Literary foreigners have ever been drawn to this country, curious to see for themselves the doings of our bumptious, God-fearing, and famously democratic people. Such notable authors as Tocqueville, Dickens, Henry James (American by birth, but cosmopolite by persuasion) and Nabokov have passed our way, leaving reports that continue to instruct and amuse us. After 160 years, for example, Tocqueville’s observation that in America “each citizen is habitually engaged in the contemplation of a very puny object: namely, himself” has only sharpened its edge, and it will take more than interstates and Holiday Inns to dissipate the pall that Humbert Humbert left hanging over our highways after his desperate romp through the stucco courts and the clapboard cabins of a bygone America.
Americans adore whatever is new; an invincible streak of puritanism runs right through their history; though their culture may seem shallow to Europeans, Americans look to the beauty and bounty of nature to even the balance; a practical people, impatient with theory, they prefer the precision and clarity of results. These familiar propositions are all that Hughes has to offer in the way of large themes. That’s not to say there is anything wrong with these ideas–they wouldn’t be so conventional if they weren’t also true–only that one expects more from an author who is so well acquainted with his subject, who commands such a penetrating critical intelligence, and who begins by posing the excellent question, “What can we say about Americans from the things and images they have made?”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
When that same layman is escorted through the halls of American art, from portraits of righteous colonial divines to contemporary pieces by no less righteous performance artists, he likewise wants to know: why did this practical, can-do, nature-loving nation of puritans give up making art about the world for making art about art? But this time his curiosity will be disappointed. Modernism, which hit Western culture with the force of a tidal wave in The Shock of the New, is just another set of breakers in American Visions: in the same way that 19th-century American artists move from didactic history to natural grandeur to scenes of polite leisure, 20th-century artists paint what they can hear instead of what they can see, drip their colors, and make sculptures out of the rubble of abandoned steel mills. There are no watersheds in this book. Its author is more concerned with his idea of American art as a whole: various and evolving, but still unified by those basic American themes of novelty, puritanism, nature, and practical precision. Hughes digs below the greatest differences in subject matter and technique looking for his connections, and, ingenious critic that he is, he finds them.
American Visions is full of this sort of thing: premodern art prophesies the modern, and modern art reworks our old passions and anxieties. In this way minimalism and conceptual art are classed as new forms of puritanical hostility to the graven image–“fixed in the American genome for three hundred years.” Hughes prefers not to ask how many conceptual artists could come up with a graven image even if they so desired; instead he draws a line that connects, say, a Shaker rocking chair with someone who registers disapproval of the modern art market by exposing his own body to third-degree sunburn. It’s unfair to demand proof for a connection like that, but we might ask whether it leads to anything worthwhile.
But hasn’t Hughes gotten himself a reputation as a scourge of this very thing? He has indeed performed the good service of scolding extremists of all kinds, both the “patriotically correct” followers of Jesse Helms and those on the other side who insist, for example, that enslavement of Africans was a European invention or that we should give up phrases like “a little nip in the air.” With his foreign nose Hughes has sniffed out the puritanism that hangs around many of these squabbles. In Culture of Complaint he put the matter this way: “Some works of art have an overt political content; many carry subliminal political messages….But it is remarkably naive to suppose that these messages exhaust the content of the art as art, or ultimately determine its value.”
On one side of the coin, daggers; on the other, a fragrant bouquet for Jacob Lawrence. His well-known “Migration” series, which portrays the northward movement of blacks in the early decades of this century, is “a visual ballad, each image a stanza.” Hughes has nothing bad or even mildly critical to say about this art. If the images seem static, it’s their “Egyptian stillness”; if the drawing looks flat, it’s a “reliance on silhouette.” Above all, despite the suffering and pathos depicted in the series, “Lawrence was not a propagandist.” Lawrence had no less a message than Benton, but Benton is the one who’s full of “rhetoric”–a favorite pejorative of Hughes’s, applied also to Bierstadt. It was not rhetoric, you see, to evoke the “permanence and resistance” of a downtrodden yet dignified race; but when the idea was to show the heartland of this country flexing its muscles with a perfectly complacent optimism, the resulting “surge and flow…mainly produced rhetoric.” (“Surge and flow,” by the way, are just fine in the hands of Jackson Pollock, who was Benton’s pupil.) In this way Hughes is not only unfair to Benton but condescending to Lawrence. Some may squirm when they read that in the “Migration” series “you sense that something is speaking through Lawrence–a collectivity,” or that “probably only a black artist could have handled it with the depth of feeling it required.”
Hughes presents this kind of abstraction as the last heroic stage of American art–at least for now. As he reviews the subsequent parade of “isms”–soon to become “wasms” in his excellent phrase–abstract expressionism increasingly wears the patina of an almost classical antiquity. It was the one indigenous, world-storming movement in American art, a source of great prestige as the leading edge of “an American modernist establishment that had gone global.” Hughes likes this movement so much he seems not to notice the odd coincidence that many of its leaders couldn’t draw: we learn that de Kooning admitted no talent for illustration, that Pollock was ham-fisted as an “orthodox draftsman,” and that the drawings Newman made before he won fame with his vertical stripes were just “feeble biomorphic doodles.”
