III.3.1 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 839794
In this letter to the editor of the Buenos Aires daily La Nación, Cuban writer and critic José Martí uses a recent exhibition of watercolors that he saw in New York as a departure point from which to examine the state of art in the United States. Like many of his Latin American peers during this period, Martí was interested in the social and cultural differences between Latin America and North America. Nevertheless, he was more interested ultimately in noting the commonalities between North American and Latin American art, particularly at a moment when the United States had finally gained its cultural and artistic independence from England. According to Martí, North American artists achieved this autonomy by shifting their attention to the landscape. In the process, their work began to display the luminosity and color of Italian and Spanish painting, which, he emphasizes, has always been the basis of Latin American painting. His letter, “El arte en los Estados Unidos—¿Hay un arte propio?—¿Puede haber un arte vigoroso en un país industrial?—Los acuarelistas americanos—Un arte pasmoso—Su entrada franca en la escuela de la luz—España, Italia y México en el arte yanqui,” first appeared in La Nación (March 13, 1880); Martí also published it in Mexico City’s El Partido Liberal (February 18, 1888). The present translation is from the reprint of the letter in the author’s complete works [José Martí, Obras completas, vol. XIII: En los Estados Unidos (Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, 1963–66), 479–84].
NOT MANY YEARS HAVE PASSED since the days when a New York exhibition of works by American painters was a sad affair. They kept producing landscapes over and over again—the only kind of art that they could learn from the English, because it is the only kind that the English know how to paint. Their dark, brutal seascapes lacked the fluid, translucent quality of water and were stiff, hazy, and purplish, like meat on the verge of rotting. Their figures were lifeless and artless; they looked like wooden cutouts, thrown up against a rectilinear background that was always gray, or emerging from what looked like a haze of smoke or ash. Who would have thought that, a mere eight years later, “Yankee” painting would have absorbed all the energy and light of America and begun to enliven the gloomy English art from which, until just yesterday, it was receiving such misguided, timid lessons!
“Yankee” painters lack the luminous palette that our artists—like the Spaniards and the Italians—inherit from their land and their sunshine rather than finding it within themselves. They also lack the gift bequeathed by sundrenched countries where the beauty and harmony of nature find their highest expression: that serene, sensible art, devoid of extravagance and excess, which is denied to those whose imagination must compensate for an absence of natural beauty. There is such depth and so much that has yet to be taught in the canon of art which is known in Latin America that neither [Eugène] Fromentin, nor [Louis] Blanc, nor [John] Ruskin could have known…!
North American painters—like their French and especially their English counterparts—lack that calm artistic temperament, but not the will to learn, nor the desire to see what is new, nor an instinct for color, nor the need for intense feelings, which are indispensable for achieving balance and peace of mind in countries where life is difficult and hectic. “Does painting produce…?” the North American artist wonders. Then, let us paint! Is painting a delightful expression of the imagination, a noble occupation, an oath sworn by the light, a refined soul’s act of rebellion against the grotesque, bestial, insipid, and degrading existence of a nation that hastens its own decline, as it gorges and dazzles in equal measure, because it loves only what is of an animal and perishable nature? Then those with refined souls should paint, so that a country’s art can become proportionately higher as its coarseness intensifies.
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That is why, even when they paint scenes from nature, English painters and aestheticians drench their work in shades of ethereal, rose-colored ideas. That is why artists in the United States—who are exiles from light—seek out places where they can flood their art with it. These days they do not imitate as much as they used to: they are less prone to copy [François] Millet’s mist, burdened with a sorrowful soul; or the lilac crests and epic waves of the English painter [J.M.W.] Turner; or the fashionable creation of some maestro blessed with fleeting fame who goes beyond blues and reds pursuing the fleeing sun or the fame that eludes him. They are no longer seduced, as they once were, by virile innovators or famous proponents of Japanism. They say that snow is a good subject for chromes! Too much color is bad, but we can’t live without color! And so, moved by a love of nature that expresses the rhythm of the republic, whose truth enhances and strengthens the truth of the spirit, they seek the light they crave where it exists as a normal part of nature or retains memories of centuries of art. In Granada, in Madrid, in Venice, in Florence, in California, in Florida, in Mexico…!
Among North American artists, who are only just beginning to trust themselves, one still finds that passion for extravagance whose only justification is as an expression of desperate ambition in countries where art merchants offer amazingly bold works to sated buyers. Or where, amidst a paucity of paintings of natural subjects, they demand—from their imagination or their dreams—the splendor heralded by the soul.
But, from this exhibition of watercolors that we have just visited; from these charming, honest, and talented works that would have seemed impossible eight years ago; from this exhibition that showcases the warm, improvisational genius of America, it is clear that once they found the source of art—which is the beauty of nature—they abandoned the schools and the false ways of literary painters who prosper in damp, dark countries. Those were the earliest forms that were inevitably used in North American painting, in this province that is increasingly pulling away from England and going its own way in the field of arts and letters.
There are still some, like [Frederic Edwin] Church on occasion, or like [William Henry] Lippincott, who envelope their rosy creations in a pale, milky veil; or like [Theodore] Robinson who, like the poet Charles Baudelaire, finds springtime in a sensuous African woman’s welcoming lips. One artist copies [James Abbott McNeill] Whistler by placing a bony bust against a yellow background. Another, displaying extraordinary temerity, clothes his Coquette in a green tunic and hides her chin behind a black fan. But what stands out here is not, as was once the case, a futile attempt to imitate those who have lost their way or seek to shock the viewer, but rather the colorful landscapes, the exploration of natural beauty, the undisguised immersion in the school of light, and the alacrity with which these young artists (in this coarse milieu) have acquired the delicate, restrained touch required to paint watercolors. So much so that [Mariano] Fortuny could well have signed Winslow Homer’s A Country Lad and [Alexandre Louis] Leloir could have claimed authorship of León Morau’s The Marquise. Those who set out to be realists now take the correct approach, scouring what is constant and beautiful for artistic reality, which is not the same as the ordinary variety. Those who considered themselves idealists no longer confuse thought with expression, and instead express ambition, dogma, or symbols in solid, well-proportioned works that please the eye, unlike those that, looking like depictions of steam, were but feasts of milk, storms of rainbows, and pools of blood.
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But the artists’ swift victory over the spirit of their native environment and the smoothness and charm of the works that emphasize their picturesque quality and serene composition are not the only breakthroughs with which this exhibition reveals the essential qualities of North American genius. Totally honest in terms of its portrayal of the country’s current reality and the frankness with which it tests universal ideas at the local level, this art scorns the falseness of whimsical schools and searches for truth naturally. . . . And the truth is that—while we cannot see where one color ends and another begins, and the works lose none of their look or faint delicacy—in terms of energy and effect, neither Catherine Greatorex’s superb Dahlias, nor Louis Tiffany’s solemn Sycamore Canyon, nor Hamilton’s colossal Landscape have any reason to be envious of the most robust oil painting, and in fact are undoubtedly superior—why not admit it?—in terms of vagueness and charm. On the other hand, the large watercolors of pale, coarse figures attempt in vain to compare with paintings; these attempts to produce larger watercolors are far less successful than the adorable, perfect Salome by [John] La Farge and Miss Dorothy by [Thomas] Moran, which are painted in an appropriate size. . . .
Among those who observe how North Americans are expressing themselves in their painting, who would brand this superficial study of the current condition, genuineness, and remarkable advances in their art as trivial? They do not yet grasp the epic issues, which not even their formidable war can teach them. But, in their canvases, as in their buildings, their businesses, their communication networks, and their public holidays they tend, in their own particular way, toward grandeur. Like all working people, they love animals, which painters depict in a thousand portraits that are snapped up by buyers in no time at all. But if they paint seascapes, they paint rolling, roaring waves that consume the beach, as in [Thomas Alexander] Harrison’s work; if they paint trees they ignore the leafy canopy and paint the trunk. Their enthusiasm is such that, in just a few years, they have acquired a level of artistic sensitivity that more educated nations might struggle for centuries to attain. Their ability to learn from others enables them—as children of storm and snow—to express themselves with Italian colors and attention to detail when they paint the minutest, liveliest facets of cities where life sparkles with restless nuances among the diversity of its residents. Their familiarity with colossal themes encourages them to use the resources of the art of grace to attempt gigantic works of the art of strength. Since the imagination guards against the corruption of nations and artists are the holy men of their people in terms of their language or their paint brush, we can see how, as the republic’s vices and mistaken concept of life temper the North American’s love of country, art returns to claim him and allows him to express his deeds and his memories as fast as maggots can lay siege to the body and as quickly as his soul can manage.
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But what pleased us most was the considerable number of canvases painted in our countries, or in places that, like [Upper] California, will always be ours by nature if not by history! These painters come to us in search of light: to the missions of Santa Barbara, Santa Ines, and San Diego, scenes of yesterday’s stoic Franciscan’s sterile virtue and today’s bare gardens, with trellises but no vines, fountains with no water, bell towers with no bells, roofs with no tiles. One day in Santa Barbara, visitors like Louis Tiffany—who paints the patio looking melancholy and the cloister deserted—witnessed Brother Junípero Serra’s works of love. They came to Sycamore Canyon where serpentine trunks sprouted from ashen rocks under clear, pure water, devoid of grass or flowers, flowing peacefully over stones. Like Hopkinson Smith, who uses the same earthy yellow used by [Ferdinand] Heilbuth, they came to the Tierra Caliente [Hot Land] where the short trees cast their shadow across the gaunt earth, whose only touch of green was a thirsty maguey cactus. Smith also came to Mexico City, and with faint brush strokes attempted to capture the beauty and shades of light in a scene of canoes bearing fruit and flowers up the waterways to market. His later colors seemed more real, though they lacked the vitality and splendor of the land, when—peering through misty eyes—he copied the cloister at Santo Domingo in a scene that included some Indians who look like Arabs. There is also the entrance to San Hipólito [church], which appears to have been composed, though not colored, by an excellent artist, with the exception of a sunshade that, in order to enliven the surrounding earth tones, is [painted the color of] red cotton. Not everyone can seize the light of Latin America…!