Seeking an American Essence in Art

The gallery's assembled presidents may not necessarily tell us much about the actual shaping of the nation or its "character." But their pictures, gathered together in a publicly funded museum, do show us how much even a democratic nation can invest in hero worship. A kind of aristocracy of power is given pride of place in our National Portrait Gallery -- and that fact may tell us more about ourselves than any bunch of famous people's faces could.

After all, regardless of whom you choose to highlight -- the museum includes galleries of entertainers and sports stars -- it's not easy to see how simply showing the faces of Americans, prominent or not, could ever really tell us much about the country's self. Imagine switching labels so George Washington winds up looking like John Adams and George Gershwin like John Steinbeck. Would a visitor seeing that topsy-turvy world really come away with a very altered vision of what is it to be American? We like to see the faces of our heroes, because it lets us talk about them -- even if it hardly changes the things we're likely to say. That conversation always depends on documents and historical artifacts, rather than art. We'll use portraits to confirm the things we know, but we would never dismiss the heartiness of Teddy Roosevelt just because some artist made him look effete.

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To really find out about America -- about the place it thinks it is, about the ideas that built it and were built by it -- you're better off with the huge mishmash of art presented across the hall from the Portrait Gallery, in the close to 1,000 works displayed in the permanent-collection galleries of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

American Art doesn't have a grand pile of great masterpieces. It holds a few major artists in real depth (Albert Pinkham Ryder and George Catlin, for instance) and has fine holdings in African American and folk art. Otherwise, it tends to have at most a couple or three significant works by many of the classic figures and one or none at all by others.

So if the museum isn't an American Louvre -- not, that is, a museum to be visited only to revel in a huge spread of our very greatest art -- what comes out of the showing and telling that it does?

Not a single coherent vision of Americanness, or of American art. Culture doesn't follow national borders -- a wealthy Manhattanite is likely to have way more in common with a well-heeled Londoner than with a Mormon from rural Utah.

In fact, the striking thing about most of the work on view at American Art is how closely it lines up with the way art has always been made and used by the Old World elites of Europe. You could tuck many of SAAM's pictures into a European museum, and nobody would leap right up and say, "Hey, what's all that Americanness doing here?"

Notable American talents, including pioneers Gilbert Stuart, John Singleton Copley and Benjamin West, have done some of their best work in Europe, and slipped seamlessly into its artistic currents. When they returned home -- or when their European colleagues settled on these shores -- the work didn't change much.

An inviting bench lures the viewer to explore Albert Bierstadt's "Among the Sierra Nevada, California" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.(Nikki Kahn - The Washington Post)

But occasionally the work has changed, and that's the really interesting fact. It wasn't fundamentally transformed, in how it looks and works at some kind of unconscious level, under the influence of some kind of "American spirit." Instead it shifted very deliberately, in what it talked about. Working at the very moment in history when the new notion of the nation-state was taking over, the first American artists sometimes chose to use their pictures to define what America was supposed to mean.

Herzfeld explains that anthropologists identify a process whereby the "highly contingent" political and cultural ideals of any national identity often come to be "naturalized." Carefully constructed notions of American identity, for instance, are made to seem "natural" and necessary, a part of the unavoidable mental landscape that comes from living in this particular place. Paintings of American nature, in particular, have long been used to shape our psychic terrain.

When John James Audubon paints his great picture of a noble bird he names a "Washington Sea-Eagle" -- a species whose very existence may have been the product of some patriotic wishful thinking -- he's careful to include in the untamed background a ship flying the Stars and Stripes. This bit of American nature isn't simply in our land . It's of our nation the way the flag is.