Who are we?

Thinking back about the last post, about how a society/culture/tribe identifies with its art, I began to consider what this meant for America.

Most of our cultural landmarks have not been in the visual arts, for one thing. When I think of American contributions to world culture, I think musically: jazz, blues, gospel, rock, Broadway show tunes. Then there are the cultural identifiers which perhaps the rest of the world might not celebrate: baseball, rodeo, the more fanciful forms of American roadside architecture, Las Vegas.

There is a lot of great American art: the paintings of Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, Homer Winslow. The photographs of Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams. The architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. All to name just a tiny fraction of America's visual cultural riches. But what is America's Mona Lisa*? Our Parthenon?

There are a few paintings, several sculptures, a feat of engineering, and a temple that I think fit the bill.

The paintings would be Gilbert Stuart's portrait of George Washington (which we have because Dolley Madison recognized iconic art when she saw it and saved it from the marauding British), Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware, and perhaps, Grant Wood's American Gothic.**

The sculpture would be Mount Rushmore, the Gateway Arch (is it sculpture? is it architecture?), and most importantly, the Statue of Liberty. How lovely that, in a nation of immigrants, the most significant piece of public art in the country should herself be an immigrant.

The engineering feat? That would be the Golden Gate Bridge, which holds a place in American imagination far beyond its utility as a means of getting from the City by the Bay to Sausalito. (Okay, I'm a Northern Californian. I'm biased.)

And the temple would be the Lincoln Memorial.***

What am I missing? What other pieces of visual art are quintessentially American?




* In 1911, Vincent Perugia stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre and brought it back with him to Florence. In France the crime was seen as a national calamity; in Italy, the thief was viewed as a popular hero.

** No, I'm not entirely serious with that last one.

***I'm not including the White House or Capitol: they are primarily interesting for political reasons.