05 Ancestral Section Panels

I don’t like [American antiques] because they are old, but in spite of it. I’d like them still better if they were made yesterday because then they would afford proof that the same kind of creative power is still continuing. —Charles Sheeler, artist, (1883–1965) Artists seeking a new national identity generally focused on the present and the modern. But a few artists looked to the past and found characteristics of the modern in earlier American artifacts. They were among the first wave to develop a taste for “Americana”—a word coined during the period. Given their desire to invent a new national aesthetic, artists sought out and, then, celebrated the humble spirit and spare designs found in Shaker furniture and the unschooled paintings by itinerant and outsider artists. They delighted in the abstract patterning found in rag rugs, quilts, and stencil paintings. Artist Charles Sheeler explained that he did not like these things because they were old but rather because, to him, they looked so modern. He felt that he had located authentic American qualities in earlier folk art and crafts of all varieties. From these things, artists borrowed and newly interpreted skewed perspectives, strong colors, bold designs, and streamlined forms, making the old appear modern.

A national consciousness is a sadly needed element in American life. . . . It is the redman that offers us the way to go. Marsden Hartley, artist, (1877–1943) Some artists found that Native American arts and rituals offered them something profound, religious, ancient, and national. Drawn to Santa Fe and Taos, with its unique mix of Native American and Hispanic cultures, Anglo artists and writers declared the Southwest to be America’s Greece and Rome. In Taos, artists such as Marsden Hartley and Georgia O’Keeffe deeply admired the handmade crafts, Indian dances, and adobe architecture of the Pueblo peoples. They found evocations of an earlier, unspoiled America in the desert terrain and dry, clean climate. In touch with nature, and away from the crush of the metropolis, they felt spiritually renewed and a kinship with the country’s first artists.