America: Painting a Nation at the Art Gallery of NSW

YOU can walk through the Art Gallery of NSW's new exhibition of American painting and feel that hardly anything has claimed your attention.

The Yankee Pedlar (1872), by Thomas Waterman Wood.

THE highest achievements in art and culture, despite the best efforts of educationalists and bureaucrats, are unevenly distributed between geographical areas, between peoples and across time. In the whole history of humanity, the greatest works of art, literature, music or of philosophy have been the work of a few generations in a few places.

Lesser but still valuable things can arise between these great moments, but there are many centuries and many lands that have left little or nothing of enduring value behind.

Different peoples, too, have special affinities with certain arts. The Germans have been unequalled in music, but particularly at a certain period. The Italians hold a similar place in painting, but again especially from the Renaissance to the 17th or 18th centuries; for a complex set of reasons, the Italy of the Risorgimento and since unification has never produced anything comparable to the earlier period.

The English, and the British more generally, have been a people of the word. Nothing in British painting or music compares with the monumental achievement of Shakespeare, and it is the same linguistic genius that has given us the greatest version of the Bible - the other cornerstone of literary English - but also the greatest vernacular translations of Homer, an author repeatedly rendered into our language from George Chapman to the present day.

The bias towards language was exacerbated by the destructive wrath of the Protestants who, taking the second commandment seriously and believing religious images to be sacrilegious, set about destroying them, first spontaneously in the 16th century and then, after the English Revolution and the victory of Oliver Cromwell, systematically and with frightening efficiency in the 17th century.

The result of this destruction was in effect to cut Britain off from the development of modern art, with consequences felt until the 20th century. One can see, for example, that British painters never had any real idea what cubism was about, because cubism is the end of a story that begins with Giotto, and we had simply lost the thread of that story. That is why almost all British - and Australian - attempts at cubism end up as superficial exercises in decoration.

American art suffers from the same alienation, if anything in a more acute form, since many of the early colonists were Puritans - Protestants who wanted to be a lot more Protestant than the Church of England, with its typically English love of moderation, was willing to be. These were people who actively hated and despised the art of painting, and their influence on the later rise of abstraction in post-war America has often been cited.

But the effect of this iconoclastic bent is manifest much earlier than that, and is indeed pervasive in the Art Gallery of NSW's new exhibition of American painting. The most surprising thing is that you can walk through this exhibition and have the odd feeling that you have hardly seen anything that claimed your attention as a painting.

You may or may not be interested in a sentimental image of a travelling salesman showing his wares, or another of an old - age is an indispensable ingredient in the generation of pathos - blacksmith toiling over his forge. You may indeed find many works that offer insights into the life and thought of the American people, but they seldom rise above illustration, documentation and didacticism to anything more perennial or more imaginatively suggestive.

The problem lies in a failure to think pictorially. What does this mean? It is something that every painter from Giotto or Duccio to Rubens, Poussin, Cezanne or Matisse has known in their bones: that a picture is first an arrangement of shapes and colours on a flat surface. The representation of the world has to be accommodated to this abstract and formal structure, just as words in a poem must be accommodated to the order of metre, if you are to turn the world into a picture.

That is the problem with most of these artists. They have little idea of the formal order of a picture as such; and so they think it is enough to make a realistic and vivid image of a subject that they, and presumably a pictorially unsophisticated audience, find sentimentally appealing. But that does not make a painting. Think of the novel: it is not enough to find a touching story; it is the telling that makes it literature.

We can see, in fact, why the idea of abstraction became so attractive to a later American generation, and how they could end up promoting the fallacy that earlier artists had been concerned exclusively with achieving an illusion of reality; it was because these theorists arose in a tradition that had barely understood what painting was, and in which so many works were indeed bald attempts at such illusion. One notable exception is Henry Inman's portrait of a Chippewa chief (1832-33), which has formal simplicity and a gentle authority that arises from the sympathetic portrayal of the subject; not surprisingly, this is the work reproduced across Sydney on street banners advertising the exhibition.

Another, and almost the only work that actually stops you in your tracks as a painting, is Thomas Eakins's Sailing (1875). One is struck at once by the simple but dynamic composition, which unifies the boat, the men and the river into a single action and a single moment. Although ostensibly realistic, too, the whole scene has been translated into a limited palette whose subdued harmonies are evocative of the quietness of the scene.

Eakins's picture is a rare example of the world metamorphosed by the artifice of painting into a pictorial idea. But the conviction of the painting arises from the artist's attentiveness to the experience that is his subject, and his avoidance of any gratuitous sentimental or picturesque effects.

Special effects are the curse of American cinema today, an apparently indispensable staple of the prolefeed manufactured by Hollywood for mass audiences of the world. But the quest for effect in general is a peril for the artist. We all know the difference - speaking of cinema - between a film that is genuinely moving and one that manipulates the viewer's reactions. There is the same contrast between the impassive, but truly touching, peasants of Le Nain and the sentimental pictures of the poor by Victorian painters.

And this is the trouble even with the big American landscapes of painters such as Thomas Moran, displayed in a special room. They are ostensibly about the sublime, but think of the pictures of Caspar David Friedrich, and these look unbearably chocolate-box. And why exactly? Because Friedrich is all intensity, lucidity and an almost frightening power of imagination. These, in contrast, combine a flat-footed literalism in their depiction of obviously impressive views, with an indulgence in lighting effects that are cloying rather than suggestive.

The most extreme case of the abuse of lighting is October in the Catskills (1880) by Sanford Robinson Gifford. And all these problems were exacerbated by the rise of photography which, as we see in the work of Jasper Francis Cropsey and William Keith, encouraged painters to think a view was the same thing as a landscape. And so we end up with the sort of broad vistas across water to hills in the background also familiar in contemporary Australians such as Nicholas Chevalier or William Piguenit. Without a foreground and without properly pictorial construction, the artist relies on the inherent appeal of the motif to compensate for the absence of aesthetic coherence as a picture.

There were several figures in American art who understood composition and the art of making a picture very well, but almost perversely, they are poorly represented here.

The point is perhaps clearest in the case of Edward Hopper, the most important early American modernist and someone who, unlike the various sometimes attractive but essentially derivative impressionists and post-impressionists, has actually contributed a new dimension to the modern experience. There is a Hopper angle of vision on the world, so to speak, just as there is in the writing of authors such as John Steinbeck or Tennessee Williams.

If you know the work of Hopper, House at Dusk (1935) is an interesting picture, evoking his recurrent themes of lonely urban interiors and the isolation of individual lives in their apartment cubicles. But you need to have encountered these themes in the pictures in which they are much more forcefully, clearly and poignantly expressed if you are appreciate what is going on here. And even then it is far from one of his best pictures.

One could say much the same about Whistler; the picture included is not a bad one, but neither is it a good choice to introduce Whistler to an audience unfamiliar with the artist. It is not going to leave anyone with a sense of his mastery of design, of subtleties of tone and hue. Nor is Sargent well-represented; of course the picture is interesting to those who know him. But to those who don't, there is none of the panache of his best work, just the deeply unattractive gaze of this beady-eyed bourgeoise with her cosseted offspring.

Once again, in this group of large figure paintings, Eakins comes to the rescue with the splendid portrait of his friend and fellow-teacher Leslie W. Miller (1901). His choice of the full-length format, usually reserved for official portraits of important public figures, combined with a casual stance, speak more eloquently of the egalitarian and democratic spirit of America than the various other rather earnest images of daily life in the city.

Among more recent artists, there are individuals, such as the eccentric Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), who are interesting in themselves - it is, incidentally, a painting of his that forms the background to Stieglitz's famous photograph (1917) of Duchamp's Fountain - but whose work is incomprehensible in isolation, jumbled in with a collection of disparate styles.

The exhibition ends with what is presumably meant as a glimpse of the promised land of post-war abstract expressionism, and the years when American painting suddenly and unexpectedly achieved international hegemony. The works selected are far from the most convincing by their respective artists, but the National Gallery of Australia's exhibition on the subject last year had already confirmed the suspicion this movement has not aged well.

It is in fact growing increasingly hard to understand how these paintings could have had such an impact, even allowing for official promotion in the context of the Cold War. In the end, it was less the intrinsic merit of the work than what it seemed to signify: its association with everything that then felt to be quintessentially American, and above all these three - power, wealth and success.

America: Painting a Nation
Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, to February 9