You will have heard of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan and,
I dare say, any number of other famous American art institutions. But I
can’t recall hearing of the Addison Gallery – a centre dedicated to the
study and exhibition of US art – let alone place the town it’s in:
Andover in Massachusetts. Then again, most on the other side of the
pond won’t know of south London’s gem, the Dulwich Picture Gallery
(although they should, as it was the world’s first purpose-built art
museum). So, as they say over there, we’re even.
Except we’re not, because despite our ‘special relationship’, us
Britishers have been reticent to find out more about the history of our
colonial cousin’s art, especially pre-1900. The cruel consensus that
undervalued all early US art has been completely revised in recent
years and the evidence for its reappraisal is on display in Dulwich’s
aptly titled ‘Coming of Age: American Art 1850s to 1950s’. Far from a
cultural PR stunt, this show – drawn entirely from the collection of
the Addison Gallery – handsomely tells the story of North America’s
rise to artistic power, which came long after it had stamped its world
supremacy on industry, agriculture and everyone else’s affairs.
This
American tale begins in the run-up to the bloody Civil War of the
1860s. It’s a turbulent place to begin, but the curators have opted for
a depoliticised show, one that focuses on how American art came out
from the shadow of its European masters. So you’d be hard pushed to
find evidence of national struggle, unless your keen eye spots two
pictures in the first room, both titled ‘The Coming Storm’. Even then,
the human costs of ominously bunching clouds are only implied in the
figure of a fleeing shepherd in George Inness’s version.
The
landscapes of the Hudson River School were such powerful images of
pride and nationality that queues formed in front of Frederic Church’s
cinematic panoramas as if they were religious icons. Alas, the intimate
galleries at Dulwich can’t cope with billboard-sized pictures and have
to make do with a modest rose-tinted painting by Church, of a sunset
over the Appalachians. The landscapes here give an impression, not of
awesome natural majesty, but of honest hardworking down-home farm folk
– more Waltons than Moses.
The real hero of this period was the
reclusive Winslow Homer, whose nostalgic all-American views of life
ended the nation’s love affair with the European Grand Manner and
ushered in a new gritty, native realism. When the eminently snobby
author Henry James railed against Homer’s ‘vacant meadows, his
freckled, straight-haired Yankee urchins, his calico sun-bonnets,
cowhide boots…’ and so on, he was in fact praising their
straightforwardness, their honesty. Two pictures by Homer here sing off
the walls: a pair of thoughtful boatmen at one with the sea, and a
female figure being buffeted by ‘The West Wind’, alone on the range.
This
brings us all too quickly into the twentieth century and the more
familiar territory of vertiginous New York city skylines by Childe
Hassam and a moody bridge by Edward Hopper. As the pace quickens, so
does the step – past a few duds by Milton Avery, Marsden Hartley and
John Marin – but the vibrant circus scene by George Bellows should stop
you in your tracks.
We know how it’s going to end – with the
abstract expressionists claiming New York as the official centre of the
modern art universe – and they don’t disappoint. The colourful, complex
Jackson Pollock is but a sliver of his usual barn-door beasts, but is
no less impressive. Although the best room is the last, given our scant
knowledge of the earlier period, it really should have been the first.
But it’s churlish to want more when it’s already a home run.
