NEWS

'Young America' at UNC's Ackland to trace colonies' march to nationhood

By ANDY BERNER
Ackland Art Museum

CHAPEL HILL -- "Young America: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum," opening Dec. 20 at the Ackland Art Museum, will present 54 major paintings and sculptures that trace the transformation of the colonies into a nation.

On view at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill museum through Feb. 17, the rare artworks from the 1760s through the 1870s portray the growing self-awareness and optimism of a new nation. The works reflect life in New England and the mid-Atlantic regions, where British influence was strong in early decades, then rivaled by Italian neoclassic styles.

"Through the hands of masters including Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Cole and John Singleton Copley, we can experience the formation of an American sensibility expressed through paintings and sculpture of the 18th and 19th centuries," said Ackland Director Dr. Gerald Bolas. "These works present the story of America from its revolutionary inception through the nation’s centennial in 1876, which celebrated a century of freedom."

The Ackland will host a free public opening reception for the exhibit from 6-8 p.m. Dec. 20. Other related activities will include:

• Two gallery talks, on Jan. 16 by Bolas, museum director, and Feb. 13 by Leslie Balkany, a museum educator, both at 12:15 p.m.;
• A concert of early American music by Dave DiGuiseppe, on instruments including the banjo, accordion and Appalachian dulcimer, at 2 p.m. Feb. 3;
• A lecture by Smithsonian American Art Museum Curator George Gurney at 2 p.m. Feb. 10;
• A symposium, "American Art and American Life," on Feb. 1-2, hosted by the Ackland with UNC's American studies currculum, art department and Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence. The seminar will be funded from UNC's David G. Frey Extendible American Art Fund, created in 1999 by alumnus Frey of Grand Rapids, Mich., for course development, seminars, visiting scholars, faculty support and student field studies that promote understanding, presentation and appreciation of American art.

"Young America" is one of eight exhibitions in "Treasures to Go" from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, touring the nation through 2002. The Smithsonian cites the Principal Financial Group, a nationwide firm based in Des Moines, Iowa, as a proud partner in bringing these treasures to the American people.

"These portraits, still-lifes, landscapes and scenes of daily life show the artists’ ambition to equal the best European art, but they also reveal developments within this country," said Elizabeth Broun, director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. "They help us understand how a British colony became an independent nation, how wilderness lands were both cherished and developed and how a rural democracy responded to the industrial revolution."

Several portraits are included in the exhibit, as portraiture was the surest path to success for early artists. Copley's "Mrs. George Watson" (1765) shows a merchant’s wife in colonial Boston, with a lavish lace-trimmed dress, imported vase and exotic parrot tulip. Copley portrays Mrs. Watson as a fine British gentlewoman living in a colonial outpost.

Charles Willson Peale painted the tender double portrait "Mrs. James Smith and Grandson" in 1776, soon after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The boy holds a manual of rhetoric open to Hamlet’s soliloquy, his finger resting on the line "To be or not to be," implying an invitation to both personal and national self-definition.

Although mostly self-taught, Lilly Martin Spencer of Cincinnati supported a large family through her painting and was one of the first American women to achieve success in the arts. Her full-length picture of Mrs. Fithian in a brand-new satin dress and holding a drooping rose, "We Both Must Fade" (1869), reflects a Victorian sentiment about the inevitable waning of beauty.

Still-life paintings show a similar variety of means and intentions. Raphaelle Peale’s "Melons and Morning Glories" (1813), of a luscious ripe fruit dripping juices and seeds on a tabletop, fits the neoclassic taste of its period. By contrast, the exuberance of Severin Roesen’s "Still Life with Fruit," painted almost 40 years later in 1852, appealed to a rising middle class eager for decorative display.

Landscape emerged early in the 19th century as a favorite subject, and 20 landscapes appear in the exhibit. Two views of Niagara Falls by Alvan Fisher (1820) include tiny figures holding their ears against the roar of the water, thought to suggest awe at the spectacle before them and the pride Americans felt in the breathtaking natural wonders of the continent.

Cole, founder of the Hudson River school of painting, chose the biblical story of the great flood for his "The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge" (1829). He depicts a rocky wilderness with the ruins of earlier civilizations destroyed by floodwaters, evoking corrupt old European monarchies. Bathed in light in the distance, the ark rests in serene waters, heralding the birth of America’s new democracy.

Andrew W. Warren’s "Long Island Homestead" (1859) presents a family home, flower gardens, grazing sheep, cultivated fields and a hillside graveyard as a rural paradise. Robert Scott Duncanson, of African-American and Scottish-American parentage, similarly conveyed the peaceful pre-Civil War period in "Landscape with Rainbow" (1859). In Samuel Colman’s "Storm King on the Hudson" (1866), large steam-powered barges bear down on small sailboats and fishing craft, as if to portray an industrialized future overtaking a simpler past.

Of two Church landscapes in the exhibit, "Aurora Borealis" (1865) presents an arctic view of a small ship locked in ice as a metaphor for the country engaged in a catastrophic civil war. The dramatic northern lights illuminating the scene refer to an actual rare display that was visible across the northern United States in 1864, believed then to be a divine signal that the Union would prevail and the nation would survive.

The exhibition also features one bronze and seven marble sculptures, including Hiram Powers’s famous "Greek Slave" (modeled 1841-43, carved ca. 1873), a work that summarizes the complicated situation of America’s aspiring artists.

Powers was eager to demonstrate his command of the nude figure, which European academies taught as the highest expression of art, but America’s Puritan and Calvinist background made nudity controversial. By showing an idealized figure of a woman enslaved and disrobed by barbarians against her will, Powers avoided hinting at wanton sensuality. And by invoking the subject of slavery, he alluded to Americans’ mounting concerns about an issue that threatened their government's stability.

Many artworks in the exhibition are similarly enduring treasures of great artistic accomplishment and complex explorations of the deepest concerns of their age, Bolas said. With the exhibit, the Smithsonian American Art Museum published a gift book by the same title with more than 60 color illustrations and brief discussions of the art treasures in the exhibition. Retailing for $19.95, the book will be available for sale at the Ackland during the exhibit.

With the Frey fund, "Young America" at the Ackland is supported by the Ackland Art Museum Guild and the William Hayes Ackland Trust. The Ackland is on South Columbia Street near Franklin Street. Hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and 1-5 p.m. Sundays. Admission is free. For more information, call 919-406-9837 (recorded information), 919-966-5736 (museum office) or 919-962-0837 (TTY), or visit the Web site www.ackland.org.

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