ART REVIEW : The Escape From Europe’s Influence

Throughout the 19th Century, American painters struggled and stuttered and occasionally stumbled onto a remarkable image or surprising success. More often than not, most made dry and lifeless pictures that, despite their wide range of subjects, looked like awkward, uninspired exercises. Today, they are usually seen as unimaginative imitations of influential European precedents.

This typical art historical generalization, however, doesn’t tell the whole story. Rather than serving up watered-down versions of European masterpieces, American painters from this era gave strange shape to their own often outlandish fantasies.

Their alternatively wild or bland paintings presented both ridiculously exaggerated and shockingly crude interpretations of what European masterpieces were--of what painting may have meant to its past viewers and how it might function in a rapidly expanding country that lacked a tradition of high culture.

Without a well-defined audience or clearly articulated identity, American painters and patrons had the freedom to experiment with diverse subjects and untested approaches. For better or worse, they regularly gave free rein to their imaginations.

Some of the results of their unlikely explorations and loony interpretations are stiffly presented in “Telling Tales: Nineteenth-Century Narrative Painting From the Collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.” Installed in the Williamson Gallery at Art Center College of Design, this sampling of 43 paintings by 42 artists swiftly spans the century, telling a conventional, conservative story that downplays the weirdness of many of its pictures.

Organized by Susan Danly, the curator of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the exhibition is not arranged chronologically, but roughly divides into three thematic categories. “European Themes,” “American Themes” and “Gilded Age Fantasies” broadly trace a general movement away from ambitious European history painting, to everyday subjects of ordinary life, and on to highly idealized and exuberantly theatrical fantasies of aristocratic privilege.

“Telling Tales” claims that narrative painting, in contrast to portraits, still lifes and landscapes, became dominant in 19th-Century America because painters adapted sophisticated European genres to the provincial tastes of a less-educated audience.

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Stories from the Bible, classical mythology, Continental history and literature were steadily if unevenly replaced by scenes from the farm, home and market, as well as U.S. history and myth. According to the exhibition, as the country prospered and its ruling class gained confidence after the Civil War, a taste for European style returned, though this time as pure fantasy--as an extravagant, nearly decadent indulgence of pretense and whim.

Like all potentially powerful interpretations of historical data, “Telling Tales” simplifies things to clarify general tendencies. The problem with the categories it establishes to make its argument is that well over half of its paintings could belong to at least one other grouping.

For example, Thomas Sully’s rigid “Gil Blas Securing the Cook in the Robbers’ Cave,” Charles R. Leslie’s grossly overstated “The Murder of Rutland by Lord Clifford,” Daniel Huntington’s sappy “Mercy’s Dream” and Thomas Buchanan Read’s cloying “The Flight of the Arrow” are so full of distorted fantasy that it’s absurd to think of them only in terms of their “European” themes.

Likewise, Charles Willson Peale’s delightfully childish “Noah and His Ark” could easily shift positions with Michele Felice Corne’s wildly fictitious “The Landing of the Pilgrims,” or Edward Savage’s wholly fabricated “William Penn’s Treaty With the Indians,” or Edward Hicks’ wonderfully naive “The Peaceable Kingdom,” all three of which belong in the “American” category.

William Merritt Chase’s boisterous “Keying Up--The Court Jester” could fit anywhere, as could Daniel Ridgway Knight’s puritanical version of Bouguereau-inspired corporeality, or Edward Harrison May Jr.’s “Dying Brigand,” in which a bleeding, green-faced thief is led to a cross by an earnest peasant woman.

Rather than attempting to limit fantasy to the third category, and proposing that the rest of the paintings neatly divide between American and European themes, “Telling Tales” would make more sense if it emphasized the preponderance of unfettered fantasy at play in all its images. Then an interpretation of 19th-Century American painting that didn’t merely repeat art historical cliches could begin.

* Williamson Gallery, Art Center College of Design, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena, (818) 584 - 5144, through Aug. 21. Closed Monday.