"Make some sense of America." The only slightly ambitious tagline for the Whitney Museum of American Art's gargantuan "The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-2000." The Century is split into two right down the middle; 1900-1950 finished on August 22nd while 1950-2000 began on September 26th and will run through to February 14th. For those can make it to New York, the Museum is on 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, take the 6 line to 77th Street. Or you can check out http://whitney.artmuseum.net.)
The concept and slogan sound arrogant and bombastic, but perhaps ironic would be a better term. Wandering the exhibition for the first half of the century (a simpler, more innocent age conservatives would have us believe) the absurdity of making a single, coherent "sense" of the amazing phenomena of America is most striking. The exhibition firmly places art in a social and political context, but the same events can drive different artists in radically different directions. For example the Great Depression inspired a wave of clear sighted social realism, as seen in the pioneering photojournalism of Dorothea Lange, and angry social protest, as in Ben Shahn's "The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti", but also the nostalgic work of Grant Wood and other "regionalists", glorifying the seemingly vanished America virtues of self-reliance, hard work and piety encapsulated in rural types as in "American Gothic" and "Daughters of the American Revolution."
The Jazz Age and its attendant machinisation also had a varying effect on art. Some celebrated the exciting popular culture and sport of the day, like George Bellows' "Dempsey vs Firpo" ; some glorified the machine with sleek lines and shiny metallic surfaces, like John Storrs' "Forms in Space #1" with its obvious debt to the aesthetic of the Empire State Building. A school called "precisionism" grew up around this motif, with Charles Demuth's "My Egypt" a strangely spiritualised depiction of a pair of steel and concrete grain-storage elevators the most notable example. Others decried the dehumanising effects of mechanisation, like Chaplin in "Modern Times" or Eugene O'Neill in "Dynamo". The Nineteen Twenties also saw the "Harlem Renaissance" (also known as the "New Negro" movement) as a new vibrancy shook black culture, with Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer mirroring in literature the new cultural self-confidence seen in such painters as Aaron Douglas and Richard Bruce Nugent, as the Black experience became a predominantly urban one.
Perhaps the only conclusion we can draw is that, while art is profoundly influenced by social and political conditions, it's impossible to predict exactly how this happens, and individual artists will bring their own individual temperament to bear.
It's often said that the Twentieth Century began with a shot in Sarajevo in 1914. But even in the earliest years of the century the nostalgic impulse was strong. A vogue arose for moody portraits of Indians and exotic Orientalism in the face of the modern era. Of the part devoted to 1900-1910, the most gripping section is that devoted to Immigration - the exhausted hopeful faces of Ellis Island, the melting pot of the Lower East Side, the nascent Chinatown - all these photographs remind us that America is the world's largest and most exciting experiment. A country where anything is possible and virtually every nation on earth has a community. In these early faces we see the American Century about to rendezvous with destiny.
Paris was still the art capital of the world for most of the time covered by Part I of "The American Century" and a slightly parochial air hangs over much of the exhibition. The moves towards modernism seem to be too wary of the shadow of the European giants such as Kandinsky and Matisse. World War I was the knife in Europe's political and cultural hegemony; an Austrian Corporal turned it twenty years after the Treaty of Versailles. A section of John Dos Passos' mammoth "USA", is entitled 1919 - the year the troops returned from Europe. But also the year that would mark the beginning of over twenty years of isolationism from International Affairs, as the heady mythos of America entered its most potent phase - the Jazz Age.
The pivotal role of the World Wars runs deep in American culture. For example two very different, canonical works not especially obviously concerned with War show its influence; The Great Gatsby shows romantic dreams menaced by the harshness of post-World War One America, while A Streetcar Named Desire shows how the brash new America spawned by World War Two (Stanley Kowalski and his friend Mitch are both veterans of the Army Engineers) destroys Blanche Dubois' mythos of a gracious South forever.
A triumphalism was present in post-World War II American culture, but so was a new anxiety. The Holocaust and the Hiroshima bomb has awakened in all sensitive people an awareness of humanity's capacity for evil and new-found enormous physical power. The theatrical triumvirate of Miller, O'Neill and Williams produced Death of a Salesman, The Iceman Cometh and A Streetcar named 'Desire' in this time, and the world-weary film noir whose existential style was epitomised in the figure of Humphrey Bogart.
In the last five years covered by Part I we see Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. New York is now the seat of the United Nations, and becoming the world art capital as well. Abstract Expressionism, often cited as the first American-born art movement with a truly global influence, was born; Part I culminates in Jackson Pollock's "Number 27."The exhibits of industrial design in Part I prefigure the coming wave of Pop Art.
Part II is now open. This covers a time when the division between low and high culture came to vanish, when the destruction of bourgeois notions of art preached by the Dadaists seemed to reach its fulfilment in Andy Warhol. What happens next? In some ways it�s the question art has been asking ever since. Is it significant that the last significant socio-political event cited on the timeline on the exhibition website is "Dow Jones Industrial Average surpasses 10,000"? Anyone who has seen Part I can�t help recalling the Stock Market's influence in 1929 on art, society and culture. Incidentally, the second last event is the opening of "The American Century."
On a completely personal level, the most spine tingling image from Part I of the American Century was a brief excerpt from "The Gay Divorcee", starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. This simply showed Fred singing "Night and Day" (possibly the greatest love song ever written, by another great American artist Cole Porter) to a bizarrely resistant Ginger. The socio-political context for this 1934 film was that Hollywood produced increasingly lavish escapist entertainments in response to the Great Depression. But for once let's throw the socio-political context in the ashcan and glory in this 2 minutes of sheer romance, as Fred shows himself every inch one of the most stylish men of the American Century. For that light, dextrous beauty is as much a part of that century as the weighty tomes of official history; Fred Astaire in his romantic yearning and his love of life, his style and his joy is also the American Century.
