International studio (60.1916/1917)

American Painters Pre-eminent

AMERICAN PAINTERS PRE-EMI-
/\ NENT
AA BY CHARLES L. BUCHANAN
Recent events in the art world bear
cumulative testimony to the fact that American
painting has come definitely into its own. Only
a judgment and a point of view congenitally
obtuse and perverted can fail, I think, to appre-
ciate their significance. By the time these words
shall have appeared in print it will probably be
common knowledge that the Autumn Woods of
George Inness has changed hands by way of the
Ainslie Gallery for the record price of $45,000
which sum represents, I think, the highest price
yet paid for a painting by an American artist.
High prices brought by an individual painter
or an individual picture are not, I grant you, an
infallible or so much even as a valid indication
of an inherent artistic worth. The thing we can-
not get away from is the concrete, bed-rock, irre-
fragable fact that these prices are a kind of
inevitable growth that cannot be confuted or
ignored. For a quarter of a century now we
have seen a certain class of American painting
consistently develop in commercial valuableness,
artistic prestige and popular appeal. Its prices
are not sporadic, inconstant, intermittent. They
are not the work of a clique. Their market is a
natural and not an artificial one. They have
not been supported and exploited by an individ-
ual house or a couple of houses; they have, as
a matter of fact, taken care of themselves, and
they have done this in face of the stupidities and
hide-bound timidities of journalism and an almost
overwhelming alien prejudice. If there is such a
thing as a spontaneous and healthy demand for
art—a demand actuated and fostered by no ex-
traneous and ulterior considerations—then, I
think, we see it in the American people’s interest
in the American painter. In looking back over
the last year we observe such salient and unmis-
takable events as the sale of the B lakelock Moon-
light to the Toledo Museum for $20,000, the sale
of a Winslow Homer to the Worcester Art
Museum for $27,000, a Wyant recently sold by
Macbeth for $15,000, and the Inness to which
mention has previously been made. With as-
tounding and incredible imbecility our gentlemen
of exotic affiliations continue to bewail the im-
potence of our native talent, and to peer prophet-
wise over the crest of the future seeking for the

new aesthetic dispensation. They will no
doubt continue to theorize, to confuse a genuine
progress with a fictitious progress, to dabble in
premeditated and artificial modes of expression
long after the authentic trend of our American
painting shall have become indubitably obvious
to any half-way intelligent and equitable per-
ception.
And what is this trend, you may ask; is it pos-
sible to define it? to extricate it from the con-
flicting chaos of contemporary paint? Well, we
all know that we can demonstrate nothing in so
abstract a matter as art; we can say that an art
is either a good or a bad art, but we cannot prove
that it is either a good or a bad art. At the same
time it seems to me that a little astuteness of
vision is all that is necessary to an accurate esti-
mate of who’s who in American painting. To
my mind it is fairly obvious that the American
people, for all their alleged faults, are not respond-
ing to the laboured excess and undisciplined idio-
syncrasy of much modern effort. I do not credit
this discrimination to the promptings of an ab-
stract aestheticism. I cannot believe that this
public appreciates the fundamental fallacy of
modern art at its true worth. I think its prefer-
ences are more or less determined by sentimental
reasons; but it seems to me these reasons pos-
sess an unusual and indubitable cogency and sig-
nificance. At a time when much modern art has
deteriorated into an almost exclusive preoccu-
pation with technical processes and formulated
modes of expression (formulated, mind you, no
less mechanically in the manner of 1Q17 than the
Winter Academy in the manner of 1830), this
public has, it seems to me, rendered us the anom-
alous and valuable service of maintaining its
sentimental and spiritual impulses as evidenced
by its response to and preference for a sheer
beauty of handling and a sympathetic attitude of
mind. Deluged by indifferent Barbizons, facile
Monets and the Armory Exhibition, it has yet
kept a level head on its shoulders, and literally
compelled a begrudged attention for our painters
in face of the concerted competition of foreign
art and the elaborate lucubrations of the profes-
sional progressive. All of which is so sheerly
banal that I blush to put it on the printed page.
And yet one has to keep hammering away on
this theme in view of human nature’s ineradicable
inability to perceive and to respond adequately
to the essential gist of things.

cxxvi