Small Show Outshines the Blockbusters

The blockbuster exhibition, that exhaustive, exhausting phenomenon that all but consumed American museums in the ‘80s, has a polar opposite in the Timken Art Gallery’s series of “Focus” shows.

Attracted by the hype, the blockbuster’s shuffling hordes marvel en masse at temporary extravaganzas, while permanent collection galleries stand vacant. At the Timken, the permanent collection of European and American paintings and Russian icons is the focus, and works from other sources are brought into the gallery temporarily--not to divert but to sharpen that focus.

“Eastman Johnson: The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket” (through June 24) is the gallery’s fourth “Focus” exhibition since the program began in 1984. Like the others, it zeroes in on a single painting from the collection, and puts it in the company of a dozen or so related works, studies by the same artist or variations on the theme by others.

These shows broaden our understanding of the Timken’s prized works, to be sure, but just as important, they nurture an approach to art based on sensitivity rather than the sensational. They encourage a slow, intimate discourse with the work, a pace of viewing and reviewing. There is room here for the gradual revelations and private discoveries that are all too often smothered by the flourishes and frenzy of the blockbuster show. Here, one can learn how a work of art is made, not just how it is marketed.

Eastman Johnson, like all ambitious American artists of the 19th Century, sailed to Europe for his training. Born in Maine in 1824, he had already established a successful career as a portraitist before leaving for Dusseldorf in 1849, but experience in the academies, studios and museums of Europe earned him a credibility unattainable in the fledgling art schools of the U.S. Johnson studied figure and genre painting in Germany, the Hague and Paris before returning to the U.S. in 1855.

Ironically, the demand for European training did not conflict with the equally insistent demand toward the middle of the century for a distinctly American art.

“Let a bold genius scan our history, note our civilization, examine our life, and he will discover innumerable themes characteristic enough to excite the interest of the people,” wrote one critic and champion of Johnson’s work in 1858. “Our colonial, pioneer and Revolutionary eras, the customs and local peculiarities of the land, are prolific subjects for pictorial art; let them be seized, with a native zest and true insight, and new life will be imparted to the limner and his achievements.”

Answering this call with “zest and insight,” as well as good doses of nostalgia and sentimentality, Johnson resumed his American career with a series of portrait studies of the Chippewa Indians around Lake Superior. Not until 1859, however, with the painting, “Life in the South” (also called “Negro Life at the South” and “Old Kentucky Home”) did he marry his interest in American themes with his study of genre, the portrayal of scenes from everyday life. The painting, an anecdotal treatment of leisure time in slave quarters, brought Johnson popular and critical acclaim.

Between “Life in the South” and the 1880 painting, “Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket,” the focus of the current Timken exhibition, Johnson pursued several other themes--farmers at work, families at home, children at play and more. Several of these culminated in broad horizontal tableaux, epic images composed of numerous small vignettes. “Cranberry Harvest” was Johnson’s last major effort of this type, and it is regarded by many to be his genre masterpiece.

A sweeping view of the golden-brown cranberry bog and its harvesters, the painting epitomizes Johnson’s sanitized, idealized vision of rural labor. The workers--men, women and children--bend over the sandy earth in search of the small crimson berries, but their crop is less Johnson’s concern than the process of its gathering.

Intrigued by the quaint island of Nantucket since he first began spending time there about 1870, Johnson observed the September harvest with a passion he called his “cranberry fit.” He respected the communal nature of the labor and, most likely, exaggerated its overtones of play and courtship. Men gaze warmly at the women working at their sides, and, throughout the finished painting and the 13 studies included in the show, couples pair off for various tasks or a flirtatious break. The sentimentality of the scene is further enhanced by a charming trio of children making a game of their work, an older man picking berries from a chair next to an admiring young girl, and most of all, by the young boy carrying his infant charge to his mother, who stands like a vertical anchor near the center of the image.

Golden dabs of light grace the cheeks and shoulders of the workers, a stoic, clean and proud class--no sweat or soreness here. American art scholar Patricia Hills has written of the nationalism and nostalgia influencing such an approach: “Turning to rural themes was, to be sure, a manifestation of the cultural protest against the industrial revolution with its concomitant overcrowded city slums, its urban pollution and human exploitation.”

As American as Johnson’s sensibility was, however, his style and subject matter borrowed heavily from the European painters--especially French--whose work he admired at home and had studied abroad. Thomas Couture, whose Paris studio hosted a bevy of American art students, including Johnson, was a great champion of the painted sketch, the quickly brushed study from life, en plein air.

Johnson’s studies here reveal a fresh, vigorous touch that, according to the conventions of 19th-Century painting, was exchanged for more deliberate, refined brushwork in the finished painting. By contemporary standards, the final composition looks stiff and staid next to the immediacy and directness of the studies. While Johnson defines the figures in the final painting by the layers and folds of their clothing, he is content in the studies to convey the same gestures through dry dashes of solid color. In the large canvas, the workers labor atop the land; in the studies (most on paper board), they merge with it in a seamless union of brush strokes.

Seeing Johnson’s finished work alongside his studies of the landscape and cranberry pickers is a luxury afforded only by time and scholarship. Though Johnson admired the energy of the painted sketch form, he--and most artists of his generation--never considered such studies suitable for exhibition.

Credit for exposing this slice of art and social history goes to guest curator Marc Simpson of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Simpson, his colleague Sally Mills and Johnson scholar Patricia Hills from Boston University, have each contributed an essay to the show’s informative and richly illustrated catalogue.