Related to the theory of art as communication is the movement called Regionalism. This is not merely art as it relates to a region or the lack of awareness of the art of the large urban areas on the part of provincials. Instead, it is commitment to the belief that art must emerge from the “soul” of the people. That it must be connected to the particular belief and modes of a group of people with shared values. [Compare this idea with the early concepts of whether we must have shared values.] Below is a selection from Barbara Rose’s book on America art. Here she defines the principle issues confronting American artists in the twentieth century.

     “The history of American art criticism in this century may be reduced to a handful of controversial issues that have provided material for a series of lively, if vituperative, running battles, in which advocates and antagonists of a cause have  lined up into viciously hostile enemy camps. Opening the century was the rather dusty matter of the battle of the ancients  vs. the moderns, which had occupied the French art world some fifty years earlier.

     “Besides the debate of academicism vs. modernism, there was the corollary issue of representation vs. abstraction. Whereas the first took fuel from the Armory Show and later declined as a serious issue, the second has occupied critics to the present. Sometimes, the discussion was carried out on a high philosophical plane, but, more often, abstraction was  simply dismissed as socially useless because it carried no message, and undemocratic because it was unintelligible to the majority. The larger issue of art-for-art's sake vs. a socially useful art, which underlies a considerable amount of anti-modernist opinion, was argued from the moment Henri took up the banner of life over art. It was still being debated in the sixties, with the young abstractionists avowing the autonomy and purity of art and its independence from life and with the pop artists and figure painters claiming that art separated from the concerns of life is sterile. On the other hand, some of the controversies of the thirties and forties, such as the relationship of American art to European art, seem to have died down. Others, such as the ability of art to change society, have become volatile again.

     “Among the most informed and least partisan early defenders of modernism were Christian Brinton and J. Nilson  Laurvik, whose articles appeared regularly in Century and International Studio. Both posited the view that modernism was a continuation of traditional painting, although Laurvik felt that Fauvism [see an example in Matisses’ painting] and  Cubism [see an example in Picasso’s painting] represented a decline from Post-Impressionism.

     “But the real front-line fighters on the side of the modernists were Walter Pach, a painter, critic, and connoisseur, and Willard Huntington Wright, brother of the Synchromist Stanton Macdonald-Wright. The attacks against modernism they  had to counter were largely based on the following grounds: (1) It was immoral and degenerate. (2) It was technically incompetent. (3) It was dehumanizing and unintelligible. (4) It was a hoax and a fraud. (5) It was insane. (6) It was a foreign conspiracy. These were the usual charges modernism had encountered when it appeared, except for the last,  which seems a peculiarly American idea. A typical response to the paintings in the Armory Show was the editorial  Lawlessness in Art. It stated, 'What drew crowds were certain widely talked of eccentricities, whimsicalities, distortions, crudities, puerilities, and madness, by which, while a few were nonplussed, most of the spectators were  vastly amused. . . . The exploitation of a theory of discords, puzzles, ugliness, and clinical details, is to art what anarchy is     to society, and the practitioners need not so much a critic as an alienist.

     “From the academic point of view, beauty of subject meant an elevated theme. Royal Cortissoz criticized the moderns because of the ugliness of their subjects: ‘I disbelieve in modernism because it seems to me to flout fundamental laws and to repudiate what I take to be the function of art, the creation of beauty.’ To Cortissoz modernism was symptomatic of  the moral decay found in ‘a world full of jazz.’ Like the isolationists who feared contamination by foreigners, he raised charges of conspiracy.

     “The United States is invaded by aliens, thousands of whom constitute so many acute perils to the health of the body politic. Modernism is of precisely the same heterogeneous alien origin and is imperiling the republic of art in the same way. . . The French post-Impressionists - Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin - retained just enough contact with the normal conventions of art for their subversive tendencies to be overlooked to a certain extent.... By the time the cubists came  along there was an extensive body of flabby mindedness ready for the reception here.... These movements have been promoted by types not yet fitted for the first papers in aesthetic naturalization--the makers of true Ellis Island art.

     “Such a passage is illustrative of what may be termed, to paraphrase Professor Richard Hofstadter's expression the paranoid style in American politics, the paranoid style in American art criticism.

     “Charles Buchanan, quoting Royal Cortissoz, in a review of the Forum exhibition of 1916, also objected to the international character of modernism, as well as to its unintelligibility: 'If a work of a art does not explain itself you may  depend upon it that there is something wrong there. . . . Now the paintings in the Forum exhibition were not only no more characteristically American than they were Chinese, they were absolutely lacking in any national characteristics  whatsoever.'

     “A novel argument against modernism was presented by Duncan Phillips, before he became converted to at least some of its manifestations. In the 1918 essay ‘Fallacies of the New Dogmatism in Art’ Phillips echoed the opinion, held by a  number of respectable critics, that modernism was not progressive but reactionary, because, from Cezanne onward, it preached the ‘cult of the archaic.’ This question whether modern art was progressive or reactionary was argued with  great seriousness in the first quarter of the century; thereafter, it seems to have been found less interesting.

     “In all these debates, the most articulate advocate for the defense was Willard Huntington Wright. Against the charges of lunacy, he presented the evidence of a psychologist that there are no epidemics of pathological lunacy. ‘It is absurd,’ he said, 'to accuse a large majority of the younger painters of the day and not a few among the elders of stark madness or perversity. One must, in all justice, recognize the sincerity of the new art and strive to comprehend its already considerable achievement.’ To the charge of unintelligibility, Wright countered in his Foreword to the Forum exhibition catalogue, ‘Not one man represented in this exhibition is either a charlatan or a maniac; and there is not a picture here which, in the light of the ideal, is not intelligible and logically constructed in accordance with the subtler and more complex creative spirit which is now animating the world of art.’ For Wright, modern art was not only progressive, it was steadily evolving new forms, keeping pace with the progress of science. As thought and philosophy become more abstract, so, he concluded, must modern art, the authentic expression of modern thought.

     “Wright's goal was to legitimize modernism. He chose to accomplish this by providing substantial evidence that 'modern  painting is not a fad' but a tradition that 'has progressed and developed logically for a century.' From Wright's point of  view, modernism represented not a step backward into the primitive past but an advance into the future. In order for modernism to gain acceptance in this country, it was essential that this premise be understood. Unfortunately, Wright's was a minority opinion; not until a sufficient body of literature tracing the internal development and roots of modern art appeared in America could he hope to be taken seriously. In his own history Modern Painting, he made one of the earliest attempts to provide such a historical context for modernism.

     “The nature of Wright's fallacies and errors in judgment are illuminating, because they are characteristic of understanding of modernism in the United States. He argued that aesthetics was, or could be, a science and could be made scientific and exact. He believed as well that modern art could only be legitimized on the basis of its similarity to traditional art. Thus, like Dr. Barnes and innumerable others, Wright sought in older art consistent formal principles that would validate the new art. Searching for the authority of precedent, bewildered Americans for whom modernism, with its emphasis on the sensuous and the intuitive, was an alien experience cast about for sureness and solid ground. In criticism, such insecurity led to pseudo-scientific svstems of analysis, and, in art, it led to abstract or semi-abstract paintings absurdly based on historical prototypes, which were merely academicism outside its usual context.

     “However, despite his limitations, Wright's contribution was impressive. He defended modernism with sophistication equal to that of the academic critics; he insisted that the task of criticism was the separation of good from bad; and he refused to adopt a different set of standards for American art, constantly measuring it against advanced European art, thus forcing the realization that standards were still set in Europe and that American art would not come of age until it could conform to them. Berating the public, he claimed, 'Modern art since Cezanne is the beginning of a new Renaissance; but the people in this country are unaware of its great significance.' Wright took it upon himself to make  them aware. If, in exasperation, he too became an eccentric, out of touch with the mainstream, his lot was not unlike that  of many of the artists he championed.

    "The battle of abstract vs. representational art, hard fought through-out the second and third decades of this century,  became, in the thirties, identified with the issue of European vs. American art. By this time, abstract art had come to be  largely identified with European painting, whereas representational art was popularly considered the native mode of  expression. Fostered by critics such as Thomas Craven, confusion between modern and contemporary helped to obstruct the development of modern American art, as it also protected Regionalists and American Scene painters from charges of academicism, to which they were certainly liable."

     “The leading apologist for abstraction in the thirties, George L. K. Morris, maintained that 'during an epoch in history such as this, when everywhere the mind seeks some order for its broken cultural fragments, the abstract art-work takes on fresh significance. It has the look of its time, the ability to hold its place among the mechanisms that characterize the new civilization we are just beginning to know.' But Morris' position was compromised by the fact that he seldom if ever praised anything but abstract art. Critics of the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies would be less exclusive, and less  prone to attempt to objectify personal taste into prescriptive dogma.

    “The major issues currently occupying criticism involve not only the position of the individual critic vis-a-vis the object under discussion or analysis but also the correct function, meaning, and role of art criticism as an autonomous discipline.  Whether, as Royal Cortissoz insisted, 'To say that a picture is bad in this or that respect is only incidentally to admonish the artist; the real purpose is to tell the lay reader what it is like' or whether, as John Dewey phrased it, ‘Criticism is judgment, ideally as well as etymologically’ has yet to be resolved. Generally, serious critics side with Dewey. But, having decided that the evaluation of quality is the main task of the critics, they part company when it comes to determining on what basis this judgment is to be made."

     “The various attempts to make aesthetics or criticism scientific were undoubtedly naive and mistaken; nevertheless, there arose from this concern with finding objective criteria of evaluation a type of criticism that endures as one of the strongest, perhaps the strongest, tradition of criticism in America. Although the roots of formalist criticism are usually traced to the English critics Clive Bell and Roger Fry, it is as much an American as an English tradition. Bell and Fry, as members of the Bloomsbury group, sought to put art criticism on an equal footing with literary criticism. Toward this end, they introduced some of the concepts of advanced literary criticism into art criticism, especially that which held form to be the expression of content. This was in contrast with the Americans who wished to eliminate the subjective factor entirely from criticism in order to provide systems of analysis that, transcending categories, personalities, and historical  epochs, would prove their universality and general applicability.

     “Fry's attention was first focused on the problem of the analysis of form in art when, early in the century, he served as a young curator in the European-painting department of the Metropolitan Museum, where he might have remained to iIlluminate the course of American art, had his talents not gone entirely unrecognized. During these years, he became acquainted with Denman Ross's Theory of Pure Design, which must have influenced his thinking enormously, since it was the only work he acknowledged in his 1909 Essay in Aesthetics.

     “Fry's definition of art as the expression of emotion, and his separation of aesthetic beauty from the beauty of 'a woman, a sunset, or a horse,' was immediately accepted by the American critics Walter Pach, Willard Huntington Wright, and Christian Brinton. Clive Bell, as Fry pointed out, supported this formulation in observing, 'however much the emotions of life might appear to play a part in the work of art, the artist was really not concerned with them, but only with the expression of a special and unique kind of emotion, the aesthetic emotion.' The aesthetic emotion, for Bell, was communicated through significant form.

     “Convinced of the rightness of Bell's and Fry's positions, Dr. Albert Barnes spent many years and devoted several books to the definition of significant form. His search not only provided the basis for an extensive method of formal analysis, it influenced the thinking of some of our most important historians, critics, and aestheticians, including John Dewey, whose Art as Experience is dedicated to Dr. Barnes. Published In 1934, Art as Experience touched the thinking of a generation of American critics, and continues to be an important step in the development of American criticism.

     “During the thirties, under the rising tide of realism and illustrational painting, formalist criticism underwent a relative setback. It came under direct attack from critics who felt, as Virgil Barker did, that 'the very conception of a pure art, the very demand for a pure aesthetic response could have arisen only in an unhealthy state of civilization.' In a review of Fry's book on Cezanne, Barker summed up the humanists' arguments 'It is a mark of malease and incomplete living for the painter to want to escape from ordinary life and to attain in his art an unconditioned state of being.... art is reduced to an excrescence on life, something on the margin, a mere means of escaping from conditions there which have proved too much for the subduing and harmonizing power of the personality. Its separation from life is fatal--to art and to life both.'

     “The most telling case against formalist criticism, however, was made by Meyer Schapiro, in a review of Alfred Barr's Cubism and Abstract Art (Nature of Abstract Art, Marxist Quarterly, January-March,1937). Schapiro criticized Barr's book, which still stands as the most lucid and thorough study of Cubism, on the grounds that it was unhistorical and separated art from its historical context. Objecting to Barr's presentation of art history as a cyclical process of exhaustion of forms and styles and reaction to this exhaustion, Schapiro stated that ‘the theory of immanent exhaustion and reaction is inadequate not only because it reduces human activity to a simple mechanical movement, like a bouncing ball, but because in neglecting the sources of energy and the condition of the field, it does not even do justice to its own limited mechanical conception."

     “This conception, that art history undergoes periodic cyclical reversals, was the view of the German art historian Heinrich Wofflin, and it is one of the understood givens of a formalist interpretation of art history. Such an interpretation traces the evolution of forms in art of the personalities and conditions that generated them. To Schapiro, and other historians and critics opposed to this point of view, stylistic change is directly tied to social, cultural, and political change. In Schapiro's  words: ‘The broad reaction against an existing art is possible only on the ground of its inadequacy to artists with new  values and new ways of seeing the banal divisions of the great historical styles in literature and art correspond to the momentous divisions in the history of society.

     “Attacked for being unhistorical, the formalist position has also been characterized as overly dependent on the judgments of history. Reviewing Clement Greenberg's collection of essays Art and Culture, Hilton Kramer accused Greenberg of taking the stand that ‘critical judgments if they are to carry the authority and force of something more than a merely personal taste, must be made in the name of history.’ Kramer interpreted Greenberg's attempt to construct an infra-logic of the relations among abstract forms as the presentation of 'the impersonal process of history . . . in the guise of an inner  logic.'

     “A more serious criticism of the formalist position than that it is unhistorical or unduly historical to the decree that it attaches positive value to advanced art is the argument that it ignores the question of social context or content in art by concentrating exclusively on formal relationships. Many critics, ranging from partisans of representational art to moralists and social philosophers, have maintained that content--ethical, emotional, social, or political--takes precedence over form as the primary criterion of value in art. Harold Rosenberg continues to take such a stand, insisting that the validity of Abstract Expressionism resides in its crisis content, rather than in its sense of pictorial form.

     “As a rule, formalist critics have stopped short of a discussion of content. Roger Fry, fearful such a discussion would plunge him into the ’depths of mysticism,’ stopped ‘on the edge of that gulf.’ Greenberg is apparently equally wary of plumbing the ineffable. In neither case, at any rate, can the accusation of illogicality or muddled metaphysics be made as it can be of many critics of modern art. The issue becomes, instead, if the aesthetic emotion and significant form are ineffable, how much can the critic tell us about art?

     “If the contribution of Americans to the twentieth century art criticism has been undervalued, it his been so because often it was buried in an eccentric frame of reference. Thus, even so excellent a study as Milton Brown's From the Armory Show to the Depression, the basic source for any discussion such as the foregoing, dismisses the work of Denman Ross, W. H. Wright, and Dr. Barnes as 'pseudo-scientific.' Given the extent to which their findings have been incorporated, without acknowledgment, into current thinking, such an evaluation seems unjust. Like the advanced artists whose work was misunderstood, these thinkers worked in a situation where a lack of tradition or context for their work put them constantly on the defensive. As a result, Wright and Barnes, at any rate, became eccentric and offensive, and those whom they offended attributed to their work the shortcomings of their persons. At this point, it seems fitting to restore to them the credit due to pioneers.

     “Their pioneering work, however, seems of little interest to the current crop of young critics reviewing for such journals as Arts Magazine, Art News, Art in America, and Artforum (which became in the sixties, under the editorship of Philip  Leider and, later, John Coplans, the most influential journal on contemporary American art). Neither aesthetics nor the history of art criticism, which is only just beginning to exist as an independent discipline, but rather academic art history,      is the background of most younger critics writing today. The result is that, increasingly as the seventies advance, art criticism comes to resemble a travesty of art-historical methodology; its aim often seems to be to provide long bibliographies for artists with short careers. Diatribes against ‘judgmental’ criticism, i.e., criticism based on value judgments, have been directed against the school of formalist critics that took Clement Greenberg as its mentor. Greenberg's gradual retirement from the pages of art magazines has considerably weakened the position of formalist     criticism, which seems unable to hold authority without a center. A lack of conviction in the future of painting as well as a disgust with the publicity function assigned to art criticism by an increasingly commercial milieu have caused a number of leading American art critics to defect to other pursuits. Philip Leider and Michael Fried, the most articulate and influential members of the Greenberg circle, have retired from contemporary art criticism to pursue academic studies. Annette Michelson writes mainly on film and performance. Lucy Lippard has become a polemicist for feminism.

     “No single strong voice has asserted itself to take a position of sufficient conviction and clarity to force the critical dialogue to resurne. Like the artists who speak only to people of their own persuasion or retire into lonely isolation, critics either move in cliques or remain completely out of touch with each other. In criticism as in art, media information has triumphed over communication: Raw, unprocessed data, statistical charts, and chronologies have replaced critical analysis and evaluation.

     “Fundamental questions have been raised but not answered. The notion of a 'mainstrean' has been attacked, the existence of avantgarde challenged, and the possibility that painting is dead entertained. Such critics as Douglas Davis of Newsweek have taken up the standard of the multiple reproductive arts of film, video, and photography, and museums are giving more and more exhibition space to such mass art forms. As the various channels of information broadcast conflicting signals, the public unfortunately becomes increasingly uncertain regarding the value of art in general. In this Tower of Babel situation, the question ‘Who is the true critic?’ at this point seems no less relevant than the question.

" Who is the true artist?"

Again, the issues may not at first appear to be related to American Indian art. But the question confronting the young artist who wants to break from tribal formulas as well as the way in which society at large understand art is caught up in this. Rose has defined the general problems confronting the art world. This is a world often left with the belief if others call it art, it is art. And if better galleries show it, it must be by better artists, or why would better galleries be showing it?

In his Primitive Art of 1955, Erwin O. Christensen writes of a renaissance of American Indian art. This language had been around since the twenties and reflects the misperception that there had been a revival of Native American painting. Actually there had been an invention of a new style.
 

"The twentieth century has seen a remarkable renaissance of American Indian painting. A new school of painters has developed styles in opaque water color that are peculiarly Indian. Where foreign or white influences occur they have been assimilated.

"An early indication of talent for graphic expression on the part of Indians came in 1903 with the publication of a series of illustrations of gods and dance rituals made by Hopi artists for Fewkes of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Another step in that direction occurred in 1917 when a young Indian, working as a janitor in an Indian school, drew dance figures of amazing realism, using bits of broken crayon. In that year Crescencio Martinez of San Ildefonso Pueblo was commissioned to paint a series of water colors for the permanent collections of the Museum of New Mexico. Other young painters--Awa Tsireh, Fred Kabotie, Otis Polelonema and Ma-Pe-Wi (who signed his work Velino Shije)--were also sponsored by the Museum of New Mexico. The interest in painting progressed with the discovery of five young Kiowa painters who in 1923, under the encouragement of Dr. 0. B. Jacobson of the University of Oklahoma, gained an international reputation. These events served as an inspiration to other Indian painters.

"Jacobson has classified the painters into four groups with distinct styles: Pueblo, Navaho, including Apache, Plains and Woodlands. Indian painters generally do not depend on models but on strongly developed powers of observation.

"From the point of view of tribal inspiration, five different sources may be distinguished, ancient murals, pottery and textile motifs, sand painting, dances and rituals and hunting. Usually one or another source of indigenous Indian art is dominant.

"The artists of the Southwest paint semi-naturalistic hunts, scenes of field and home life, and supernatural representations of Kachinas and ceremonial dances. The Navaho represent the healing ceremonies of their sand paintings and the Apache warriors, rituals and dances. Among the Plains tribes are painters of the Sioux, Kiowa, Comanche and Cheyenne. The subjects painted by the Sioux are scenes with horsemen and phases of the annual Sun Dance, whereas prayers and visions are represented in Kiowa paintings. Woodland artists of the Cherokee, Creek and Onondaga tribes emphasize a decorative element in their style. The artists have been educated in American schools and colleges, and have been active in creative Indian art as developed in an Indian school. They live on or off the reservations but they are all aware of their own Indian heritage, which is strongly emphasized in their art.

"The styles represent a mingling of ancient tribal traditions with elements taken over from modern painting. The Indian tribal element is at times more pronounced than the modern contributions; all paintings have a distinctly Indian flavor, which easily distinguishes the style from all others. At the same time each artist has an individual manner of his own. All styles have a few general characteristics in common. The treatment is flat and decorative; there is no rendering of depth through light and shade and perspective is either absent or used in a decorative manner. Color may be brilliant, jewel-like, or in subdued tints and shades."

It seems that educators who were encouraging Indian artists were not looking at the work already in existence but were relying on a basic concept cultural development where Native Americans were held to be underdeveloped and therefor childlike. The materials given the artists and the styles suggested to them were those commonly given by art educators to the young. Other influences from the white culture on these artists include commercial and motion picture cartoons. The resulting art as you can see in the following works transcends the limits of the influences and become an art style in their own rights. These works were very important to the European community, especially the Germans. The flat, decorative effect combined with traditional action can be seen in works such as Paul Goodbear (Cheyenne) Cheyenne Staking Wagon of 1913, Alan Houser (Apache) Navajo Square Dance Chorus of 1917, and Begay Harrison, (Navajo) Navajo Going to a Dance of 1917. The symmetry and stylization in Steve Mopope’s (Kiowa) The Eagle Dancer and his Medicine Man is closer in spirit to traditional forms. (Both works are undated.)

The isolated figures found in works by Asah Spencer (Kiowa) Two Dancers, Antonio Archuleta Taos Scene of 1934, Emiliano Abeyta (San Juan) Dancers of 1934, Gerald Nailor (Navajo) Female Rain and Corn Dancer seem to avoid the style problem by ignoring space and treating the figures in the manner of turn-of-the-century fashion plates. While the Navajo Social Dance by Any Tsihnahjinne (Navajo) has many figures the feeling has a similar quality. The same can be said of Moquino Ignagio (Zia) Mother and Son, Archie Black Owl (Cheyenne) Prayer for the Mother and Cecil Dick (Cherokee) Man of 1915 and Bosin Black Bear Buffalo Hunters.