American Progress is an 1872 painting by John Gast, a Prussian-born painter, printer, and lithographer who lived and worked most of his life during 1870s in Brooklyn, New York. American Progress, an allegory of manifest destiny, was widely disseminated in chromolithographic prints.
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The sky was never as beautiful as it was before 1492
Fuck this shit showing my ancestors as the darkness being pushed away.
It’s total propaganda, but viewing it now, I see it as a picture of the story Americans tell. Their shitty ideas of progress are highlighted - pollution, cars, use and abuse of the land.
In the shadow of all this, hidden in the dark on the corner of the painting that they’re all moving towards, is genocide, murder, killing of buffalos, and the eradication of wildlife.
“American Progress” sounds like a dark joke - like a greasy canteen pizza being labeleld “American vegetable”.
Of course, this was not the intention of the painter, and generations of white Americans have looked at this painting and completely ignored the story that is really being told. But it’s all there, laid bare, and there’s no use pretending they weren’t aware of what they were doing.
And for that, at least it has some value. It’s like gathering evidence of war crimes from the offenders bragging about their atrocities. Anyone who proudly hung this on their wall you know what they knew, and you know where they stood.
That said, what a shitty piece of work. It’s a crime against good taste depicting a crime against humanity.
Should have been called America’s Shame.
Even disregarding the racist content, I think we can all agree this is a pretty average/bad painting. Not really “art porn” material.
Nice but the giant lady needs a repeating rifle and some smallpox blankets.
It’s not even wrong to like railroads, school books, electricity, farming and America, all the centuries of backbreaking work by ordinary unremarkable people that went into building the paradise land that a lot of Americans got to inhabit until Reagan ruined it for the rest of us. But yes, Mr. Gast is definitely missing a whole other side of the coin.
I just finished watching this pbs doc:
The American Buffalo
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-american-buffalo
It’s actually about how the buffalo’s decimation in the 1800s greatly accelerated the destruction of native American Indians’ way of life. This shouldn’t be news to anyone, but then again the show should be required viewing for every American, as a reminder.
It appears to be themed after Virgo, goddess of the prophesied golden era.
As far as death angels go, that’s is an average-sexy looking one.
