Painting: The National Quest

PAINTING One wonders whether he asked them to hold their pose, or jotted it down in a hasty sketchand later recalled it the tranquillity of his studio. But there they are, for all time, transfixed on a roseate, smoky day: the fur trader puffing his pipe, his half-breed son derisively peering at the artist, and the huddled bear cub chained to the bow of the dugout. The river is the Missouri; the year is 1845, and the painter, who by his art has enshrined a timeless moment by on the frontier, is George Caleb Bingham (see opposite page). It is also American landscape drawing at its best accurate, knowledgeable, architectural and withal a key link in the chain of shared experience that finally defined America as a nation.

Landscape as a subject sufficient unto itself was a Johnny-come-lately even in Britain, where it was not appreciated for itself until the late 18th century. In the Colonies the practitioners were expatriate second-raters. “Landskips” at first lendedto be more offshoots of the topographer’s art adn when available, where popular. George Washington, for instance, bought two renditions of the Potomac Falls by George Beck.

Nature’s Teaching. For the classically oriented viewer, a prospect was pleasing to the degree that it was orderly. It was not until romanticism emerged around 1820 that the essential dialogue between man and nature was articulated as central theme in the quest of an American idendity. Nowhere is the theme better illustrated then in the current exhibition at Manhattan’s Metropopitan Museum selected more then 450 for display in 22 galleries (see following six pages in color).

They show that to a pioneering people the wilderness originally represented a hostile world to be tamed, tilled and harvested.What appealed first were “the sightes,” hazardous gorges, natural rock arches, the torrents of the Niagara a scene naively and delightfully captured by the Quaker sign painter Edward Hicks. But with leisure there came a more open sky, sophisticated and view.”Go forth, under the open sky, and list to Nature’s’ teachings.” Poet William Cullen Bryant exhorted the painters.

Westward, Ho! the commonplace was endowed with the transcendental values;the primeval forest became a refuge for reflection and repose. Both attitudes became enshrined in the American litany, and even today te preservation of America’s natural beauty is a key credo of all conservationists. what gave vision to this concept was the work of such artists as Thomas Cole of the Hudson River school. Cole, as Poet Bryant rhapsodized, painted “pictures which carried the eye over scenes of wild grandeur peculiar to our country, over our aerial mountain tops with their mighty growthof forest never touched by the axe, into the depth of skies bright with hues of our own climate” the primeval forest

But Cole’s wilderness was nothing compared with the expanses found by the artists who, from the 1840s onward, Set out to answer the cry, “Westward, Ho!” Freebooters, poets and discoverers though many of them were, they rode the rafts with fur traders, saddled up with military expeditions, visually discovered, in the still nomadic Indian tribes, a world adying, and saw in the lonely plains and mountains a new testing ground. Outstanding was Albert Bierstadt, whose monumental views of the Rockies, with their Wagnerian thunder and soaring rainbows , earned him $35,000 a canvas. But so rapidwas the conquest of the continent that even the Bierstadt outlived his epoch. By the time of his death in 1902; artistic concert was already shifting from the grandeur of the West to cityscapes, from God given wilderness to man-made America.

Cool Poetry. “Macadam, gun-grey as a tunny’s belt/Leaps from Far Rockaway to Golden Gate,” is was this America on the move, ironing out its regional peculiarities and aswarm immigrant energy, that artists were now forced consider, and most of them found viewing best when equipped with foreign spectacles. While the newspaper-trained illustrators who became the ashcan school saw ugliness as a police court scene, their friend. Maurice Prendergast, went to Paris, returned to paint Manhattan’s Central Park in the pure colors of a soft-hued tapestry.

French cubism and Italian futurism gave Italian-born Joseph Stella the organization for his Coney Island, with its warring scene of roller coasters and jumbled humanity. German expressionism gave the discipline to Marsden Hartley’s strong Maine landscapes fishermen and lumberjacks.Georgia O’Keeffe, now 77 and living in New Mexico, depicts with barebone simplicity her lyric view of “my country−terrible winds and wonderful emptiness.” Even more sharp-focused was Charles Demuth’s I saw the Figure 5 in Gold, with its exulation of typographyand kaleidoscopic street imagery, is now revered as an icon of pop art,

Nor has landscape ceased to be source of inspiration today, although the results might baffle the Founding Fathers. Pop artists bring to the shelve of supermarkets, road Signs and neon light all the naive delight with which the primitives approached nature’s wonders. The abstract aires expressionists, for all their paint slinging often evoked a topography new in art, often but recognizable . De Kooning’s splashes of green and brown are glimpses of landscape any driver who barrels down a thruway at 85 m.p.h,; Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rythm distills the essence of a smoky fall day; his skeins of paint make of a season an environment. Arshile Gorky’s Water of the Flowery Mill is filled with fluid, biomorphic forms; they are of nature, but the images seem to glide gently across surface. The total impression is one ambiguity; the landscape is of the and no less valid for being so