A peep into American folk art collecting history

An interesting research-based book that peeps into the glorious past of American folk art, also explores some of its negative aspects. On the one hand, it takes us through the wonderful world of folk-art collectors who had the vision to see the hidden beauty and value of the fascinating folk-art portraits, carvings etc, hitherto relegated by mainstream America to barns, dustbins and attics.

On the other hand, it rekindles debate over the apparently ‘seamy underbelly’ of the process of folk-art collecting, as The New York Times columnist Eve M. Kahn, testifies to the ‘Carousel of misbehavior in the folk art world, wherein owners have somewhat muddied the attributions of works over the past century or so; added irrelevant flourishes to those quaint, old woodcarvings, and inadvertently let paint spatters gather on carelessly stored canvases.

Providing a backgrounder to , ‘A Kind of Archeology: Collecting American Folk Art, 1876-1976’ (Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press; October, 2011; 464 pages; 223 color illustrations; 139 b & w illus.; Price: $ 65), an accompanying note elaborates: “It begins by examining the evolution of the concept of folk art, relating it to 19th- and early 20th-century movements like romanticism, nationalism, arts and crafts, and colonial revivalism.

Four sections follow, each presenting a category of collector-antiquarian and ethnologist, modernist, decorator and aesthete, and patriot and nationalist-and offering portraits of individual collectors and dealers. In fact, going beyond merely encapsulating the timeline of collection and collectors, the art historian has painstakingly pinpointed the fallacies of certain culture culprits in her detailed documentation, based on an extensive research for over decade and a half. For this, she pored through museum and several family archives.

It was possible for Ms. Stillinger to report on owners’ misdeeds, intentional or otherwise since ‘a majority of them are no more alive,’ she stated in a recent interview, adding, ‘you only hope you will not offend their descendants.’ The author also notes of museum administrators’ bad behavior. The American Folk Art Museum was so haphazardly managed in the mid-1970s that the institution had to pay off a pile of debts by disposing large part of its permanent collection.