A Stunning Glimpse Into Amish ‘Spirit’

The idea that art is where you find it is bracingly democratic. Back in the swinging ‘60s, artniks developed the habit of looking at absolutely everything for its aesthetic value. Among the many things this richly inclusive mind-set learned to appreciate were Navajo blankets and Amish quilts.

Even laser-eyed Minimalist painters like Frank Stella started collecting such material. Not only was it knockout stuff, but it tended to connect their own work--often viewed as an extension of European abstraction--with the native tradition.

What started as a fad deepened into appreciation of American grass-roots cultures. Its latest local manifestation is the stunning exhibition “A Quiet Spirit: Amish Quilts From the Collection of Cindy Tietze and Stuart Hodash” on view at UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History. The Los Angeles collectors seem to have been inspired by the original wave since they started amassing these treasures some 20 years back.

A concurrent show, “Views of an Amish Community: Photographs by Susan Einstein,” makes the important link between the quilts’ double status as pure art and their manifestation of the ethos of a very particular subculture. The pictures vary nicely from the documentary to the arty.

A glance at each show seems at first to set up a boggling contradiction. The visual effect of the quilts is sumptuous and--to anybody familiar with mainstream abstract art--they look like sophisticated hallmarks of modernism.

By contrast, the life shown in Einstein’s pictures is the simple, self-abnegating way of a people who literally attempt to dwell in the horse-and-buggy days of family farms, plain living and high thinking. Purposely distanced from what they see as the vanity and corruption of the modern world, they for the most part eschew motor vehicles, power tools, cameras and television.

The Amish evolved from 16th century Swiss Anabaptists, religious reformers with such radical ideas as the separation of church and state. Such notions got them tortured, imprisoned and executed by the thousands. Around the year 1750 survivors set sail for the New World.

Today some 150,000 Amish live in 22 U.S. states. Enclaves depicted here show Old Order sects in Indiana.

They live by rules of self-denial, modesty and humility. Obedience is mandatory from childhood. Most kids’ education stops at the eighth grade. Selflessness holds such sway among the Amish that for years children’s dolls were made without faces.

There are ways in which singularity is taken into account. Teenagers get a time of sanctioned rebellion to drive cars, hang out and get up to mischief before making a final commitment to the church. About 80% return to the fold. No stigma is attached to those who don’t. There is wisdom at work here.

Nobody advertises Amish quilt-making as a form of blowing off creative steam but that’s what it looks like. Color combinations are so sonorous and sensual that catalog essayist Jonathan Holstein dubbed them “erotic.” These breathtaking works are conceived with a simplicity entirely suitable to an austere way of life. All are squarish in format, bilaterally symmetrical and made in abstract block patterns within the confines of traditional formats such as “Center Diamond” or “Bars and Stripes.” When angular or curved movement appears it’s clearly derived from the straight and narrow.

Quilts carry the aura of thrifty housewives saving scraps of textile from which coverings are made during chatty sewing bees with the ladies of the neighborhood. There is nothing wrong with that and some evidence of partial truth to the practice in these largely anonymous quilts. But their breathtaking range of both subtle and spectacular optical effects suggests something far more studied. To the extent any pejorative attaches to the label “folk art” it’s an insult to stick it on this work.

Looking at it, one is reminded that the most abstract of historical modern art has been associated with religious, philosophical or metaphysical thinking. Everybody from Malevich to Mondrian, Kandinsky, Rothko and such an L.A. artist as Robert Irwin has, one way or another, been linked to the numinous.

The Amish quilts actually give mainstream abstraction a serious run for its money. They have a literally throbbing sense of heartfelt authenticity the uncloistered world rarely achieves.

Aside from that, taken together, the two forms make us realize that issues of sophistication and modernism are irrelevant here. Both are really about devotion.

“A Quiet Spirit” was organized by Fowler director Doran H. Ross and his colleagues Betsy Quick and David Mayo.

* UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History, through Feb. 16, closed Monday and Tuesday. (310) 825-4631.