Ringling exhibit showcases America's finest

[John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art] Edward Henry Potthast, Afternoon Fun, undated.

By LENNIE BENNETT
© St. Petersburg Times
published July 7, 2002

Works by artistic heavyweights trace country's history.

SARASOTA -- The United States is still a young country by most standards. "American Anthem: 300 Years of Painting from the Butler Institute of American Art" makes one hope that, artistically, America never grows up.

As the exhibition at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art demonstrates, even when American artists were emulating their continental brethren, their art had a vibrancy that could never have been created by an old European soul.

Not a blockbuster exhibit, "American Anthem" consists of just 55 paintings dating from the colonial years through the 20th century. But it is likely "the finest American art exhibit encapsulated" this area will see for some time, as museum deputy director Aaron De Groft said.

The show presents most of the great names of American painting, and although the specific work might not always be an artist's finest, the exhibition has an impressive sweep and depth.

[John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art] Frank Weston Benson, Red and Gold, 1915.

It is mostly arranged chronologically, and also in thematic groupings that sometimes seem forced. For example, a gallery with art classified as Scene Painting in the Early 20th Century has appropriate work by Robert Henri, George Luks and John Sloan; then, mid-century artists such as Edward Hopper, and, most oddly, a watercolor dated 1988 by Andrew Wyeth. But that's a minor quibble with an exhibition that has work by masters such as these, wherever they're hung.

The earliest paintings are 18th century portraits, and one of the most recent works, a silk-screen and acrylic work by Andy Warhol from the 1970s, also is a portrait. Each in its way evokes its era: the early ones a means of recording an image and validating a family's prosperity; the Warhol, more about the artist than subject.

Most of the paintings dating before the 1930s are suffused with America's sense of manifest destiny and belief in capitalism. At the same time, many of these painters confronted the dark side of prosperity, looking subtly -- and sometimes not so subtly -- at the plundering of resources and the human toll of rapid growth.

The 19th century landscapes have the same picturesqueness as those by English artists such as John Constable, but there is a uniquely American tension in some. Salt Marsh Hay (1865), by Martin Johnson Heade, is a luminous pastoral, but it is underpinned by a sense of mourning, as storm clouds gather, possibly for a proud wilderness coming under cultivation or the pyrrhic victory of the North after the Civil War.

Two of the most important 19th century American landscape painters, Thomas Cole and Frederick Edwin Church, are represented. Unfortunately, their work is of non-American scenes, Italian Landscape (1839) and In the Andes (1878), respectively, but you get the sense of grandeur in those works that they brought to their more famous American landscapes.

Eastman Johnson's Feather Duster Boy (c. 1865-75) proclaims the virtues of hard work. It is juxtaposed with David Gilmour Blythe's Street Urchins (c. 1865-68), a disturbing reminder of the unrelieved grimness of 19th century poverty.

A section titled "The Gilded Age" is packed with masterful work referencing the influences of European realism and impressionism that American artists were both challenging and embracing. Thomas Eakins' The Coral Necklace (1904), Frank Weston Benson's Red and Gold (1915) and Edward Henry Potthast's Afternoon Fun are among the most beautifully rendered works on display.

In the late 20th century paintings, a truly American vernacular seems to emerge as artists such as Robert Motherwell grabbed the reins of modernism and quickly outdistanced European artists. The galleries devoted to painting in the postwar years are the most varied, the smorgasbord of art movements that flowed through our culture represented by artists with widely varying agendas such as Joan Mitchell, Romare Bearden, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Rauschenberg, Phillip Pearlstein, Chuck Close and Janet Fish.

[John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art] Edward Hopper, Pennsylvania Coal Town, 1947

And then there is Snap the Whip. The Winslow Homer masterpiece has been hung on a long wall that bisects the exhibition, alone except for related works such as a copy of a study for the painting and an engraved version Homer made for publication in Harper's Weekly that disseminated this quintessential image of American spirit. Homer painted it mid career in 1872, when he was poised between the bucolic scenes of an American Eden of his youth and his later, darker paintings of man at the mercy of a harsh nature.

Snap the Whip shows a line of boys, let loose from school, releasing their pent-up energy in a game. Around them are the reassuring reminders of home: adults waving in the distance, gentle hills that seem to embrace the little schoolhouse and the people in the valley. But the game they play has potential for violence and injury, which you see in the rocks lying amid the grass and wildflowers. The boys are not laughing or making eye contact with one another; they seem deadly earnest as they strain to hold on. Seen reproduced in books, it has the appearance of a monumental painting; it actually measures just 22 inches by 36 inches. But Homer packed a lot of images, brilliantly arranged, into the canvas.

Snap the Whip came to the Ringling by special arrangement with the Butler Institute and was not part of the American Anthem exhibit. It alone is worth the trip to Sarasota and enriches an already bountiful offering of American creativity. The show does not have a catalog, but the many wall labels provide plenty of historic and aesthetic information. A detail irrelevant to the value of the exhibition but nevertheless interesting is the parallel between the Butler Institute, founded in 1919, and the Ringling Museum, opened in the 1930s. Just as John Ringling gave this museum and its contents to the people of Florida, so did steel industrialist Joseph G. Butler Jr. leave his collection of American art to his hometown, Youngstown, Ohio.

REVIEW: "An American Anthem: 300 Years of Painting from the Butler Institute of American Art" is at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 5401 Bay Shore Road, Sarasota, through Sept. 8. General admission is $15 for adults, $12 for seniors 55 and older. Free for children younger than 12 and Florida students and teachers with ID. Includes the art museum, Ca d'Zan (reservations suggested), Circus Museum and grounds. Open 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily. Call (941) 359-5700.

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