America on Canvas.

Art

Decades hence, if the present tide of American affluence should recede, future generations may look back on the latest retrospective offering at New York's Whitney Museum as the very summit of our arrogance. The triumphalist spirit of "The American Century: Art and Culture 1900- 1950" (the latter 50 years go on display in September) has more to do with the soaring Dow, the triumphs of our military, and the steady progress of the American democratic model than with what a few of our painters, sculptors, and photographers were doing three generations back. The last time anyone saw an exhibition as unabashedly nationalistic as this, it was the "New American Painting" show that toured Europe in 1958-59, and the art world still won't shut up about it. Intended to introduce Europeans to the best examples of Abstract Expressionism, it has recently been "exposed," through the paranoid industry of certain art historians, as having been a CIA plot all along, the high-cultural facade of the military-industrial complex.

And yet, at least for the time being, there is something infectiously celebratory about the scene at the Whitney. Its abundant offerings from every province of visual culture, including film, architecture, and design, are the visual equivalent of a bacchanal. And the causes of celebration are manifold. To begin with, it is a triumph of curatorship. The number of excellent and representative works assembled in one space, over 700 of them, is staggering. All of them, without exception, are the very finest of their kind. And though the Whitney is by nature an ugly-looking thing, both inside and out, it has never appeared quite as spiffy as this. Through lighting and manipulation of space, the fourth floor has become the very model of effective and evocative display. In accord with the millennial fever of the moment, everything is ultra-high-tech, from the digitized "acoustaguides" to the Intel- sponsored computer banks on each floor. So what if the latter are mainly for display? They still look great.

Unlike the artists to be included in the second half of the exhibition, many, if not most, of these earlier ones are not widely known. Certainly you will find here the usual icons: Grant Wood's eternally constipated couple in American Gothic(1930), Hopper's Early Sunday Morning (1930), Ben Shahn's Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1930-32). But most of the art on display comes as a very pleasant surprise. For much of the period under consideration America was still largely an artistic backwater. Even the geniuses of our early avant-garde- Stieglitz, Steichen, and O'Keefe-were the followers of imported fashions. And yet, for all that, how talented we were! If there is one quality that emerges from all the clashing styles and vocabularies of our earlier art, it is a sense of earnest and yet inspired diligence. This is different, surely, from the high seriousness of the Europeans that, a generation later, would produce the mirthless intensity of Rothko and Rheinhardt, which begins to appear only toward the end of the present exhibition. The very status of being a follower imbued much of our art with a hokey vanguardism. But it also liberated us from the folly of supposing that the future of art history depended on the outcome of every last artifact we made.

We allowed ourselves, therefore, to be obvious and bombastic and petulant by turns, but the art that this produced had, as the Whiney exhibition reveals, the highest artistic virtue: It was alive. From a theoretical point of view, there is little of importance in George Bellow's Pennsylvania Station Excavation (1909) or in the vaporous chromatic mists of Charles Demuth's Poppies (1915) or in Gerald Murphy's unexpectedly brilliant Watch (1924-25), beyond the irrepressible desire to create something of beauty. To this end, our artists were willing to try anything at all.

The number of styles paraded through this exhibition is dizzying: Ashcan, American Scene, Social Realist, Synchromist, Surrealist, Geometric Abstraction, Gestural Abstraction. The curator Barbara Haskell, together with the museum's new director, Maxwell Anderson, and David Ross, the man he replaced, has embraced this variety with open arms, and so, doubtless will the public. There is little sense of the subordination of one style to another or of popular art to high art, or even of cinema to painting and sculpture. But then, a bacchanal is not a ballet, and as long as its bacchants are in ecstasy, they probably couldn't care less.