Folk Art

C

“Pennsylvania Dutch” Influences

The “Pennsylvania Dutch” were actually Germans, Swiss, Hollanders, and Moravians of German stock. Although many were members of pietistic sects—Amish, Mennonites, Dunkers—others were orthodox Lutherans. Industrious and pious, they secluded themselves (the pietists in particular) from external social and political affairs, followed their traditional ways, and maintained and nourished the folk arts they brought from Europe. Perhaps more than any other immigrant group they fulfilled the folklorists’ vision of an isolated people maintaining their own folkways against all inducements to do otherwise.

The common denominator among most of the Pennsylvania Dutch folk arts is a strong delight in color. Their fraktur manuscripts were painted in bright greens, yellows, oranges, Prussian blues, and reds. The same colors dominated their quilts, pottery, toleware, barn signs, and painted chests; even their delicious traditional foods were brightly colorful. Only their graceful metalwork lacked color—a deficit amply compensated for by strength of design.

Throughout these arts is woven a body of visual symbolism derived from the Bible, hymns, and sermons: the Tree of Life, the phoenix to symbolize death and resurrection, the self-sacrificing pelican (representing Christ), the tulip, the unicorn, hearts, parrots, peacocks, and symbols representing the sun. Typically associated with frakturs, many of these motifs also appear on quilts, on marriage chests, and in the carvings on domestic implements, creating a lively sense of image and color. The European art of wood carving flourished not only among the 18th-century Pennsylvania settlers and their descendants, but also among the immigrants of the following century. Among the latter were two carvers who came to be widely appreciated long after they were dead: Wilhelm Schimmel, admired for his whittled eagles, and John Scholl, a house carpenter, whose freestanding colorful celebrations are unique in the U.S.

D

Norwegian and Swedish Influences

Despite the vigorous folk-art traditions in Scandinavia, the overall impact on American folk art of immigrants from northern Europe was relatively slight. Only recently have institutions such as the Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum in Decorah, Iowa, and the Bishop Hill State Historic Site at Bishop Hill, Illinois, offered insight into these transplanted cultures. Each has added the name of one master to the list of American folk artists.

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Lars Christenson arrived from Norway as a pioneer settler in Swift County, Minnesota, cleared his own land, built his own homes, served as a government employee, and helped to found the local Lutheran church. Like so many of his compatriots, however, his greatest satisfaction came from carving. He carved boxes and furniture for his own house, but in 1897 he began work on an intricately carved altarpiece (Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum), 365.7 cm (12 ft) high by 304 cm (10 ft) wide. Using a great variety of woods, which he left unpainted, he merged his boyhood memories of Viking and Norwegian design with simplified versions of the French artist Gustave Doré’s biblical scenes. Like its counterparts in many churches on the west coast of Norway, it is a tripartite and tiered altar, embellished with carved flowers and angel heads. The Last Supper (after Leonardo da Vinci) and a crucifix with the two thieves occupy the center. This is one of the masterpieces of religious folk art made in America, symbolizing not only the religious sincerity of the carver but also the tradition of Scandinavian carving from which it derives.

Olaf Krans was born in Sweden and came to Bishop Hill, Illinois, with his parents in 1850. There they joined a religious commune of other Swedes. During his youth Krans watched (and remembered) how the prairie was broken, how the men and women sowed and reaped, how the settlers created a special enclave of their own on the rolling, fertile prairies. The paintings he began to create in his 50s are a remarkable record of one of America’s many utopian settlements in the years of its original enthusiasm. The long rows of planters and sowers, of reapers and gatherers, convey a sense of unity and dedication. Krans also did a gallery of portraits of the original settlers. Most are based on photographs, but he imparted to each portrait an insight drawn from his recollections and far surpassed the photograph in depiction of character.

Krans’s paintings are outside the mainstream of Swedish immigrant folk art, which, like that of the Norwegians, stressed woodcarving. Essentially this was a domestic art, its practitioners creating fine carved spoons, chairs, cupboards, and wooden boxes. Genre scenes in minisculpture reflect the life of the farm or lumber camp but were intended for the carver’s own home.

E

Hispanic Influences

The Hispanic traditions come from two directions, the Southwest and Puerto Rico, and their most striking products are religious. New Mexico was generally neglected by Mexico after 1750, as routes going north bypassed it. It was then that local santeros (“saint carvers”) began to carve holy figures, bultos, for the isolated churches of the countryside. At the same time painters were developing a characteristic style of retablos (“altar paintings”). Stylistically, the carvings reverted to the first half of the 17th century, echoing the works of Andalusian followers of the Spanish sculptors Juan Martínez Montañés and Pedro de Meña. The bultos were of wood, the figures elongated, with strong graphic devices in faces and bodies. They convey an intensity of feeling that, even at a much later date and in a different culture, are gripping.

The retablos, although less impressive, are aesthetically attractive. Flatness characterizes them—little attempt is made to convey any sense of depth or roundness. The spaces are filled in with decorative details, and frequently the frame is painted. The aesthetic sources for the retablos are a century more recent than those of the bultos; they can be traced back to the followers of the Spanish master Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, painters who turned out devotional images for the New World.

Puerto Rico has a tradition of life-size religious figures, but more typical are the santos for the house shrine. Representing a person’s birth saint or the patron saint of a village, these figures are seldom more than 30 cm (12 in) high and are often smaller. They were made either by professional santeros or by the most skilled member of a family, and the carver invested meticulous care to ensure that the saint’s identifying symbol was made clear.

Although the santos were originally polychromed, many of the older ones that have long been handled and cherished have lost their paint and grown dark with age.

F

African Influences

The earlier assumption that when slaves were brought to the United States from Africa they came culturally empty-handed has now been exploded. The contributions of African tradition in work songs, blues, jazz, in certain musical instruments (the banjo, for example), and in folk narrative were beginning to be recognized in the 1930s. Only in the ‘60s and ‘70s, however, were the more subtle relationships to African visual arts identified. This recognition came partly as a result of long-overdue unified study of the areas of American folk art that most clearly reveal veins of African culture: basketry, musical instruments, quilts, ceramics, wood sculpture, ironwork, and grave decorations.

Of these, certainly woodcarving is the most widespread. Carved canes with snakes and alligators climbing up toward the handle, which was frequently a human head, are popular and are still being made. Plenty of other examples of carved figures and architectural carvings that spread across the South are also available: a cigar-store figure dated about 1800, a carved “throne” for a Presbyterian church, and any number of examples of minisculpture. They add up to a distinctive segment of American folk art, and all contain strong African echoes.

IV

Forms of Folk Art

North American folk art was expressed in a variety of forms: painting, in both portraiture and landscape; carving, in stone, wood, metal, and ivory; pottery in profusion; and needlework, ranging from quilts and samplers to embroidered pictures.

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