In the 1930s Sidney Janis was a garmento and an art collector who joined the junior committee of The Museum of Modern Art, which actually organized and sponsored shows, including one of his own collection, which the museum people did feel weird about, so he agreed to take his name off it. And there was a show of what Janis called Primitive Art, because, as the Modernist thinking of the time went, self-taught painters had access to individualist intuition and aesthetic purity untainted by History and the Academy and the pollution of ever having stepped foot into a museum. And Janis became known for scouring the countryside and the outer boroughs, running down tips on self-taught artists, whose work he either bought up en masse, or whose careers he quietly shepherded into the galleries of his friends.
Anyway Janis found William Doriani’s paintings on a handrail on MacDougal Street during an art street fair in the Village, then he set him up with a show, and started hyping him as one of his Primitivist finds. Others include Morris Hirshfield and Grandma Moses [who, tbf, was getting art world recognition before Janis began promoting her.]
According to the only thing I can find instantly, Janis’s 12-page chapter on him in the 1942 exhibition catalogue They Taught Themselves: American Primitive Painters of the 20th Century, Doriani had been an opera singer, and—oh hey, just like Jasper Johns—he had a dream to make a painting, and then he woke up and painted it. That was in 1931. Many of Doriani’s paintings depicted theater, performance, and spectacle.
But the reason he painted Flag Day in 1935 was because when he returned to the US after studying and singing in Europe for 13 years, the day he got home was Flag Day. And he just loves America and a parade and the flag and Flag Day . “And,” Janis concluded, “if the marchers resemble French school boys doing the German goose-step, it is immaterial, for the flags they carry are unmistakable.”
Janis went on to become an extremely influential dealer—the only dealer, I think, who was also a MoMA trustee—and he and his wife donated around a hundred works to the museum in 1967, including Flag Day.
This dealer/trustee/donor thing, I knew all about, but not the Janis’s prewar history. Or Doriani, who I saw for the first time in a tumblr post a couple of weeks ago. [ZOMG look at this one some Janis heirs just donated to the Folk Art Museum, it’s title is Two Flags, but one of them is somehow not the Ukrainian flag of Doriani’s birth.]
I just wanted to post one quick blurb about one interesting painting, and now the rickety shallowness of this entire historiographic process just really bugs me.