ART : Hassam’s ‘Flag Paintings’: A Banner Exhibition

The comforting thing about the sight of most art is that it plants us firmly in a time and place. A headless, reclining female figure clad in marble drapery wafts us to a soft landing in classical Greece and no mistake about it. Tangled skeins of paint on a huge canvas plop us down uneasily in New York circa 1940.

Given some years of practice, even the most casual museum visitor develops a sense that style forms a kind of relief map of the islands fashioned by civilizations in time’s shoreless sea. It is pretty hard to confuse a room of ancient Egyptian sarcophaguses with galleries full of 17th-Century Dutch landscape.

People who say they don’t know anything about art just aren’t paying attention. They know a lot and are just not surfacing it. Art historians, aestheticians and poets understand cradle cultures by looking at their art and translating formal vibrations into words that invariably crystallize into precise metaphors of the spirit of their epoch. The stained glass at Chartres accurately speaks of a medieval faith as disembodied as dye in water but contained by leaded borders of dogma. An earthy Dutch interior is domesticated by those walls, doors and vanishing oblique floorlines that tell us the human tragicomedy is now acted out on a hidden chessboard of rationality.

Most of the rest of understanding and pleasure is just a question of making distinctions in art’s altering surface features. It begins simply and slowly grows slicker, bigger and more complicated until it finally mutates into a new appearance for a new era. It is nearly impossible to confuse a Van Gogh sunflower painting with a Cubist composition by Picasso even though only a tiny quarter-century separates them. They are so inescapably different we suspect the world altered drastically in that short time--and we are right.

Just now there is a charmingly modest exhibition visiting the County Museum of Art through Oct. 30. Called “The Flag Paintings of Childe Hassam,” it comes with a neat catalogue by LACMA associate curator Ilene Susan Fort and consists of only 21 pictures by the undisputed master of a hybrid style known as American Impressionism, a movement that tried with varying success to graft the beloved airiness of the French style to a Yankee passion for realism. The paintings depict the buildings and sidewalks of New York circa 1917 festooned with American flags--sometimes by themselves, sometimes mixed with the banners of other nations.

It is both easy and forgivable to take these paintings at face value for the exceedingly pretty and effective pictures they are. Flags waving in the breeze of a pluperfect spring day in Manhattan are as cheerfully bracing a sight as can be found a stroll through the town. Translated into paint by Hassam, they become something of an artistic coup. What better way to dramatize Monet’s sense of weightless moving air than with wafting lengths of colored cloth? At that level Hassam beat the Impressionists at their own game.

But there is something else going on. We’ve all looked at pictures of pure pleasure from the rococo to Bonnard without getting the funny internal sense of imbalance lurking somewhere in Hassam’s flag paintings. He surely did not put it there on purpose. He was one of those righteous Eastern seaboard artists who painted without subtext. Well, maybe there is an occasional twinkle in his eye as he paints the stuffy stones of the Union Club bedecked with banners or a slight smirk at the cheerful excess of Yankee patriotism in a painting with the long-winded title, “The Greatest Display of the American Flag Ever Seen in New York. Climax of the Preparedness Parade in May 1916.” On the whole, the paintings seem very straightforward.

Their vague oddity comes from our sense that they have their feet in two different worlds. One is in the bucolic charm of the French countryside, cultivated for centuries like the Gallic mind which had finally analyzed the landscape down to a proto-scientific ordering of tiny bright strokes. The paintings seem so light and true because their colors are partly mixed by the perceiving eye. There is a mixed metaphor in Impressionism that is partly about mechanical optics and partly about the subjective individualism of the coming century, our century.

Hassam didn’t have a foot in each century even if the paintings did. By the time he painted these pictures Cubism was already a fact. In that way the American was already behind the times. He represented a normal American view of things, so what the paintings reveal is twice as accurate for being unintended.

Surely Hassam exercised no guile in painting sapling skyscrapers or emphasizing flags as a symbol that takes the mind back to the heraldic banners of the Middle Ages with its feudal wars and an ersatz sense of valor. We are free to see their standards as symbolizing the enthusiasm of bands of armored gangsters plundering in the guise of honor.

Hassam’s flags are inescapably symbols of the modern world, but their associations define that world as a revival of the Middle Ages on a larger scale.

What is the first flag any artnik thinks of after the bellicose, status-defining banners of king and baron? Surely it is the French tricolor in Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People.” That tattered rag is as eloquent a cultural symbol as any in art, layered with enough meanings for a lifetime of debate. Does it stand for Romantic Individualism leading the common man out of oppression? Does it stand for Religious Nationalism insisting that our flag (whichever one it is) represents the only true faith and must be defended to the death because God is on our side (whichever one it is)?

However that shakes down, every adult now living has seen enough evil perpetuated in the name of swastikas, hammers and sickles, rising suns and crescent moons to be sure that flags are not altogether the cheery hip-hip-hooray handkerchiefs they seem to be in Hassam’s vision.

The wonder of these paintings is that they offer not the slightest clue of the dark side of flag symbolism. It must really be true that the United States went into World War I with a sense of righteous purpose. We believed unblinkingly that we would save the world for democracy and end all war forever.

We can only envy them their innocence.

The artistic mind knows that every revolution, every war, kills something of value even on the bad guys’ side because the artistic mind values style. In the film “La Nuit de Varennes” the Casanova character actually makes us feel sorry for the aristocratic civility lost in the French Revolution. In “Grand Illusion” Jean Renoir makes us empathize with Erich Von Stroheim’s Junker aristocrat.

Hassam celebrates the purity of American intentions in The Great War with the lovely symbol of Old Glory fluttering on the breeze.

Actually it doesn’t flutter that much.

Flags in these paintings are often curiously inert and squared off. Their bright colors and absolute patterns force them forward visually as if they are trying to become abstract art. Flags are a kind of abstract art.

We just can’t see those paintings as they were originally meant. Modern art has viewed flags--especially ours--with every attitude from Jasper Johns’ jaundiced irony to Ed Kienholz’s satirical indignation.

In one of Hassam’s paintings a Red Cross flag begins to look like a painting by the Russian pioneer Kasimir Malevich. Malevich’s art wanted to be about an irreducible aesthetic bedrock.

Odd. After Hassam’s sweet, casual paintings of flags, abstract paintings came to look like flags. At a certain point their attractive surfaces even took on the absolutist character of a flag. In the Minimalist days they seemed to say, “Believe in this or you are cast into outer darkness.”

What do you suppose that means?