“I want my work to talk to the ordinary cowhand, as well as to experts who know a good deal about painting, in the same way that art of the Italian Renaissance talks to everyone.” If Harry Jackson, the painter of pictures of life on the range, had been shown this statement a dozen years ago and told that he himself would utter it in 1967, he would undoubtedly have laughed derisively. His reaction would not have been surprising, for in the late nineteen forties and early fifties, Harry Jackson was a member of that most un-Italian-Renaissance school of painting, Abstract Expressionism. Like many artists in the immediate postwar years, he had found traditional American painting dull and uninteresting and had turned elsewhere for inspiration, particularly to the French painter Matisse and the American drip-and-dribble master Jackson Pollock. His own work, brightly colored and fashionably abstract, had earned him two important exhibitions in New York and a leading critic’s encomium: “most talented young painter in America.” Yet as soon as success as a modernist was his, Harry Jackson rejected it and sought other paths.
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January 2011
Written history is fiiirly manageable stuff. The facts that are known can be artfully arranged to conceal those that are not known, or anyway to make them less noticeable. Awkward questions can be left unanswered just by leaving them unasked.
Historical photographs are quite another matter. The camera lens makes an instantaneous statement of fact, often a very comprehensive one. Elusive details that nobody present would otherwise have remembered, or would have agreed on if he had remembered, are caught at a single, irrefutable wink. There they are, quietly but stubbornly correcting the subjective impressions of partisan reporters; visual shards for the reconstruction of “what really happened.”
Yet this sometimes leads to pu/zles and surprises. It is a commonplace that ten minutes after an accident you can get ten different versions of the event, depending on whom you query; but if someone happened to take a photograph at just the right moment, you might think the facts would arrange themselves in a straightforward way. They don’t always clo so.
The most famous, or infamous, traitor in American history was Major General Benedict Arnold—a brilliant officer, a whirlwind hero, a trusted military comrade of George Washington’s. The culmination of his treachery was a plot to deliver up West Point, America’s strongest and most important fortification, to the British. AMERICAN HERITAGE presents in this issue two segments of Benedict Arnold’s complex story. “How the Traitor Was Unmasked,” by James Thomas Flexner, is the exciting and moving account of General Washington’s discovery of his friend’s “villainous perfidy”—an excerpt from Mr. Flexner’s book, George Washington in the American Revolution, to be published early in 1968 by Little, Brown and Company.
Ulysses S. Grunt never said much during his brief stay at Oak Bluffs. He rode about in a carriage with Mrs. Grant, waving to the crowds; he watched the fireworks from a balcony at Dr. Tucker’s cottage, and he attended Sunday services at the Methodist tabernacle. According to one of his pastors, he found his peace with God at that meeting, but Grant himself never said whether that was so, and nobody seemed disappointed. Nobody expected him to say much of anything. What really counted was that he, the President of the United States, was there, at Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. And for anyone who likes to see the people of history make a highly appropriate entrance, even if only on a very small stage, it is a fine thing that he cruised over that August afternoon aboard Lincoln’s old steamer, River Queen.
As much as it depends on its paper and ink, this magazine, like all books and periodicals published in this country, owes its continuing existence to the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees freedom of speech and the press, and to the Fourteenth, which requires the states to respect the same rights. Whenever a threat to these liberties arises, therefore, we must resist it. For this reason AMERICAN HERITAGE and its editor have become involved, together with a great many eminent historians, in one of the most curious legal cases in recent years, that of Frick v. Stevens.