From Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware” to the contemporary works of Jasper Johns, the American flag has long figured in American art.
Curiously, it has also been a component of American Indian art, and not simply as the emblem of “the enemy” in Indian depictions of the long conflict between white settlers and the continent’s indigenous people.
As a new exhibition opening Aug. 30 at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton explains, ironically, Native Americans even viewed the Stars and Stripes design as an amulet that could protect one from opponents in war.
Obviously, this was not the case with the American flag carried by the lamentable Lt.Col. George Custer in the battle of Little Big Horn with the Sioux.
Plains Indians–Dakota and Lakota Sioux, Kiowa and Otoe-Missouria–are the most represented in this 37-piece show, which displays a variety of flag designs and motifs on clothing, weapons, baskets, rugs and other Indian objects. But there are also works by the Yakima and Makah tribes of the northwest, the Apache and Navajo from the southwest, and the Han Indians of Alaska.
Some are quite contemporary. A rug made by Navajo artist LaVerne Barber is a tribute to an uncle who served in the Vietnam War.
Organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, “The Flag in American Indian Art” runs through next Jan. 18 at the New Jersey State Museum, 205 W. State St., Trenton (609-292-6464). It moves to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta Feb. 21.
Steamboat twins
Steamboats were also a colorful part of the American past–and always at their most colorful when they had their portraits painted by the Bard Brothers, whose uniquely American artworks are featured in a new exhibition, “Painting America Under Steam and Sail,” at Washington’s National Museum of American Art, 8th and G Streets, N.W. (202-357-2700), through Sept. 28.
Twins who did their first commercial work–a portrait of a ship owned by Cornelius Vanderbilt–when they were only 12 years old in 1827, James and John Bard were self-taught artists whose sprightly maritime oils, gouaches and watercolors enjoyed great popularity in the years prior to the Civil War.
They painted virtually anything afloat–steamboats, racing yachts, sailing ships, barges and excursion steams. Among the 37 works on view are a splendid likeness of the America’s Cup yacht America and another of a safety-minded steamboat in which the passenger cabins and compartments were on a separate barge towed behind a steamboat. The separation was to protect them from exploding boilers–an unfortunately commonplace aspect of steam vessels of the era.
John Bard went a little strange in 1849 and fled the partnership, seeking his fortune in the California goldfields and dying stone broke seven years later. James continued painting ships into the 1890s, but the market for his style diminished and he ended up in reduced circumstances as well.
A studio restored
In the last half of the 19th Century, not only was New York the center of American art, but the center had a street address: 51 W. 10th St. in the heart of the city’s fabled Greenwich Village.
On this site in 1858 was built the first structure in the country created solely for the use of artists. The work of architect Richard Morris Hunt, who later went on to design the city’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was called the Tenth Street Studio Building and had studios and exhibition space for 25 artists.
The structure was demolished in 1956, but it has been temporarily restored–at least in spirit–with a quite wonderful exhibition of some 50 paintings, 100 photographs and other representations of the memorable, mostly 19th Century art created there over the decades.
Called “The Tenth Street Studio Building: Artists Entrepreneurs From the Hudson River School to the American Impressionists,” the show runs from Thursday through Nov. 16 at New York’s National Academy Museum, 1083 5th Ave. (212-369-4880).
In its prime, the building housed the best artists in the country. Hudson River School landscape painters Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt completed some of their monumental canvasses there. Winslow Homer used the building, as did American Impressionist William Merritt Chase, who used to arrive flamboyant in red fez and flowing cape with a pack of Russian wolfhounds on leash.
In the era before art galleries, collectors and other purchasers bought directly from painters, usually visiting them at their studios. In this century, the rise of the art gallery system greatly diminished the importance of and need for the Tenth Street Building, but some hung on. Among those who used space there were artist/philosopher Kahlil Gibran, author of “The Prophet,” and Thomas Stephens, art teacher to Dwight Eisenhower before he became president.
A squatter named Romany Marie, a Greenwich Village palm reader, was the last known resident. She put a curse on the owner when he tried to make her leave so he could have the building torn down. He died the following day. When the wrecking crew refused to work on the job, a new and less superstitious one had to be hired. Thereafter, artists began congregating on the east side of 5th Avenue.
More shows
– The Rhode Island School of Design, 2 College St., Providence (401-454-6100), is considered by many to be the nation’s pre-eminent art school, and a new exhibition there, “Recent Acquisitions: Spotlight on Rhode Island,” reveals why. On view through Sept. 7, it highlights works by such graduates as Ruth Dealy (’71) and Elaine Anthony (’76). Through Sept. 28, RISD is also exhibiting paintings by British artists David Hockney, Alan Davie, John Salt and others. Through Sept. 21, you’ll also find “Waves of Tears From Sodden Sleeves,” a show–all about the Japanese kimono–whose title comes from a line from an 11th Century poem.
– Washington’s National Gallery of Art has just acquired one of Winslow Homer’s finest Civil War paintings, “Home Sweet Home” (1863), and to celebrate, the museum is exhibiting the painting and 20 of Homer’s Civil War drawings, including “Two of Sheridan’s Scouts,” which the artist–then a magazine illustrator–sketched during action near the end of the war at Petersburg, Va., in March 1865.
“Winslow Homer and the Civil War: Recent Acquisitions” is on view through Sept. 28 at the Gallery’s West Building, 4th St. and Constitution Ave., N.W. (202-737-4215).
