American Vernacular Art in 1938 Paris: Its Categorization and Reception at MoMA’s Three 99 Centuries of American Art Exhibition (original) (raw)

Given the complexity embedded in the process of categorizing artworks, the period terms of "folk" and "popular" as well as the current use of "vernacular" must be defined before inserting the artworks into these categories with the artistic and political motivations of the American and French curators, critics, and diplomats. To differentiate period references from current discussion the all-encompassing "ver-nacular" applies to all forty-three works of art and incorporates both period categories. To Barr, American vernacular art could represent the cultural values of small communities or constitute a national ethos. Fundamentally, vernacular art, as an aesthetic style, did not align with a specific period; rather, it extended throughout the history of the United States. Despite the slippage of these terms, Barr's "popular" underscored the object's perceived ubiquitous quality and suffused it with rhetoric that promoted the emerging middle class art market as worthy of study. For instance, the widely distributed Currier & Ives prints, including American Forest Scene, Maple Sugaring (Figure 2), functioned as examples of this category. In contrast, Barr aligned "folk" with assumed idiosyncratic, isolated artists whose names had often been lost to the art historical record thus permitting a type of cultural recovery as evidenced by Barr's choice of Portrait of Henry Ward Beecher (Figure 3) for the show. Even within his own designations, Barr demonstrated the flexibility of his categories, for example, choosing to capstone the entrance to the vernacular art section with the label "Art Populaire" at the Musée du Jeu de Paume (Figure 1) thereby sublimating the folk category and connoting a decidedly political subtext to the French given the widespread circulation of the weekly politically left-leaning publication, Populaire. Alfred Barr, Jr., "Painting and Sculpture in the United States," in Trois Siecles d'Art