Wednesday, August 03, 2005
From before the Death of Painting
For several weeks now I’ve been meaning to pay a visit to the New York Historical Society to see their current exhibition, The Hudson River School at the New-York Historical Society: Nature and the American Vision. (How much better the name would be if the subtitle became the title, and vice versa.)
Painting from the Hudson River School piqued a latent interest in art for me when I saw the Frederic Church exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in early 1990. The current exhibition of more than 100 pieces, I can say, is the best show of works from the period that I have seen since then.
Here are some impressions I took away from seeing the exhibition:
Painting from the Hudson River School piqued a latent interest in art for me when I saw the Frederic Church exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in early 1990. The current exhibition of more than 100 pieces, I can say, is the best show of works from the period that I have seen since then.
Here are some impressions I took away from seeing the exhibition:
- The salon-style installation in the main gallery is just perfect for the work. It really couldn’t be any better. Not a bit.
- Seeing so many paintings from this period at once makes the tricks of the trade all too evident. Framing the composition by placing a tree, leaning to the right, on the left side of the painting was a crutch that too many of these painters relied on too often.
- No one has painted bark and leaves, though, with as much detail and care as painters from this era.
- Thomas Kinkade may have trademarked the phrase but Cole, Kensett, Durand, Cropsey, Church, Bierstadt, et al. were the original painters of light. And they did it better (much better) than Kinkade does.
- If at first you don’t see the presence of a human taming the sublime landscape, look again. If you see one instance of this, look again. You’ll probably find more.
- Has anyone done a study of the iconography of domesticated animals (e.g., cattle and sheep) in nineteenth-century American painting? If not, there’s enough fruitful material here for a decent masters thesis, at least.
- The New York Historical Society has an extensive collection of paintings by Asher Durand—most of which were given by his daughter in 1907. When the organization went through serious financial difficulties over the last decade (much more serious difficulties than a simple decline in the endowment’s balance due to a general market downturn), it didn’t decide to sell them. Thank goodness.
- Thomas Cole’s five-painting cycle, The Course of Empire, feels much more current today than it did the first time I saw it (in reproduction) in 1989—the same year that Francis Fukuyama was first talking about the end of history.
