors particularly, had to become expatriates to Europe in order to learn their crafts and sometimes remained there because they found a culture that valued art in ways that America in the 1800s did not. Americans in the early republic were fascinated by and imagined themselves to be the philosophical descendants of democratic Athens and republican Rome (the Classical world), which is why so many of our public buildings take Neo-Classical forms. It was one way of justifying slavery, since both the Greek democracy and the Roman republic had domestic slaves. Southern slave owners frequently gave their slaves Roman names, such as Junius and Calpurnia. Classicism and Neo-Classicism are characterized by a smooth, flawless modeling of idealized human forms.
Native American's are depicted in Classical style in Joseph Mozier's "Pocahontas" (ca. 1850) (a statue mentioned in Nathaniel Hawthorne's French and Italian Notebooks) and "The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish" (ca. 1857) and in Chauncey Ives's "The Willing Captive" (ca. 1862-68). The last two depict scenes out of literature, namely the legends of whites who "went native" after being captured by Indians, refusing to return to their families when they had the opportunity. Such statues reflect actual events as well as fiction, reflected in captivity narratives, like Mary Rowlandson's, and James Fenimore Cooper's novel, The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish.
Larkin Mead's "The Battle Story, or the Returned Solider" represents an ironic commentary on war's horrors. It is also related to all the sentimental depictions of military homecomings that still dominate the media in the 21st century.
Nearby presidential busts depict Washington and Jackson as idealized Roman senators, though the Lincoln bust is realistic. It is doubtful that Washington ever wore a toga, as depicted here, but citizens in the early republic wanted to see him in continuity with the Roman republic.
This ends the tour for students in ENG 241, Survey of American Literature I
Frederick Childe Hassam (1859-1930), "At the Florist" and Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), "The Family" both show scenes of common life, women's domestic world, in a style pioneered by European Impressionism.
This gallery includes Impressionist canvases by William Glacken, William Merritt Chase, Frederick Frieseke, Robert Reid, Ernest Lawson, Robert Henri, George Luks, and George Bellows. Note the number of artists who felt compelled to expatriate to Europe in order to study or paint. Lawson's "Harlem River Winter" is an interesting urban landscape, presaging the urbanism of later Modernists.
Herman Atkins MacNeil (1866-1947), "The Sun View": In this sculpture of a Native American warrior initiating a boy in the art of archery, we see some of the white nostalgia for the ancient Indian culture that it had eradicated. MacNeil's sculpture, however, is not simply sentimental but a faithful rendering of life that MacNeil had observed.
Take a close look at Franz Kline (1910-1962), "Hot Jazz," Reginald Marsh (1895-1954), "Down at Jimmy Kelly's," Henry Glinten Kamp (1887-1946), "Cuban Workers' Club," Philip Evergood (1901-1973), "Music," and Edward Hopper (1882-1967), "New York Pavements." These canvases are characteristic of various forms of social realism and urban realism, which represent the gritty, seamy, and democratic aspects of American society. Hopper captured the lonely, ominous quality of American urban life.
Postmodern America (after World War II) and its postmodern art are characterized by an increasing fragmentation of social life, an absorption on consumer culture, especially as reflected in mass media, and a sense of the competing claims on our attention by mass media. Postmodern art tends to be either cool or hot. Cool art is detached, apparently meaningless, ironic, and aesthetic (that is, its purpose is primarily aesthetic pleasure). Hot art is engaged, polemical, political, socially conscious, even sentimental (that is, its purpose is didactic, instructive). Postmodern art pushes the limits of what society considers art to be and what it considers appropriate materials and subjects of art.
Abstract art presents large canvases with dense fields of color (such as Mark Rothko's "Untitled") or apparently random applications of paint (such as Jackson Pollock's "Number 23, 1951") attempt to convey a sacred inner landscape represent a subjective image vocabulary. Much modern poetry and fiction similarly represent personal vocabularies and eccentric styles that are difficult for readers to understand
What might be called "discard" or "recycle" or "salvage" art pushes the limits of what we consider to be the appropriate materials of art. The Western art tradition reveres paint, canvas, noble metals, stone; artists such as Robert Rauschenberg ("Wooden Gallop") and John Chamberlain ("Fancy") employ "found" objects, the detritus and discards of consumer culture. There is something playfully democratic about these materials in that you don't need to purchase the expensive materials revered as art media by the Western tradition. Modern literature often employs "found materials" and fragments instead of the smooth, seamless style of earlier periods.
Pop art is the name given to a generation of artists (like Andy Warhol ["Portrait of Jack Tanzer," "Marilyn," "Campbell Soup Can"], Roy Lichtenstein ["Live Ammo"], and James Rosenquist [Silver Skies"]) who employed hip, ironic appropriations of pop culture and mass consumerism, such as the forms of photo journalism, comic books, advertising, and billboards. They mock the seriousness of art, the pretensions of the art world, and the emptiness of mass culture.
Socially conscious postmodern art is typified in Jaune Quick-to-See Smith's "Trade (Gifts for Trading With White People") and Tim Rollins and K.O.S.'s (Kids of Survival) "The Temptation of St. Anthony--The Nicolations." Smith's collage assembles found items, kitsch objects, mass culture items smeared with blood-red paint to provide a counterpoint to the cheap barter objects that colonizing whites legendarily used with Native Americans and to highlight the subsequent ways in which whites have commodified Native Americans. It is both funny and sad. Rollins's collaborative sequence composed with at-risk students contrasts the cool textuality of a French literary work printed on broadsides with the messy physicality of his own blood (mixed with alcohol). This is art as activism pushing the limits in several ways: it is collaborative (rather than the work of an individual artist), it is the product of social activism (rather than an object of aesthetic contemplation), and it employs a product of the artists' own bodies (rather than "artistic" materials).
Nam June Paik's "Hamlet Robot" demonstrates the ways in which artists are further pushing the limits of artistic form and material, employing found materials (old radio and TV cabinets) as well as digital electronic media (analogue and digital images).
Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) worked during the depths of the Great Depression with the attendant social and economic unrest. His public works, frequently commissioned to decorate public buildings, are painted in the social realist style. "Unemployment, Radical Protest, and Speed" comments on the social conditions in America at the time, while "Achelous and Hercules" places a scene from Classical Greco-Roman mythology in an American prairie setting.