As its last exhibition before the opening of Chicago quarters next month, the Terra Museum of American Art in Evanston has a show that is a virtual pendant to the Art Institute`s John Singer Sargent retrospective.
Called ”The Bostonians: Painters of an Elegant Age, 1870-1930,” the exhibition is devoted to some of the lesser lights of the American city that had Sargent as its favorite son. Broadly speaking–and in ways that were not always a credit–their values were his in both artistic and social realms.
Sargent was a dazzling technician and the period`s foremost portraitist. He also had a challenging, experimental phase, but such was the hold of his academic training that this foray into Impressionism looked like none other. Art to him was a celebration of social privilege and a conservative (if dandified) esthetic order.
The turn-of-the-century tendency to embrace art as if it were a religion became in Sargent a matter of decor. All the late-Victorian props are there, rendered with great suavity; yet because he recorded the fashions of the period in an earlier style, on a fundamental level Sargent remained an artist out of his time.
This likewise proves true with many of the Bostonians. Take, for example, their treatment of Japanese objects. Screens, prints and porcelains are crucial to several of the paintings and drawings, but not quite in the way one might expect. For while modern French artists took formal ideas from the objects, the Bostonians most often saw them as luxuries to be recorded. Of the better-known figures on show, only Edmund Tarbell adapted the treatment of perspective in Japanese prints to his paintings, and even then his basic conservatism did not allow it for long.
No less than Claude Monet found Sargent`s Impressionism remote from that of the Parisians, and this distance became greater with the Bostonians. To be sure, Childe Hassam produced some effective Impressionist canvases, but the others didn`t seem to grasp its theoretical base and instead worked by imitation. Not until Dwight Blaney`s ”Brookline Village in Snow” does one see that the Bostonians really mastered Impressionism, but that work was done in the `90s, almost a decade after the last of the exhibitions held by the European Impressionists.
Surprisingly, there was a Bostonian whose work–at least the earlier of his two pieces on show–captured an aspect of Post-Impressionism at the very same moment as French and Italian counterparts. This artist was Philip Leslie Hale, one of the few Boston painters who exhibited in the famed Armory Show. Though it might be mistaken for a failed attempt at exploring Impressionist light, Hale`s 1893 ”Girls in Sunlight” has an atmosphere closer to the Symbolist style that even Winslow Homer (in his piece at the Musee d`Orsay in Paris) adopted. The problem was, again, that Hale chose not to sustain it.
(His artist wife, Lilian Wescott, apparently was more consistent.)
Another exhibitor at the Armory Show, Maurice Prendergast, outdistanced them all with his paintings, watercolors and monotypes that explore Post-Impressionist ideas of surface pattern. His key work on view is ”Salem Willows” (1904), a painting as sensuous as those by Pierre Bonnard or Edouard Vuillard, almost entirely made from curves that prove irresistibly lyrical. Of all the Boston painters from the end of the century, Prendergast was the master.
After him, the exhibition becomes a wasteland of justly forgotten artists. Most of them achieve a considerable degree of finish, but nowhere is it higher than with William Paxton, an anecdotalist who aspired to the greatness of a Dutch master. Here the conservatism is positively stupefying. Little wonder that the artist is not included in standard histories of American painting. He was, however, an elegant draftsman, and elegance–as the show`s subtitle makes clear–is what this venture is partly about.
The other part has to do with the kind of tub-thumping that has become a Terra forte. Anything American, as long as it is old and two-dimensional, is worth seeing. Or so the story has gone. It is worth seeing precisely because it is American, even (as in the present case) when all ideas come from Europe and are doggedly pursued.
Of course, the Terra is not alone; in the museum world, no less than the world at large, ours is a conservative time. But it is one thing to encounter an exhibition like this in the city of origin where its import is civic, and quite another to see it promoted elsewhere as if it were for the national good.
The truth is: Mediocrity is no better because it is our own. And there is much that is mediocre (or worse) in the present show. Art historian Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. makes no bones about it. In the exhibition catalogue he writes, ”What began in the `80s as an embrace of the new on the part of Boston painters slowly became stale and repetitive, as any style does. New blood came, but the values, methods and style of the `80s remained in place, unchallenged.” Such staleness is at the heart of this exhibition.
Nonetheless, it doubtless will be popular, appealing to the same values as the Sargent retrospective. The period under review was, after all, an age so gilded that women not only bent beneath the weight of their jewels but carried added handsful for deposit on dinner tables, all the better to show. Even this reduced version of the exhibition–all the works reproduced in the catalogue are not on display in Evanston–often suggests such pleasure in ostentation.
Coinciding with the run of the exhibition in Boston last summer, Elizabeth Hunter published a volume of the writings of her godfather, late Boston artist and critic R.H. Ives Gammell. This text is perhaps the ultimate tribute to the painters currently on view, though in light of all that has happened in art of the 20th Century, its praise of American academicism is ridiculous. On the eve of the new Terra Museum`s opening, one hopes its ideological base proves better founded.
”The Bostonians: Painters of an Elegant Age, 1870-1930” continues through May 10.
