A First-Rate Weathervane Show at the American Folk Art Museum

American Weathervanes: The Art of the Winds exhibition has the wind at its back in quality and fun.

T he word “weathervane” once described a politician whose opinions changed depending on which way the wind blew. Politics always has lots of those, as well as sleazebags, drunks, and fools. Now, we’ve got a universe of pols and bureaucrats who actually think we mortals can control the weather, of all things. Academics parrot the party line as they drink from the grant-money trough. Big corporations live off subsidies. Then there’s what I kindly call the “impressionable youth.” They’re programmed to lose sleep because they think they’ll burn to a crisp before they get to go to their senior prom.

Enough with medieval gloom and hubris-parading-as-expertise. Let’s think about actual weathervanes, which do indeed tell us which way the wind’s blowing, and focus on the art of weathervanes. The best exhibition I’ve seen in New York this summer is American Weathervanes: The Art of the Winds at the American Folk Art Museum, across the street from Lincoln Center.

It’s easily the most enchanting display I’ve seen in a while. In early America, weathervanes were the finials topping not only showplace civic buildings and churches but also barns and stores. They were the finishing touch expressing pride in a building and its purpose, and often added that bit of whimsy which reminds us that one of life’s goals is joy. The luxe models are big and meticulously handcrafted, ruling the sky in grandeur. In the less-is-more department, the simplest ones have presence and authority.

The shapes are various and ingenious. Cockerels, or roosters, are among the earliest. They’re grounded birds so doesn’t this seem odd? No, Jesus predicted at the Last Supper that Peter would deny him three times, after which a cock would crow. The cock signals. It points the direction of the plot. Crowing cocks forecast the break of dawn, though in my experience, cock-a-doodle-do is an all-day background noise in rural Vermont.

We’ll see doves, the Goddess of Liberty, Native sachems, horses, gulls, angels, pigs, grasshoppers, cows, snakes, and a witch or two. And there’s no doubt we’re seeing some very good art. Weathervanes are early American sculpture and, at their finest, are as much art as the best American silver and furniture. Curator Robert Shaw’s catalogue explores design, history, and iconography. It’s seductively designed and illustrated, but it’s the scholarship that’s done best.

Weathervanes are democratic art. They were everywhere, easily read, and everyone could see them. They’re not mundane, though. The first lines of the catalogue’s introduction tell us we’re in for a treat. “Look up! Weathervanes invite us to pause, to linger with our eyes aloft.” After reading a thousand dry, clinical introductions, finally I’ve found one that’s buoyant. “Weathervanes invite us to experience the world they inhabit, high above us and our everyday cares.”

I love messaging that’s aspirational, and messaging that delivers. A heart and lyre banneret vane, four feet long, is installed above the intro panel. It’s from an old Maine church, dates to 1840, and signals the blend of simple beauty and abstract charge defining the genre.

Shem Drowne (1683-1774) was America’s seminal vane maker. He produced the golden grasshopper on Faneuil Hall in Boston and the Native American archer for Province House, the old royal governor’s mansion in Boston. He probably introduced the old London weathercock model to American vane-making. The cock vane over the Old Statehouse in Boston is probably his. In the realm of arcania, a golden grasshopper is on top of Faneuil Hall because the building copies the Royal Exchange in London, founded by financier Thomas Gresham in 1565. “Gresham” is a German name. His crest was the grasshopper, reflecting “Gras Heimchen,” or field cricket, the German diminutive of his name.

The exhibition explores the iconic forms with good examples arranged for impact and lucidity. The American Folk Art Museum isn’t big, but it’s mostly in an open format. Visitors enter the space to a wing on the left on how vanes are made and the earliest examples. A big gallery with a 15-foot ceiling seems made for the show. Vanes are double- and triple-hung, inviting us to look up, but the art is never so high we can’t study the object closely.

I deplore installations that treat the art as decorating props. Exhibition designers often think the overall look of a space is what matters, not the autonomy and merit of each object. Objects are often slapped on the wall in tiers, with the top items made inscrutable. The Art of the Winds has a perfect pace and gives each object plenty of space.

A section on how weathervanes were made is well done and important. Obviously, a paintings show doesn’t need a primer in how they’re created, but the art of weathervanes is a new subject. Some are mass-produced, but most in the show are handcrafted, and many are bespoke. First, carvers created solid wood patterns. A molded copper running-fox weathervane and wood pattern from around 1870 envisions the process but also tells us how refined these patterns could be. The carver here suggests lush fur and active bones and muscles. Like fancy trade signs, ship figureheads, and shop figures, these were prototypes.

An iron founder would then cast a reusable mold. Makers would hammer sheets of, often, copper onto the mold to create its two-sided components. Then, extensive, intricate hammering would develop details. Craftsmen sometimes added paint or bits of gold leaf. These pieces were soldered together. Often, weathervanes would seem sculptural and three-dimensional from the ground.

These things aren’t light and airy. They were buffeted 365 days a year, every year, so were weighted with lead fillings, front-loaded, as the front faced the prevailing wind. And, yes, a steeplejack installed them. Not a profession for the squeamish.

Weathervanes often signaled a building’s purpose. They’re grace notes, or exclamation points, at the top of a building and seeming to finish it. A gilded and painted copper quill pen from the 1880s decorated a schoolhouse. Sometimes, a vane drew from superstition. If the need was for something horizontal, why not a sinuous dragon with a long, thin tongue for good measure? They’re fire-breathing monsters, and the Great Red Dragon from the Book of Revelation isn’t exactly friendly, but if we call them a talisman, who’s going to complain?

Vanes often had heart elements to suggest welcome and warmth. Churches seemed to like the Angel Gabriel, as in “Blow, Gabriel, Blow.” Textile factories in New England often had beautifully detailed sheep and rams. There’s a steam fire engine from 1870 drawn by galloping horses used for fire stations throughout Massachusetts. “Ride Like the Wind” is a cowboy cliché and, if I remember, a song from the ’70s, but it’s a good subject for a weathervane.

The molded copper “Indian Chief” model from the 1890s is a lovely work of sculpture inspired by the Parthenon metopes but also the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Headdress, quiver, drawn arrow, and pose are in striking equipoise. The museum enlisted a Harvard graduate student to write a label telling us how mean the White Men were, and I think that’s obligatory in museums these days, though we all know it and have heard it a million times. It’s a label and not as obnoxious as a Harvard professor would be, piously blaring guilt. I’m glad “Indian Chief” is there. It’s so elegant and graceful but at the same time so spare and so suggestive of history.

The Cooperstown Cow is in the exhibition. It’s from around 1881, is unique, and originally topped the Cooperstown, N.Y., barn of Singer Sewing Machine heir Edward Severin Clark. It’s molded copper and zinc made in multiple parts and, at five feet in width, makes a statement. It’s faux rustic. Clark was one of the richest men in America. He owned the Dakota in New York and summered in Cooperstown. His farm, though a working one, was a luxury proposition. The iconic object, now in a private collection, sparked Cooperstown’s association with folk art. Today, there’s a farm museum there as well as the Fenimore, a great small museum of mostly American primitive art. The “Cooperstown Cow” signals new thinking about weathervanes. Some of the most elaborate vanes in the exhibition are luxury goods for the squirearchy.

A molded polo player from the late 19th century decorated America’s first polo club. “Witch Riding a Crescent Moon” from 1890 is fun and makes sense, as witches fly, but it seems almost entirely decorative and doesn’t have the flatness or horizontal format to actually move with the wind. We like things to be practical. Still, it’s got presence and is still used. A Bleriot XI monoplane vane from between 1909 and 1914 topped one of the wings of the Poland Spring House, a resort hotel in Maine. It’s in the show and was a fancy ode to travel. All of these are over-the-top and look good in the show. Everything looks good.

That said, I like the simpler weathervanes best, such as “Curlew” from 1874, which topped a barn in New Jersey. It’s minimalist and, at 92 inches, up close and personal even from the ground. It was in the seminal “The Flowering of American Folk Art” exhibition at the Whitney in 1974. The Museum of Modern Art did folk-art shows in the 1930s, and artists such as the sculptor Elie Nadelman collected it.

“Curlew,” “Quill Pen,” and vanes depicting hounds, pigs, and horses are straightforward and practical. Originally bright copper or, in the case of “Curlew,” covered with gold leaf, these vanes were made with the understanding that age would change their look. Patination was part of the design. American aesthetics isn’t fussy. Gilded Age Gaudy is part of the mix sometimes, but our default aesthetic is guided by Protestant reserve, deleting elaboration rather than turning objects over to it.

Around 1900, weathervanes started to seem optional, then, as buildings got taller. They turned quaint, the stuff of country life. Cars allowed people to get places fast, and in an enclosed setting, cue the radio music. In the horse-and-buggy era, or when people walked places, weathervanes had an audience. In the era before weather forecasts, that blowing Gabriel, giant cow, Pequot pointing an arrow, and ubiquitous copper cock were as good as meteorology got.

The catalogue has lots of good material on weathervane conservation and the businesses that made weathervanes. The last gallery in the show, to the left of the introduction and the “Heart and Lyre Banneret” vane, analyzes the surface finishes of weathervanes. I’m a science geek and learned so much about aging copper. Jennifer Mass is the conservation specialist and scholar who analyzed the vanes. Her work is effectively applied to a range of American architectural ornaments. We like multitaskers, and we like work that’s multipurpose, too.

I can’t praise the book’s usefulness and beauty enough and want to add that the exhibition we see follows the scholarly catalogue in organization. Among my phone-book-size list of bugaboos is a catalogue that has a bare acquaintance with the exhibition it accompanies or, worse, contempt for it.

This is the American Folk Art Museum’s 60th anniversary. The self-taught artist is at the center of American aesthetics and creativity, and at the center of the museum’s collecting and scholarship. We’re a huge country and never had a central academy dictating style, so American art is an immense, unruly proposition.

There’s plenty of charm at the museum, and I’m not against that. What I love most about it is the attention it gives artists who haven’t gone to art school or aren’t part of the milieu of critics, dealers, and the rich but do have a brilliant, dexterous design vision. The museum has a fantastic collection, passionate donors, and, in Jason Busch, a great director with a seriously good reputation as one of the best decorative-arts curators of our time.

And the museum is free.