American Literature and Painting

Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, by Benjamin West

Another new dimension on our civilization can be found in a sumptuous new color volume, Three Hundred Years of American Painting, by Alexander Eliot (Random House, $13.50), 250 plates and over 300 pages on a subject that is only now coming into clear focus through the labors of such scholars as Edgar P. Richardson, whose Painting in America: The Story of 450 Years (Thomas Crowell, $10.00, 17 color plates, 170 B&W) appeared a year before Eliot's.

Especially useful to English teachers unfamiliar with the field of American painting is the list in the Richardson book of "One Hundred Collections of American Painting" throughout the country, where a lot of looking will convince one of the feasibility and importance of relating Eliot's volume to the traditional survey of American literature. His time-line chronologies will suggest connections between poets and painters who shared the shifting climates of belief that constitute our intellectual history.

The pictures in the book will suggest even more obvious filiations: Asher B. Durand's painting of William Cullen Bryant and the nature painter Thomas Cole, appropriately called "Kindred Spirits" (1849) on page 72; the sternly sober visage of "The Reverend Thomas Hiscox" (1745) is a visible emblem of the thought and expression of Jonathan Edwards; Benjamin West's "Penn's Treaty with the Indians" (1771) is motivated by the same historical spirit that prompted the Hartford Wits to try to pen epics celebrating the Infant Republic; Washington Allston's "Moonlight Landscape" (1819) can help you teach your students the meaning of the sublime and ethereal in romantic poetry; Edward Hick's "The Peaceable Kingdom" (1830) has something to say about the Quakers of American literature, from Woolman to Whittier.

John Quidor's "Rip Van Winkle at Nicholas Vedder's Tavern" (1839) is another example of the community of the arts in America of which our textbooks give no hint, e.g., the Harcourt, Brace volume prints Durand's "Kindred Spirits" with the caption, "William Cullen Bryant with a companion enjoying the scenic Catskills ... ," thereby completely ignoring a chance to show how practitioners of various arts in America shared points of view and interests. To put it baldly, this is bad teaching.

Neither Richardson nor Eliot is completely satisfactory on the twentieth century in American painting: the former because he suspects it is too early to say anything certain; the latter because he tends to be anecdotal rather than critical. Luckily there is a third volume, New Art in America, edited by John I. H. Baur (New York Graphic Society, Greenwich, Connecticut, $22.50), in which five first-rate curator-critics (Barr, Lloyd Goodrich, Dorothy C. Miller, James Thrall Soby, and Frederick S. Wight) examine carefully, through fifty full page color plates and 177 B & W illustrations, the work of fifty major American artists of the twentieth century.

Once again the connections that can be made between art and literature are as obvious as they are unexploited. The Ashcan School of urban realists like Robert Henri, John Sloan, and William Glackens are cultural cousins of Theodore Dreiser and Carl Sandburg. Joseph Stella's love affair in paint with the Brooklyn Bridge is not unrelated to Hart Crane's poetry. Marsden Hartley's wonderfully vitriolic satire of Junkerism in "Portraits of a German Officer" is reminiscent of the anti-war writings of the 1920's. Philip Evergood's "The New Lazarus" and Ben Shahn's "The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti" show the continuing vitality of the American tradition of artistic social conscience exemplified by Babbitt-baiters like Sinclair Lewis and proletarian critics like John Steinbeck in the 1930's.

If the Negro's torment is verbally recorded in Richard Wright and others, the same misery of body and soul is given visual embodiment in Jacob Lawrence's powerfully hopeful "Slums," in which one is almost overwhelmed by the ugliness until, almost hidden, a flower in a tin can emerges in the foreground.

But quite apart from the pedagogical usefulness of this handsome book, there is the simple attraction of expanding one's horizons to include the profound pleasures of American painters like Charles Sheeler, Georgia O'Keefe, Jack Levine, Edward Hopper, Charles Burchfield, Stuart Davis, Peter Blume, and George Grosz. The next step in developing anthologies that exploit new technologies of communication and the best available scholarship will be to include study references to books like these on American painting, with, ideally, film strips based on the books produced for more efficient use.

The same thing applies to American music, about which I will talk next month, and to American architecture, dance, drama, sculpture, indeed the whole range of artistic expression. It is no longer necessary to look at American culture on a small B & W screen; when it's relevant, why not a three-dimensional portrait of America, in technicolor yet?