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The Canvas of a Young Democracy
Making American Taste opens the renovation and expansion
of the New-York Historical Society by James Balestrieri
T
he question of taste in American art has
been highly charged almost since the arrival
of the rst Europeans. Indeed, the terms of
the debate have changed little over the intervening
centuries, as a stroll through the New-York Historical
Societys upcoming exhibition, Making American Taste:
Narrative Art for a New Democracy, will attest. The
New-York Historical Society is in the nal stages of a
renovation and expansion designed to reintroduce the
public to this best kept, worst kept secret among the
many glorious cultural institutions in New York City.
Linda Ferber, vice president and senior art historian of
the New-York Historical Society, who co-organized
the exhibition with guest curator, Barbara Dayer
Gallati, was kind enough to offer her insights.
The rst Europeans to settle in America brought
with them a healthy skepticism of the trappings of
elites, of aristocracies, of inherited wealth. Artif
there were to be art at allought to be useful. Art
ought to educate, elevate, allude to an ideal plane,
create a national mythology, bolster faith; art ought
not to distract the viewer from the strenuous task of
nation-building. Most of all, it ought not to divide
viewers into an elite, educated to understand art,
and an underclass left out of the interplay between
the artwork and the knowing eye. The question of
government involvement in the arts was as vexed
then as it is today.
And yet, having no native school of art, the rst
American artists looked to Europe for training and
inspiration and required the patronage of wealth to
support their nascent efforts. Before long, the rising
mercantile class in America clamored for an American
art, an American culture, seeing it as an essential
arm of the young republic. These dichotomies,
November 11, 2011-August 19, 2012
New-York Historical Society
170 Central Park West at Richard Gilder Way
New York, NY 10024
t: (212) 873-3400
www.nyhistory.org
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Louis Lang (1814-1893), Return of the 69
th
(Irish) Regiment, N.Y.S.M. from the Seat of War,
1862, oil on canvas, New-York Historical Society, Gift of Louis Lang, 1886.3
PHOTO COURTESY WILLIAMSTOWN ART CONSERVATION CENTER, 2010.
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between suspecting art and embracing
it, between cultural nationalism and
cultural continentalism, between useful
art and art for arts sake arose at the
very outset.
The underlying question posed by
the exhibition is the same one that
will underscore this column and the
magazine as a whole as it unfolds from
issue to issue: what is American art?
More specically: what is American
about American art? Whatever is it
is, it can be found on the honed edge
of the dichotomies, as American artists
endorsed or repudiated or sought to
reconcile their various claims.
When artistic merit derives from
skill at arranging and representing
the contours of observed reality,
allegory conveys deeper meanings
through systems of symbols apparent
to patrons and viewers. Art that aspires
to transcend reality seeks to represent
ideal visions of human action, faith,
and so on. The 18
th
and early 19
th

centuries in Europe and America
was, thus, the age of the emblem.
But what might have been readily
understood then has become elusive
to us now. Making American Taste
brilliantly begins to recover some of
the codes in these early works, lost
legends to dusty and forgotten maps.
The beautifully researched catalogue,
written by Barbara Gallati, Linda
Ferber, Ella Foshay and Kimberly
Orcutt, will serve, as Ferber says, as an
instant standard reference to a host
of magnicent American artists who
once enjoyed wide acclaim but who
have slipped from public memory as
tastes and times have changed.
Americas rst star in the artistic
rmament was Benjamin West. Born
in Pennsylvania in 1738, he showed an
early aptitude for drawing and made
his way to Italy in 1760, where he was
something of a sensation. Journeying
to London, West helped found the
Royal Academy and became president
in 1792. A close friend of King George
III, West entertained and taught many
American artists, including Morse,
Stuart, Dunlap, Peale and Trumbull.
Wests 1771 painting, Aeneas and
Creusa, and its companion, Chryseis
Returned to Her Father, exemplify the
prevailing aesthetic of the age. Themes
from antiquitythese paintings depict
emotional peaks in the Aeneid and
Iliad, respectivelyand the Bible were
thought to represent the pinnacle of
artistic endeavor. In Aeneas and Creusa,
Troy has fallen to the ruse of the
wooden horse. Aeneas determines that
he will die with his family. But omens
fall from the sky and Aeneas believes
that they are telling him to take his
family and leave Troy, that their destiny
lies elsewhere. Aeneas bears his father
Anchises on his back and takes his
son, Ascanius, by the hand. Aeneass
wife, Creusa, walks behind, but they
are separated in the chaos, and Creusa
dies. Aeneas, so Virgil writes, sails away
to found the Roman Empire. This is
a tale of leaving home, of departing
to found a new and better country.
Sound familiar?
Beyond the surface masteries of
form and color and the epic episodes
to which they refer, works like these
in the exhibition invite us to speculate
on their possible allegorical meaning.
Speculation: the Boston Massacre
occurred in 1770. America was restless
and on the boil. News of the unrest
had made England uneasy. Might the
English court and public have seen
prophecy in the paint?
In Chryseis Returned to Her Father,
the daughter of Apollos priest in Troy,
having been seized by the Greek King
Agamemnon, has been returned to her
Robert Walter Weir (1803-1889), Saint Nicholas, 1837-38, oil on wood panel, 30 x 24,
New-York Historical Society, gift of George A. Zabriskie, 1951.76
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father to appease the gods displeasure.
Might this, conversely, be an allegory
for what the English hoped for? The
return of a lost childAmericato
her father?
Second speculation: Might the
original collector of the two Wests,
William H. Webb, have seen them in
this light? Intention and reception have
clouded over in the intervening years.
Robert W. Weirs Saint Nicholas
gave shape to the Dutch vision of
Santa Claus envisioned by Washington
Irving in his 1809 satire Knickerbockers
History of New York. Not quite the jolly
bearded elf we know from Thomas
Nasts 1862 painting, Weirs Kris
Kringle satised a need to transform
American civic celebrations to suit
our mounting interest in the family
and children as symbols of national
health and prosperity. Weirs 1837
painting illustrates Irvings lines: And
when St. Nicholas had smoked his
pipe, he twisted it in his hatband,
and laying his nger beside his nose,
gave the astonished Van Kortlandt a
signicant look; then mounting his
wagon, he returned over the tree-tops
and disappeared. (p. 182) St. Nicks
gift to Van Kortlandt, in Irvings tale,
is nothing less than a vision of the
founding of New York, an apparition
formed in the smoke of the elf s pipe.
The carving of the New York City seal
in Weirs painting, hanging over the
mantle where the stockings would be
hung, cements the connection.
Part of the impulse to cement
national myths and civic celebrations
lay in a desire to stave off some of the
rapid social and economic changes of
the early 19
th
century, particularly those
that took place in the teeming cities.
On the surface, William Henry
Burrs The Intelligence Ofce feels like
a simple genre painting. The ofce
pictured is an employment agency.
The seated lady, eyes averted, inspects
the two standing women, both of
whom are roughly attired. But Burr,
who would go on to author books
that outlined the contradictions in
the Bible, that asserted that Abraham
William Gilbert Gaul (1855-1919), Charging the Battery, 1882, oil on canvas,
New-York Historical Society, Gift of Mr. Donald Anderson, 1954.111
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Lincoln had been the victim of a
Jesuit conspiracy, that Shakespeare
had been the illegitimate son of
Queen Elizabeth, was no mere genre
painter. As the catalogue conrms,
these intelligence ofces were often
conduits to prostitutionthe frank,
blank look of the young woman
dressed in red that has faded to
pinkon the left indicates, perhaps,
an already fallen state. The women in
the background, like something out
of Giotto or Raphael, sit gossiping in
judgment.
In the discourse of the day, the
intelligence ofce was a metaphor
for the increased commodication
of human relations in a democratic,
capitalistic society, one that Emerson
and Hawthorne debated. Emerson
seemed to see this as a necessary, if
regrettable state of affairs, going so
far as to deem the government a kind
of marketplace. He also believed that
it was no substitute for chance and
submission to divine will.
Hawthorne, on the other hand,
in his short allegorical tale, The
Intelligence Ofce, sees the agency as
a mirror of deeply awed individual
desire. Addressing the seeker of Truth
the Man of Intelligence replies that
he is no minister of action, but the
Recording Spirit. In this light, Burrs
painting becomes a kind of cosmic
philosophical pinball machineHow
did these people come to be here?
What do they say they want?What
do they really want?Is the Lady a
Lady or a Madam dressed as a Lady?
Who will be responsible for whatever
comes of this?
Louis Langs masterwork, Return
of the 69th (Irish) Regiment, N.Y.S.M.,
from the Seat of the War, N.Y., begins
to ask these questions on a national
scale. Recently rediscovered and
beautifully restored, the large-scale
canvas documents the return of the
Irish Brigade after the Union defeat
at the Battle of Bull Run in 1861. It
is the centerpiece of the exhibition.
Executed within little more than a
year after the brigades return, the
work included portraits of some of
the actual gures who led the 69th.
Brig. Gen. Thomas Francis Meagher,
for example, is mounted center right.
General Corcoran, taken prisoner by
the Confederate troops, graces the
broadside held up by the newsboy at
the extreme right. This fascinating
piece of reportageCNN for the
Civil War, as Ferber put itshows
the men vanquished but unbowed,
valiant even in defeat, wounded, brave,
weeping. According to Ferber, it is
possible that the work was intended
to be made into a print, and that the
Draft Riots of 1863in which Irish
New Yorkers resisted the draft and
murdered many black citizensmay
have cast a shadow on the efforts of the
69th and doomed the enterprise. But
the essence of the painting lies in the
individuals depicted, as if each has a
part to play, some heroic distinction
however smallto contribute to the
war effort.
The Civil War, however, seemed to
elude the grand heroic manner. Too
many individualsthe very sense of
individualityvanished in the tragic
immensity of the carnage. It was, in
many ways, the rst modern war.
The scales were tipped away from
individual heroism toward anonymous
death. Contemporary critics and
reviewers, sensing this, felt that, for the
most part, art had failed to convey the
Benjamin West (1738-1820), Aneneas and Creusa, 1771, oil on canvas,
New-York Historical Society, Gift of Mr. William H. Webb, 1865.2
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truth of the Civil War.
One of the last works,
chronologically, in the exhibition,
Gilbert Gauls Charging the Battery,
seemed to come closer to satisfying
viewers tastes and was widely praised
when it was painted in 1882, this
despite the fact that it dees any
demand for national mythmaking,
eschewing faith at nearly every level.
Depicting an undifferentiated mass of
men on an unnamed mission in the
dark, it neither elevates nor educates,
unless, by education, it means to
convey the simple notion that war is
hell, that battle is chaos. Implicating
the viewer, Gaul makes us stare down
the muzzles of the cannon in the
battery; their ash blinds us even
as it blinds the soldiers who follow
ordersblindlymarching to win or
lose, live or die. We barely know that
the attackers are Union soldiers.
Like Langs Return of the 69
th
,
Gauls painting is reportage, but it is
emotional rather than journalistic,
stripped of propaganda, describing the
psychology of a moment of fear.
Works like these close out the era
of the search for a unified national
taste. American artists like Frederic
Remington will continue to adapt
the conventions of the heroic
picture to write the hagiographies
of westward expansion, and genre
paintings and prints depicting scenes
of the lives and livelihoods of average
citizens will decorate humble and
stately homes. But the horror of the
Civil War and new approaches to
painting emerging from Europe
Impressionismwill influence artists
like Blakelock, Ryder and Whistler.
They will chronicle shadows and the
outlines of men and women as they
fade into omnivorous night.
The debate over the place and
purpose of art in America rages
on. Art is always on the chopping
block in Congress. The New-York
Historical Society, with its new,
spacious, interactive galleries, the new
DiMenna Childrens History Museum
on the lower level and large windows
overlooking Central Park opens itself
to us, inviting us to educate ourselves,
enter the fray, and have our say.
William Henry Burr (1819-1908), The Intelligence Ofce, 1849, oil on canvas,
New York Historical Society, Purchase, Abbott-Lenox Fund, 1959.46