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Collecting the Popular and the Vernacular
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19801 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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5 / 1991 |
1,310 Words |
| Author
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Judith Bell
Judith Bell is an art historian and novelist based in
Arlington, Virginia. |
"I don't feel that I own the collection," Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr., has said of the approximately three thousand folk art objects he has acquired over the past four decades. "I don't believe that in theory any individual can or should own art. We as collectors are curators and conservators. Art belongs to history." Over the years Hemphill has repeatedly proven his point, making his collection available to those wanting to see it, loaning a great many of his things to exhibitions. In 1986, he decided to place the core of his collection in the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. With the exhibition Made with Passion: The Hemphill Folk Art Collection, the museum recently celebrated one of the most significant acquisitions in its history.
Among the 199 objects forming this extraordinary survey of the folk art created in America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are monumental "tin men" trade signs, visionary and political painting, whirligigs, tattoo designs, fraternal objects, bottle cap animals, carvings, canes, and face jugs. These objects have been made, for the most part, by what Hemphill has called "truly American folk: everyday people out of ordinary life, city and suburban, small town and country folk, who are generally unaware of professional art--its trained artists, trends, intentions, theories, and developments." These are artists who have invented "from scratch," drawing upon their experiences and the materials in their immediate environment. Consequently, many of the works--be they a wood chair turned and stained to resemble a banjo, a vase fashioned out of sewer pipe, or a Mickey Mouse kachina doll--explode with the energy of their makers' underlying passions and ideas.
Pioneer days
Through his far-reaching interests Hemphill has gradually redefined not only the collecting of folk art but folk art itself, extending the existing boundaries beyond the historical and the aesthetic to embrace a whole new area of creative output that previously had been ignored or overlooked. When he began collecting around 1950, established perceptions held that folk art had died out after 1875, when industrialization and mass production ended the pioneer days and the era of handcraft. Nineteenth-century objects such as weather vanes, mourning pictures, and trade signs were seen as valid aesthetic expressions of the vanished craft tradition. Pioneering collectors like Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and Col. and Mrs. Edgar Garbisch, who began collecting in the twenties, had followed this idea closely, as did many collectors of Hemphill's generation. Hemphill broke away, proceeding to collect without regard
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