American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America by Robert Hughes Harvill 635pp, £35 in UK
I regret not having seen the TV series on which this book is based; it seems genuinely to have impressed all sorts and conditions of people, from the lay viewer to the specialist. Though an Australian, Hughes has lived and worked in the US for more than a quarter of a century - and as he points out in a foreword, without taking American citizenship. So perhaps such a work could only have been written and compiled by a man who unites first-hand knowledge of America, its art and history with the broader, more detached view of an intelligent and receptive outsider.
We still tend to think of America as a "new" country, a new-found-land, but Hughes remarks very pertinently that European settlement in Mexico and Massachusetts began in the early 17th century when the site of St Petersburg was still a marsh. The Spanish were in North America long before the English were, and "the United States of America was a multi-ethnic society right from the start". The Pilgrim Fathers, arriving from Plymouth, merely wanted a place where they could worship in peace. The Puritans who began arriving in 1630 were a very different matter; they were religious visionaries intent on creating the New Jerusalem, followers of a new Moses moving into a land which the Lord had specially predestined for them. The native Indians had no place in this, and "these men of God were killers on a biblical scale: before 1615 about 72,000 Native Americans lived between southern Maine and the Hudson River, and by 1690 most of them had been wiped out and the rest beaten down." Family portraits apart, the Puritans had little interest in painting and disliked images in any case, but their meeting places, their furniture, quilts and other artefacts possess that bare, clean American elegance which runs through the centuries and today can be seen in the better Minimal artists. Another, and more essential, legacy was their work ethic, which has largely made the US what it is.
However, the major development in the late 18th century was the creation of American neo-classicism, seen in the forceful portrait paintings of John Singleton Copley and the "history" pictures of Benjamin West, who emigrated to England where he built up a huge reputation. More sympathetic than either, perhaps, are the gracious buildings created by Thomas Jefferson (who of course was never trained as an architect) in patrician Virginia: Montebello, the State Capitol, and the incomparable state university.
Until quite recently, American art was never popular in Europe or even well known there, with the exception of a few cosmopolitans such as Sargent - who, in any case, was born in Europe of expatriate parents. So Hughes is writing about figures who are known to most of us chiefly through reproductions; a close acquaintance with American public galleries, American architecture, the major private art collections, is something only a small minority of Europeans manage to acquire. For instance, the Hudson River School which emerged circa 1830 was America's first importance school of landscape painting, but there is hardly an important example of it hung outside America.
Similarly, as the cult of the great Wilderness and the Frontier expanded - part myth, part geographic reality - the men who put it into paint and canvas were, and remain, strictly national reputations. The great Western panoramas of Albert Bierstadt, for instance, are as purely American as the films of John Ford but unlike them have never travelled abroad. Frederick Church's grandiose paintings of Niagara and the Andes were tours-de-force of High Romantic rhetoric which caused cultural shock waves at the time, and are still worth looking at today. Later, Frederic Remington painted the cowboys-and-indians subjects immortalised by Zane Grey - although he himself was almost too fat to ride a horse, and by background was an Easterner educated at Yale. According to Hughes, "There are passages in John Ford's films, such as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, based entirely on Remington's pictures."
A curiosity about so much of this mid-century painting was that it was created by foreigners - Bierstadt was a German, like Leutze whose Washington Crossing the Delaware was familiar to generations of American schoolchildren. Even the founding father of the Hudson River school was an Englishman, Thomas Cole, and Thomas Moran, another panoramic painter of the West, was Liverpool Irish by origin. William Michael Harnett, one of the best still-life and trompe l'oeil painters, came as a child from Clonakilty in Cork. Charles Bingham, a Southerner who fought in the Civil War, gave Americans a new sense of their country's vastness and variety by painting the busy life of the Mississippi, explored in literature by Mark Twain. That same Civil War marked the emergence of one of America's very greatest artists, Winslow Homer, who began as a newspaper illustrator but ended up, early in this century, as a voluntary recluse painting visionary but realistic pictures of the sea and the rocky Maine coast. The fighting between North and South also virtually launched modern photo-journalism through Matthew Brady and his assistants - although their work was less purely documentary than used to be thought, since they sometimes "arranged" their battlefield scenes by moving corpses around or placing a rifle to suit the demands of "composition".
The unique Homer apart, the greatest realist was the Philadelphian Thomas Eakins, who often faced official disapproval and more than once got into trouble by exposing male models to a life-class which included young society women. He was the polar opposite of Sargent, a jaunty cosmopolitan and the painter par excellence of Society and the world of Henry James; but Sargent's fall from popularity in the last seventy years should not blind us to his outstanding gifts. In architecture, the advance of technology made possible such achievements as Brooklyn Bridge (designed by the Roeblings, father and son) while in Chicago the extraordinary Louis Sullivan virtually created the skyscraper. Sullivan, too, "felt rejected by the American Establishment" and was far less famous or successful than his contemporary Stanford White, whose flamboyant life and career ended when he was shot in a hotel lounge by a jealous husband. The career of Whistler, like Sargent's, was largely a European one. Early in the century the so-called Ashcan School, though they were gifted and zestful rather than front-rank painters, upheld the native tradition of nitty-gritty urban realism, a parallel to the novels of Dreiser. But Modernism was now building up into a seismic force and though the great photographer Alfred Stieglitz and his New York circle were notable pioneers in their own right, the epochal Armory Show of 1913 almost swamped the local talents. Matisse, Duchamp, Brancusi (who was burned in effigy in Chicago) and other giants of the School of Paris made American Modernism look like a congress of country cousins, even though it included people as gifted as Georgia O'Keeffe and Marsden Hartley (whose finest work, in any case, came later). It was plain that things could never be the same again.
It is to the credit of certain remarkable people that they kept their heads and their own counsel, and by doing so refused either to become mere followers of Europe, or to recoil into cosy, colonial mediocrity. Edward Hopper is possibly the greatest American painter of all, but though he was represented in the Armory Show (by a single watercolour) his career lies outside Cubism, abstraction, Expressionism and all the other major schools of European Modernism. Hopper remains simply Hopper, and that is enough in itself. Another great genius, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, was fully alert to innovation and change, but he integrated them into his own original vision and remained wholly himself - unlike, for instance, the generation of American architects who followed Mies van der Rohe. Hopper apart, Stuart Davis stands out among the painters between the two world wards because he is at once "international" and thoroughly American - not really a paradox, after all. (The "native" school of Benton, Curry and Grant Wood now looks not only provincial next to him, but meretricious.) The immediate post-war era, of course, saw the great explosion of Abstract Expressionism, of whom Pollock, Guston and Gorky seem to me to have lasted best; Rothko, of course, is a giant, but then he stands alone and apart.
In sculpture, Calder, David Smith, Louise Nevelson and Noguchi are at least the equal of any of their contemporaries in Europe, though none of them belonged to any school or group. This was the heroic age of New York art, and as in the case of the School of Paris which it had largely supplanted, what came after it could hardly be on the same level of energy or inspiration. Pop Art, Warhol excepted, now looks oddly deflated, while most Minimalism has rapidly become tedious. There have been artists of high calibre active, such as George Segal, Richard Diebenkorn, Philip Pearlstein, Agnes Martin, Fairfield Porter, Ellsworth Kelly, Nancy Graves, Susan Rothenberg, Louise Bourgeois to name some of them, but they seem isolated from one another and hardly add up to a coherent "generation". Robert Hughes does not go much into the fields of conceptual and installation art, though he ritually deals with Robert Smithson's once-famous spiral jetty in the Salt Lake in Utah (now under water), and he does discuss courant figures such as Jeff Koons (fading already, I think), Peter Halley, Eric Fischl, Cindy Sherman and Kiki Smith. Curiously, he almost ignores Photorealism, so vital in the Seventies, although Richard Estes and Ralph Goings are surely in the mainstream of American realism.
Various major figures from all eras are also unaccountably missing, or else get the briefest mention: Mark Tobey and Morris Graves (so much for the North-West, and the Orientalism which was so strong there a generation ago!), Edwin Dickinson the quintessential New Englander, Charles Burchfield the visionary watercolourist, the great early Romantic, Washington Allston, whom his friend Coleridge called "the best painter to come out of America", George Inness whose Lackawanna Valley must be one of the best-loved American landscapes. But then, Hughes might reasonably reply that he is creating a panorama or charting a continent, not compiling a dictionary of American art, and that gifted individuals had to be sacrificed to cope even adequately with the sweep of his huge canvas.
The breadth and energy of his book are surely its own best justification; he is a gifted, highly intelligent populariser, and he genuinely knows and loves his many-sided subject. And though Hughes is pessimistic about the immediate future - in NY at least - he concludes with the words "Tomorrow is another day."
Brian Fallon is Chief Critic of The Irish Times