American Art and Vernacular

Early American art was sometimes looked at as being derivative of German, French, and English art. What is now referred to as industrial design, John A. Kouwenhoven called a “vernacular” and called the separation of American industrial design from British industrial design as the beginning of a way of seeing a unique American nationhood. The United States, unlike Great Britain, France, and Germany, didn’t have a sense of history (some say we still don’t) and “repressed artistic impulses found release in uncounted rudimentary and personal expressions." This artistic impulse, in opposition to Europe, and the slow change of industrial and agricultural design has created a very specific American cultural and artistic mode.

This sense of American culture and art is the subject of a Washington Post article concerning the opening of two new Smithsonian museums.

The museums don't manage to elucidate some essentially American culture -- because no such thing can or should exist, especially in a country as young and big and plural as this one. But they manage to do something just as important. They show the country and its artists, and even sometimes today's curators, busily constructing what it is to be American, and investing in the building of some kind of national identity. American pictures -- but only some, at certain times -- have set about defining what Americanness is supposed to be. […]

The fact that there's no claim that the art is especially American, or even especially good -- only a tiny fraction of its artists come anywhere close to Degas -- doesn't simplify the museum's artful task of using it to give us a big-picture view of America.
I don’t mean to sound a trumpet of American nationalism, but what Blake Gopnik of the Washington Post doesn’t understand is that American art doesn’t define what he calls “Americanness,” or “set about defining what Americanness is supposed to be.” Rather, an identity or artist like Jackson Pollock (whether you like him or hate him, or place his art in opposition to Europe) brings a specific American identity to his work. That is, Americanness or American cultural identity isn’t found in a museum, it’s usually found on the sides of miles and miles of brick walls. Americanness “as an ideal in art” isn’t collapsing; it’s shifting away from the Smithsonian and the museum.

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