America: painting a nation

As part of the ‘Sydney International Art Series’, a new exhibition spanning 200 years of American art history comes to Sydney, on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until February.

Such a large collection of American art has never been shown in an Australian gallery before, which is significant, given the primacy of American painting in the history of art, particularly contemporary. There is certainly a taste for large survey shows of national art about at the moment – ‘Australia’, the Royal Academy in London’s collaboration with the National Gallery of Australia, featured the best and brightest of Australia’s art scene, and received mixed reviews. With this in mind, it will be interesting to see how ‘America: painting a nation’ fares, as an equally ambitious display with an equally ambitious title.

The exhibition includes works by leading American painters including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Georgia O’Keeffe and Edward Hopper. For many, some of these 20th century names (Pollock, Rothko and O’Keeffe) will prove most familiar, but this exhibition goes far beyond the popular understanding of American art – which believe it or not, does extend back before Jackson Pollock. Many will recognise the Whistlers, Homers and Hoppers, but most will be unfamiliar with Copley, Peale, Sully, Cole, Moran and many others, whose heyday was the 18th century. These artists have much in common with other examples of colonial portraiture, and this Australian audience will draw comparisons between these works and the English roots from which they sprung. With works dating back to 1750, this survey is expansive, covering a myriad of experiences, styles and a significant sample of America’s visual history.

Gary Tinterow, Director of the Museum of Fine Art, Houston notes that Australians and Americans have a “common heritage, and our nations and national identities emerged on parallel tracks.” Australians will no doubt appreciate this aspect of the exhibition, and the fact that the AGNSW has a substantial collection of Australian colonial art, makes this exhibition a unique and interesting opportunity for comparative study of colonial artists.

Charles Willson Peale’s portrait of the Cadwalader family reveals a world in flux. Where in conventional aristocratic portraits the sitters would be facing the viewer, formal in their posture, Peale’s family are active. To the right, the figure of John Cadwalader stands facing his family, revealing only his profile, as his wife and daughter gaze adoringly up at him. This disturbance of the conventions of portraiture in itself reveals the emergence of a distinctly American character in the face of its colonial masters – something that Australians will relate to on a very fundamental level.

As we move through the years, through the Revolutionary era and the Romantics, to the 20th century, some of the great masters of American, and indeed global art, are revealed. Georgia O’Keeffe’s move to Mexico produced a new symbol in the Horse’s skull with pink rose (1931), in which she combines a symbol of frontier and history, with beauty and death. Pollock’s No 22 (1950) exemplifies the artist’s distinct version of Abstract Expressionism, often classified as field painting.

While it is a shame such an expansive exhibition doesn’t venture past 1960, this is regardless an important exhibition for the Art Gallery of New South Wales, both in terms of maintaining substantial international connections, and in bringing a collection of works to Australia, rarely seen outside their American homeland.

Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW)
Until 9 February, 2014
Sydney