Asa Ames at the American Folk Art Museum
Asa Ames, a little known American sculptor, worked mostly from life, carving and painting three-dimensional wood portraits of family and friends. When he died of consumption in 1851, at the age of 27, he left behind 12 or 13 sculptures, most made during the last four or five years of his short life. Eight of these works form a stunning little show at the American Folk Art Museum.
“Seated Female Figure with Lamb and Cup” (April 1850)
The art, artifacts and objects produced in America during the first half of the 19th century constitute something of an artistic golden age, of people making lots of different kinds of things by hand — for pleasure, use, profit or a combination of the three. Their efforts constitute an amazing tribute to their collective spirit, imagination and ingenuity as well as the basic human need for beauty and decoration — a time when creativity was widespread, initiative was bottom-up and per capita participation was high.
“Naked Child” (June 1849)
Much about Ames’s life remains a mystery. It is thought that he may have spent time at sea and might have apprenticed to a carver of ships’ figureheads or trade figures.
Until 25 years ago, Ames’s work, when noticed at all, was probably lumped into this genre. But in 1981 the American Folk Art Museum received an anonymous work as a gift: a painted wood sculpture of a young girl whose head is painted with a phrenology chart. Stacy C. Hollander, the museum’s senior curator and director of exhibitions, began to research it and ultimately attributed it to Ames. In 1982 Jack T. Ericson, an antiques dealer, culminated 12 years of research with an article on Ames in Antiques magazine that reproduced the works that could be traced or attributed to him. It included the folk art museum’s piece, which is thought to have been made at the end of Ames’s life, when he was ill and living with a doctor who practiced alternative medicine.
One of the show’s standouts was discovered only in 2003, in the basement of the Boulder History Museum in Boulder, Colo. It is a full-length portrait of Susan Ames, the daughter of his brother Henry G. Ames that Asa made, and signed, in December 1849. Wearing a purple dress, Susan stands staunch and solemn, looking as if posing were not much fun. The colors and details imbue the entire sculpture with the intensity of Susan’s expression.
There is a familial resemblance both among the sculptures and between them and the only known photograph of the artist. Two of the best pieces in the show are robust sculptures of young men who may be Ames’s brothers or the artist himself.
“Head of a Boy” shows a teen-ager with carefully combed hair (back from the brow, but forward on the sides), a spiffy black jacket and tie and a starchy white shirt. His dark focused eyes and slightly pursed lips brim with youthful ambition and undashed hope; he seems to be practicing to look like a judge or senator.
“Head of a Boy”
The slightly fairer subject of “Bust of a Young Man” is even more lifelike; here the pursed lips seem about to speak. Ames’s inspirations clearly included the portraits that itinerant painters were making during this period, but taking these wonderfully stiff, often emotionally fraught images into three dimensions gave them an added sense of life and realism. In their close-to-life stillness the best of them are really like 19th-century photographs, with which Ames had at least one close encounter.
“Bust of a Young Man”
A further testimony to his ambition, this encounter yielded a strange, beautiful and overpopulated daguerreotype portrait of the artist as a serious young artist. Ames is in his Sunday best, working intently on the bust of a man. Three sculptures look on from the upper right: a pudgy baby with a drape of real fabric and the busts of two other children in carved, off- the- shoulder togas.
The busts teeter on a sculpting pedestal beneath which is the young man whose portrait bust Ames works on. The carving of a hand and real-looking bass viol visible behind this party of five increase the sense of elaborate stage-managing. Ames was probably ill when this photograph was made, and perhaps he knew that obscurity threatened. Still, when the time came — and it has come — he intended to be ready for his close-up. Via N.Y. Times
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