Will Crystal Bridges Become the Walmart of American Art Museums?

When Walmart comes to your town, there are always two different reactions: “No! They’ll kill all the small businesses!” Or “Yes! Big selection at low prices!” A similar phenomenon is taking place in the world of American art museums as all eyes turn toward Bentonville, Arkansas, where the doors of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art will open this November. The brainchild of Alice Walton, daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton and the third richest woman in the world (her sister-in-law Christy is number one), Crystal Bridges both beckons art pilgrims to a new experience and inspires dread in those who see it as a sign of the apocalypse of art in America. After reading Rebecca Mead’s New Yorker profile of Alice Walton and her museum, “Alice’s Wonderland,” it’s only natural to ask if Crystal Bridges will become, for good and/or ill, the Walmart of American art museums. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Will Crystal Bridges Become the Walmart of American Art Museums?"

American Original

For Americans with an historical awareness of the visual roots of our culture, the Saturday Evening Post is the mother lode of lore. The look of our celebrations, from Mother’s Day to the Fourth of July to Thanksgiving to Christmas to New Year’s, all seemingly took their cue from the Post. And no artist’s name is linked with the Post’s power to shape the American psyche as is that of Norman Rockwell. Yet, the Post influenced society well before Rockwell’s first published cover in 1916 thanks to a Rockwell’s predecessor—J.C. Leyendecker. Born March 23, 1874 in Germany, Leyendecker came to America with his family at the age of eight in search of a better life. Leyendecker not only lived the immigrant’s American dream, but also gave it visual life. In December 1907, Leyendecker painted New Year's Baby 1908 for the Post (above), beginning a tradition of New Year’s Baby covers that would extend into the 1940s, when even the New Year’s Baby would join the war effort and take a swing at a surreal swastika beside him. Symbols such as the Baby New Year seem so timeless to us today that it’s important to recognize the people such as Leyendecker who created such enduring images.

As a native German, Leyendecker must have absorbed many of the Christmas traditions of Germany that he and so many other immigrants brought over to America. We like to think of Christmas as a Victorian and Dickensian creation, but the real roots of modern Christmas traditions reach back to Germany, the homeland of Queen Victoria’s beloved Albert, whose death gave birth to the Victorian Christmas through Victoria’s great grief. When you look at Leyendecker’s Christmas covers for the Post, such as Santa's Lap (above, from 1923), it’s easy to think that he’s borrowing from Rockwell, unless you realize that the time line works the other way around. Rockwell certainly belongs in the upper echelon of great American illustrators and created his own share of original characters, but when it came to Christmas and many other bits of Americana, he often followed the lead of Leyendecker. Leyendecker created much of the visual language of Americana to which Rockwell later gave his unique flavor.


In addition to the Post, Leyendecker illustrated books and enjoyed a lucrative career in advertising. Leyendecker’s advertisement for Kuppenheimer’s men’s clothing (above, from the 1920s) shows the dapper look of the Roaring Twenties with fascinating unreal touches such as the lithe nymph clad in gossamer and the cherub above the young man’s head. The lady and cherub recall Leyendecker’s fascination with the Art Nouveau works of Alphonse Mucha that Leyendecker encountered as a young student in Paris. Today, many people search such advertising for hidden clues to Leyendecker’s homosexuality, imagining that the women fawning over the devastatingly handsome men in their sartorial splendor are actually “self-portraits” of Leyendecker. Leyendecker lived the raucous life of the Roaring Twenties and suffered the agony of the subsequent Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. Leyendecker’s 1943 Baby New Year fighting the Nazis was his last cover for the Post. The Golden Age of American Illustration had passed, leaving only enough work for stars such as Rockwell. Leyendecker died in 1951, at the beginning of a decade that embraced Americana like no other had before, but with the name Rockwell rather than Leyendecker as their chief mythmaker.

Winning Combination

Before newspapers could properly reproduce photographs, lithography and lithographers served as the windows onto the world for most Americans unable to travel and see it with their own eyes. When James Ives (born March 5, 1824) went to work for fellow lithographer Nathaniel Currier (born March 27, 1813), it was only a few years before Ives became a full partner and Currier & Ives was born. Aside from the news of the day and homey scenes of Americana, Currier & Ives tried to bring culture into the lives of ordinary people through prints such as their version of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (above). Before affordable reproductions of reasonable quality were available and before the beginnings of the art museum, much of the public’s impressions of fine art came through the efforts of Currier & Ives and others, who saw a market for such “high brow” images. Today, their print of The Last Supper might seem a poor substitute for seeing the real thing, but in the nineteenth century, it was far better than nothing.

Currier & Ives was first and foremost a business, with business considerations trumping everything else. They almost always maintained a high level of quality in their work, but their subject matter targeted a deep-seated need in nineteenth century America for sentimentalism and that distinctive yet elusive idea of “Americana.” Currier & Ives’s print titled A Brush for the Lead (above, from 1867) plays into the classic ideas of sleigh rides and wintry fun that we still associate today with the idea of Christmas. In fact, Leroy Anderson's song "Sleigh Ride" alludes to a memorable moment that will will "nearly be like a picture print by Currier and Ives." In many ways, Currier & Ives created the idea of Christmas in the American psyche the same way that Charles Dickens did for Victorian England. These two lithographers depicted an unattainable ideal that people around the world still try to attain, usually before giving up and pouring another consoling cup of egg nog.


It’s hard to imagine, but Currier & Ives also did highly political prints of battles and other disasters. A Brush for the Lead comes only two years after the end of the American Civil War, which Currier & Ives depicted for many people far from the fray. After the war, they continued to analyze visually its implications in works such as The Lost Cause (above, from 1872). By 1872, the promise of Reconstruction in the South was already beginning to falter. The man in the print may mourn the fallen beneath the graves, but the Stars and Bars lurking in the trees hints at the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and other means of revenge by those who wished to continue the slave-based Southern way of life. Much like Norman Rockwell, Currier & Ives suffer from a sanitized version of their work, which emphasizes the commercial side of their partnership over the full, often darker historical and cultural relevance of the lesser-known images. Advances in print reproduction of photography doomed Currier & Ives eventually, but they made their lasting mark on American culture long before.

Heights and Depths

I’d love to know what percentage of art-related calendars consist of the art of Norman Rockwell, Thomas Kinkade, and Ansel Adams. The number has to be staggering. Born February 20, 1902, Ansel Adams has become over the years the comfortable-as-an-easy-chair photographer of choice for many Americans the same way that Rockwell has become synonymous with Americana and Kinkade with kitsch. Images such as Adams’ Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (above, from 1941) simply take your breath away with their composition and beauty. Black and white photography never seems archaic in Adams’ hands. The tonalities just leap out at you. Adams also had the ability to frame an image in such a way that it seemed unfamiliar yet recognizable—just changed enough to make you look at it with fresh eyes. Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico could almost serve as a pendant to the “Earthrise” photo taken by astronaut William Anders of the Apollo 8 mission that landed on the moon.

Unlike Alfred Stieglitz, Adams never resorted to distorting tricks to make his photographs more painterly, which was the ideal of much early photography. Instead, Adams pushed the technical limitations of photography to the brink ,experimenting with sharpened focus, increased contrast, different rates of exposure, different types of paper, and other darkroom magic to achieve realer-than-real images such as Winter Sunrise, the Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California (above, from 1944). Adams helped further photography as a medium when he founded with Edward Weston the Group f/64, which eventually became the photography department of the MoMA. Thanks to Adams’ efforts, photography grew from a poor cousin to painting and the other accepted fine arts to a medium on equal standing. Adams’ work also preserved much of the natural beauty of the American west, particularly that of Yosemite National Park. Sadly, much of the actual land has been altered by climate changes, but at least we have Adams’ photographs to remind us of what once was and what we have lost.



Other photographers, particularly Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, are associated with the social injustices of the first half of the twentieth century in American, but Adams also belongs in that circle. When the U.S. government detained Japanese-Americans in camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Adams felt compelled to fight back with his camera. Adams visited the Manzanar War Relocation Center and took a series of photographs to demonstrate that these Japanese-Americans were “real” Americans, too. Adams faced heavy opposition (even Theodore Geisel, the future Dr. Seuss, drew cartoons questioning the loyalty of the Japanese-Americans), but he hoped that photographs such as Manzanar Baseball (above, from 1943) would change minds in a “See, they play baseball, too!” kind of way. Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans, the book that came out of this project, remains an almost-forgotten chapter of Adams career and certainly one that will never make it to the calendars. As with Norman Rockwell, we have grown too familiar with Ansel Adams and think we know him, but Adams has depths that we too often lose in his mountains.

History in the Making

Watching Andrew Wyeth’s critical life after death play out in real time truly fascinates me. Very little about Wyeth’s art can be described in black and white terms, and the way that normally talented critics stumble over these grey areas says a lot about contemporary art criticism and how it makes or breaks certain artists. Although there have been some truly great tributes to the man and his art, most write-ups on Wyeth range from tepidly uninformed to almost defiantly uninformed. For example, The Boston Globe’s Sebastian Smee says in “Wyeth's Works Inspired Condescension, Postwar Public,” “His finest paintings were lifted out of the ordinary by a haunting sensitivity to the emotional effects of open space. But he also peddled in kitsch. His painstaking technique had something mildly self-congratulatory about it, and the world he conjured was too pristine by half.” For Smee, Wyeth was a great technician but lousy chooser of subject material. I don’t understand how Wyeth’s world could be “too pristine” considering how he depicted poor African-Americans, simple farmers, and even disabled women in their disheveled natural environments with almost brutal honesty. Critics such as Smee simply cannot call upon the same sense of empathy that allowed Wyeth to enter into the world of these people. Wyeth’s “world” isn’t really “his,” it’s the world of his models made transcendent through his skill.

A great, yet unfortunately typical offender against Wyeth is Peter Schjeldahl of The New Yorker. Schjeldahl, winner of the 2008 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing, normally speaks and writes eloquently on art. When participating in a recent radio show focused on Wyeth’s art and legacy, Schjeldahl admitted he didn’t give Wyeth “a second thought,” because Wyeth lacked importance in the contemporary art scene dominated by the other Andy—Andy Warhol. In a perfect tautology, Wyeth doesn’t get a second thought because he’s not important, and isn’t important because he doesn’t get a second thought. Schjeldahl cites Wyeth Christina's World (above, from 1948), readily at hand for the critic at the MoMA in New York City, as his idea of Wyeth’s art. Somehow Schjeldahl decided that one famous work painted 60 years before defined an entire 70-year career. Another prominent anti-Wyeth critic, The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones titled his take on Wyeth’s legacy in his blog, “Andrew Wyeth’s Work Represents the Worst of America.” Jones linked the end of the Bush presidency with the end of Wyeth and somehow arrives at the idea that Wyeth’s and Bush’s worlds are one and the same. “Good riddance,” Jones says to both, calling them “retrogressive, short-sighted, and strangely empty and banal.” Jones, too, remarks upon Christina’s World, recalling how he was “stunned by its triteness” upon seeing it in person for the first time. If Jones had ever studied Wyeth’s paintings of the poor, normally unseen and uncelebrated people of America, he would never equate Wyeth with the elitism of the Bush regime. Again, ignorance of the facts has its price, but Wyeth rather than critics pays.


Jones echoed Schjeldahl’s modernist prejudice by contrasting Wyeth with his contemporaries, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, whom he sees as courageous in their experimentation. “Wyeth by contrast is the artist of dishonest, selfish, conservative America,” Jones concludes. “And no, it is not more complicated than that.” Actually, it is. When one of the other critics on the radio show with Schjeldahl mentioned Wyeth’s Otherworld (above, from 2002), The New Yorker’s award-winning critic admitted that he was unaware of such a work and would be interested in seeing it. Jones and Schjeldahl never took the time to understand Wyeth’s “other world,” whether it be the classic Wyeth works of rural life or the nearly surreal images such as Otherworld. It’s disheartening to think that even such prominent critics refuse to take the time to give Wyeth a “second thought,” especially at this important juncture in Wyeth’s career, when the general picture of Wyeth as an artist is taking hold for what most likely will be the next generation or two. Ironically, both Schjeldahl and Jones praised a different American as a contrast to Wyeth—Norman Rockwell. Rockwell endured decades of critical mockery before he received the reevaluation that has made it “trendy” and “edgy” today to say that Rockwell’s a great artist. Is it too much to ask that the critics learn the lesson of Rockwell’s life after death and apply it to Wyeth by reevaluating his work now, thus saving him from the torture of misrepresentation for years? How many other artists have suffered or will suffer the same critical fate? Doesn’t the public following these critics deserve better service? Ultimately, Wyeth’s fate rests in the hands of those who set the standards for the times. Is it too much to ask for those standard-makers to live up to some standards themselves?

Living the Golden Rule

Friend, neighbor, and fellow blogger Christine at PurpleCar recently posed the interesting question to me of what I think Norman Rockwell would paint today. Christine placed an image of Rockwell’s The Problem We All Live With (above, from 1964), which shows federal marshals guarding 6-year-old Ruby Bridges on her way to elementary school in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1960, next to a photo of President Barack Obama’s daughter Sasha walking to school accompanied by the Secret Service. For many people, Norman Rockwell, born February 3, 1894, is the saccharine painter of hokey Americana. I recall visits to the doctor as a child and seeing on the examining room wall a print of Rockwell’s illustration of the little girl holding up a doll so that the doctor can hear its heart. And, yet, Rockwell, especially late in his career, addressed social issues such as civil rights. If Rockwell were alive today, I think he’d be painting Sasha Obama and all the ills of today’s American society, yet still with the basic optimism at the core of his art.

It’s important to remember that Rockwell was primarily an illustrator, selling his images to commercial magazines for a wide audience, most famously The Saturday Evening Post. The Post placed many restraints on Rockwell, one of which was to keep the subject matter light and hopeful and for their primarily middle class, white readership. Ruby Bridges may be the first black face Rockwell painted for the Post. Even in the midst of the Great Depression, Rockwell was ordered to keep things cheerful, so he focused on quaint images of small town America, what people often refer to as “the heartland.” Yet, the financial crisis weighed so heavily on the hearts of Americans that Rockwell couldn’t restrain himself entirely from depicting it somehow. On the cover of the January 18, 1930 issue of The Post, Rockwell placed his Stock Exchange Quotations (above), which shows a group of people anxiously reading that day’s stock returns. You can’t see their faces, but their bodies clearly express their angst. In 1943, Rockwell painted his series called The Four Freedoms, including Freedom from Want, which features a mammoth turkey meal with the works that the survivors of the Great Depression dreamt of.

“I paint life as I would like it to be,” Rockwell once said to his critics. People still confuse Rockwell’s idealism for a lack of sophistication. There’s a depth of faith in the goodness of people in Rockwell’s art that looks like naïve blindness if you fail to understand just how fully Rockwell comprehended the failings of American society. The Problem We All Live With overtly expressed the problems Rockwell had been covertly covering for decades, always wishing he could break free of the chains of commercial necessity. Rockwell’s The Golden Rule (above, from 1961) beautifully brings together the whole family of humanity under the banner of doing unto others as you would have others do unto you, an ideal found not just in Christianity but in almost all major religions in some form. If Rockwell were alive today, I’d like to think that he would be more than a commercial illustrator pandering to the lowest common denominator, but rather an artist challenging us to look at ourselves through his art and to live up to the ideals he put into pictures.

A Time to Give Thanks

A Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! (Norman Rockwell’s Freedom From Want [above, from 1943], part of the Four Freedoms series, provides the appropriate visual.)

I personally want to give thanks first and foremost for the person who keeps me sane on a daily basis within the cocoon of her love—the beautiful, the intelligent, the laugh-out-loud funny, the ever-patient Annie. Second, I want to thank Alex for being the most magical child in the world and allowing me to relive all the wonders of childhood again. Without my family, I am nothing and could accomplish nothing.

I give thanks, too, for my extended family and friends, too numerous and humble to be named here.

I give thanks for the Obama victory and the Phillies’ World Series Championship. I underestimated how much God loves me until he dropped those two great moments in quick succession. (God, if you’re still listening, a guilt-wracked Dick Cheney’s confession implicating the rest of the Bush mis-Administration would make a nice Christmas gift. No wrapping involved.)

Lastly, but not leastly, I give thanks to all the people who drop in here and peruse my ramblings. I’d still do it if I was the only one listening (it is cheaper than therapy), but knowing that I’m not just typing into the internet void makes it even more gratifying.

Feel free to include your thanks in comments. Share the love until new posts and a new poll arrive on Monday, December 1st.