Seeking an American Essence in Art

One of the most impressive pictures at American Art is the 10-foot-wide canvas called "Among the Sierra Nevada, California." It gets a room all to itself, where it sits majestically framed in gold, set off between lavish theatrical curtains -- rather as it would have been presented when it made a profitable tour of Europe, and then the United States, in the years after 1868. That was when the German-born painter and showman Albert Bierstadt had cobbled together his giant "American" painting -- while he was in London, using sketches of Swiss mountains and bits and pieces of Western wilderness and traditional ideas of what a beautiful landscape painting should look like. It gives an artifice-filled, manufactured image of an archetypally "American" moment, made more convincingly present by including rushing water (that may never have rushed) and flitting reflections (that can never have flitted). And it is a moment that, even if it had existed in reality, would have been (still is, mostly) foreign to the daily experience of the vast majority of Americans.

Bierstadt's picture stands for a deliberate building of nationhood that plays out across the whole museum.

Tying art to America, and to the events and ideas that are supposed to have mattered most to the American psyche, happens more deliberately in these galleries than in most other "national" museums -- in Germany or England, Norway or Canada. That may be because few other countries have had as much invested in ideas of coherent nationhood, and a less obviously coherent nation to build them around.

The collection opens with a blast of all-American fervor, in the form of Frederic Auguste Bartholdi's original 1880s maquette for the Statue of Liberty (made by an entirely French artist, incidentally). But after that the works at American Art proceed more or less chronologically from the 1600s on, divided up not just by century or movement -- the standard way to tell the story of artistic change -- but also by historical epochs peculiar to America. There's the art of "The American Colonies," of "The New Republic" and of "The Gilded Age." There's a gallery of "Antebellum Art" and a space that represents "The Civil War" by cutting across the middle of the whole suite of second-floor galleries. The thick volume published for the museum's reopening is essentially a quick trot through American history. Its lavish reproductions feel almost like they're only there as illustrations for that simple history lesson.

Many of the pieces on show in the museum are busily at work "Americanizing" European traditions: There are a bunch of iffy marbles that seem to cross Indian "squaws" and "braves" and "chiefs" with ancient Greek gods. There are also plenty of landscape paintings, good and often bad, that set out to demonstrate the nature of our unique Home on the Range. (Interestingly, the most thoroughly Europeanized countrysides of the East Coast, which early English settlers worked so hard to craft, are slighted in the country's later art. They fail to signify as symbols of a distinct nationhood.)

But there are also pictures, plenty of pictures, that refuse to flesh out a particularly American story. The roomful of glorious Pinkham Ryders tend to live in the artist's head more than in the public space of national identity. A delightful 1909 painting by Frederick Carl Frieseke, of a roly-poly redhead wearing nothing but slippers, would stand better for exhausted European decadence than for any notably American virtue or vice or aesthetic. It would make a perfect illustration of the title character in Emile Zola's scandalous "Nana," the famous Frenchman's deliciously salacious tale of courtesans in Paris.

And once you get to the museum's galleries of modern and contemporary art, there's often a sense that works are keen to address new issues of the international avant-garde, rather than local concerns.

When later works do seem to register ideas -- or fictions -- of national identity, it's often only to pull them apart, almost the way a Harvard anthropologist might want to do today.

A painted collage made by Tom Wesselmann in 1962 is an ironic compendium of classically American symbols, as clipped from the nation's advertising imagery: The giant Sunday roast on a gingham tablecloth, the ice-cold beer, classic green bottles of Coke. By the time of pop art, pictures such as this were clearly set on questioning the "American way" that earlier art had helped define.

In the early 1970s, with the country still swamped in Vietnam, photographer Lee Friedlander began to shoot a huge series of images called "The American Monument." They helped establish him as one of the country's greatest artists, worthy of being shown in depth at our national art museum. Their central theme, you could say, is destabilized American identity, and it affects these pictures right down to the chaos of their compositions.

One of the crucial functions of this art museum, at its best, is to let us witness the rise of Americanness as an ideal in art. And also its collapse.