In response to European assertions in the 18th and 19th centuries that Americans had no aptitude for the arts Tocqueville investigated the claim. It was because Americans were so preoccupied with the pursuit of their material well-being, he concluded that they didn't have an inclination for artistic endeavors. Tocqueville viewed it as inevitable, however, that once America slowed their material and economic expansion they would match European artistic and intellectual abilities, since he did not believe that Americans were intrinsically and different from Europeans. The title of his chapter on this topic is, “How the example of the Americans does not prove that a democratic people can have no aptitude for science, literature, or the arts.” Since Tocqueville's time, American art has indeed come into its own. Paris, used to be the aesthetic magnet and the heart of the art world in the second half of the 19th century. 100 years later, New York would become the epicenter of the global art world. In this chapter, I'd like to give you a taste, not only of American art through French eyes, as well as French art through American eyes, but also allude to the abundance of materials, people and aesthetic movements that flowed back and forth across the Atlantic, and made it ultimately impossible today to identify a distinct American or French school of art. If you ask anyone of any nationality what is the greatest museum of art in the world, many would probably respond the Louvre. In a way the Louvre is not a French museum but a universal one. Whether or not you've had the chance to visit it yet, it belongs to everyone as much as it belongs to any French person. The Louvre's collection attracts millions of visitors a year. More foreigners than French because there simply aren't enough French people to match the throngs of foreign visitors waiting on long lines to get into the Louvre daily. I'm always over joyed to see lines of people to get into museums. It reassures me that we haven't all become uncultured blockheads. In this sense, I guess I share a certain snobbism with George Duhamel, whom we met in chapter four on capitalism. Duhamel detested the idea of long lines of people waiting to get into the cinema, which he considered to be artificial anti culture. But he would not have said the same of museum queues. The Louvre has attracted many American visitors. In 1854, during her book tour for Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote about her first goal upon arrival in Paris. Quote, “It was, then, with a thrill almost of awe that I approached the Louvre. Here, perhaps, said I to myself, I shall answer, fully, the question that has long wrought within my soul, what is art and what can it do?” Henry James said in 1887, quote, “it's sounds like a paradox, but it is a simple truth that when today we look for American art, we find it mainly in Paris. When we find it out of Paris, we at least find a great deal of Paris in it.” Many American Artists in the 19th and 20th centuries went to France to study with French teachers, mingle with French artists, and imbibe French artistic life. John Singer Sargent showed his art at salons in the 1870s and 80s, and many American women artists found their way into studios and salons and produced prize winning work. And like French and other foreigners, American artists spent long hours in the Louvre and other museums to observe and copy the masterpieces on the walls. Take a look at American artist Winslow Homer's sketch, Copistes au Louvre, which appeared in an 1868 monthly of the widely circulating, Harper's Weekly. And observe this grand tableau by Samuel Morse called La Galerie du Louvre. Inventor of the eponymous code, Morse had founded the National Academy of Design in New York in the 1820s and was the first to teach art history in the United States. Exposing American artists to the French art and artists he knew firsthand. Morse's Tour de Force painting features an image of himself in the foreground with a copyist. In the bottom left, we recognize James Fenimore Cooper with his wife and daughter, symbolizing the multiple interactions of French and American art forms. This painting blew away the American public by its complexity, and enhanced the aura of French museums. Mary Cassatt was the only American invited to show her work at the impressionist salons in France. After her encounters with discrimination in the US against women artists, Cassatt lived most of her life in France. Where she also met anti-women resistance in the art world, but managed to forge a successful artistic career. She nurtured other young American artists in her wake. And she's buried in France. Cassatt�s friend, the well known French artist, Degas, did a painting of her called Mary Cassatt au Louvre. This portrait of an American artist is a testament to the rising stature of American art through French eyes. Hundreds of American artists have had the honor of having their artworks displayed in the Louvre during their own time. John Vanderlyn was the first in 1800. At the turn of the 20th century, a prosperous American elite had emerged and longed to spend their money in ways that increased their cultural capital. Mary Cassatt played an instrumental role as an intermediary between French artists and American collectors. She guided American patron's interests in buying French and European contemporary art, and urged that their collections later be donated. Many of these private collections form the foundations of the great American museums of today. Though Cassatt was singularly well placed as a Parisian insider, a successful artist and a member of Philadelphia's highest social class to be surely the most important American artist in this exchange she was not the only one. Art historian Christopher Realpel summarizes American artists in the 19th Century Paris can be said to have played a role in shaping the superlative collections of modern French paintings that are a distinctive feature of America's major art museums today. Nearly all the big museums in major US cities opened in the 19th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1870. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, in 1870. The Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1876. And the Art Institute of Chicago in 1879. American museums modeled themselves on European museums. And particularly, on the Louvre, as the epitome of what a museum should be. They borrowed or purchased works from the Louvre and sought advice from it's curators. Look at this image of the main Fifth Avenue grand staircase in New York's Metropolitan museum. Inspired by the Louvre's Daru staircase that leads up to the sculpture of Winged Victory of Samothrace It wasn't until after 1945 that New York replaced Paris as the world capital of art. And throughout the 20th century, French influences on American artistic movements, as well as on museum curation, were significant. In time, French artists would come to observe American art in the US, inverting the magnetic travel pattern. Today, French and American artists, artworks, patrons, and museum collections cross the Atlantic in round trip swirls of fluidity. In my hometown of Houston, Texas, the Menil Collection is one of our most cherished museums. Founded in 1987 by Dominique and Jean de Menil, a French couple who lived their adult lives in Houston, the Menil collection is singularly defined by these tastemakers' collecting with an emphasis on modern art, which was originally ignored by some French museums. The Menils were strong early supporters of American artists such as Mark Rothko. Dominique de Menil played a critical role in the creation of the museum of modern art in Paris known as the Pompidou and donated several American paintings to this national French institution. In the 21st century, Houston philanthropists have brought American private patronage practices across the Atlantic and created the charitable organization called American Friends of the Louvre. Which directly funds Louvre projects and aims to stimulate Franco American collaboration among art institutions. In 2006 the Louvre organized an exhibition called American Artists and the Louvre. The catalog proclaims that the exhibition underlines the importance of confrontation of cultures, reinforces the conviction that art is a key factor of diversity and of universal harmony glorifies the great European museum of the Louvre and its collection of masters. Which has been a veritable talisman in the eyes of American artists all throughout the 19th and 20th century. Let's end this chapter on French and American artistic exchange with a salute to Lady Liberty. The majestic statue by the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi that watches over New York harbor. She was a gift from the people of France to the United States many years in the making and dedicated in 1886. What was the impulse behind this sculpted gift? It was partly a French salute to the United States for its successful conclusion of the Civil War and partly a gesture of alliance from France's recently established Third Republic regime to America's 100-year-old democracy. Symbolic of the two nations' friendship, the Statue of Liberty was in many ways a collaborative project. It was financed by both French and Americans, and the American ambassador to France symbolically placed the first rivet on the Statute on its big toe. Few American's know that a smaller replica of the statue sits in Siene river in Paris. Initiated by the American ex-patriots in France, and french ex-pats in America, built by Bartholdi and inaugurated three years after New York's unveiling. The statue in France contains inscriptions commemorating the dates of the American and the French revolutions. Art and democracy together. Tocqueville would be delighted.
