[Editor’s Note: Vance Maverick — range-rider, blue jeans model, American hero — is back to let us know how the NEH works for all of us (suck it, Newt). Thanks for sending this along Vance. And for keeping us safe. And clad in dungarees. We appreciate everything you do. Also: Readers, if you want your name to appear in lights pixels, all you have to do is send good stuff our way. We reserve the right not to post what you send. But we’ll thank you nevertheless. Remember: Ask not what your blog can do for you; ask what you can do for your blog. Stirring!]
The National Endowment for the Humanities has initiated a new program, Picturing America, to promote American art in the classroom. (I learned about it from Margaret Soltan, reporting on a lecture by John Updike at the launch; a version of his text is here.) The heart of the program is a virtual exhibit, distributed to schools as a set of reproductions, and also visible online in a well-designed chronological gallery.
Some caviling aside – the “wall text” for the images isn’t great, and the selections of sculpture and architecture are fragmentary compared to the paintings – the “exhibit” is really impressive: substantial but digestible, “link-rich” without distraction, and consistently strong in selection without sacrifice of breadth. You may not come away knowing what’s American about American art (neither, as Soltan points out, does Updike), but you’re sure to be surprised. A few surprises for me: Whistler’s “Peacock Room”, a cinematic Hopper , a challenging Romare Bearden collage. Check it out.
The Edge of the American West 
21 comments
June 10, 2008 at 10:07 am
Vance Maverick
Thanks, Ari. I should probably also warn people that the exhibit doesn’t shy away from kitsch. And that’s as it should be.
June 10, 2008 at 10:12 am
ari
My pleasure. And it’s about American art, right? Given that, there would have to be some kitsch, I’d think.
June 10, 2008 at 11:54 am
Michael Elliott
It’s a nice site, and I hope there are more images over time. I object, though, to the way that the first slide in the gallery groups together indigenous arts from 1100 to 1960 in a single slide. (Why not put the 1960 work where it belongs? For the record, I also object to the placement of indigenous stories at the beginning of Am Lit. anthologies instead of the period of their enunciation and recording.)
To continue my crankiness: Why is the Grant Wood interpretation of Paul Revere’s ride placed in the colonial period and not in the modern one?
If it sounds like I enjoy being fussy about this, well, I do. But I do think that if you are teaching students, it’s important that they learn to differentiate the representation of a period from the period itself.
On the other hand, I’m really, really, really glad that some of my tax dollars are going to the dissemination of art.
June 10, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Vance Maverick
Michael, there are at least two other anachronistic/retrospective items on that “Colonial” page — the Leutze and the Hiram Powers. The Wood is only the most salient. And what’s the Wyeth Mohican illustration doing on the second page? Or Cassatt’s Japanese/Impressionist boating party between two Modernist images of the Brooklyn Bridge?
It’s infuriating for offenses to be defended as “provocations”, but I think it’s appropriate here, to an extent. A teacher working with these images, ought to be able to turn even the ghettoization of the Native American crafts to good use.
June 10, 2008 at 12:22 pm
ari
No! No excuses for the NEH! This is typical government inefficiency and social engineering at its worst. Zero out the organization’s funding! NOW!
(I feel better now. I knew I should have been a Republican.)
June 10, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Michael Elliott
Isn’t it true that sloppy periodization is the first step on the slippery slope to Communism?
June 10, 2008 at 6:23 pm
eric
I always thought the NEH was the first step on the slippery slope to Communism.
June 10, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Michael Elliott
No, I think the NEH is the second or third step.
(NB: If you are an NEH administrator out there, this is a joke. I love you. Please approve my next grant application. PLEASE.)
June 10, 2008 at 7:16 pm
eric
(NB: If you are an NEH administrator out there, this is a joke. I love you. Please approve my next grant application. PLEASE.)
Yes, what he said.
June 10, 2008 at 9:16 pm
Vance Maverick
Michael, it looks as though periodization was a starting point, and they improvised from there. That is, the arrangement is quite consistent with the principle of the infinite wisdom of the NEH, not to mention its generosity.
June 10, 2008 at 10:29 pm
eric
the infinite wisdom of the NEH
… in regarding smart-alecks as especially grant-worthy.
June 11, 2008 at 12:00 am
rja
I always thought the NEH was the first step on the slippery slope to Communism.
No, that used to be the NEA. But Sen. Helms et al. fixed that.
That said, and irritations over periodization aside, Picturing America seems like a very good thing. Only a few observations: No amount of pleading got government support for George Catlin’s work while he was alive; Sargent’s Madame X might tell you a whole lot more that Portrait of a Boy does about how Americans pictured themselves in the Gilded Age; Martin Puryear is brilliant and utterly deserves to be included.
June 11, 2008 at 6:55 am
Vance Maverick
What he said about Martin Puryear. (His work photographs well, too, which helps in this context.) And once we start indulging in what-ifs, there’s no end — Puryear makes me think about Noguchi.
June 11, 2008 at 7:37 am
Michael Elliott
Vance and rja: Just to be clear, I too think this is a “very good thing”, esp. since it will probably grow. Maybe something down the road would be a way that you could toggle it so that works line up in chronological order of production and then chronological order of representation.
But, but, but I still get grumpy with the slide of Native art that puts things from pre-contact in the same slide with something from 1960. I’d make them separate slides. That being said, this is all just blog-griping — it’s not like I’d write an article about it or something (which I may have done once regarding the Norton Anthology of American lit).
To sum up: Great site, very happy, some minor tweaking would be good, and lots of expansion. And I’ll start preparing my materials for the new NEH Grants for Nitpickers, Smart Alecks, and Blog Gripers.
June 11, 2008 at 8:23 am
rja
Michael: I thought your gripe was completely justified. Sadly, back when the godless communists over at the NEA were handing out money, there was something like a grant for smart alecks. Or at least Karen Finley in the Enough is Enough era (when the biggest fights with Helms were occurring) seems to fit the bill. That loss is part of what seems especially sad to me. But, when it comes to art, I like a little funny with my transcendent.
Speaking of which, agreed, Vance, that Noguchi would be good to. But, of course, so would Rothko.
June 11, 2008 at 8:40 am
Vance Maverick
But note that there’s no abstraction (except in the quilts). That excludes most of Noguchi and Rothko — and most of Puryear too. The piece they’ve got, while lovely, offers itself to an allegorical reading. (And specifically an African-American political one.) This is just one of many ways they’re conservative.
About the scope, I have mixed feelings. Yes, there’s much more work that should be honored/canonized/made accessible in this way. However, I think the small size of this exhibit is a real virtue. Perhaps they might host both a large collection, and a number of exhibits constructed as threads through the labyrinth.
June 11, 2008 at 8:57 am
rja
The lack of abstraction is weird, isn’t it? Especially given that governmental agencies have a history of using mas macho abstract expressionism to sell American culture abroad. Somehow, though, students continue to come to art history courses with an understanding of American art that often ends somewhere around 1900.
I guess we want foreign audiences to picture America differently than we do.
June 11, 2008 at 9:03 am
eric
Thinking about how keen the US government was on using highbrow culture to wage the Cold War makes me sad. Yes, it was propaganda, and that’s not so nice, but—the US government was keen on highbrow culture as a way of showing how great we are as a country! How awesome was that?
June 11, 2008 at 9:39 am
rja
It was awesome. And it seems to have worked, given the shot in the arm the whole era gave to American artists and dealers. My feeling, from the Jesse Helms as Savonarola ’90s, is that the withdrawal of support does have an impact on how innovative new art will be. When the big clients are corporations, it all tends to be stuff that will match the boardroom.
I’m only sad that I think the ongoing message is that highbrow culture is somehow not for John and Jane Public. Someone like Puryear is an excellent start because his work is accessible, but manages to contain some complex content in an elegant way.
June 11, 2008 at 3:54 pm
andrew
Speaking of pictures, do you know about the Flickr Commons?
June 11, 2008 at 4:31 pm
ari
That’s cool, though surely there’s a way to monetize it, right?