#124 - A Banjo On My Knee
Among the paintings in the exhibition, Americans in Paris, 1860-1900, currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is Frank W. Benson's Portrait of Joseph Lindon Smith.
Finished in 1884, the painting portrays Benson's Boston friend and fellow artist Smith playing the banjo in his spartan Paris studio. The use of the banjo in this painting seems to signal an American identity constituted nostalgically, sadly, longingly, in absence.
The banjo plucks songs from home, condenses the self into a nationality, plays the blues, strums an identity into being, sings the American body banjoistic.
20 November 2006