Art: Arcadian Vision

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So far, the Bicentennial's art exhibitions have tended to be worthy but familiar: they offer much detail but tell us little that is new. However, a show of a different kind opened last week at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It contains no works of American art. Its title is "The European Vision of America," and its aim is to emulate Tocqueville: "To tell us," the catalogue announces, "what Europeans saw here and what they felt and thought about matters which, traditionally, have been the preserve of American opinion."

So, at the prompting of the Cleveland Museum (where the show goes in 1976, before opening in Paris next fall), the English art historian Hugh Honour has assembled some 340 works of art related to America, chiefly from European collections, in every medium from printer's ink to porcelain. Honour has also written the catalogue and a much longer study, The New Golden Land. In depth and details, with an unfailing subtlety and tartness of argument, his exhibition sets out to illuminate one of the most intriguing subjects in the history of art: how European artists responded to the bewildering and distant shapes of the New World and, in so doing, refracted reality through the glass of European stereotypes.

Legend Confirmed. "The greatest event since the creation of the world, excepting the Incarnation and Death of Him who created it." That sounds like Richard Nixon's blurt on the Apollo 11 moon landing, but it was written in the 16th century by a Spaniard named Lopez de Gomara, after men knew Christopher Columbus had found not Cathay but a wholly new "fourth part of the earth." For centuries, fabled islands populated by demigods, monsters or Arcadians had been part of the imagery of European legend, and the discovery of the South American Indian—lolling in a hammock, innocent of toil and tyranny, naked except for a bright girdle of macaw feathers, as imagined by Stradanus in 1589—seemed to confirm it.

As Honour points out, even Columbus described the Caribbean in phrases taken from Latin poetry describing the mythical Golden Age. It was culturally impossible for him, or his immediate followers, not to do so. The woodcuts and paintings of the time reflect that Arcadian vision, which would duly be modulated into the cult of the Noble Savage. By 1505, only five years after Cabral's discovery of Brazil, the first American Indian had made his way into a European painting: a Tupinamba chief, crowned with feathers, included as one of the Wise Men from the East in a Portuguese nativity.

Surprisingly, Spanish art was poor in its American imagery—probably, Honour suggests, because of guilt at the genocidal cruelty of the conquista. Yet the Spanish massacres in South America and Mexico did give a Dutchman one poignant vision of the ruin of Arcadia, which is also the earliest known painting of the New World: Jan Mostaert's West Indian Scene, circa 1542, with its naked Indian tribe defending their pastoral paradise against a phalanx of armored Spaniards.