Portrait of America?

Last week Manhattan's Hyperion Press put out a $10 book for the Christmas trade which was likely to strain its readers' patriotism. It included some of the best --but many of the worst--of the most widely published pictures recently produced in the U.S. Portrait of America reproduced four Satevepost and two New Yorker covers, a spate of paintings for ads, and a few art-gallery pictures. It led off with a four-page primer on U.S. art history by Book Critic Bernard DeVoto who, being a literary man, thinks of art as illustration.

DeVoto's thesis is that U.S. art was all right so long as it concentrated on illustrating "the native life." Recently rediscovered genre and landscape painters like William Mount, George Caleb Bingham and Thomas Cole were fine, DeVoto thinks. But after the Civil War, he argues, a new class of industrial millionaires took to raiding European art and completely ruined the U.S. taste for esthetic home cooking.

Now things are looking up once more: "It amounts to a cultural revolution . . . the reinvigoration of the native tradition. . . . Men & women of marked talent have undertaken to communicate what they have perceived in the life immediately at hand--three adolescent girls on their way home from school, a man burning leaves while his son coils the garden hose for winter, a farm wife mixing the icing for a cake. . . ."

DeVoto thinks the big corporations have taken over from the millionaires and museums to make home-grown art possible. To prove it, Portrait of America has six paintings from the Pepsi-Cola contest, ads for Kaywoodie pipes (each with a pipe smoker) and the U.S. Brewers' Foundation (in which brown bottles appear). But to labor DeVoto's thesis, Portrait has to omit the best examples of art in advertising: the Container Corp. of America's series by foreign artists (TIME, Apr. 30). The book contains a few interesting pictures (some of them badly reproduced), such as Grant Wood's tufted Fall Plowing, to represent Iowa; John Steuart Curry's praying Negroes in a flood, which Curry called The Mississippi and the book labels Tennessee; John Falter's End of School (Pennsylvania); Dong Kingman's watercolor, Morning in New Orleans; Charles Burchfield's The Great Elm (New York). George Grosz's Tobacco Road looked as if he had seen the stage play, but not Georgia. A boy holding a lemon was labeled Boston; a picked chicken hanging on a door, Ohio. The attempt to label the paintings by states showed how hard it is to put too tight a geographical frame around art.

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