For the past couple of weeks, we’ve talked about how art and culture can reinforce a national identity. We looked a little bit at the example of how, through time, a handful of sea powers reinforced their identity by having maritime themes dominate their public art.
Art and culture can also signify whether a country is forward looking and seeks to associate itself with the notion of progress, or is more interested in looking backward to some notion of a classic age in its past. It reminds me of the official salons in 19th century France that refused to exhibit any new works of art that didn’t keep perfectly in line with established notions of what art should be and look like. Painters whose work didn’t hold to standards long established had their work ostracized. In 1863 there was an exhibit mounted called the “Salon of Rejects.” Its artists included Manet, Whistler, Pissarro, and Cezanne. Today we make fun of how such a backward-looking culture could shun painters who would be lionized just decades later. The message of the French academy however was that the peak of artistic endeavor was in the past and new art was to reflect that clearly.
In terms of national identity here, in 1839 a newspaper writer who would soon be credited with coining the phrase “manifest destiny,” called the United States “the great nation of futurity.” He said the country has very little connection with the past of any other country and “still less with all antiquity, it’s glories or it’s crimes. On the contrary, our national birth was the beginning of a new history, the formation and progress of an untried political system, which separates us from the past and connects us with the future only….”
There’s a deep irony here because one of the issues into which the current administration has waded, involves the architecture of public buildings. It is convinced, evidently, that American architecture for its public buildings should look backward for its inspiration. Not to the contemporary world and not to the future.
By contrast, a group today called “The National Civic Art Society,” makes no secret that it wants to look backward for cues to the country’s identity and believes such an identity can be shaped and reinforced by architecture. The group believes that “the Founders understood that the classical tradition, harkening back to democratic Athens and republican Rome, is time-honored and timeless. It is unparalleled in its dignity, beauty, and harmony, not to mention its legibility to the common person.”
Well, perhaps. But more certain is that anyone who considered the country to be “the great nation of futurity” would be surprised that it was taking its public cultural styles from 2000 years ago.