“Lake George and the Village of Caldwell,” left, by Thomas Chambers, challenges the perspective of John Frederick Kensett’s “Hudson River Scene.” More Photos »
Published: January 31, 2013
Why don’t you, as Diana Vreeland might have asked, mix folk art in with the more realistic, academically correct kind that has so dominated museums since the 19th century? Despite rising interest in and scholarship about folk art — and even after the wholesale rethinking of several major American wings on the East Coast — the isolation of folk from academic is still the norm.
This is a problem for several reasons. For one thing, pre-20th-century folk art is every bit as good, as a genre, as academic art of the same period, and in some ways far more original and vital. Its strengths lie not in its adherence to reality but in its enlivening deviations from it. For another, the distinction between folk and academic can be blurry, more a matter of degree than either-or. Third, this segregation results in galleries of academic 19th-century American art that are predictable and monotonous, effectively deadening the works on view and shortchanging the viewer.
The quality of folk art has been recognized enough to be heavily collected by most of these four museums, if not heavily shown. In addition to their formal ebullience, so-called naïve efforts convey the raw desire for art that prevailed in the early years of this country, when museums and art academies were virtually nonexistent. They exemplify an insistent sense of American can-do, the instinctive pursuit of art and, in a way, happiness.
As it stands, galleries of 18th- and 19th-century American art proceed in a highly predictable fashion: Hudson River School paintings in one gallery, genre paintings in another, colonial and Revolutionary period portraits in a third. The goal seems to be galleries as homogeneous as possible, so as not to confuse viewers. “You don’t want to shake the snow globe too much,” was how a curator at a fifth East Coast museum put it to me. Au contraire. The snow globe definitely needs shaking.
Homogeneity dulls the eye and lulls the brain. It is the discrepancies that grab our attention and make us look more sharply and deeply. . .
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