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John La Farge's "Water Lily in Sunlight" courtesy the Smithsonian Museum of American Art
We can admit it. Sometimes, appreciating art can be like eating vegetables; you know it’s good for you, but there’s no assurance the experience will be enjoyable. The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Graphic Master I exhibit is something of a vegetable side dish. It's devoid of sensational subject matter and primary colors, the aspects most likely to catch and hold a contemporary American’s attention. The hour I spent in the three rooms containing the collection remained empty even of security guards, save for one tourist couple who stomped into the center of the room holding cameras, glanced uncertainly around at the walls, and quickly left without taking pictures.
These selections have the undeniable imprimatur of being very serious works by very serious people, and are, one must assume, consequently very character building. They imply the power to bestow viewers with the patience and maturity that were hallmarks of adults in the by-gone years, but no longer exist in the fallen citizenry of today, ruined as we were by miniskirts and MTV. When you visit, try not to be distracted by the siren song of the shamelessly bright "Devocion de Nuevo Mexico" across the hall. Focus. This is good for you. And if you can get past the earthy palettes, it might even be fun for you.
The best offerings come from John Henry Twatchman. His serene pastels look like they were dashed off on the back of brown paper placemats, a la Bob Ross’s seemingly haphazard, ultimately successful school of execution. John Frederick Kensetts’s "Standing Artist" is reminiscent of a couturier’s fashion sketch. It features a face of faint pencil features with a form cloaked in rich blue and gray. "Lillie Langtry", as depicted in watercolor by Childe Hassam, wears a dress of aqua icing, her hair a hat of muted peacock feathers.
Thomas Moran‘s peach and white rocks of the Northwest are reminiscent of the lyricism in the watercolor-on-glass landscape of Disney’s “Bambi”, albeit with considerably more detail. And after viewing Thomas Wilmer Dewing ‘s chalk portrait of Walt Whitman, Abbott Handerson Thayer’s "Head of Mary B. Thayer" looks something like a Disney princess sketch. The two portraits differ so wildly in quality—one is piercing and nuanced, the other tentative and unfinished—that their adjacent placement is almost cruel.
Maxfield Parrish is represented with two gentle illustrations from The Golden Age, quaint pieces that give no hint of his ability to create the exquisite, ethereal worlds of Poems Of Childhood. John Taylor Arms’s astoundingly detailed work in pencil, "Porta Della Carta" has such precise white space that viewers are excused for feeling tempted to deface the work with crayon.
The end of the exhibit features what may be one of the most delightfully childish works ever seen in a museum. People too often use the “a child could paint that” criticism to indicate a lack of skill. Real children take their artwork, however crude, seriously, and William Zorach’s The White Mountains, Randolph, N. H. is dominated by the earnestness of its unevenly peaked, penciled hills and the awkward sectioning of space. His purple watercolor rocks sparsely blot the foreground, rising like aubergine whales from a white sea. His trees are little more than green dabs disconnected from their stick-like trunks. There’s a lesson here for art snobs who gripe about the capriciousness of modern art: older art can look willfully untrained, too.
Graphic Masters I runs through May 25. The Smithsonian American Art Museum is open for free daily from 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m..
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Heather, did you notice how the Water Lilly represents man's inhumanity to man, yet the painting is hovering between profundity and dead-pan cliché?
HAH! Did the ol spit take with my coffee on that one,
It was worth a try...