A Grand Old Flag And Very Modern Art

In the early days of the American Revolution, before independence had been declared, the so-called "Grand Union" flag of Washington's army had been the 13 "Liberty Stripes," one for each colony, in white and red. (In traditional heraldry, two colors can't abut. Only silver-white or golden yellow -- considered "metals" -- can sit beside a color.) And then on top of that there was, sensibly, a canton with the blue-grounded Union Jack, to make clear the colonies' original dependence on the British motherland.

When it came time to make a new flag for the more fully rebellious states, it made sense to keep the basic pattern and coloring intact. That provided some continuity between the old banners and the new, because the same troops would be fighting under them. The canton, however, clearly had to change: Washington described how his soldiers, flying the old British-tinged standard, were once mistaken for loyalists.

In the end, the canton's Union Jack was replaced with another revolutionary flag, already in use by Washington's troops, which reiterated the egalitarian thirteen-ness of the new nation's almost-separate colonies by portraying them as a "constellation" of white stars sitting on blue.

That final stars-and-stripes flag may be crucial in this nation's visual culture, but it doesn't have much in common with all the art and artifacts we've chosen for pleasure's sake. Maybe that's because the flag came about almost by accident, without a whole lot of choice involved. The Flag Resolution of June 14, 1777, is almost a casual thing, just four lines of messy scribble stuck into a page of other business at the Continental Congress.

The earliest surviving flags -- even the Star-Spangled Banner of Key's poem, which now lives at the Smithsonian -- are workaday objects, often with stars cut out without much care and stuck on any which way. They didn't seem to invite the fine artistry of their era's best needlework or tailoring. One of the official flags preserved at the Smithsonian, which flew proudly from Fort Hill in Maine during the War of 1812, is laughably crude.

It wasn't until the later 1950s that the flag finally began to take up room in mainstream art. The standard explanation is that artists began to riff on the flag's iconic -- and ironic -- charge, as a central symbol of America's new self-confidence and superpower status. That must be mostly right. But it could also be that artists were commandeering the symbol for more purely visual ends: The flag was a kind of readymade-in-waiting, sitting in the wings already costumed for the role of modern art.

A half-century of modernism had prepared artists, and their audiences, to enjoy the weird, off-kilter boldness of the stars-and-stripes design and coloring. At long last its patterns had started to feel natural instead of remote and were ripe for full assimilation into art. Plenty of rigorous abstraction from the 1960s shares the hard edges, asymmetries, unusual proportions and unlikely color combinations of the American flag; stripes and even starlike forms were big in pictures that made no explicit attempt to cite the country's central symbol. Think of the stripes, zigging angles and jarring color contrasts in the 1960s abstractions of Barnett Newman and Kenneth Noland. In 1955, Johns, the great pioneer of flag-based art, for the first time made a painting that was just a U.S. flag, covering his canvas from edge to edge. He must have realized that, whatever else the flag might stand for , it also could stand as a daring modern picture -- even if he still chose to cut down its stripes to more standard artistic proportions.

We've come a way since then. Thanks to Johns and other modern artists, we've now become so comfortable with the flag's ungainliness -- even in its untrimmed state -- that it takes work to appreciate how promisingly ugly it really is.