Folk Art: A Swedish Connection

G. CARL RUTBERG

n early fall 1922, Holger Cahill (1887-1960) boarded a Swedish American Line steamship, possibly the S/S , in IGothenburg, , to return to New York after a four-month stay. He had gone to this Nordic country on behalf of the American- Swedish News Exchange in order to write about Swedish culture. I imagine, however, as he went up on deck and looked west, as the ship slowly cruised through the Swedish archipelago, that Cahill was thinking more about American art. When he left New York earlier that summer, he had been deeply involved in a couple of art exhibits organized by the progressive Society of Independent Artists. The group was fighting the old, es• tablished, European-influenced, academy-produced art and promot• ing the new, the modern, the American. But America lacked aes• thetic traditions, and how could new art develop if it had no roots from which to grow? How could the public be convinced that Ameri• can artists could create art of equal or higher quality than their European colleagues? Cahill understood that the present needed a past. And he had now found such a past, or at least the idea for it, in a couple of Swedish . Folk art, Cahill believed, might just prove that there was such a thing as an American aesthetic tradition, prove that there was an American art. When Cahill disembarked at Pier 97 in New York a week later, he went straight to work, and "in one generation a body of work [folk art] that had little market value or historical significance was located,

G. CARL RUTBERG holds degrees from Pratt Institute and the Stockholm School of Economics, as well as a studies certificate. He has served as a member of the Board of Governors of the American-Swedish Historical Museum in Philadelphia and as a member of the board of SAHS. For five years he was supervisory curator of exhibits at Ellis Island. He is currently working on a Ph.D. in American history at NYU. His dissertation is on Holger Cahill. 154 named, collected, researched, put into market play, and shown in museums across the country."1 There is little doubt that Cahill was instrumental in establishing folk art in America. He curated not the first, but the most important folk art exhibits: American Primitives at the Newark Museum (1930); American Folk Sculpture, also at the Newark Museum (1931); and the pivotal American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man 1750-1900 at the Museum of Modern Art (1932). Cahill wrote the catalogs to these exhibits as well as a number of articles, and he remains today the most frequently cited authority on American folk art.2 Cahill was first introduced to primitive American art by a few of his artist friends during the late 1910s.3 What is less understood, though hopefully this article will change that, is that it was in Sweden that Cahill first realized the potential of folk art as a unique art form. It was in Swedish museums that he found curators treating folk art as seriously and with the same reverence as they would fine art. And it was in Sweden that he first understood that high quality folk art could capture a nation's artistic soul. As Cahill said thirty-five years after his Swedish trip, "The beginning of my interest in folk art, as such, was in Europe in the summer of 1922, in Sweden. . . . Seeing all those costumes, seeing the museums, seeing the Nordiska Museet/ Nordic Museum and seeing created an interest in me in folk art, because I saw the Swedes had done a great deal about it."4

EDGAR HOLGER CAHILL

Edgar Holger Cahill—Eddie to his friends, Holger to his read• ers—was born in Iceland in 1887 as Sveinn Kristjan Bjarnarson. When he was two years old the family emigrated to Canada and soon thereafter to North Dakota, where Cahill spent his rather miser• able childhood. What sustained him during these years was the com• fort he found in the written word. His love for books came early, perhaps via his Icelandic mother, who recited her own poetry to her young son. He read anything and everything he could lay his hands on, a habit that remained with him throughout his life. At some point in his early teens Cahill worked in Cleveland, where he met two young men who would not stop talking about the 155 wonders of New York City. He became curious and decided to go for it. He had no money, of course, but he knew of a train that would let him ride for free, or at least let him ride between the cars for free. Cahill jumped on it and held on for his life, just like a sailor holds on to the rig of his ship during a raging Atlantic storm. He arrived in Jersey City, where he met a man who needed an able young man to take two horses on barge over to Brooklyn. Cahill took the job, which paid fifty cents. He got to Brooklyn and walked up to the Brooklyn Bridge. And then, crossing the bridge as darkness fell, he entered a Manhattan that sparkled like a solitaire on a dowager's finger. "I got to New York at a late night hour, and I was fascinated by those lighted up buildings. I thought it was the most fascinating sight in the world."5 He had made it to New York on his own. He didn't owe anyone anything.6 Like many newcomers, Cahill struggled. He worked odd jobs at the same time as he tried to educate himself. He claimed to have graduated high school, but it is more likely that he had six or seven years of schooling and then only when there was no work for him to do on the farm. In New York he began to study aesthetics at Colum• bia University and journalism at New York University. He found a small room on McDougall Street in the heart of Greenwich Village and soon made friends with his artist neighbors. He often hung out at a bar called The Golden Swan, better known as the "Hell Hole," where he discussed the burning issues of the day with, among others, Eugene O'Neill. Some of his friends were begin• ning to find examples of early American art, simple and lacking in technical sophistication, perhaps, but striking nonetheless. One of these artists was Charles Sheeler, who, like Cahill, would become interested in finding artifacts "that historicized and validated modern•

istic aesthetics."7 Cahill hoped to make a living writing freelance articles for vari• ous art magazines and jumped into this field with the same determi• nation he had shown on that train to New York. He wrote reviews for the New York Post, the Nation, and the Freeman. And he wrote longer articles for Shadowland Magazine, a well-distributed movie magazine with mostly articles about movie stars. The editor also wanted some serious art discussions in his publication. "One of the 156 leading contemporary painters of today [1957], Clyfford Still, told me that my art articles in Shadowland were the first articles he had ever seen when he was a young man beginning to study art on the prairie."8 By 1920 Cahill had a well-established reputation both as a writer and as an art connoisseur, and in 1921 he became the public rela• tions director for the Society of Independent Artists, replacing Hamilton Easter Field. Cahill jumped at the opportunity to use his creativity and wit in order to lure New Yorkers to these exhibits. He also began to do publicity work for the Newark Museum in New Jersey. And then he came in contact with a small, rather obscure Swedish news agency.

THE AMERICAN-SWEDISH NEWS EXCHANGE

At the end of World War I American-Swedish relations were at a low point. Many Americans viewed Sweden's neutrality with suspi• cion and some even questioned the sincerity of the neutrality, believ• ing that Sweden, at least during the first years of the war, had sup• ported Germany. In 1919, therefore, discussions began in Stockholm focusing on how the relationship with America could improve. As a result of these discussions, the American-Swedish News Exchange was established towards the end of 1921. The Exchange came about through an unusual combination of private and government funds, with private industry paying for almost 80 percent of the Exchange's budget—at least for the first five years.9 Its first director was Dr. Borje Brilioth. Its office was located on Nassau Street, around the corner from Wall Street. A few years later the office was moved to Rockefeller Center, where it remained well into the 1950s. The American-Swedish News Exchange had a straightforward objective: provide as much information as possible regarding Sweden to the American public. It did this by placing articles about Sweden in American newspapers. This was not as difficult as it may sound, since most newspapers did not have a wide network of foreign corre• spondents, and therefore often welcomed any help they could get.10 Precisely how Cahill got involved with the Exchange is unclear. It is possible he tried to sell himself to the organization, but it is more 157 likely that the Exchange contacted him. On 19 February 1922 Cahill had, for example, published a full-page article in the New York Times called "Hanging out the Crepe for Europe," in which he wrote about some of the lesser-known European countries and their art.11 If it is unclear how the Exchange and Cahill met, it is certain that in the early summer of 1922 Cahill sailed to Sweden on behalf of the American-Swedish News Exchange. Most likely the Exchange paid for Cahill's trip as well as for the expenses that he incurred there. In return, Cahill would write articles, some for the Exchange12 and others that he would try to sell directly to American newspapers and magazines: "That's when I went to Sweden, in a journalistic capacity. I interviewed a great many people there. I interviewed Hjalmar Branting, who was the Socialist premier there. I interviewed Prince

Eugene, the king's brother, who was a great art collector."13

IN SWEDEN

Cahill must have been impressed as he walked along Strandvägen, Stockholm's Fifth Avenue, towards the Nordiska Museum: to the left of him were magnificent Beaux Arts apartment buildings and to the right open water. The museum was built to look like a seventeenth- century Danish castle. The only building in Stockholm that could compare in grandeur was the Royal Palace, but the palace housed the royal family and the Nordic Museum merely artifacts by and for the common man. However, as interesting as the building is, the real story is about the ideas that produced it and its content. The nineteenth century had, in many ways, been difficult for Sweden. First there were external pressures, such as those that led to Finland's annexation as a grand duchy by the Russians in 1809. Then there was a rising tide of nationalism, which led to Norway's indepen• dence in 1905. National and/or political conflicts in Germany, France, Italy, and Russia influenced affairs in many small European states. Internally, Sweden went through dramatic convulsions, including waves of migration to America. By the time Cahill arrived in Stockholm, some 1.2 million Swedes had emigrated. In addition, Sweden was fast becoming industrialized, and many were deserting the farm for the city. 158

Artur Hazelius (1833-1901) realized early that something had to be done or the Sweden he knew and loved would slowly disappear, never to be found again. During the 1870s, therefore, Hazelius began to travel around the country to collect a wide variety of artifacts in order to save them from loss or destruction in this age of alarming modernization. But Hazelius did not want to collect for the sake of collecting; he had a burning passion for education, and especially for adult education. He soon rented a space in downtown Stockholm, where he began to exhibit his collections. He decided to use the objects as props in large dioramas, much like the ones we see in natural history museums:

In some rooms he had created tableau-like interiors and land• scape views, made up of the objects he had collected and including figures in folk costumes. The exhibition was a great success with the public, and with it a new concept of display was born. This was 's first great contribution to the history of museums: creating entire historical interiors

using both objects and people.14

But mere objects were not enough for Hazelius; he wanted to preserve and display entire dwellings. As a result, in 1891 he founded one of the first outdoor museums in the world—Skansen (roughly meaning "fort"). "We shall rebuild the old farmstead. . . . People shall behave in these houses as they did before, the cat shall lie and purr by the stove, the animals shall graze on the meadow."I5Skansen is located a short walk from the Nordic Museum, and as Cahill walked there he could hardly have imagined that thirteen years later he would be working on the exhibits for one of the first and perhaps best-known American outdoor museums, Colonial Williamsburg. Hazelius soon outgrew the small space he had rented and set his mind on building the castle-like structure that we now know as the Nordiska Museum. By 1888 he had amassed enough funds to begin construction. The motto for the new museum would be "Know Thy Self." Hazelius wanted Skansen and the Nordic Museum to be an institution where Swedes could come to know their land and culture, both of which, he believed, were closely related.16 Hazelius had 159 national romantic ideas, and he was prone to oversell the heroic life of the common man, which, of course, in reality was more often harsh than blessed. When Hazelius died in 1901, the building was still under con• struction. It was another six years before it opened. And, as is often the case when a dynamic founder dies, the institution found itself without a clearly designated leader, and an internal struggle broke out. During this fight an interesting twist in this story of trans-Atlan• tic ideas took place. Two staff members suggested that the exhibits should be organized in groups according to the use of the objects. For example, fishing equipment should be exhibited in one place and all farm-related equipment in another. The men, however, had not thought of this idea themselves; rather, they had read about it in a report that the Smithsonian Institution in Washington had published in 1898.17 It would seem there is a tradition of museum concepts going back and forth over the Atlantic. Yet the new director, art historian Bernhard Salin, preferred a different plan. He wanted to place the object in the center. The exhibits would be organized on the basis of aesthetic principles, and some of the overly romanticized environments were removed.18 Systematic and scholarly research had always played an impor• tant role in the museum, and in 1913, when Gustaf Upmark became director, this was emphasized even further. Upmark was also an art historian with a passion for folk art. A couple of years later he instituted the Chair of the Nordic Museum and Comparative Folk Life Studies. The Nordic Museum then, in essence, became a mu• seum and research facility wrapped up in one:

Research into the growing collections proceeded along different lines. To begin with, during the decades around the turn of the century, the aim was to compile inventories and taxonomies. It was considered important to date the mate• rial; the older an artifact was, the more interesting and valu• able it was considered. . . . Increasingly there was also an attempt to determine who had created the different works. . . . One task of the early researchers into decorative peasant crafts was to distinguish the individual achievements, to de- 160

cipher signatures where they occurred, and to attribute works to different craftsmen on the basis of stylistic features and

peculiarities.19

When Holger Cahill opened the Nordic Museum's heavy doors, he saw for the first time an institution that collected, researched, and exhibited art works by the common man. Thirty-five years later he remembered the visit well: "The beginning of my interest in folk art, as such, was in Europe in the summer of 1922. Seeing all those costumes, seeing the museum, seeing the Nordiska Museet, and see• ing Skansen created an interest in me in folk art, because I saw the

Swedes had done a great deal about it."20 Cahill traveled the country like few Americans ever had. In Gothenburg, he remembered visiting a museum called Konstslöjd (roughly translated "art craft"). Today that museum is known as Röhsska Museet, and its focus is on design and crafts not only from Sweden but from countries around the world. He also visited Visby and recalled, "I even made a trip to an island in the middle of the Baltic called Visby [Cahill is, of course, referring to Gotland]. It was an August day. It was freezing cold. I was with some Swedes, and they insisted on driving me about twenty miles into the country side to see a folk art museum which had been built by a school teacher, at a place called Bunge."21 He traveled to Lappland. The American-Swedish News Exchange probably wanted him to visit a mine (remember, the Exchange was funded mostly by private industry), but Cahill ventured out in the wilderness in order to visit a Lapp village. He later described this excursion in a short story called "Fun," published in Scribner's Maga• zine in 1930: "Now he had seen it. That was the way things were up here. They kept themselves away from you and you had to go and find out about them. They acted shy, but when you got close to them you could see they had real stuff in them. They were worth knowing. These mountains. These people. God, what a Country!"22 Cahill returned to New York during the fall of 1922, but he was not quite done with Sweden. He had been hired by the 1923 Gothenburg Exhibition to do their publicity work in America. The main mission of the exhibit was to celebrate the three hundredth 161 anniversary of the founding of the city. The exhibit contained a large historic section, and extensive field work had been done in order to collect artifacts from throughout the region. There was also an inter• national exhibit in which the Unites States was represented. That the organizers hoped for American visitors is clear from this New York Times article from 9 July 1922 (a year before the exhibit opened): "Sweden is not a prohibition country and visitors can have any kind of drinks they care for. Both the steamship and hotel rates are very reasonable and traveling facilities in Sweden are good."23 The article is aptly named "Gottenburg's Coney Island," since the exhibit was held in the Liseberg amusement park. As a token of appreciation for his work, Cahill received a letter from the American-Swedish News Exchange's director, Borje Brilioth, in which he wrote,

This work of your's [sic] has undoubtedly in a large measure contributed in putting the exposition and Sweden in general on the map here and has given ample proof both of your good connections with the press and of your aptitude for international publicity work. I want to emphasize in particu• lar your wealth of good ideas and initiative in general which in my opinion should make your work a most valuable asset to any one seeking publicity in the press of this country or

abroad.24

Very little material has survived from this period of Cahill's life. He often moved and probably never thought that anyone ever would be interested in his stuff. The fact that he did save the above letter gives a clue to how much he valued it and his experience in Sweden.

BACK IN NEW YORK

The Swedish trip marked a turning point in Cahill's career. Prior to it he had been writing about art, but after the trip he began to handle the paintings, buy the art, and create the exhibits. Cahill now began to work full time at the Newark Museum, and with the mu• seum came its legendary progressive director, John Cotton Dana (1859-1929), who would until his death serve as a mentor to Cahill. 162

Cahill was in charge of public relations at the Newark Museum, but he also served as curator-at-large, specifically focusing on con• temporary art. In 1925, with very limited funds, the museum began to collect contemporary American art consistently. Four years later Cahill said, "There may be disagreement about the value of its [the museum's] collections, looked at from an aesthetic point of view. There can be little disagreement about their value in stimulating a

wider interest in the work of living American artists."25 In addition to advertising and curating, Cahill began to study a then-rarely consid• ered area now known as American folk art. It is important to note the close connection between Cahill's interest in folk art and in contemporary art. First, both genres are made in America, which may seem unnecessary to point out; but for Cahill—the Icelandic immigrant—America was important. Second, there were aesthetic similarities between the art produced by the common man and the art that his Village friends were creating. Finally, if the cultural elite of the time believed that there was an American aesthetic history, they would, Cahill thought, be much more likely to accept, buy, and exhibit contemporary art. That is why he was both buying contemporary art and researching folk art. He believed that "the creation of an aesthetic past had to be func• tional: their aim was, not to honor forefathers, but to bolster those in the present trying to do fresh and authentic American work."26 Cahill began by reading whatever he could find on the subject of primitive American art, but not much was yet written. He then, just as the Swedes had done, began to travel around the eastern seaboard to see what he could find. One of his first stops was at the Ogunquit Colony in Maine. This had been founded by the artist Hamilton Easter Field. "Field had for years decorated the fishing shacks clus• tered around Perkins Cove. . . . Cahill quickly made a connection between these artifacts and the collections of folk art he had recently seen in Europe."27 Cahill loved to tell stories of how he found examples of folk art. Here is one of his favorites:

I went through the place, and I came into a little room where the walls hadn't been cleaned or painted in probably 163

fifty years. There, on the wall, was that, "Glass Bowl with Fruit," in a gilt frame. I looked at it, and it had on it the figures 3-5-0, and no punctuation about it. ... I finally asked the girl who was in charge of the floor, "How much did you say that picture was?" She said, "Three fifty." Well, three fifty—whether it is $3.50 or $350, that still baffled me. . . . "I'm not sure I caught what you said about the price of that?" She said, "Three dollars and a half." On my way back to New York, I stopped at Ridgefield, Connecticut, where Charles Sheeler lived at that time. He's a very severe purist, the purist tradition in American painting. I said to him, "Charles, how would you like to have done this?" (Showing him the painting) He held it in his hands and looked at it and said,

"My God, I wish I could!"28

Cahill began to work with Edith Gregor Halpert, who owned the Downtown Gallery in New York City. The Downtown Gallery fo• cused on living artists (something rather unusual at that time), but Halpert soon developed a strong interest in folk art. Cahill's mentor and close friend John Cotton Dana died in 1929, after a long illness. Around the same time, Cahill decided to leave the Newark Mu• seum, perhaps in order to get more time to write. But the new director, Dana's old assistant, Beatrice Winser, persuaded Cahill to curate one more exhibit. This was called American Primitives, and it opened in 1930. It was not the first American folk art exhibit—the Whitney Studio Club had organized one in 1924—but it was the first folk art exhibit in a major museum with an accompanying catalog. The term folk art was not generally accepted, and Cahill instead decided to use the term primitive: "The word primitive is used as a term of convenience, and not to designate any particular school of American art, or any particular period. It is used to describe the work of simple people with no academic training and little book learning in art."29 The following year, Cahill curated another folk art exhibit at the Newark Museum, American Folk Sculptures. He also became a part• ner in Halpert's new gallery, The American Folk Art Gallery, located in two rooms above her old one. Not surprisingly, he had now be- 164 come something of an authority on the subject. He had curated two major exhibits, and written several articles, and was a partner in one of the few galleries that sold the stuff. One of Halpert's clients was Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. For a number of years she had been interested in American art, and now she became equally interested in folk art. The Rockefellers had an estate in Maine, and perhaps she had seen examples of the art form there. Whatever the case, she visited the American Folk Art Gallery, where Halpert introduced her to Cahill. It is not a coincidence that the three of them became comrades in arms: "Edith [Halpert] preached a form of cultural nationalism in devoting her life to the cause of American Artists. Such a passion— i.e. support of American art—would appeal to Abby [Rockefeller], who believed deeply in American creativity."30 Cahill now began to buy folk art for the Rockefellers' collection. On 13 October 1931, for example, the American Folk Art Gallery received a check for $5,000, and on 26 October another one for

$6,195, for purchases that Rockefeller had encouraged.31 By 1932 Cahill was well entangled in New York's art web, and when Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, called one day, Cahill did not think much about it. Barr needed help at MoMA. He was tired, overworked, and in a need of a long rest. Abby Rockefeller, who had been one of the founders of the museum in 1929, suggested that he go to Europe for a year. She also suggested that Cahill take his place at MoMA, and a Rockefeller suggestion had a tendency to become reality very quickly. Cahill, now MoMA's acting director, argued forcefully for a major folk art exhibit, and the board concurred. In 1932 Cahill was able to open American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man 1750-1900, the largest folk art exhibit ever organized. It seems as if Cahill had now settled on folk art as the preferred term: "The work of these men is folk art because it is the expression of the common people, made by them and intended for their use and enjoyment. It is not the expres• sion of professional artists made for a small cultured class, and it has little to do with the fashionable art of its period."32 After its New York debut, the show traveled to six cities. "It established American folk art as a force in art history that would 165

never again be taken lightly."33 Cahill had achieved his goal. It was clear that folk art now had become part of art history; or, as he wrote in the exhibit catalog, "This work gives a living quality to the story of American beginnings in the arts."34 When Cahill wrote the catalog, little if anything was known about the individual artists, and he realized that he needed not only the names but any information he could find regarding their lives for them to become accepted as artists. This was precisely the kind of research that the Nordiska Museum had done. For example, to find data on Joseph Picket, Cahill went down to New Hope, Pennsylva• nia: "Nobody could give me the exact dates, but one man told me he knew where Picket was buried! . . . When I got to this one [cemetery] in Hulmeville, I very quickly found not only his stone but his wife's stone. They were there side by side. That established imme• diately the dates of his birth and death. Then I talked to some of the old-timers there, and they told me that he had done his paintings mostly very late in life."35 When Barr came back from Europe a year later, Cahill left MoMA to try again to pursue his first love—writing. He could take pride that he had been a part of a group that had securely established folk art as part of American aesthetic history. But his life as a writer didn't last long. In the summer of 1935 Cahill was asked to come to a meeting in Washington. He went to what he thought would be a discussion about art. Little did he know that Harry Hopkins, the man the President had put in charge of the New Deal, had decided to offer Cahill the job of national director of the Federal Art Project under the Works Project Administration. Cahill was reluctant to accept. He didn't like Washington, and he wanted to write. But he had heard that the other candidate for the job was someone from the National Academy, and if he got the job, Cahill feared all unemployed artists would be forced to follow Academy principles and only paint realis• tic landscapes. Cahill further believed that he was being drafted into the New Deal army, and, after thinking about it for a week, he accepted. This is not the place to delve too deeply into the Federal Art Project (FAP) or the Works Project Administration (WPA), but one 166

cannot write about Holger Cahill and folk art without mentioning the Index of American Design. Cahill's mission at the FAP was to ensure that at least some of America's artists kept working through the Depression. The administration was not necessarily interested in art, but it was afraid that the knowledge that these artists had amassed would be lost and perhaps impossible to regain. The idea behind the FAP was to keep the artists working. In order to do so, Cahill came up with a number of ideas, one of which was the Index of American Design. Actually, the idea for the Index originated at the New York Public Library and its Picture Collection. A draft was produced by Ruth Reeves, a textile designer, and Romana Javitz, the superinten• dent of the NYPL's Picture Collection, that described the project as one "to make an historical, pictorial record of the daily life of the

American people."36 In essence, the Index killed two birds with one stone: it employed hundreds of artists, and it produced a visual record of America's material culture. As Cahill later commented, "No really comprehensive collection [of the visual arts] exist[ed] here such as one found in Germany before World War II and may still find

in Sweden."37 The Index was "set up in thirty five states and em• ployed an average of three hundred artists from the time it was organized in December 1935 until it was closed down shortly after

the United States entered the war in 1941 ."38 All in all, over 17,000 drawings were made of American decorative arts dating from before 1700 to about 1900. The collection is today stored under the aus• pices of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The idea behind the Index is remarkably similar to what Hazelius had tried to achieve some sixty years earlier at the Nordic Museum, and one could say that Cahill in the end was able to create an American equivalent of that wonderful place. However, rather than collect the real artifacts, Cahill had to settled for two-dimensional versions.

AMERICAN FOLK ART: THE SWEDISH CONNECTION

In 1998 Daniel T. Rodgers, professor of history at Princeton University, published a book called Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. In it he described the people and ideas that crossed the Atlantic from the 1870s through 1945. One of his main theses is 167

that some of these were the ideas that laid the groundwork for the New Deal. Rodgers clearly demonstrates how common it was for ideas to cross the Atlantic, and how we now perhaps have forgotten that under the notion of American exceptionalism. He does not specifically discuss art, though he does mention an exhibit that opened

at MoMA in 1932, focused on architecture and social housing.39 It was, of course, common for artists, curators, collectors, and dealers to go to Europe not only to buy art but also to get inspiration. Also, as this article demonstrates, Rodgers could have mentioned another of MoMA's 1932 exhibits, American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man 1750-1900, because it too had its roots in Europe. That Cahill was the dominant player in the fascinating story of how American folk art was discovered and institutionalized is clear. It is less known, however, that his inspiration came from the ground• breaking work of Artur Hazelius and the staff at the Nordic Museum and Skansen. The irony of this story is that the ideas that led to the discovery of American folk art did not originate, as one might have thought, in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania, by the coast of Maine, or in the cafes of Greenwich Village, but rather in the capital of Swe• den.

ENDNOTES

1. Wanda M. Corn, The Great American Thing, 319. 2. John Michael Vlach, "Holger Cahill as Folklorist," Journal of American Folklore 98 (1985): 388. 3. Corn, 294. 4. Holger Cahill, Reminiscences, Columbia University, Oral History Project, 1957, 192. These reminiscences are the result of a series of interviews with Cahill by Joan Pring, held between April and June 1957. 5. Ibid., 49. 6. It is not absolutely clear when Cahill arrived in New York. This is partly due to the fact that Cahill for many years claimed that he was born in 1893 rather than in 1887, which makes it difficult to set precise dates for his early years. Wendy Jeffers believes that he arrived in 1913. See "Holger Cahill and American Art," Archives of American Art Journal 31 (1991): 4. Others believe it was closer to 1905. See Vlach, "Holger Cahill as Folklorist," 148-62 and 151. 7. Corn, 295. 8. Cahill, Reminiscences, 107 168

9. Allan Kastrup, Med Sverige i Amerika (Malmö, Sweden: Norden, 1985), 30. The author of this article is responsible for the translated sections. 10. Ibid., 32. 11. Holger Cahill, "Gottenburg's Coney Island," The New York Times, 9 July 1922. 12. The American-Swedish News Exchange saved copies of all articles it placed in American newspapers. Where these copies are today is unclear. They are not at the Swedish Information Service in New York, and they are not at the Swedish National Archives in Stockholm. Chances are that they were thrown out, or sit in a box where no one can find them. 13. Cahill, Reminiscences, 108. 14. Arne Bjornstad, et al., Skansen: Traditional Swedish Style (London: Scala Publications, 1995), 7. 15. Ibid., 8. 16. The Nordiska Museet and Skansen were originally one institution un• der one leadership, but later split into two separate institutions. 17. Hans Medelius, et al., Nordiska Museet under 125 år. (Stockholm: Nordiska Museets Förlag, 1998), 141. The author of this article is responsible for the translated sections. 18. Staffan Carlen, Att Ställa ut Kultur (Stockholm: Carlsson Bokförlag, 1990), 106. The author of this article is responsible for the translated sections. 19. Barbro Klein and Mats Widbom, eds., Swedish Folk Art: All Tradition Is Change (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994), 25. 20. Cahill, Reminiscences, 190 21. Ibid., 193. 22. Holger Cahill, "Fun," Scribner's Magazine, 1930, 660. 23. Cahill, "Gottenburg's Coney Island." 24. Borje Brilioth, Letter to Holger Cahill, 28 August 1923. Cahill papers. New York Public Library, Box 1. 25. Holger Cahill, "The Museum and American Contemporary Art, " Cre¬ ative Art, March 1929. 26. Corn, 298. 27. Vlach, 148-62, 151. 28. Cahill, Reminiscences, 213. 29. Holger Cahill, American Primitives (Newark, N.J.: The Newark Museum, 1930), 7. 30. Bernice Kert, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: The Woman in the Family (New York: Random House, 1993), 254. 31. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Letters to the American Folk Art Gallery, 13 October 1931 and 26 October 1931. Rockefeller Archive Center, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller papers, Box 7, folder 88. 169

32. Holger Cahill, American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man 1750- 1900 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1932) 6. 33. Kert, 322. 34. Cahill, American Folk Art, 3. 35. Cahill, Reminiscences, 218. 36. William F. McDonald, Federal Relief Administration and the Arts (Ohio State University Press, 1969), 442. 37. Holger Cahill, The Index of American Design (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1950), 20. 38. Ibid., 24. 39. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1998), 406.