Books, Arts & Manners: Return to an Older America

The 1968-69 season may well go down as the year when American art lovers rediscovered the art of their beginnings as a nation—the art of a still rural America which dreamed of carving a new civilization out of the yet untamed wilderness, far from the mouldering cities of a decadent Europe. The long-ignored paintings of the first half of the nineteenth century have been gathering dust in museum storerooms and country attics since the 1880s, when a more cosmopolitan generation dismissed the art of their fathers and grandfathers as hopelessly literal, sentimental and academic. Now, however, it is suddenly booming.

Galleries specializing in nineteenth-century American painting are popping up all over Madison Avenue, and the pages of Art News are filled with sales notices of relatively unknown artists of the period, whose prices now parallel the cost of the advertisements. Parke-Bernet, for instance, illustrates an important auction announcement with an Albert Bierstadt, the German-born painter who, in the 1860s, rendered the grandeurs of Yosemite and Yellowstone in the slick accomplished techniques he had learned in Dusseldorf; his prices, like those of his contemporaries, are skyrocketing. But it is not just the prices: when a prestigious gallery like Wildenstein, whose velvet walls are commonly hung with Cézannes, Renoirs and Rembrandts, plays host to a benefit show of the cowboy artists Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell one can be sure American nineteenth-century art has arrived.

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Ruth Berenson

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The 1968-69 season may well go down as the year when American art lovers rediscovered the art of their beginnings as a nation—the art of a still rural America which dreamed of carving a new civilization out of the yet untamed wilderness, far from the mouldering cities of a decadent Europe. The long-ignored paintings of the first half of the nineteenth century have been gathering dust in museum storerooms and country attics since the 1880s, when a more cosmopolitan generation dismissed the art of their fathers and grandfathers as hopelessly literal, sentimental and academic. Now, however, it is suddenly booming.

Galleries specializing in nineteenth-century American painting are popping up all over Madison Avenue, and the pages of Art News are filled with sales notices of relatively unknown artists of the period, whose prices now parallel the cost of the advertisements. Parke-Bernet, for instance, illustrates an important auction announcement with an Albert Bierstadt, the German-born painter who, in the 1860s, rendered the grandeurs of Yosemite and Yellowstone in the slick accomplished techniques he had learned in Dusseldorf; his prices, like those of his contemporaries, are skyrocketing. But it is not just the prices: when a prestigious gallery like Wildenstein, whose velvet walls are commonly hung with Cézannes, Renoirs and Rembrandts, plays host to a benefit show of the cowboy artists Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell one can be sure American nineteenth-century art has arrived.