What if Jackson Pollock hadn't been born in Cody, Wyoming, but rather Moulins sur Allier in France? Would critics and enthusiasts have written paeans to the artist's early years in the Auvergne? Would they have suggested that the French notion of rural expanse contributed to works that won the affection of cosmopolitan Paris? Would Pollock's work be considered the pinnacle of French rather than American abstraction, the successor to the French modernists? Or would his work have given Parisian gallery-goers the nagging feeling that something was amiss, that Pollock seemed out of place somehow?
I'm roughly paraphrasing the question Adam Gopnik raised to illustrate his lecture for the American Art in a Global Context: An International Symposium, hosted by SAAM. It was a hypothetical he borrowed, in fact, from his brother Blake Gopnik, chief critic for the Washington Post. In is opening remarks, Adam asked: How often do you wake up and feel compelled to wade into a debate between your little brother and a conservative New York Times columnist?
Adam Gopnik, a writer for the New Yorker and author of books on Paris and fatherhood, refers to a newsprint dialogue that followed American Art's July opening between his brother Blake and David Brooks, opinion columnist for the New York Times. Blake Gopnik wrote: "The [Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery] don't manage to elucidate some essentially American culture — because no such thing can or should exist, especially in a country as young and big and plural as this one. David Brooks responded: "Blake Gopnik spoke for the art establishment in his review of the museums in The Washington Post, arguing that there is no essentially American culture — no transcendent thing we Americans share simply because we happen to inhabit the same nation-state. . . . But most people who tour these museums will feel a transcendent thing called Americanness deep in their bones.
