III.

Styles and Traditions

In the United States folk art plays a major role in defining what is perceived as a quintessential American domestic style. After Independence (see Declaration of Independence), the newly constituted United States sought a national style that would embody an amalgam of the many diverse folk traditions that the early settlers had brought with them. Today certain traditions of North American folk art have acquired the status of national icons (and command high prices at auction), notably the austerely graceful furniture produced in the Shaker community or the quilts made by the Amish women of Pennsylvania, with their beautifully balanced colour schemes and geometric designs.

Many of these traditions have a European lineage that can be traced to settlers from the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, and elsewhere. These people, a very heterogeneous “folk” were originally simply trying to re-create surroundings in the New World by using the art styles and craft skills that they had brought with them. In America, distinct regional folk-art traditions that in Europe had persisted for centuries were soon influenced both by each other and by the new environment. On the East Coast, wood was plentiful and was used for parts of buildings that in Europe would have been constructed of stone or brick. Surviving American houses of the 17th century clearly show the development from the imitation of European styles to a distinctive new idiom.

In Latin America, particularly Mexico, the fusion of Catholicism with indigenous customs and festivals has produced a particularly exuberant folk art. This is seen nowhere more clearly than in the festival of the Day of the Dead, which is celebrated with striking and elaborate skeletal figures some life-size, some made as toys in pottery or papier-mâché and dressed in brightly coloured fabrics. Other figures, such as that of Judas, are made for feast days more closely associated with Christianity. The retablo (an ex-voto painting of a religious figure) is another outstanding form of folk art in Mexico and the south-western United States.

In England the term “folk” carries overtones of a pre-industrial agricultural idyll, simple life, imagined to have existed before the Industrial Revolution, to which the middle classes of the 19th and 20th centuries looked back with yearning. Yet some of the most vital English folk art, for example the decorative painting and ropework found on canal narrowboats or the carved and pointed horses on steam-powered fairground carousels, belong to an industrialized, essentially urban world. There are rich traditions associated with particular trades and occupations, such as the straw roof ornaments created by thatchers, decorated and beautifully fitted out gypsy caravans, and the many objects produced by mariners that range from carved whalebone (scrimshaw) to ships in bottles. Some industrially produced pottery, such as the glazed earthenware Staffordshire figures, has the colouring and naive vigour of folk art.

Eastern European folk art has a very varied repertoire of designs, many of which can be traced to Classical of Islamic motifs. A bold graphic element is especially strong in the folk art of Russia, which has been open to influences both from the West and, via the ancient Silk Route, from East Asia. Folk art in Russia has long played a role in different political agendas: during the 19th century the folk idiom was seen as a virile symbol of imperial Russian nationhood, and at the time of the Russian Revolution, artists and designers adapted elements of folk art to express the new political order.

Many museums worldwide have good collections of folk art, and nation museums dedicated to folk art include the Museums of Folk Art, Moscow; Museo de Arte Popular, Mexico City; Museum of American Folk Art, New York; Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde, Munich; Museum für Volksunde, Vienna; and Museo Nazionale delle Arti e delle Tradizioni Popolari, Rome.