Charm, Yes; Inspiration, No

By ROBERT HUGHES

In Boston, a survey of America's home-grown impressionists

"American Impressionism," which runs at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art until Aug. 31, is in many ways an excellent summer show: refreshing and nostalgic by turns, more amenable than audacious, and most of it no more problematic than a scoop of lemon sherbet on a hot day. It consists of 133 works. Some, like Mary Cassatt's delicately unsettled, Jamesian glimpse of social manners, A Cup of Tea, 1880, are of memorable quality. But, in general, the level wobbles. The fault is not in the selection: Art Historian William Gerdts, who organized the show (first seen last winter in Seattle), is a ranking authority on his subject, and his catalogue is a model of precise explanation.

The problem is simply that except for Cassatt, none of the Americans whose work reached toward what was being done in Paris by Monet, Renoir, Degas or Pissarro could consistently perform on a high level. They saw what the French saw; they studied in Paris; some of them even painted the flowers in Monet's garden at Giverny, with the assiduity of students doing the Roman ruins a century before. They were not trivial or maladroit. Yet charm, rather than inspiration, remained the order of the day. No wonder that Childe Hassam, William Merritt Chase, Edmund Tarbell, John Twacht-man and their colleagues have always seemed to be squeezed uncomfortably between the great Yankee realists like Eakins and Homer in the late 19th century and the robust "Ashcan" painters like Robert Henri in the early 20th.

Still, theirs was undoubtedly a moment of liberation. One great preoccupation of late 19th century art, not only in France but across Europe, America and Australia, was light: the description of sunlight and its effects, not as an incidental portion of the painting, but as a main theme, almost a protagonist. This "glare" aesthetic, as Gerdts calls it, turned paintings into "mirrors from which dazzling sunlight is reflected back toward the spectator and upon which strong silhouettes of still clearly rendered forms may be cast."

One reason why some American impressionist canvases do not look like French impressionism is that they depicted a different kind of glare: a high-keyed white light, rather than a vibrating spectrum of color a la Monet. They were, in other words, tonal rather than coloristic impressionism. Some of the artists who had studied in Paris, notably Childe Hassam, managed to work the authentic French flicker into their surfaces without making it seem heavy handed. Hassam's view of a victory parade in 1918, The Union Jack, New York, April Morn, with its vibrant banners hanging over a throng of pedestrians and traffic, is a study of color and air done with fervent elan.

But for every one such painting there were a dozen tame, regional variations on then popular French artists like Bastien-Lepage or Tissot, whose work provided a palatable substitute for the analytic modernity represented by impressionism at its best. Hence the Boston show is heavily freighted with affable but basically in sipid dining-room pictures of young Wasp rosebuds swathed in yards of white voile, clustered on lawns, playing on beaches, posing on verandas or picking flowers. They make one realize how badly America needed modern art. Not until the ad vent of some of the impressionist-influenced painters of "the Eight"--say, Maurice Prendergast after 1900, with his vigorous friezes of jostling figures by the sea--does vitality reappear.

That vitality is there, written across the canvas with enormous chromatic zest, in William Glackens' Breezy Day, Tugboats, New York Harbor, circa 1910. But in Glackens' cheerfully slathered impasto, the sky streaked with cat's paws of pink and the puffs of whistle steam stitched across the fat, oily pelt of the sea, an other kind of sensibility is present. It is very like the world of the French Fauve painters Derain and Vlaminck. The gap between Paris and New York has narrowed to less than a decade, and American modernism is about to begin in earnest. --By Robert Hughes

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