Craft by Glenn Adamson

Author:Glenn Adamson [Adamson, Glenn]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Hazel Hyde, Billethead from Ship “Favorite,” 1938. Index of American Design, National Gallery of Art.

The index, compiled between 1935 and 1942, ultimately included more than eighteen thousand watercolor renderings, executed by a paid staff of about four hundred people—mostly commercial illustrators, who were relieved to have the work. Cahill described this huge undertaking as a “search for a usable past … a wellspring to which workers in all the arts might turn for a renewed sense of native traditions in design.”18 That phrase, “a usable past,” was borrowed from Van Wyck Brooks’s essay of 1918. But Cahill was no revivalist, like the reformers of the Southern Highlands, or even his own patrons, the Rockefellers. He was interested in form, not theater. Each object in the index was shown floating in a void of space, much in the way that artworks were held up for admiration in MoMA’s white-walled galleries. This was exactly the opposite of a fully appointed period room or a historic museum with costumed interpreters. Cahill did not want to re-create the past. He simply thought that a vital American art could grow only if it were connected to authentic roots; otherwise, it would be as artificial as anything made in a factory. Some years later, in a novel called The Shadow of My Hand, he put the point like this: “Someone had to be an old-days man, otherwise people would forget, and wouldn’t really know what they come out of. Like kittens born in a bake oven growing up to think they were biscuits.”19

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