Who Is the Great American Artist?
Put your suggestions in the comments.
With the semibiquinhemidemicentennial at hand, people have been asking about the Great American This or That.
For example, Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution offers a number of reasons why Alexander Calder, who invented the mobile (much to the subsequent delight of babies), might be the Great American Artist.
Probably not. But a worthy nomination. But Calder deserves at least brief consideration and sustained appreciation.
Other readers jumped in with their suggestions, such as John Singer Sargent.
We live in an era that appreciates painters like Sargent who were paid huge sums to beautifully depict rich men’s beloved womenfolk. Gustav Klimt of Vienna is another such painter whose reputation has ascended steadily over recent generations.
The supremely skilled Sargent is definitely in any debate about the best painter with some connection to the USA.
But was he American enough to be the Great American Painter? After all, he was born in Florence (to American parents) and spent all but a few years of his life in Europe. Back then, it was crucial to spend a lot of time in Europe to learn how to paint superbly (and that still might be true).
Granted, Sargent was American enough to play for the US World Cup team. But I don’t want to try to come up with a hard and fast minimum qualification, but instead suggest that some artists deserve extra points for being extra American.
For instance, was Mark Twain or Henry James the Great American Novelist? James spent 46 of his 73 years living outside of the U.S., while Twain’s best books were about the life on the Mississippi River. Points to Twain.
Similarly, while I enjoy T.S. Eliot’s poetry more than Walt Whitman’s, I have to admit that Whitman was awfully American while Eliot worked hard to turn himself into an Englishman.
Hence, if any photographer is in the running for Great American Artist, I think it would be Ansel Adams, in part because there’s something exceptionally American about his love of vastness: not just in his subject matter of the American West, but also in the size of his cameras and darkroom enlargers.
Other suggested Norman Rockwell.
Norman Rockwell was a brilliant creative artist, comparable to the best movie directors like Frank Capra in creating visual stories.
I once assumed that Rockwell (1894-1978) was painting his Norman Rockwell-style illustrations well before the American movie industry matured, so Hollywood borrowed inspiration from him. After all, the two leading collectors of Rockwell today are George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.
But my theory about the arrow of influence turned out to be largely backward.
Rockwell didn’t develop his mature method in which he operated like a film director, employing a crew to build sets and auditioning dozens of people to find his models, until 1934 when he was age 40, by which point movies were pretty mature.
If he’d been doing that back in 1914, I’d give him credit for a lot of what Hollywood did with movies. But instead it seems like he was a more conventional illustrator until movies were well-established, at which point he developed his expensive, ambitious new approach.
Other nominees included David Lynch and Andy Warhol, who do seem very American.
So, who are your nominees for the Great American Artist?
My suggestion is …
Paywall here.
