American Folk Art and the Construction of Colonial Identity
This is another paper I wrote for my MA in art history, I wrote it a few years back but decided to upload it now cos I mentioned it in my latest Youtube video. It examines how the genre of “American Folk Art” was created to celebrate and define a colonialist “American” identity, and how depictions of Native Americans as the “Noble/Ignoble Savage” cement this. It also looks at how and why objects are defined as “Art” vs. “Not Art”, and how they can move between these categorisations. As with other essays I’ve posted on here I’ve included the bibliography but not the footnotes/references as they don’t fit with Medium’s formatting. If you’d like to see a version with the full references drop us a line.
Please note that this essay contains descriptions of colonialism and racism towards Native American people
The American Museum was founded by John Judkyn and Dallas Pratt in 1961 with the intention to “[…] foster historic ties between the United States and the United Kingdom by showcasing the decorative arts of America in what continued to be designated the ‘mother country’”. Because it has remained largely unchanged since its establishment, the museum offers an insight into how the history of America was understood and presented at this time. The folk art collection is the only of its kind in the UK and consists of decorative weathervanes, duck decoys and paintings, as well as a collection of shop figures including three cigar store Indians. In this essay I will look at the history of the cigar store Indian attributed to John L Cromwell (1) and what the history of American folk art collections and the image of the Indian (particularly in relation to the Native American population) tell us about American identity and nationhood, and how these contribute to ideologies that enforce American colonisation.
The Cromwell cigar store Indian is carved from a tree trunk and painted. He wears a dark yellow tunic with fringe on the arms and around the bottom edge with a large brown collar, brown bands around his shins and a black animal skin draped around his shoulders and over his left arm. The large tobacco leaves on his headdress and belt resemble feathers creating a kind of visual pun. Cigar store Indians would often hold a box of cigars, but he holds a tomahawk with a horsehair tassel over his head in his right hand as if to strike, and a large knife close to him in his left (the latter may be the artist’s idea of a tobacco-harvesting tool). This is not a representation of a real Native American person: the costume, headdress and knife bear no relation to those worn by any tribes. Rather it’s an idea of an American Indian created by someone who had probably only heard of them through ideas spread by other colonisers. As commercial artworks they very rarely have maker’s marks, but here the attribution has been made on the basis of style.
John L Cromwell ran one of the leading wood carving workshops in New York in the mid 1800s. Like most carvers of cigar store Indians of the time Cromwell originally made ship’s figureheads until the introduction of steam-powered ships caused him to diversify his work. We can see the legacy of figurehead carving in this piece as the Indian leans forward as if on the prow of a ship. In 1850 Cromwell had five apprentice carvers working under him in his workshop, and he as the master craftsman would create the initial design and finish the face whilst the apprentices would carve the rest. They were able to create an entire finished figure in three days, and would charge up to $3000 for one piece. Cigar store Indians functioned as shop signs at a time when literacy levels were low, and the Indian was used because Native American people had introduced the colonisers to tobacco. The earliest visual document of a cigar store Indian comes from 1810 in a watercolour of the corner of Greenwich and Dey streets in New York by Baroness Hyde de Neuville, and they remained popular throughout the 1800s but declined towards the end of the century. They were popular across eastern cities such as New York and Philadelphia that were colonised earlier than the “Wild West”, and where both carvers and residents were much less likely to have encountered Native American people.
American Folk art became seen as a legitimate subject for collectors and art historians in the early 20th Century, with the first major American folk art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1932. It was through this exhibition and others from the same period that the category of American folk art became established. As we look through the MoMA exhibition catalogue we can see the same kinds of items as in the Folk Art collection at the American Museum; portrait, landscape and still life paintings, decorative weathervanes, wooden toys and carved ship figureheads and shop figures, including cigar store Indians. The exhibition catalouge defines folk art as:
“[…] the expression of the common people, made by them and intended for their use and enjoyment. It is not the expression of professional artists made for a small cultured class, and it has little to do with the fashionable art of its period. It does not come out of an academic tradition passed on by schools, but out of craft tradition plus the personal quality of the rare craftsman who is an artist”.
From this definition we can say an object is classifiable as Folk Art if it’s not influenced by fashions in art, comes from a craft rather than academic tradition and was made by and for “common” people. This definition allows the inclusion of both ameture artists and skilled craftspeople making commercial art. It does however draw a line between folk art and design, as neither the MoMA exhibition nor the American Museum folk art collection include items such as furniture or silverware.
For the exhibition MoMA bought items as antiques and exhibited them as art, and we can look at this in relation to Clifford’s work describing how objects move between categories and the various factors that cause this. Objects can be defined by the opposing categories of art/artefact and authentic/inauthentic, and Clifford illustrates these as intersecting axes which form four categories in which objects can be placed (2). Using his diagram, we can see how cigar store Indians, which were common commercial art at the time of making, were initially put in section 4 by the artistic establishment (inauthentic, artefact), moved to section 2 as they became less common and were seen as representations of a dying age (authentic, artefact) then ended up in section 1 when they were exhibited in the MoMA, a space “[…] otherwise reserved for the likes of Cezanne and Picasso” (authentic, art). However it is debatable whether simply being exhibited in the MoMA means the work has fully entered section 1, particularly as it retains the title of “folk art” rather than simply “art”.
Clifford almost exclusively discusses cases where western individuals and museums create collections around work from other/ed “exotic” cultures and the politics around this. However when we have an American museum exhibiting American folk art for an American audience we can instead see the collection as a way for members of a culture to create an identity and history for themselves, even though the lives of those who originally made and used the pieces were very different from those creating and viewing the exhibition. However the works go through another change when it’s exhibited at the American Museum in Bath, becoming more other as they move further from their original source.
The rise of Cubism and abstraction in the early 20th century was instrumental in allowing these objects to become viewed as art-objects. This was a time when “Classical idealism and realism [had] been discarded as the primary objectives of art”, which left the art world and historians more receptive to the work of untrained and commercial artists that was previously seen as crude or “primitive”. The Modernists appreciated “[…] folk art’s spare, nonmimetic formal principles and declared an atemporal affinity on the basis of beauty. As such, modern art abstractions could thus be regarded not as aberrations, but instead as a larger, and significantly, American artistic tradition”. Folk art became not only a way to justify the truth and validity of Modernist abstraction by “[…] demonstrating modernist properties in already familiar things”. but also presented early American craftspeople as masters of this new aesthetic, thus implying that colonial America was always Modern.
The creation of folk art dropped after the civil war as people moved from the countryside to cities and mechanised techniques replaced handmade crafts. This imbued folk art with a pre-industrial nostalgia, which added to its popularity. The MoMA catalogue expresses this nostalgia as it describes the end of folk art traditions: “A few of the old craftsmen remained here and there, but […] their creative efforts met with little response from a public whose taste [would] accept only the machine-made. By the close of the century […] American folk art was dead”.
Because folk art was made and used by common people, and because of the perceived lack of references to European artistic traditions, folk art was considered more authentically American and more representative of American identity that American fine art; “This home grown art, finding its inspiration in the robust American people and the unromanticised American scene, based […] on the assumption that anyone could learn to paint or carve, was American to the core. It was indeed a free artistic expression of the very spirit of the flowering of American democracy”, “[…] it was neither intended to be nor regarded as art at the time it was made. It is here then that we will find the truest and most unself-conscious expression of American character”. It was thought that due to a lack of formal art training or an attempt to follow an artistic tradition (or at least the perception of this) the folk art of America demonstrates a direct line into what it means to be American. This assumes that there is an innate “American-ness” that those who made the folk art possessed, and that was able to emanate from them as pure, unfiltered expression into their work. The collection and elevation of folk art became an important vehicle for a new country trying to find its own sense of history and identity separate from the “mother land”.
A significant exclusion from the American folk art cannon is work by Native American artists — neither the MoMA exhibition nor the collection at the American museum contain any work of Native American origin, despite containing many images of Indians. The figures that are included are based on colonialist fantasies of the Indian, which is an entirely different entity from the Native American people. As “All such collections embody hierarchies of value, exclusions, rule-governed territories of the self”, this demonstrates that the American identity which the work is supposedly an authentic portrayal of does not simply refer to inhabitants of the geographic area known as the United States of America, but only to the colonising population. The colonial American identity is tied up with concepts such as “manifest destiny”, a term first coined in 1845 to justify colonialist expansion as a God-given right, and the “American Dream”, an idea based around individual land acquisition and later that of commercial goods. Both of these ideas build an American identity around taking land and resources from native people by right of colonisation. When we consider this it may at first seem strange that representations of Native Americans (even imaginary ones) are common in folk art collections, however the Indian came to be used by both the colonisers and those at home as a symbol of sorts for America. For example during the Boston Tea Party of 1773, a group of American merchants dressed as Indians to protest British tax policy. “As the original inhabitant of the New World he was, after all, the perfect vehicle for expressing nationalistic sentiments in a country that was searching to establish its identity and distinguish itself from Europe”.
If we examine the Indian as presented in American folk art we can begin to see why it was so important to the colonising forces. The Indian was the Noble Savage, a concept strongly influenced firstly by Neoclassicism (depictions of Indians, including cigar store figures, are often posed similarly to Classical statues and wear clothing resembling ancient Greek and Roman robes) and later Romanticism, with the Indian becoming an important symbol in the development of Romantic art and literature. The Neoclassical influence was in the idea of the Indian living close to nature as a counterpoint to Western civilisation, whilst the Romanticism became an influence once it became clear that the Indian’s way of life was under threat and he became a tragic hero, aware of his fate and facing it with dignity; “Underlying these […] works was the image of the rational, enlightened savage who began to sense his fate and the futility of resistance in the face of the onslaught of a superior civilisation. As he did he became an object of compassion, nostalgia and sentimentalism, the perfect vehicle for romantic sensibilities”. These depictions also served to “perhaps assuage underlying feelings of guilt” of colonisation.
There is a counterpoint to the Noble Savage in the Ignoble Savage. This was “[…] the terrifying presence of the frontier, the bloodthirsty demon […] his exploits could send a romantic chill up the spine of a reader”. The Ignoble Savage, or “bad Indian”, rather than contradicting the romanticism of the Noble Savage, serves to reinforce it through ideas of melodramatic danger. The explicit savagery represented by the Ignoble Savage was necessary for the Romantic idea of the Indian as part of the wild and uncontrollable forces of nature, which stood in contrast to the tame safety of civilisation. Because of this cigar store Indians depicting the image of the Ignoble Savage, such as the Cromwell example, were very common during the 19th century. Sessions quotes a carver saying “[…] the genuine old roving red skin with a bad eye and ugly looking tomahawk […] is the stand-by […]. Indian maidens do very well, but not so well as the fine old gore-drinking warriors”. The Romantic images of the Indian as both the tragic hero resigned to his fate and melodramatic boogeyman worked together to solidify the colonists’ identity as those with an inherent right to the land of America and was used as justification for the subjugation of the Native American people. This explains why cigar store Indians were much more popular in Eastern cities, as one would be unlikely to have one’s idealised image of the Indian challenged by meeting a real Native American person; “No longer a direct threat, the Indian was a picturesque detail that evoked visions of the primeval bounty of the promised land of America”.
With this in mind we can see how both American folk art collections and the image of the Indian were based on the seemingly contradictory ideas of nostalgia for the past and a desire to create a Modern American identity. These threads come together in the figure of Cromwell’s cigar store Indian at the American Museum and frame it’s presence in the gallery, as its creation and display contain complex histories of American identity, what it means and who is able to lay claim to it. However its display within the collection communicates none of this complexity and serves to reinforce rather than challenge the dominant ideologies under which it was made and purchased. The nostalgia around the collection is reflected by its location in Bath, a city which has been described as “one of those places people choose when they want to remember England with affection […] the kind of place that is conducive to […] historical amnesia”. However this is nostalgia for a history that never was; “This is a history of America completely without slavery, indentured servants, workers, and death. The Native Americans simply and naturally gave up their land to a higher order with God-given rights”. The collection’s location in England heightens this, as visitors are less likely to be well versed in US history and understand the full context of the collection. To compound this, in 1995 the museum had never had a specialist in American history on the staff. On the other hand the museum literature has described it as a “[…] marvellous document in the history of collecting, taste, and museum display”, and there is an argument to be made for preserving collections in their original setting as a record of archaic ideologies. However in order to do this there needs to be an active effort to include information that puts it into context, and changing the display of the collection to show Cromwell’s cigar store Indian in a new way could better communicate and educate visitors on its histories and implications.
One example of how this has been done is Fred Wilson’s 1992 piece Mining The Museum (3), in which the artist used items from the Maryland Historical Society to create a temporary museum which exposed the colonialist history of the objects, subverting their usual presentation. Wilson exhibited the collection of cigar store Indians facing towards the wall labeled with the names of the Merchants who commissioned them, and titled the piece Portraits of Cigar-Store Owners. The unusual positioning forces the beholder to consider the objects differently and think about why the objects exist as they do. It could be read as the Native people turning away from the beholder to refuse the role of spectacle. Such radical changes are unlikely in a museum so dedicated to the legacy of its founders, so it may be that increasing the commitment to historic education and putting the work into a greater context would be more appropriate. However it’s clear that the presentation of the collection would benefit from changes and that it’s still the case that “The American Museum in Bath has a lot of catching up to do”.
Bibliography
Beresford, L (2011) “Folk Art from the American Museum in Britain” pub. Scala Publishers, London
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Lansford, T M (2018) “American dream” In Encyclopedia of American studies, pub. Johns Hopkins University Press. http://libezproxy.open.ac.uk/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/jhueas/american_dream/0?institutionId=292 (Accessed 25/5/18)
Marshall, J (2002) “Common Goods: American Folk Crafts as Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1932–33” in Prospects 27, pub. Springer Netherlands. https://doi-org.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/10.1017/S0361233300001289 (Accessed 9/5/18)
Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.) (1932) “American folk art the art of the common man in America, 1750–1900”, pub. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2930 (Accessed 9/5/18)
Myrone, M (2014) “Afterword: re-instituting British folk art” in Kenny, R., Mcmillan, J. and Myrone, M. British Folk Art, pub. Tate Enterprises Ltd., London
Sawyer, A R (1953) “American Folk Art” in The Art Institute of Chicago Quarterly, Vol. 47, №1 (Feb. 1, 1953), pp. 11–14, pub. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4112617 (Accessed 9/5/18)
Sessions, R (2005) “The Shipcarver’s Art: Figureheads and Cigar Store indians in Nineteenth-Century
America” Pub. Princeton University Press, Oxfordshire
Wilson, F & Halle, H (1993) “Mining the Museum” in Grand Street, №44 (1993), pp. 151–172, pub. Jean Stein http://www.jstor.org/stable/25007622 (Accessed 9/5/18)
