Reflections 14 - The American Wing

 Incredibly, it has been almost a full year since I began my exploration of the American Wing. Familiar as it now is to me, it was mostly terra incognita when I started out. It's an extraordinary collection, perhaps the world's finest, of American art, and I barely knew of its existence. I have learned so much, and especially how much I don't know.

I wonder why the paintings on display here were, with a few exceptions, made  before 1930.  Later works by American painters are, I suppose, represented in the museum's collection of modern art. Is that to say that there is little distinctively American about modern  paintings, either in subject matter or in style? I can  imagine that abstract art readily crossed international borders, and that many native-born painters were influenced by the influx of European abstract and Expressionist artists who came to the U.S. as refugees in the 1930s and afterwards. That will be an interesting hypothesis to investigate.

But then, throughout America's existence, a great many of its artists and artisans - painters, potters, silversmiths, furniture makers, sculptors, etc. - have been in dialogue with their European counterparts.  Early on, many American artists immigrated from Europe; and later, many native-born artists went to Europe - especially, London, Paris, and Rome - to study. Stylistic shifts - from Neoclassicism to Rococo revival to the Arts and Crafts movement to Impressionism - echo what was going on in Europe. It's hard for me to identify what makes a painting  distinctively American, aside from depicting American citizens or  American landscapes. 

Still, if Americans were not at the forefront in developing new artistic styles, the country was far from a cultural backwater - it was too educated and prosperous for that. It's striking that within a century after English settlement began, prominent people were commissioning artists to paint their portraits or portraits of their children.  By owning paintings or beautiful decorative pieces,  Americans of means could convey their status and and present themselves as no less sophisticated and cosmopolitan than their European counterparts. 

I'm struck yet again by the vagaries of taste over time. Styles and objects come into and out of fashion.  I think of myself as having good taste, but someone looking at my possessions a hundred years from now - or 25 years from now - might well disagree. It's humbling. 

If commissioning and collecting art is largely the preserve of elites, it's not surprising that images of poor people and people of color don't figure prominently in the museum's collection, despite curators' best efforts. If the American Wing presents a rather limited perspective on American political and social history, it's a great introduction to the country's aesthetic concerns over the last three centuries.