HICKS/KANE/PIPPIN
FOLK ART HAS ALWAYS EXISTED WITHIN the context of European culture as a sort of obbligato related to, but distant from, the main directions of painting and sculpture. It has been almost wholly religious in character, and has served as the decorative enrichment of a rural population unable to afford or easily comprehend the talents of a Michelangelo or a Tiepolo. With increasing secularization in the late 19th and 20th centuries it turned its attentions to portraiture, still life, and genre, and, indeed, as mainstream painting has undergone the same secularization as well as a flattening of form the place of folk art, and its status as an art, has become increasingly ambiguous. This ambiguity is enhanced in the United States by the fact that folk art is infinitely closer to the native American painting tradition than it has ever been to the European painting tradition. This is partly due to the fact that American painting was itself initially a provincial offshoot of the European tradition, but as it found its way American painting developed as characteristics many of those traits—flatness of color, painstaking delineation, homely subject matter—that had traditionally been the province of folk art. Thus, the distinction between folk and mainstream art is not nearly so meaningful in this country as elsewhere until the late 19th century when an infusion of European influence began to revolutionize American art. During this century the widening breach between folk art and high art has made it increasingly clear that folk art occupies a limbo position somewhere between the history of art and the history of taste.
This being the case, it is highly questionable whether an exhibition of three folk painters belongs in an art museum at all, and when the painters involved are Edward Hicks, John Kane, and Horace Pippin, one wonders what, other than their all having lived in Pennsylvania, justifies their being shown together. A discontinuity similar to that which separates folk art from high art often separates folk artists from one another, and there is almost no visual or intellectual point to be made by the Hicks-Kane-Pippin grouping. Not only are the painters involved three quite distinct personalities working in isolation, but they have achieved three quite disparate things with very different relationships to the art of their respective times.
Edward Hicks, a Quaker preacher who painted in the first half of the 19th century, is the most successful of the three in terms of having been rooted in a sympathetic pictorial tradition. Devoted to the placid, pastoral idyll so common in American 19th-century painting, Hicks’s work—particularly the variations on The Peaceable Kingdom for which he is best known—have all the charm and naiveté which ultimately justifies the existence of any folk work. Hicks’s is an art of enumeration, most effective when viewed extremely close, and at its strongest when most rigorously organized. The Peaceable Kingdom of about 1835, for instance, is among the best versions of this subject because a few animals—notably the lion and the ox—are allowed to dominate, giving a strong ordering principle to the composition. The scattering of children among the animals and the clarity with which the scene of Penn’s treaty with the Indians stands out add to the anecdotal pleasures of this picture.
The farm scenes painted by Hicks in the last years of his life are without exception among his best work. They are full of the emotional warmth and directness of vision that characterize the best 19th-century American painting and free of the sentimentality imposed by a painterly tradition on such subjects (Currier and Ives) on the one hand and the flaccidity resulting from painting memory rather than immediate experience (Grandma Moses) on the other. The vertical spatial organization of The Residence of David Twining and the rhythm of multiplied animal profiles in The Cornell Farm give these two pictures a special charm. In general, the pleasures of taking time to travel slowly and carefully through a Hicks picture are very great indeed.
The painting of John Kane is about as far from that of Edward Hicks as it could possibly be. Kane attempts more than either Hicks or Pippin, and because he falls short his work is in many ways the least successful and the least enjoyable of the three. The obvious consciousness of a painterly perspective tradition in Kane’s work robs it of the flatness of form and clarity of color that is so important to most folk art. Kane’s color is often muddy and unsympathetic, and the impact of his works is too frequently dissipated by attempts at careful spatial relationship in depth. The best works by far are the portraits—most notably the Museum of Modern Art’s Self-Portrait—in which the figures are, without exception, placed against a plain background and gaze directly out of the picture. Excepting Across the Strip, the landscapes and industrial scenes are generally neither compositionally powerful enough to register from a distance nor meticulously detailed enough to reward very close viewing. Much of the effect of folk art depends on its achievement in the face of seeming to attempt very little. Kane attempts too much, thereby forcing himself to be judged against work which makes his painting look very unaccomplished indeed.
Horace Pippin is the most surprising of the three painters in this exhibition. Surprising because, while living at the same time as Kane—during the first half of this century—his work is free of the pretensions of Kane’s and fully as straightforward as Hicks’s. Although Pippin’s earliest work in the show dates from about 1931, the best of his paintings seem to have been made beginning in about 1940. Using carefully delineated flat color areas, and placing his figures and objects in shallow depth against plain backgrounds, Pippin achieves effects of considerable charm. He is particularly adept at making color areas stand out in isolation, as in West Chester Courthouse, and has by far the surest natural color sense of the three. At times, notably in Saturday Night Bath and The Hoe Cake, he uses simplified shapes of blue, red, etc. against warm greys in a manner strongly reminiscent of the early Vuillard. More than either Hicks or Kane, Pippin gives everything in his canvases equal weight, thereby achieving more thorough visual analogies with modernist painting. The result of these qualities is a kind of miniaturism coupled with a strength and directness which gives his work unusual conviction.
It must be clear by now that the problems raised by an exhibition such as Hicks-Kane-Pippin are far more philosophical than artistic, the principal one being: what exactly is the place of such painting? On the one hand, it is certainly of sufficient interest to save it from the hell into which the early 20th century definers of primitive art would cast it. On the other, it is certainly not of that ur-significance which its staunchest defenders would have us believe. It is charming and delightful, certainly not less, seldom more. If that seems belittling one need only consider the all-too-frequent absence of these qualities from contemporary life. Above all, the presentation of this exhibition as containing major art emphasizes the importance of trying to see any expressive phenomenon as clearly as possible for what it is and to honor it for that, rather than trying to abase or exalt it into something else. The masterpieces achieved by modernist painting should not mislead us into ascribing qualities they lack to other works using similar means. The misconception that in Hicks-Kane-Pippin we are faced with major art or, as the catalog seems to suggest, that this painting is of importance because of the sympathetic characters of its creators, distorts its true position and value and forces its evaluation on grounds both alien and unfair. The fact that it is now more possible to understand the intrinsic worth of “primitive” art should clarify rather than confuse the standards by which it is judged.
—Charles W. Millard
