Whittling at the Whitney

By Robert Hughes

For decades now, dealers in early American folk art have been ransacking barns and attics, dragging back to the cities truckloads of their quarry: samplers and fracturs, whirligigs and tavern signs, painted chests, quilts, scrimshaw, wooden Indians and running-horse weather vanes peppered with goose bumps from 50 years of target practice by farm boys. It is an industry with scholarly spinoffs.

The first exhibition of American folk art--which, roughly speaking, means the work of late 18th and 19th century rural (or at least not cosmopolitan) artists and artisans with little or no formal training--took place in 1924. It was organized by a collector, Juliana Force, at the Whitney Studio Club in New York. This small institution has since become the Whitney Museum. Now, 50 years later, it has mounted an ambitious exhibition, "The Flowering of American Folk Art, 1776-1876," which reflects the growth of interest in a once ignored field. If any show can provide a canon of quality in so vast an area, this assembly of works does it.

They were produced at almost every social level of the young democracy, largely because ornament and design had not yet been wholly surrendered to either industry or "professionals." If, living in rural Maine or Pennsylvania in 1850, you wanted a chair, a yarn winder or a painted fire screen, there was a probability that you would have to make it yourself; the only other choice was a local or traveling craftsman. (By 1880 the mail-order and catalogue business was to change all that.) So folk art includes the minutely stitched embroideries over which the dutiful daughters of urban merchants strained their young eyes, no less than such humble ornaments as the chalkware statuettes cast from plaster by itinerant peddlers--of which a brightly spotted goat with striped horns and a Picassian leer (see color page) is one amusing example.

It is mildly ironic that such unpretentious objects, conceived and made without much more than a fleeting reference to the canons of 18th and 19th century mainstream art, should now have lost their practical use and migrated to the museums. History cautions us not to think of pre-industrial America as a lost paradise; albums of 19th century photos like Wisconsin Death Trip remind us how brutish, crazed and short life could be in America then. But the folk art gathered in this show does counterbalance the pessimistic view with its vitality and awkward graces.

Of course, our eyes are prepared for it by modern art. The Flag Gate, found in Jefferson County, N.Y., with its wavy battens of red-painted wood delicately mimicking the ripple of fabric stripes in a breeze, inevitably suggests Jasper Johns' flag paintings, but that is only an accident. Likewise, a deliciously anthropomorphic wool winder (see cut), with a human head and the hub of a decorated worm gear for its belly button, predicts the surreal wooden constructions of H.C. Westermann. And then there are the quilts. The best products of America's 19th century women quilt makers anticipate many of the formal devices and color systems of Op art and color-field painting. Seen with an unprejudiced eye, the snap and sparkle of the piecework Cactus Rose-pattern quilt of 1875 can reduce a lot of modernist abstraction to visual mush.

Less Work. Such comparisons, however, would have seemed quite absurd to the folk artists of the 19th century. When an itinerant painter from Maine, Matthew Prior, advertised that "persons wishing a flat picture can have a likeness without shade or shadow at one-quarter price," he was not prophesying what would happen to Matisse but stating a fact of his experience as a tradesman: flatness meant less work than roundness. Yet if there is one thread running through American folk representation, it is the desire to enumerate, to render back to the client a faithful and optimistic image of himself, his family, his possessions and allegiances. The folk portraits of the era were crude--the gimlet-eyed ladies in Sunday best; the slit-mouthed Yankees gripping their Bibles and ledgers like hatchets. But they were as close to realistic painting as anything the rural American public had ever seen. The daguerreotype's first casualty was folk portraiture, not realism of the more academic sort.

The limits of the style often added to the force of the image. Thus, to modern taste, the standing figure of Abraham Lincoln may well be more affecting than the seated marble giant in Washington; the straight, intractable line of the wooden block from which the figure is hewn could have been concealed by a more skilled carver, but here it lends expressive weight to the sense of fervent patriotic rectitude--the American grain, as it were--with which an unknown Illinois whittler tried to imbue his presidential icon.

Certainly, a lot of primitive folk art is only documentary in value, like the dancing, banjo-strumming slaves in a watercolor, The Old Plantation, circa 1800, from South Carolina. But at their best, the folk painters were able to give their pictures a deeper current of significance and poetry. Some had an animistic sense of landscape, as in Echo Rock, where the looming presence of the stag on the white wintry road is truly apparitional; others, like Edward Hicks, perceived the new country as a receptacle of religious grace, a promised land or peaceable kingdom, in which the act of painting a fat beeve or a field of standing corn became a way of counting one's blessings. And though it seems we have left the sense of paradise behind us for good, these crude images have stayed on to recall it.

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