The American historical art boom. Is it a bust? Not in Seattle.

As Tyler Green noted today, American historical art is popping up all over:

The National Gallery, the Met, the Huntington and the Nelson-Atkins have all opened major American presentations this spring. (The Met isn’t done: Its American paintings and sculpture galleries open in 2011.)

Opening next year in Arkansas, Crystal Bridges (collections link here) is sure to transform the field.

In the meantime, Green wondered the following:

On a morning when an American president born in Hawaii to a Muslim
Kenyan father and a Kansasan mother is speaking about Islam, Israel and
the United States at Egypt’s Cairo University, while back home a Latina
visits Capitol Hill to drum up support for her landmark nomination to
the Supreme Court and while New Hampshire becomes the sixth state to
offer state-level marriage equality, does it make sense for our art
museums to present American art galleries that present American art as
it might have been considered in 1935?

Really, 1935? There wasn’t a great deal of enthusiasm for historical American in 1935. Let me first say I’m happy to have a dog in this race. When the Seattle Art Museum reopened in 2007, it was (for the first time) with an American wing. What is old hat in this material on the East Coast is less so in the West and especially in the Northwest, where its absence has been nearly total.

The problems in building these collections are dramatic. American historical art is now a big crowd pleaser. With the best material increasingly hard to come by, it’s tempting to offer second tier work from stars rather than shake up the field with first-rate work from lesser knowns.

Because it apparently went for the former, Christopher Knight found the Huntington lacking, here. So did a well-informed blogger going by the name of Los Angeles County Museum On Fire, here. (Who? Who knows? On the Web, nobody knows if you’re a curator at one of the institutions you deplore. Or not.)

(For this topic, we need Robert Hughes back at his peak. Failing that, we can reread American Visions.)

SAM shines in the quality of what it has collected. Starting late, it came on strong with the best material.

SAM signaled its intentions in 2005, with a small exhibit organized by
Patti Junker, then new curator of American art (a new position, as well): A Quieter
Spirit, featuring four paintings by Frederic Edwin Church. It was a gem
few expected to see at SAM, that has strengths in Asian, African,
Northwest Coast Native American, historical European decorative,
post-WWII modernist and contemporary art.

But 19th-century American?
Until recently, SAM didn’t own enough to fill a closet, never mind a
suite of galleries. For most of the museum’s history, its enthusiasm
for the subject could be expressed in negative numbers.
When Mrs. Paul C. Carmichael left the museum an 1854 Church painting
that had been in her family for generations, A Country Home, her 1965
bequest sounded almost apologetic, as if she were hoping SAM would be
kind enough to shelter her ugly ducking.

The museum sheltered it in storage.
SAM was not alone in its indifference to its country’s art history.
Junker says historical American art was an under-the-radar field until
1976, when celebrations of the nation’s bicentennial brought it new
prominence.

America always embraced its writers. Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau,
Hawthorne and Melville were (to greater and lesser extents) celebrated
in their own time, and their work has continued to grow in stature.

But American painters and sculptors were blank spaces on their
country’s mental map. The greatest 19th-century figures, such as
Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, were esteemed but in a niche context:
pretty good for Americans. Even Hudson River painters who wowed the
masses with their landscapes were judged to be also-rans when compared
with artists in Europe of the same period.

American Impressionism? Why bother?
Americans were busy building a nation. Even early in the 20th century,
when it came to our own art, we didn’t have time for it.

Fast-forward to 1976. American artists had moved easily onto the
world’s stage 30 years earlier, but few museums or art historians were
making major claims for all but a handful of earlier figures until
after the bicentennial.
Junker, an art history student at the time, realized the field was ripe
for reconsideration and got her master’s degree at the University of
Michigan because it was one of the few places in which she could focus
on the subject.

Had SAM begun collecting early American art in the 1970s, it could have
picked up prime material for a small fraction of its current value.
Thanks to the bequest of the Rockefeller Collection of American Art,
the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park
has the best and most extensive 19th-century American art on the West
Coast.

SAM can’t catch the de Young on quantity but is working to approach the
de Young on quality. Small but great is its mantra.
Given its meager acquisitions budget and the soaring cost of the
material, the ambition would be laughable were it not for a handful of
Seattle collectors, including Tom and Ann Barwick and Bill and Melinda
Gates, who concentrate in the 19th century.

In early 20th-century American art, there’s Jon and Mary Shirley and
Barney Ebsworth. Allan Kollar is the key local dealer for this
material.
Few museums buy their way into prominence. They rely on the acuity of collectors who donate what museums can’t afford to
purchase, which is why collector care and feeding is such a crucial
part of a museum’s mission.
Good museums inspire people to become collectors and respond to the
passions of the collectors who are already active and collectors the museum encourages to be so.

Junker’s was the first clear signal that SAM is responding to a new
passion in its collector base. When the time comes to donate, SAM wants
these people thinking Seattle, not Washington, D.C., Boston, New York
or San Francisco.

Soon after Tom Barwick and his late wife, Ann, began collecting in the
1970s, he tried to reach out to local museums. First, he went to the
Frye, which seemed like a natural home for his interests. Ida Kay
Greathouse, director at the time, was collecting 19th-century/early
20th-century American art when no other area institution was
interested.
Being a rugged individualist, Greathouse didn’t want advice from
Barwick or anybody else. Backed by the Frye’s endowment ($92 million
before the crash), she didn’t need him.

All would have been well had he been a yes man or she willing to hear
him out. He wanted her to aim higher, and she resented it.
“She was frugal,” said art dealer Kollar. He said he once asked the
director of a New York gallery that regularly sold her paintings why
she wasn’t getting A-list material, and the dealer told Kollar she
didn’t want to pay for it. Getting a bargain by a big name was more
important than getting the best available, said Kollar.

Next, Barwick approached the University of Washington’s Henry Art
Gallery, where he got a warm reception from director Harvey West. Two
exhibits followed, dear to Barwick’s heart: “American Impressionism” in
1980 and “William Merritt Chase” in 1983, the latter opening here and
traveling to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
After Richard Andrews was hired as director in 1987, Barwick knew the
Henry was heading in a contemporary direction.

At that point, he turned to SAM.
“The interest of a few people can transform a museum,” said Junker.
Barwick is a transforming force. He made it possible for SAM to acquire
a rare John LaFarge window at auction in New York in 1987 (Peonies
Blown in the Wind, 1893-1908) and was key to the acquisition of an
1809 Rembrandt Peale portrait in 1989.
The museum organized a Friends of American Art council in 1993,
spearheaded by Barwick and his wife. Quietly, SAM’s choice American
holdings grew: In 1990, Sanford Robinson Gifford’s Mount Rainier, Bay
of Tacoma — Puget Sound from 1875, and in 2000, Albert Bierstadt’s Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast from 1870.

Both Microsoft co-founders — Bill Gates and Paul Allen — are high-end
art collectors, but while Allen’s holdings range widely, from tribal to
Post-Impressionism and contemporary, Gates is increasingly focused on
historical American material.
Junker refused to say whether she’d even seen Gates’ collection. (We
know she hasn’t seen Allen’s. Fromer modern art curator Lisa Corrin
said, to her knowledge, no SAM curator ever has.)

Business Week writer Thane Peterson mentioned a few of Gates’ purchases
in a 2001 article, The Art of Being Bill Gates.
According to Peterson, Gates owns Winslow Homer’s Lost on the Grand
Banks from 1898, paying $36 million for it in 1998. For Childe
Hassam’s The Room of Flowers, Gates paid $20 million. George Bellows’ Polo Crowd from 1910 cost him $27.5 million, and William Merritt
Chase’s The Nursery from 1890 was a steal at $10 million.

Gates has ties to SAM. For one thing, his stepmother, Mimi Gates, now retiring, was director for 14 years. When he gets around to donating, SAM would have to work hard
not to be first on his list.
Since the mid-1990s, the Shirleys have been crucial SAM backers. When
they choose to give away their early Calders, among other treasures,
SAM has every reason to be hopeful.

And Barney Ebsworth, long associated with the National Gallery in
Washington D.C., lives here and parties with fellow SAM trustees. When
Ebsworth’s passing art on, SAM hopes he’ll love his new friends more
than his old.

“Think of the money made in Seattle in the last couple of decades,”
said Kollar. “This is one of the few cities in which collectors can
compete for the material if they choose, and they do. There is no
reason why Seattle can’t be the leading museum in this field on the
West Coast.”

Of the four Churches in the 205 exhibit, one (and the least significant) is owned by the Amon
Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. SAM owns A Country Home, and the
two others, both masterpieces, belong to unnamed Seattle collectors.

Church needed to amaze his 19th-century neighbors to get their
attention at all. If art wasn’t awe-inspiring, there was no reason to
waste time on it, unless it was the work of an itinerant portrait
painter making a record of the family, or a silversmith hammering out a
teapot and spoons.

There was practicality, and there was spectacle.
The spectacle still works. Evening After a Storm, painted in 1849 when Church was 23 years old,
has orchestrated depths. A small red cabin tucked into the left-hand
corner and a horizontal expanse of rocky ledge are the prelude in the
foreground. Against the ledge is an abandoned wheel covered in ivy, a
puny human effort obscured by vegetation. Look beyond it into the
valley, where animals lean into light and a row of trees cast long
shadows. Behind the valley are mountains, distant in layers, and the
sky, a dark purple bruise lifting its heavy drama off the earth.

In Europe, the romantic sublime was crumbling castles. In America,
wrote Hughes in American Visions, it was nature.

If American nature
was one vast church, then landscape artists were its clergy.