Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [160]
Roosevelt was in no hurry to bypass the American rooms, which outnumbered those of France, Britain, Ireland, and Germany almost three to one. The first area he entered, a luminous, tented space full of sculptures and decorative pieces, at once seized his attention. He was predisposed to like the lacquered oak screens of Robert Chanler, not just because the artist was the brother of one of his former Rough Riders, but because the exquisite designs that covered them fulfilled his long-held dream of a new aesthetic arising out of the paradox of American identity. Here was the work of a man like himself, a wealthy Knickerbocker who had lived in the West and served as a sheriff, yet who was at home in European salons. Chanler, too, loved nature, finding zoomorphic beauty even in the rule of tooth and claw. His Asiatic-looking black wolves, their tails flowing like serpents, bit soundlessly into the writhing bodies of white stags. Attenuated giraffes, splotched as delicately as orchids, grazed the tops of impossibly tall trees. Moonlight irradiated the needles of porcupines slinking through a forest of blue and silver. Perhaps most thrilling, to a tired man of letters planning to take his youngest sons to Arizona in July, was a representation of the Hopi Snake Dance in the “sky city” of Walpi. By transfiguring primitive movement into an ethereal choreography, Chanler was doing the reverse of what the Ballets Russes had done in Paris—where his panels were apparently admired.
Moving on through five more galleries of contemporary American art, Roosevelt saw nothing by Saint-Gaudens, Frederick MacMonnies, William Merritt Chase, and other favorites of his presidency. He did not miss them. They had had too long a reign, with their effete laurel wreaths and Grecian profiles. It was clear that the show’s organizers, headed by the symbolist painter Arthur B. Davies, intended to eradicate the beaux arts style from the national memory. Even Sargent was shunned, in favor of young American artists of powerful, if not yet radical originality: George Bellows, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, and dozens of women willing to portray their sex without prettification. Roosevelt was taken with Ethel Myers’s plastilene group, “Fifth Avenue Gossips,” whose perambulatory togetherness reminded him of the fifteenth idyll of Theocritus. He liked the social realism of John Sloan’s “Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair” and George Luks’s camera-quick sketches of animal activity at the Bronx Zoo. Leon Kroll’s “Terminal Yards” impressed him, although it represented the kind of desecration of the Hudson Palisades that he and George Perkins had worked to curtail. From a vertiginous, snowcapped height, the artist’s eagle eye looked down on railroad sidings and heaps of slag. Drifting vapor softened the ugliness and made it mysteriously poetic.
What pleased Roosevelt about the work of these “Ashcan” painters, and indeed the entire American showing as he wandered on, was the lack of “simpering, self-satisfied conventionality.” All his life he had deplored the deference his countrymen tended to extend toward the art and aristocracy of the Old World. Sloan was a social realist as unsentimental as Daumier, but bigger of heart. Walt Kuhn’s joyful “Morning” had the explosive energy of a Van Gogh landscape, minus the neurosis. Hartley’s foreflattened “Still Life No. 1” was the work of a stateside Cézanne, its Indian rug and tapestries projecting a geometry unseen in Provence.
Davies modestly exhibited only three oil paintings. He eschewed realism in favor of a dreamlike classicism