NATIONALISM IS MUCH in the news these days. So it might be appropriate to ask, “What is the American national tradition in painting?” Tracing the question back, the first answer has to be that it was originally British painting.
The first notable American painters had either come from England or studied there. That was a period one art historian calls the "brown school" of oil painting. In other words, bright colors were absent, and a work was usually built up from earth colors. Archetypal were John Singleton Copley, who returned to England, and Benjamin West, who stayed in the new United States and applied European “history painting” to American stories.
To imagine what was uniquely American, however, we might think of the empirical mind of native-born Benjamin Franklin, who had a fascination with things. As a touchstone, Franklin sets the stage for what art historian Barbara Novak calls the emerging American painting tradition’s interest in the “unbroken integrity of objects or things of this world.”
What elevated that mundane interest, moreover, was an idealism of the mind, illustrated by the way literary Romanticism (and German Idealism) characterized American high culture in the 1800s before the Civil War. Novak has identifies this as “luminism,” a painter’s preoccupation with the effects of light. This was not the light-and-color of the Impressionists, but rather the light of America’s big skies and open landscapes, and how that light made objects more real than they were—that is, “ideal.”
As the emblematic philosopher of early American nationhood, Emerson put it this way: objects were “spirit in fact” as painters and poets looked upon nature and things “with a supernatural eye.”
Perhaps the first group of distinctly American painters, the landscape artists of the so-called Hudson River School, illustrated this merger of “the real and the ideal.” Their works, while reflecting a similar feel to the early Impressionists (before the Impressionists overdosed on color and short brush strokes), emphasized the luminosity of the sky. Or, think of Monet’s haystacks if they had sharp edges (which they don’t), like a photograph. America luminism was also opposite to European “Tonalism,” which emphasized darkness with glimmers of light.
The end result of the unique American mixing was a painting tradition that Novak ties to the Hudson River painters, and others, as precise, conceptual, and quietistic. One might say that the unique American style was surrealist in its own continental terms: a clear, bright, freeze-frame, highly-worked, and descriptive presentation of things.
While Hudson River landscapes, and the set-table still life work of William Michael Harnett—whose paintings bear titles such as A Study Table and Old Models—are indicators of this American predilection, its peroration can be seen in Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins.
Homer was an illustrator by trade. Thus, his paintings had a rendered precision in tandem with well-lit color. Eakins, based at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, used measurement and mathematical precision, in addition to luminism, in his paintings. He frequently painted ordinary things and people, which was see later in New York.
There, the so-called Ashcan School of painters similarly focused on portraying ordinary things in good light. The European love of fogginess of line and color, and of shadow and “painterliness,” was never lost in the United States, of course. Indeed, this European import remained a strong rival to indigenous American luminism, and such giants of American painting as George Inness, John La Farge, and John Singer Sargent retained the European “hand.”
Given these intercontinental forces, what is the answer to Novak’s rhetorical question: “What is American in American Art?” One valid answer arises: precise limning of things in luminist light. Some proof of this comes in the early twentieth century with a style called “Precisionism,” which differed from Cubism or Futurism by its adherence to hyper-realist drawing and high-key values and colors. Pop Art would have similar characteristics.
I suppose that I’m persuaded by Novak’s interpretation because, when in college, the painting style of photorealism, not to mention Pop Art, was going strong. One of my professors hailed from the Pennsylvania Academy, and his superb landscapes in acrylic were both precise and luminous.
As a land of immigrants, the United States is an ocean of migrated styles, now transformed into an endless storm of rival approaches, mixed media, and fortified schools of thought. So it’s good to remember that the antebellum period in America (1812-1861) was formative in our “national system,” our literature, and our indigenous philosophy (a combination of evangelical Protestantism, German Idealism, and British empiricism).
In that crucible, some uniquely American art was born, and as Novak argues, those characteristics can be called indigenous art forms because of the “frequency or constancy of their occurrence.” In short, she says, “The American experience tempers its art from the first moment of its making.”