National art

“ It is idle for us to dispute about the relative greatness of our national arts, for their greatness lies not in national idiosyncrasies, but in the personality of the artist, and in the single, the unique quality of the particular works of art, and these belong not to this country or nation or to that, but to us all. ”

“ No, we lack not subjects for those who know how to see them; while nothing is more certain than the truth that a national art can only be founded and sustained by those who are wholly in sympathy with the influences of the land whose art they are aiding to establish. Those who are familiar with American art will easily recall a number of our artists, educated both at home and abroad, who have no difficulty in finding material around home, and at the same time take the lead among us in point of artistic strength. ”

“ The Art of a nation I think one of the most important points of its history, and a part which, if once destroyed, no history will ever supply the place of—and the first idea of a National Gallery is, that it should be a Library of Art, in which the rudest efforts are, in some cases, hardly less important than the noblest. ”

“ We have postulated as a necessary background of this epic world an enterprise of national significance, in which the entire compass of a national spirit can express itself in the bloom and freshness of its heroic condition. From this fundamental substratum in its simplicity we now further assume the apparition of a particular end, in the realization of which all other aspects of the national character, whether in belief or action, can be represented to our vision. ”

“ From a survey of prints in their varying national aspects, we have arrived now at that vast period of an art increasingly cosmopolitan, the nineteenth century. In these last hundred years nationality has blended together to a great extent; travel is not the serious matter of former times, a pastime rather than a venture; all races have intermingled in the great world-centers; students from far and near congregate in the centers of art. ”

“ On the other hand, the great resemblance which the arts of a single time and country bear to each other, is accounted for by the fact that their creators look upon the external facts of life through a glass, if we may put it so, tinted with the colours of the national genius. ”

“ There are those who sneer at nationality in art. You can no more speak of English art, laughed Whistler, than you can speak of English mathematics. The analogy is entirely a false one. [271] You can say with truth ‘English art’ as you can say ‘German music’; for although art in its language is universal, in its expression it is national, or at least racial; and it is the merit of a nation to express itself frankly in its art in its own natural way, and to despise the affectation of self-presentation in the terms and in the guise of foreign practice not native to itself. ”

“ At the same time new influences are entering into the national culture of æsthetics, and branches which have hitherto received little attention from our artists are coming rapidly into prominence, suggesting that we are about entering upon a third stage of American art. ”

“ And yet a closer inspection into the history of American art enables us to detect in its growth the same rapid spasmodic action, when once a start is made in a certain direction, as in other traits of our national development. ”

“ Thoroughly, almost fanatically, national by nature, even when their art shows traces of foreign influence, and drawing their subjects from their native soil, they have created an art which can fairly claim to be ranked as a school, whatever be the position assigned to it in future ages. ”

“ The brief annals of our sculpture may be divided either according to our wars, or according to our times of peace. The critic who chooses the former way will point out that our Revolution called into being a national consciousness which was strengthened by the War of 1812, and which immediately thereafter sought expression in Federal or State buildings, and in their adornment by the arts. Side by side with national yearnings for art sprang up half-thwarted individual longings either to produce art, or to enjoy art, or to possess art. ”

“ The arts lie at the heart of our Nation and of the heritage we cherish. The freedom we enjoy allows our arts to breathe the spirit of liberty and to ennoble, inspire, and nourish us. During National Arts Week, when we celebrate the arts and thank the artists, patrons, and audiences who give them life, we salute a precious dimension of America. ”

“ And the national soul can be seen very imperfectly in the [Pg 61] official art of a nation; it must be sought for in the popular art—in the myths, the fairy tales, the ballads, and the folk-songs. So when the newly awakened national consciousness began to demand musical expression, it inevitably sought its materials in the music of the people. ”

“ The number of genre artists has notably increased; and the quality of their work has, on the whole, been on a higher plane. The war gave an impetus to this department, with its many sad or comic situations, and the increasing immigration of the peasantry of Europe, and the growing variety of our national types and street scenes, have all contributed to attract and stimulate the artistic eye and fancy. ”

“ Fred Leighton.
P.S.—Having lived much abroad during my young years, the years when one is wax, I have been in turn, thoroughly and sincerely, an Italian artist, a German artist, and a French artist. I need not say that, though every man is of a nation (and I am most emphatically an Englishman) , all Art intentionally national is an error to my thinking. ”

“ When completed according to the present design, American architecture, sculpture, and painting, will therein coalesce in consummate excellence to signalize an advance in native art commensurate with the immensity of our republican domains.
Another favorable symptom among us is, that the people themselves, and leading minds in particular, are becoming more inspired with a taste for noble art. This is indispensable to the production of great and worthy national monuments. ”

“ All these men come within the active extension of the French movement, and one may say that the honour of having first recognised the truly national movement of this art must be given to those foreign countries which have enriched their collections and museums with works that were despised in the land which had witnessed their birth. ”

“ For the rest, one must, with the Muses, wait with such patience as one may for the appearance of National types of literature and art; types probably only to be formed when the National types of men and women have reached their fully distinct development out of existing cosmopolitan chaos. ”

“ They have assisted in the establishment of a native tradition which without question has by this time a definite foundation. The public must be made aware of their contribution to a native production. It will no doubt be a matter for surprise to many people in the world today that art in general is more national or local than it has ever been, due mostly to the recent upheaval, which has been of great service to the re-establishment of art interest and art appreciation everywhere in the modern world. ”

“ After the French Revolution of 1789, a school of neoclassical artists dominated painting, using themes of patriotic heroism and stressing severe beauty of line and firm modeling, over light and color. ”

“ The noisiest spokesmen of to-day claim for Art that it should be supreme and independent, and have no relation whatever to the national soul—a costly trinket to be picked up where it may be found, and idly played with ”

“ NATIONAL MONUMENTS Count not the cost of honour to the dead!
The tribute that a mighty nation pays
To those who loved her well in former days
Means more than gratitude for glories fled;
For every noble man that she hath bred,
Lives in the bronze and marble that we raise,
Immortalized by art's immortal praise,
To lead our sons as he our fathers led. ”

“ We can measure the sensibility of these politic amateurs when we overhear their chatter about patriotic art and catch them, as we caught them lately, attempting to ban German music. "Give us patriotic art," they cry. As if art could be patriotic or unpatriotic! One might as well cry for patriotic mathematics. The essence of art is that it provokes a peculiar emotion, called æsthetic, which, like religious [Pg 239] emotion or the passion for truth, transcends nationality. ”

“ We shall see that the literature of a nation is exactly what its graphic and plastic art is, and by this rule it might have been predicted what its painters and sculptors would have done during the ages in which they were checked by the troubles of civil wars and religious persecutions ”

“ So then, generally, it should be the object of government, and of all patrons of art, to collect, as far as may be, the works of dead masters in public galleries, arranging them so as to illustrate the history of nations, and the progress and influence of their arts ”

“ The most evident proof of this triumph of American progress is the decadence or disappearance of all the schools of art. Europe was in past centuries, in harder and more difficult times than the present, the glorious mother and mistress of civilisation, because under diverse forms, she managed to create and keep going schools of literature, sculpture, painting, architecture, and music. ”

“ Such we find to have been the case in the rise of the fine arts in this country, which up to this time have been rather an echo of the art of the lands from which our ancestors came, than distinctively original. ”

“ That a great nation should deliberately discourage the importation of beautiful things, should wallow in the mire of ugliness and refuse to be cleansed by art, was to him a mystery,—for what difference does it make whether painting, poetry, and music come out of the East or out of the West, so long as they add to the happiness of a people? And why should painting and sculpture find the gate closed when poetry and music are admitted? ”

“ Shall not America, partly through the people being followed, partly led, by the art-seers, develop an art like that of the past, which, "by the very fact that it must speak to the soul of multi- tudes in a language prescribed by precise relations," thus having "its technical merits exalted, reached the lofty expression which reveals itself in fragments, the immortal footprints of bygone civilizations"? Shall she not by being true to her traditions and her destiny, her "manifest destiny," a democracy grand and great, develop an art such as the world has not yet seen ? ”

“ The image created in the mind which sustains the devotion of the individual is also an aesthetic form. It is the idea of a nation transformed by story, symbol and eloquence that is established. The dimness and mysticism of the long ago, all dramatic scenes of the national life, the forms of royalty are used in transforming reality into an ideal. The consciousness of a nation is indeed an artist which creates an ideal nation, glorifying and transforming the past, and painting a vivid picture of [73] the empire that is to be. ”

“ They make their successful generals Presidents; they give dinners to Morphy and banquets to Cyrus Field. They are thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the age. Therefore they are artistic.
How amazed some will be at the proposition,—amazed that the age should be called an artistic one,—amazed that Americans should be considered an artistic nation! Yet art is only the expression in outward and visible form of an inward and spiritual grace,—the sacrament of the imagination. ”

“ I look upon this as the natural talent of an American, and have no doubt that glories will be displayed by our sculptors unknown to classic art. The facts of our history, ideal and social, will be grand and of new import; it is perfectly natural to the American to mould in clay and carve in stone. The permanence of material and solid, relief in the forms correspond to the positiveness of his nature better than the mere ephemeral and even tricky methods of the painter,—to his need of motion and action, better than the chambered scribbling of the poet. ”

“ When we review the various forces now actively at work to hasten forward the progress of American art, we see that they are, with one or two exceptions, still immature; while, on the other hand, the sum of their influence is such as to prove that they are already sufficiently well established to give abundant promise of vitality, and of a career of success that seems destined to carry the arts to a degree of excellence never before seen in America. ”

“ Yet in a nation great and opulent there is room, and ought to be patronage, for an art like that of painting through all its diversities; and it is to be wished, that the reward now offered for an historical picture may excite an honest emulation, and give beginning to an English school. ”

“ Finally, I would suggest—referring with all due modesty to my own efforts in this direction—that the lives and labours of our Art worthies form wholesome as well as curious subjects for popular study. I do not desire to set up the artist—merely in right of his professing himself an artist—as peculiarly or romantically entitled to public regard. But a nation's Art is, in truth, an important matter. ”

“ Wherever the traveller goes, in France, he is reminded of this very honourable practice—the purchase by the Government of a certain number of "pictures of the year," which are presently distributed in the provinces. Governments succeed each other and bid for success by different devices; but the "patronage of art" is a plank, as we should say here, in every platform. The works of art are often ill-selected—there is an official taste which you immediately recognise—but the custom is essentially liberal, and a Government which should neglect it would be felt to be painfully common. ”