Art in America (by way of France) November 14, 2006

Jack (Jackson Pollock), Charles Pollock, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Collection of Elizabeth Pollock, 1976.65.7.

What if Jackson Pollock hadn't been born in Cody, Wyoming, but rather Moulins sur Allier in France? Would critics and enthusiasts have written paeans to the artist's early years in the Auvergne? Would they have suggested that the French notion of rural expanse contributed to works that won the affection of cosmopolitan Paris? Would Pollock's work be considered the pinnacle of French rather than American abstraction, the successor to the French modernists? Or would his work have given Parisian gallery-goers the nagging feeling that something was amiss, that Pollock seemed out of place somehow?

I'm roughly paraphrasing the question Adam Gopnik raised to illustrate his lecture for the American Art in a Global Context: An International Symposium, hosted by SAAM. It was a hypothetical he borrowed, in fact, from his brother Blake Gopnik, chief critic for the Washington Post. In is opening remarks, Adam asked: How often do you wake up and feel compelled to wade into a debate between your little brother and a conservative New York Times columnist?

Adam Gopnik, a writer for the New Yorker and author of books on Paris and fatherhood, refers to a newsprint dialogue that followed American Art's July opening between his brother Blake and David Brooks, opinion columnist for the New York Times. Blake Gopnik wrote: "The [Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery] don't manage to elucidate some essentially American culture — because no such thing can or should exist, especially in a country as young and big and plural as this one. David Brooks responded: "Blake Gopnik spoke for the art establishment in his review of the museums in The Washington Post, arguing that there is no essentially American culture — no transcendent thing we Americans share simply because we happen to inhabit the same nation-state. . . . But most people who tour these museums will feel a transcendent thing called Americanness deep in their bones.

I'm cherrypicking from their articles to get at the nut of the debate, but read both—neither is as simple as all that. (Note that Brooks's article is now hidden behind the paper's subscription firewall.) During his lecture, Adam Gopnik admitted to finding himself more closely aligned with Brooks than his brother—but the position he finds vis-a-vis American art and American essence is something of a compromise between their views.

Returning to his original hypothetical, Gopnik noted that the question about Pollock wasn't entirely rhetorical. Apparently—and the anecdote may be apocryphal, so take it for what it's worth—the art historian Kenneth Clark said upon seeing a Pollock painting for the first time that Pollock was a Walt Whitman. So Clark, at least, saw some broad American theme in Pollock's work before he knew that Pollock was an American (and well before Pollock's work garnered its status as iconic American imagery).

Neither is the French connection in the Pollock hypothetical arbitrary: Gopnik's made a career of commentary on French culture, its similarities to American culture and divergences from same. It's no surprise, then, that his opinions on American art—on the Americanness of American art—share a parallel course with his musings on American (and French) wine. Americans strove for the French Burgundy but, lacking the French climate and tradition in California, discovered and developed instead a grape that suited the environment: the Pinot Noir.

So too, he said, did American art originally ape its European counterparts. Tellingly, Gopnik chose to use as examples artists who studied at length in Paris. There's a mechanism by which Americans have responded to and imported European themes, said Gopnik: first, by mimesis, then by adaptation. Visual art examples abound: Homer encountered Hokusai's work in Paris. Audubon adopted the naturalist style familiar to Western European science. Gopnik emphasized that in American art, borrowing from Europe led to adaptation, which led to real invention: Cassatt, for example, re-examined motherhood in a manner that was inconsistent with traditional European themes about motherhood.

Working from these examples, Gopnik expanded on two general trends in American art: the sublime and the empirical. He cited Pollock as an example of the former, along with Frederic Church and Clyfford Still; for the latter, Gopnik gave Audubon, even noting that Darwin considered Audubon to be "a liberating influence." Gopnik focused on Audubon, but George Catlin is another example. It's important to note the context of the early 19th century: Most American artists, whether naturalists like Audubon or landscape painters like Church, were self taught. (Church studied under Thomas Cole for only 2 years; John Singleton Copley never studied with any masters.) External factors beyond tradition and the academy led these artists to develop an American style—so even the uniquely American branches of empiricism and the sublime share a common root.

So where does Gopnik fit with respect to the question proposed by his brother? He said plainly that that there are distinctly American themes in American art that have their origins in dialog with Europe. He even proffered the coasts, whose relationship to Europe would have been strongest: Nationalism (as in national themes), Gopnik suggested, is not at at odds with with cosmopolitanism. This assertion challenges a popular assumption that the national character emerged from the heartland. (The very word "heartland" derives from the conventional wisdom that America is something to be found in the Sun Belt, the Breadbasket, the deep South, and the Southwest—and pointedly not on the east coast or west coast, or even in the Pacific Northwest.) But it's the dialog, not Europe — or the Near and Far East, or other international influences — that clarifies the national character, Gopnik countered. The national character emerges in the comparison between American works and those of the nations that contributed to and influenced American progress.

• Jackson Pollock, Adam Gopnik, Smithsonian American Art Museum