American Art

American Folk Art

Introduction

Many try to define American Folk Art, an art form that comes in a variety of mediums with a simple and natural expression appearing in a variety of shapes and forms. Visionaries that transcend the rules and boundaries set up by other art forms, where they are free to show experiences, the past, events that happened prior to the present upon a surface with no regard to the general criteria found in art that has to do with anatomy, proportions, or symmetry.

What defines American Art ?

In the 1920s, American Folk Art made a true rise after World War I when returning artists came back from the war with a mission to discover what makes an American Art, distinctly American. The age where scholars, collectors, and art enthusiasts, attempted to define and confine the definition of what this native art form was considered with little to no success. Artists unbound by the criteria of proper proportions and symmetry, those that lack technical training in the art field using a variety of mediums to express the native style, started to explore that style into the late 1920s to the early 1930s where prominent figures would appear bearing the names Grandma Moses, John Kane, Patsy Santo, Morris Hirshfield, and Horace Pippin. The first self-taught pioneers of this art form gave rise to a style that would recede in the 1940s to the early 1970s.

American Folk Art was rediscovered in the 1970s by the few collectors and artists who communicated by word-of-mouth this tangible possibility that a small group of individuals worked with an art form that could be defined as Folk Art. The rediscovery was in the midst of a time of civil unrest within the United States. This was the time where both the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War occurred and the accompaniment of the age of Pop Artists that lit up an interest in the expressions of the common people.

In the 1980s, there was an explosion of interest in American Folk Art, prominent and well known museums started exhibiting and showcasing the style of art, new artists started appearing. Where initially the style had been started by small town, technically untrained individuals of all ethnicities in a smooth traditional, yet natural format was starting to transform into a more edgy, modern style, keeping that same native feeling up till the 90s.

It was evident that not everyone amongst the art critics and collectors would appreciate the sudden exposure of such a questionable style. At the same time new mediums were introduced into the style, mediums such as quilts, cardboard, metal, gravestones, whirligigs as surfaces to be drawn or shaped using tempura, oil, graphite, mud, knives, anything was game. The best folk art, in rough terms, was described as simplistic, direct, to the point, natural, and inventively imaginative.

Prominent Figures

Many describe folk artists as unknown, itinerant, and completely untrained, which is not true. Folk artists are self-taught well known individuals, Grandma Moses, also known as Anna Mary Robertson Moses, started painting at age 70 made The Old Checkered House(1950) and Sugaring Off (1943). John Kane, the first self-taught American painter of the 20th century to receive museum recognition, he was remembered for his landscape paintings of industrial Pittsburgh as well as his painting Self Portrait (1929). Patsy Santo, originally an Italian who immigrated to the United States was well known for his snow-scape painting Church in the Valley, which won first place in the 1937 State Fair in Rutland, Vermont. Beach Girl (1937), Angora Cat (1937) and Girl in the Mirror (1940) works painted by Morris Hirschfield who was known for two categories with regards to his work, animals and childrenís book Story telling who was discovered by Sidney Janis, an art dealer who had given him a one man show within an art gallery.

Finally, Horace Pippin, an African American painter who displayed the injustice of slavery and segregation within his works such as The Trial of John Brown (1942), Interior (1944) and Zachariah (1943) made his national debut in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the of year 1942. These artists were the first prominent pioneers of American Folk Art which would define and form a path for other American Folk Artists to follow and modify.

Organizations and Museums

It did not suddenly become famous; the artists did not suddenly become appreciated without the help of many art collectors and museums. Within the 1980s boom, the museum collector, Herbert Wade Hemphill Jr. provided the paintings he had collected since the 1950s to the museums in order to showcase the works of the American Folk Artists, a massive array of work that would later be purchased by the Smithsonianís National Museum of American Art in 1986.

In 1961 with the help of the Smithsonianís National Museum of American Art, the American Folk Art Museum would be founded in New York and later gain popularity in the 1980s featuring one of its early exhibitions of Early American Folk Art. Its director Robert and two of its main collectors Chuck and Jan Rosenak would help make this particular museum a rather large success in the future.

Many other collectors would travel from place to place, spreading the word about American Folk artists and art, trying to interpret what it exactly means for an American to discover what American Folk Art actually means and what kind of style is actually is. It was the national curiosity, most of all that made American Folk Art Famous and well known.

Summary

So what exactly is American Folk Art? It is an art form that captures the raw, untamed, uncontrollable spirit that is America. It is a familiarity within itself regardless of media, regardless of surface and regardless of style format, a mixing pot just like our countryís people. An art form that no other art form can mimic, that can only add to it and expand the already broad art form.  Where people of every ethnicity, can contribute to it, where the common folk call out with their voices through an unrestricted form of expression with no regard to the general criteria found in many art forms. American Folk Art is what defines America.

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Categorised as: American Folk Art