Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, August 11, 1994 TAG: 9408110051
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SETH WILLIAMSON SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Chief curator Mark Scala says most people expect that what may well be the most famous piece of patriotic Americana ever created would be ... well, bigger, for one thing. But Archibald Willard's celebration of colonial steadfastness measures only 18 by 24 inches.
Striding resolutely through the fog of battle, a white-haired old man and a boy play side drums, while a fifer, bloody bandage around his head, marches beside them through the wounded and dying. A staple of American iconography, the scene has welded itself into our national consciousness, having been reproduced countless times in classrooms, advertising, even Bugs Bunny and Disney cartoons. And it's in Roanoke until Oct. 16.
Willard's oil painting, created for the 1876 Centennial celebration in Philadelphia, is part of ``The American Spirit: 19th-Century Masterpieces from the Masco Collection,'' now showing at the Art Museum of Western Virginia at Center in the Square.
The 33 paintings constitute one of the most immediately accessible and likable shows the museum has staged in recent years. Spanning nearly a century from 1819 to 1907, ``The American Spirit'' is a vivid evocation of how Americans once conceived themselves and the world around them. Straightforward, sentimental and yet sometimes disturbing, the pictures are ``a good cross-section'' of the Masco Corp.'s collection of Americana, said Mark Scala.
Scala reports that Roanokers have been enthusiastic about the show. ``People are really fascinated. We've had a lot more sign-ins, and a much more positive response in our donation box than we're used to. We've put a lot more labelling and information beside the pictures as well, and people really seem to appreciate that. It's been a great show so far,'' said Scala.
A manufacturer of building, home-improvement and home furnishings, Masco acquired the bulk of its collection from company executive Richard A. Manoogian. When not loaned out for shows around the country, the much of the collection occupies various corporate offices.
Scala, who traveled to Masco corporate headquarters outside Detroit in April to choose the pictures for ``The American Spirit,'' says that Manoogian started out by collecting 20th-century American art.
``But the collection evolved. Manoogian is Armenian by birth, and he wanted to buy the art that really defined his adopted country. So the collection became primarily 19th-century American painting and some decorative arts,'' said the curator. Scala estimates that he chose about a fifth of the total collection for the museum's current show.
The pictures are roughly evenly divided among portraits, landscapes, still lifes and didactic ``story pictures'' of the type that Americans once loved.
Besides ``The Spirit of '76,'' highlights include Thomas Moran's ``Under the Trees,'' dating from 1865. Under a magnificent bower of autumn trees a man - presumed to be a self-portrait of Moran - reclines beside a mossy brook and gazes into the hazy distance, where a still lake surface and a beautiful Appalachian mountainside are framed by a leafy bower. Though Moran is not well-known today, this picture compares favorably with anything produced by the painters of the Hudson River School.
John George Brown's ``A Liberated Woman'' is a derisive portrait of a cigarette-smoking suffragette, obviously meant to strike viewers as a wealthy and phony lady of leisure with too much time on her hands. In Eastman Johnson's ``The Reprimand,'' painted in 1880, a cranky-looking older man is lecturing a lovely young girl for some unknown reason - is it a father chiding a flirtatious daughter? A rich old man with a wayward young wife? Puzzling over such questions was half the fun for the 19th-century Americans who loved pictures like this.
``I wouldn't call it simple-minded, but it's simple,'' said Scala. ``It was a time when art was seen as a way to provide a moral lesson, common ground. Most people agreed on what was beautiful and in the landscapes, for example, they wanted to take people's breath away, associating the wilderness with the grandeur of God.''
The earliest work is Alvan Fisher's 1819 oil, ``Family Abandoning Home in Flood.'' In the midst of an idyllic mountain- and forest-scape a young family leaves their house on horseback as rampaging floodwaters threaten their lives. The contrast between the distant Eden-like vistas and the menace in the foreground is arresting.
Not all the pictures are ``easy'' or reassuring. What's going on in Edmund C. Coates' weird 1865 painting, ``The Arrival of St. Nicholas''? Santa scatters gifts from his sleigh - but he's much too far from the children, who skate and frolic in the distance. Two positively demonic-looking elves bounce from the speeding reindeer, and the birds that roost in a nearby tree are bizarre creatures out of a Brueghel portrayal of hell. What kind of a Santa is this?
``The paintings after the Civil War lose a lot of that optimism,'' said Mark Scala. ``There's more self-doubt and introspection. The more you look at this St. Nicholas picture, the odder it gets.''
Two Virginia art experts will give lectures in connection with ``The American Spirit.'' On Sept. 13, William Whitwell, professor of art at Hollins College, will speak on ``Themes and Ideas in American Landscape Painting.'' On Oct. 5, Bailey Van Hook, assistant professor of art at Virginia Tech, will discuss ``Women in 19th-Century American Art.''
Both talks will be from 11 a.m. to noon in the museum's first-floor galleries.
``The American Spirit'': on view at the Art Museum of Western Virginia, Center in the Square, through Oct. 16.
by CNB