From the founding, this country's leaders have concentrated on conceiving and executing an art worthy of this ever being born-again country. This century promises to be no less self-conscious or self-dedicated. If all men are created equal, why not all nations, each with its own artistic heritage to preserve, maintain and continue?
For years, a now glowing painting stood accumulating grime and dust until it was rescued by the Walton family and brought to
That long-neglected, varnish-dulled painting turned out to be a landscape by the great American landscape painter
Why the emphasis on the American landscape that
Not that painting was the only American art to shape Western civilization. So did American craftsmanship and architecture, which now have merged till they've become one. To quote
Early examples of Georgian and Colonial architecture may carry the "stumbling uncertainties of a harsh Yankee accent." While the pottery-like surface of an adobe structure in the old Southwest resembles "little more than an enormous pot."
The author's ethnocentric prejudices are showing when he commits such judgments to paper, but not when he goes into detail about
Like the stair railings shaped to the human hand. One is reminded of the Quaker buildings that combined utility and beauty, with their pegs for chairs placed high above the floor. There they don't interfere with the dusting, mopping and general housekeeping that the contemporary housewife must insist on if she is to be not "just a housewife" but chief executive of a well-kept home.
Federalist architecture -- so simple and simply beautiful -- was a perfect expression of "the broad common strength of the new nation." Or as one perceptive critic put it, the first United States Treasury building was (and still is) "the noblest possible symbol of the lofty concept of federal government." What a contrast with our own era, when any mention of the federal government may be enough to strike fear into the hearts of those Americans who have higher things to celebrate than their own work or precious selves.
In the American arts, as in America herself, the best is always yet to come. Fast-forward to a few of my own favorites like
Comment by clicking here.
Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer-winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.