Local Heroes, Far From Home By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

April 27, 2010
Local Heroes, Far From Home By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Rome

I JOINED the crowds heading into an Edward Hopper show at the Fondazione Roma the other morning. Organized in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (most of the works come from there), the exhibition has been a hit here. In a country with what often seems like the most refined taste in the world and no taste at all, it owes something to a cheesy full-scale reconstruction of the “Nighthawks” diner in the first gallery. Visitors snap pictures of themselves posing beside fedora-clad mannequins slumped stiffly over the counter. There’s another, better gimmick too, a room with pencils and stacks of white paper, where doodlers copy Hopper’s drawings. Reproductions are projected onto the stacks, so lines can be easily traced, and people labor over their tracings, then tote them around the show like diplomas. (By people, of course, I mean me.)

Which got me thinking: Just how global is art? I quizzed some Italians and also a few New Yorkers at the exhibition, and it wasn’t that the Italians didn’t “get” Hopper, or didn’t like him. He’s world famous by now, beloved, and the Italians easily brought up the links to film noir and Antonioni. But New Yorkers, naturally, spoke quite differently about him.

Hopper’s work, like all good art, remains local on some crucial level, and that’s no doubt just as true for those Italian, French and German old master paintings that fill museums from Tokyo to Tulsa and epitomize what we have come to think of as universal Western art. Italians from the small Umbrian village of Montefalco will tell you that they see in the Renaissance works of Benozzo Gozzoli, their hometown hero, a landscape and light that doesn’t make the same impact on people who didn’t grow up there. These visceral reactions are acquired through firsthand experience.

No matter how much culture has become globalized, art retains meanings specific to a certain time and place. Good art does, anyway (which accounts for why too much not-so-good contemporary art, aimed at the global marketplace, looks generic and everywhere alike). Those meanings come, as it were, bred in the bone. Hopper is an American exemplar.

Although he visited Paris early on, he always denied any lasting French influence. But clearly he picked up plenty of ideas from Manet, Degas and Daumier, European masters of modern alienation, then did far more than merely substitute the Williamsburg Bridge and the Sheridan Theater for the Pont Neuf and Longchamp. He recognized how all those bridges and high-rises reaching for heaven and all those wide-open spaces and country barns in spring-green fields were clichés of an America whose population numbered countless people leading interior, often profoundly solitary lives.

Hopper conveyed the psychological angle in silent places that he cast in a hard, melancholy light. But that light could also conjure up memories: the elevated tracks and anonymous apartment blocks, to New Yorkers who know them intimately, can invoke not just industrial sprawl or glum urbanism but also a singular beauty and dignity amplified by, and grounded in real, lived experience.

We talk about the art world these days as if everyone everywhere who appreciates art belongs to the same global tribe, united by jet travel, integrated markets and the Web. But there are many art worlds, countless ones, which often don’t talk to one another, don’t know or care about one another, and that are no less potent because they’re not, strictly speaking, universal. In Berlin, Heinrich Zille is a beloved artist, and streets, bars and restaurants are named after him. There’s a Zille museum. Books, plays and movies have been written about him. Another play just opened this spring around the corner from my home in Berlin.

But outside Berlin, even in the rest of Germany, he’s little known. He’s Berlin’s Hopper in that he grasped, in a similarly granular way, the city’s inner life a century ago. Rough and affectionate, never sentimental, typically Berlin-like, his work still tends to speak more directly to old-time natives than the works of many better-known global stars like Grosz or Kirchner. He invented nothing, unlike them. He wasn’t a modernist or even a great stylist. He trafficked in the same lower-class scenes of everyday life that contemporaneous artists in America like George Bellows and John Sloan painted. But he focused on places and qualities rooted in Berliners’ particular self-image: on life inside the city’s communal courtyards and in the rental barracks and the sweaty, smoky, beer-stained corner bars.

He called this, in his Berlin slang, his “miljöh,” his milieu. And it included the alleys and tent villages on empty lots and along windswept avenues that peter out, as does so much of the city even now, into nowhere.

Zille was a minor painter and illustrator, from a ruthless global perspective, but to dismiss him, or lump him along with Sloan or Bellows as just another urban scene painter from the turn of the last century, is to miss the soul of his art and also the way much culture, globalism notwithstanding, works today.

It happens that a Henry Moore retrospective has lately opened at Tate Britain in London, the first major Moore show in decades. After the war Moore was the ultimate global sculptor, his studio churning out one after another smooth, lumpy monument to fill government buildings, housing projects and office parks around the world. He was Britain’s de facto ambassador of art, its Picasso and Miró rolled into one, and his late works, anodyne abstractions, typify postwar faith in universal art representing universal values.

But after he died in 1986, it was as if everybody had had enough of him and what had become a factory line of production. His works were everywhere, but he dropped mostly off the radar of contemporary artists. The show rescues him from near-forgottenness by locating his true contribution in his British roots, as an artist who early on absorbed important lessons from Giacometti and the French Surrealists, then added a very British mix of elegance, sexual confusion and shambling abjectness to produce, before the war, objects in stone and wood that look far more memorable and unsettling than the soft-edged ones he produced afterward.

The show reminds us that his breakthrough to stardom, not incidentally, came during the Blitz, with the circulation of drawings of Londoners huddling in the Underground to escape the bombs. Masses of faceless people look like cocoons or mummies, glumly suffering, except that these drawings were promoted at the time as emblems of British fortitude. Beleaguered Britons, via Moore, became quiet heroes, modest martyrs, local versions of universal men.

We like the idea of universal art because most artists make work that they hope gains universal appeal and can speak to anybody who’s interested; because art’s formal values are supposed to transcend borders and ages; and because we can’t help fantasizing about the virtues of a global society. We imagine walking into any art museum, whether in Toronto or Timbuktu, and, up to a point at least, understanding the pictures and sculptures. But it’s often what we can’t understand that is most distinctive and enduring about the work.

Tourists make a beeline in foreign countries to art museums to say they’ve done the “Mona Lisa” and Botticelli’s lady on a half shell, but also because museums promise familiarity, or a simulacrum of it. They’re our 21st-century town squares and safe havens where strangers, who don’t necessarily speak the language or know the city or country they’re in, think that they occupy common ground with both locals and everyone else, because everybody supposedly speaks the universal language of art.

But culture’s ultimate value is in difference. Art is supposed to provide us with one-of-a-kind experiences. We make and consume it to share with others, the more people the better, but also to affirm our individuality, our links to specific things, places, values and people. Universality is useful to the art market but a concept still underexamined and overrated.

There’s another American art show now, at the Prado Museum in Madrid, a two-picture stellar one, juxtaposing Velázquez’s “Meninas” with John Singer Sargent’s portrait of the American Edward Darley Boit’s daughters, from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. I spent a couple of hours watching tourists and schoolchildren check out the pair of paintings, which looked related (the Sargent is an explicit homage) but nonetheless like distant cousins. The comparison pointed up a trans-Atlantic gap in character and ambition beyond the obvious qualitative divide between the work of an elegant, first-rate painter of Edwardian silk and sash, and, hands down, the greatest painter of all time.

What accounted for this gap? I don’t believe it was just an inferiority complex among Americans about their own (prewar) art. I think it had to do with Sargent’s essential Americanness. True, he spent almost his entire life in Europe, was in some respects more British than anything else, and leaned heavily in his work on not just Velázquez but other European greats like Van Dyck, Gainsborough and Degas. In fact, you can see Degas’s influence in the Boit portrait, whose figures look, as Degas’s often do, psychologically disconnected, occupying a space that is ambiguous.

Like Degas, Sargent was a heartless but dazzling virtuoso. But this is also a picture about new money and social ambition, an American combination. It allows a shadowy view inside one of those big new Paris apartments that rich Americans tended to occupy. To the French, who received it coolly at first, it conveyed foreignness, with its pretty, pink-cheeked, distant girls vaguely, almost offhandedly, portrayed in everyday dress, an American informality. Modern outsiders, they seem a world away from Velázquez’s infanta and her court, a bunch of ultimate insiders.

Or is all this reading too much into the comparison? An American who happened by suggested that the issue was simply Sargent’s “republicanism”: the picture projects 19th-century capitalist affluence in the midst of Old World royalty. That’s right, but I’d add that the perceptual divide for an American between the paintings also depends on the American’s sympathy and identification with an outsider’s striving.

It’s about projection, in other words, which all good art provokes, whether by Sargent, Zille, Moore or Hopper, whose laconic and merciless drawings can, seen by a New Yorker passing through Rome, have a kind of Proustian eloquence. I stared at the ones he did of summer in the city and the sun splashing across Lower Manhattan before carrying my tracings of two of them to a favorite Sicilian bakery a few blocks away from the Piazza Colonna. It was unconscious, deciding to go there, but I realized it was because the cannoli reminded me of ones I fetched as a boy from a cafe on MacDougal Street, where the owner used to pack them in little white cardboard boxes tied with striped red string. I carried the pastries home to my family, past the Hopper-like brownstones, through the concrete park that faced our house, and across Sixth Avenue to our apartment, under what in my memory was forever a dusky Hopper sky.