By Peter Walsh

The symbolism here can grate loudly against reality. Those panels extolling the creativity and stoic virtues of the American working class clash with the ways workers were actually treated during the Gilded Age.

The Dance of Life: Figure and Imagination in American Art 1876-1917, Yale University Art Gallery, through January 5, 2025

Edwin Austin Abbey, Study for The Hours in the Pennsylvania State Capitol, c. 1909–11. Oil on canvas. Photo: Yale University Art Gallery.

Overtly patriotic art has been out of fashion in the United States so long that it is almost out of living memory — since the 1930s, in fact, when Regionalism was the dominant school and the Depression-era Federal Art Project put unemployed artists to work creating murals for post offices, courthouses, public libraries, high schools, and the 1939 World’s Fair. That era’s last, lingering breath was Norman Rockwell’s small-town populism: family Thanksgiving feasts, returning veterans, Boy Scouts, and Fourth of July parades — a quiet, benign nationalism, free from the terrifying bombast of Communism and “we will bury you.”

The Dance of Life: Figure and Imagination in American Art 1876-1917 documents a very different moment in American history. The time span — starting from the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia, the first official world’s fair on US soil, marking 100 years since the Declaration of Independence, and ending with the American entry into World War I — is coextensive, more or less, with the so-called Gilded Age, a time of great American fortunes and ambitions: industrial, political, military, and cultural. After a century of coy isolationism, the United States was suddenly center stage and loving the attention. Anything seemed possible, even world power.

The Yale exhibition often refers to “the American Renaissance,” a confusing term partly because it has been also applied to a literary movement of a generation earlier and partly because it was not a revival of anything that had come before. Americans had been studying and working in Europe for generations, returning to paint portraits and landscapes for the new millionaires the continent turned out in unprecedented numbers, particularly in the aftermath of the Civil War. In one way, though, American art was indeed Renaissance-ready: this generation of artists and architects were obsessed with the Italian Renaissance of the 16th century, when the likes of Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Titian created, for public places, some of the greatest and most celebrated works in Western art. Like the Italian Renaissance, which reached back through the Middle Ages and even beyond the Roman Empire to revive the Greek idealization of the human form, this American Renaissance focused on the figure.

Exhibition labels make reference to “a wave of new public spaces” including “libraries, universities, and museums; state capitals, courthouses, and train stations; parks, squares, and world’s fairs.” Imitating the great art projects of the Renaissance church and the Italian city-states, these American builders, public or private, imagined grand decorations, created by the nation’s leading artists, to fill up all those freshly plastered, empty walls.

Edwin Austin Abbey, figure study for The Spirit of Vulcan: Genius of the Workers in Iron and Steel, in the rotunda of the Pennsylvania State Capitol at Harrisburg. Photo: Yale University

Sadly, the results were less than what was hoped for. Churches and religious buildings — the exhibition includes several works by John La Farge related to his famous decorations for Boston’s Trinity Church —  were able to draw on centuries of well-established, easily recognized imagery. Some works found some grounding in European legends and tales: Greek mythology, Shakespeare, and King Arthur. But the more explicitly American and secular projects frequently had to make things up. John Singer Sargent’s attempt to create a civic homage to religious freedom and pluralism at the Boston Public Library set off a huge controversy over its perceived antisemitism. Other projects concocted awkward neo-allegories: Science Revealing the Treasures of Earth, The Spirit of Vulcan: Genius of the Workers in Iron and Steel, The Apotheosis of Pennsylvania, Science Instructing Industry, The Progress of Civilization. These themes were all planted on thin soil; they would have had little resonance for the ordinary Americans for whom they were intended.

The symbolism here can grate loudly against reality. Those panels extolling the creativity and stoic virtues of the American working class clash with the ways workers were actually treated during the Gilded Age. This was a period of violent worker unrest and union suppression, time of the Haymarket Riots, the Boston Police Strike, the Homestead Massacre, the Pullman Strike, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. To break up unions and end strikes, Pinkerton agents and even Federal troops attacked and beat picketing workers and sometimes killed them. All of this terrorism the murals ignore. “Industry” itself was euphemistically personified in classical poses. In Kenyon Cox’s Science Instructing Industry, the financiers and robber barons who controlled American industry and their myriad employees are rolled into a single nude male, shyly reaching out to an open book held by the draped female figure of “Science.”

Trying to find a lingua franca, the artists in the exhibition tend instead to fall back on the monuments they had admired in Italy. Kenyon Cox’s “Study for Venice in the Walker Art Building, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine” hangs next to his “Study after Michelangelo’s Night,” revealing how closely Cox has modeled his figures and composition for Bowdoin on the Medici tomb Michelangelo designed in the church of San Lorenzo (which is in Florence, not Venice).

Edwin Austin Abbey’s grandiose Apotheosis of Pennsylvania, painted for the House Chamber in the Pennsylvania State Capitol, appears in numerous sketches. It is clearly based on Raphael’s long celebrated School of Athens in the Vatican. Instead of the Greek philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists like Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Pythagoras, and Archimedes that are featured in the Vatican work, in Harrisburg it is William Penn, Benjamin Franklin, and Robert Morris who preside in robes below a temple holding a statue of the “Genius of State.” Around them gathers an ill-matched, all male assemblage that includes Sir Walter Raleigh and other European explorers, Daniel Boone, military groups including a cluster of Civil War soldiers in Union uniforms, and, in a lower corner, scientists and the usual delegation from the working classes.

Edwin Austin Abbey, Compositional Study, for The Spirit of Light in the rotunda, Pennsylvania State Capitol, Harrisburg, c. 1902–08. Photo: Yale University

Few American painters ever mastered the techniques of true fresco, in which pigments brushed on wet plaster become an integral part of the wall and the composition can last centuries despite disasters raining around them, like the destruction of the refectory housing Leonardo’s Last Supper in a World War II allied bombing raid. Most of these American murals were painted in oils on large strips of canvas in the artist’s studio, then rolled up for transport to their destination and, once there, glued to the wall. Over the decades, varnishes darken with age and tobacco smoke. Damp causes paint to lift and flake off. Leaks behind the wall can set off mold; changes in heat and humidity can make the canvas stretch and contract and its painted surface crack. Neglected and rarely understood by their audiences, these works can decay and dissolve into the background, like a long discontinued style of faded wallpaper.

Henry Siddons Mowbray, Muse of Electricity, 1893. Photo: Yale University

The exhibition evasively acknowledges these problems when it says of these artists, “The clearest and most direct expressions of their ideas rested not in their large-scale commissions, which were mostly executed by teams of assistants, but in their preparatory studies and other iterations.” The drawings, watercolors, and oil sketches in this show certainly suggest this is true; in fact, the work is stronger and more satisfying the further you back away from the finished piece. As, reversing the order in which these studies were created, the costumes and allegories fade away, you are left with beautiful figure studies by talented and skillful artists of particular, living men and women, in all their American individuality

Best of all are the monuments that never put on Renaissance dress in the first place. A series of powerful bronze portrait heads of young African-American men, made by Augustus St. John as studies for the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on the Boston Common, are among the strongest works in the show, arresting because they are so vividly detailed. Instead of a gauzy neoclassical allegory, St. John brilliantly chose to depict Shaw and his battalion of Black men as real people, in their everyday uniforms, marching off to Civil War battlefields where many of them, including Shaw, heroically and unmetaphorically died.

Peter Walsh has worked as a staff member or consultant to such museums as the Harvard Art Museums, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Boston Athenaeum. He has published in American and European newspapers, journals, and in scholarly anthologies and has lectured at MIT, in New York, Milan, London, Los Angeles and many other venues. In recent years, he began a career as an actor and has since worked on more than 100 projects, including theater, national television, and award-winning films. He is completing a novel set in the 1960s.