Quilts and Scrimshaw in Way -Out West? : ‘American Sampler’- A fascinating show at County Museum of Art

What the heck is folk art anyway, and why do we keep aggravating ourselves with the question? We don’t go around wringing our hands and moaning, “What is folk music?” It’s that stuff with the fiddles and banjos.

Whatever folk art is, there is a wunnerful new exhibition of it that just opened at the County Museum of Art. Titled “An American Sampler,” it lays out 120 signs, decoys, carousal critters and cigar-store Indians without surgeon-general warnings. Then there are quilts and scrimshaw. In case you’ve been napping in a hatbox on the top shelf in the closet, scrimshaw is carvings that look like ivory, but they aren’t. Not usually. They are made out of whale bones and whale teeth--you might say whale tusks. Still, they look a lot like ivory.

One of these depicts a lady who is as naked as a baby bird. She looks a lot like one of those ancient Oriental ivories known as “doctors ladies.” They say that in the old days, sick Oriental females used them to point out to the doctor where they hurt because they were so modest the doctor was not allowed to touch them or look at them in the buff.

Anyway, nobody says that exquisite Oriental ivory carvings are folk art, so why do we say these scrimshaw are folk art? As a matter of fact, the handsome carrousel animals--the padding tiger and the vain giraffe--bear suspicious resemblance to courtly ceramic animals in the Chinese gallery next door. So why is one grand art and the other folk art? Maybe because the carrousel animals have saddles for the kids to sit in. Since nobody ever saw a saddle on a tiger or a giraffe, these have an air of fable about them. Maybe that quality of magic brought to ordinary things is what makes folk art. Maybe it’s a quality of domesticated mythology. This show makes us sigh for an America that may never have existed except in myth.

What the ding-dang heck is folk art anyway?

This exhibition makes it clear that whatever it is, it is more than one thing. Out here in California we tend to think of folk art as being made by loners, eccentric outsiders with no art training, such as Simon Rodia or Grandma Prisbrey, who just up and make private worlds for themselves. We think of them as neighborhood oddballs and hermits or social outcasts like the black folk artists in a memorable exhibition seen at the Craft and Folk Museum or in “Cat and a Ball on a Waterfall” at the Oakland Museum. That’s the kind of folk art we tend to have here in the far-out West.

But “An American Sampler”--on view through April 30--insists there is more than one kind of American folk art. It comes from the Shelburne Museum, which is situated on the shore of Lake Champlain in southern Vermont. Considered the leading repository of the genre, it was founded in 1947 by Electra Havemeyer Webb, youngest daughter of the Henry O. Havemeyers, the great collectors who bequeathed a famous gift of Impressionist and Old Master paintings to Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum.

Given that provenance, it is not surprising that Mrs. Webb’s exasperated mother once asked, “How can you, Electra, you who have been brought up with Rembrandts and Manets, live with such American trash?” It is also not surprising that the East Coast Shelburne collection presents us a more civilized version of folk art.

Where the California version tends to emphasize the idiosyncratic, the Eastern version plays to something almost classical. A Brunnhilde figurehead, circa 1850, was clearly made by an artist who knew about Baroque sculpture. It would not look out of place in a mainstream gallery. On the other hand, a stark little carving of a revolutionary soldier looks real direct and frank, like one of those African tribal sculpture. Maybe folk art is everything in between academic art and primitive art that doesn’t quite fit either category.

What the willy-dad-blasted heck is folk art anyway?

One thing is sure, it isn’t a handle that was invented by anybody that makes the stuff. Nobody says, “Here in our little town we play folk music and make folk carvings.” If they do, you smell a rat, since folk art’s charm is supposed to include unself-consciousness. The category certainly came into being as part of the avant-garde modernist movement that was so generous about recognizing non-academic art and so enthusiastic about copying its virtues. A sculptor such as Elie Nadelman based his whole oeuvre on folk figures. To this day,many a modern artist shares qualities often ascribed to folk artists. Warhol was a naif, O’Keeffe a no-bull earth mother and the whole lot stood outside the social mainstream doing it their way until they became the mainstream.

Here folk art comes across as a popular art ancestor of Pop art. The show is punctuated with oversize common objects, such as a huge rocking chair that makes us feel 3 years old again. There are trade signs like a huge tooth, giant rifle and oversize spectacles that have the same hyperbolic Yankee humor that turns ironical and multilayered in Claes Oldenburg. Big rock candy mountain. It’s very patriotic stuff full of bald eagles and George Washingtons that set you thinking about the deadpan flags of Jasper Johns and the inability of sophisticated city people to honestly express a corny emotion.

A breath of fresh air blows through the mind when you look at quilts made with more concern for love than for time, quilts dedicated to friendship proved through endless hours of affectionate labor.

The downside of folk art is that it remains imprisoned in convention like some decent modest soul who always sticks to the neighborhood rules. Its concern with good behavior rarely allows any emotional outburst, but here there is a quilt that defies the rules, looking like a haunted Rorschach blot. The upside of folk art is an innocent approach to the business of making art that lends it an authentic aura of wonder and surprise. Look at that wooden Indian weather vane. It is conceived like a flat, drawn profile silhouette, but it has real thickness that gives it a funny frontal view where the gesturing arm seems to come out of the middle of the chest. Alberto Giacometti would have loved it. He would have loved the cigar-store Indian on the wheeled wagon.

All art is, in fact, concerned with verisimilitude, getting it to look like the thing depicted. What every artist learns is that you can’t do that because sheet tin has no third dimension and wood is not flesh. You have to settle for some aspect of reality and that way you wind up exaggerating part of it. Great folk art uses guess work and respect for the material to come to the same decisions as great art in general. When it doesn’t, it remains a craft object.

A life-size Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines captures the same drama of solid volumes as an Egyptian old kingdom figure. Our jaunty soldier takes on a wry sense of self-importance. An adamantly accurate weather vane depicting a horse-drawn fire engine retains life-size detail at about one-tenth scale. It has a vivid hallucinatory presence of surreality like a Rene Magritte.

So folk art is just art made by folks who get the better of themselves. At best, it has all the clout of mainstream art with the added endearments of modesty, independence and willingness to face the unknown. Just doing the best with what it’s got, it sometimes creates aesthetic effects accidentally. The French call it bricolage.