Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School of landscape painting are distinctly American, depicting the magnificent scenery of the United States in the first part of the 19th century. In “Thomas Cole's Journey Atlantic Crossings,” as exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we wee how both Cole's art and his thinking was shaped by his experiences in Europe. Cole was born in northwest England in 1801. The Industrial Revolution was beginning and during his boyhood, Cole witnessed the transformation from a rural society to an industrial one with nature giving way to factories and crowded cities. For a time, the young Cole worked in the new mills designing patterns for textiles. However, in 1818, facing financial hardship in England, Cole's father moved the family to the United States. As a young man Thomas Cole traveled around Pennsylvania and Ohio painting portraits. Although he was largely self-taught, Cole achieved some success, exhibiting his work at the Philadelphia Academy. In 1825, Cole fell in love, not with a person but with the beauty of the undeveloped Catskill region of New York. He painted what he saw and although landscape painting was not a well-established genre in the young United States, his paintings drew attention and he was made a member of the National Academy. Cole decided that in order to develop as an artist he had to return to Europe. There he could study past masters and meet leading contemporary artists. His first stop was England. There was a long tradition of landscape painting in England. In addition, two contemporary painters were taking this genre in new directions. J. M. W. Turner was incorporating bold colors and unrestrained brush work to produce pieces that were significantly different than traditional landscape painting. His work has been described as a forerunner of modern art. Cole was impressed with some of Turner's paintings but was uncomfortable with both Turner's unkempt appearance and the wildness of his approach to art. Cole was much more comfortable with John Constable, with whom he became friends. Constable's large finished canvases were more traditional and constrained than Turner's works. However, the oil sketches that he made in preparation for his finished works have a great freedom of brush work and spontaneity. In addition to Cole's work, the exhibit displays some of the works by Turner and Constable that Cole saw or could have seen during his journey. Particularly interesting are the numerous Constable oil sketches. Cole did not just stay in England but traveled into France and Italy. In Italy, he enrolled in classes. made copies of works by Renaissance masters and made oil sketches of the Italian countryside and Roman ruins. As he had hoped, Cole's journey to Europe enhanced his artistic skills. In addition, he met many wealthy Americans while traveling abroad and received a number of commissions. As a result, his reputation also grew. Returning to the U.S., Cole had a successful exhibition of his European paintings in New York City. More commissions followed. He established a studio in the Catskills. Other artists also came to study under Cole and he shaped an artistic movement. Having seen the results of unfettered industrialization in England, Cole became very concerned that President Andrew Jackson was leading the country in the wrong direction. The beautiful American wilderness was in danger from unrestrained development. Cole took up his brushes to warn of the consequences. Thus, while Cole's works may appear to be just paintings of beautiful scenes, they are actually political pictures. Cole was saying that all this will be lost if you continue with such policies. It is still a timely message. In this vein, the exhibit presents a series known as “The Course of Empire.” In the various canvases, Cole shows the same landscape first in its wild state and then progressively through development into a classical city and eventually to the final ruin of civilization. Perhaps more more subtlety, Cole expresses much the same message in“The Oxbow,” which shows a pristine river valley about to be engulfed by a massive storm. Cole's works transcend their political message. He had mastered traditional landscape painting and used it to portray magnificent scenes. Furthermore, his ability to compose a scene so as to make it speak to a wide audience cannot be denied. Visitors to The Bahamas mostly come for its great beaches, snorkeling, shopping and of course, the weather. However, there is also a deeper side to these islands and that ongoing story is being told at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas in Nassau. (See our profile of the NAGB) The mission of the National Art Gallery is to develop, collect, and promote a national collection of art for the benefit of Bahamians and the international audience. The easy course for a museum with such a mandate to have taken would have been to view it as a license to go out and collect art from all over the world which would then serve as a general educational tool just as a library purchases books from all over the world. Instead, the museum has chosen to develop and showcase Bahamian art. In doing this, the museum has placed itself in the midst of the conversation about what it means to be Bahamian. Topics such as colonialism, independence, tourism, religion, race, class and immigration are among the many topics dealt with by Bahamian artists. The museum does not impose its own views on these topics but rather lets the artists speak. To illustrate, one form of art that developed before independence in 1973 is picturesque scenes of the islands' natural beauty and scenes of everyday life. Some in the Bahamian art community criticize such works as presenting a superficial view of the islands and catering to "neo-colonial" exploitation of the Bahamas by the tourist industry. However, this uniquely Bahamian art can be viewed as analogous to the American Hudson River School, which showcased to the world the beauty of the young United States without going into the social and political issues then-facing the young nation. Just as the Hudson River works are recognized as valid and important art so too the Bahamanian picturesque. The National Art Gallery provides a forum for such conversations. This does not mean that only Bahamians will be interested in the National Art Gallery. By the end of my visit to the museum, I felt that I knew much more about the complexity of the Bahamian people and the issues they face. This added dimension to my visit to these islands. Furthermore, the works were visually appealing. Because the museum is interested in the full span of Bahamian art, it does not specialize in one particular movement or style of art. During my visit, I saw works that were traditional European style landscapes, contemporary realism, abstract art, folk art, sculpture, conceptual art and works that combined elements of African, European and Caribbean influences. One element that recurred throughout the exhibitions I saw was strong use of color. Perhaps this is a result of the light in the Bahamas, perhaps it is emotion, perhaps it is tradition, perhaps it is a desire to speak boldly but it does seem to be a unifying element. I particularly liked the strong use of color in Ricardo Knowles' “Turtle Cliff”, Dorman Stubbs' “Flamingos” and Lynn Pavoritti's “Mangrovia.” The National Art Gallery of the Bahamas is not a store-front operation but rather a first class facility. It is housed in the historic Villa Doyle. Located just down the street from Government House, Villa Doyle was built as a mansion by Sir William Doyle in the 1860s and served as the home of the first Chief Justice of the Bahamas. It was enlarged by Sir Arthur Moore in the 1920s, becoming one of the premier residences of Nassau. After the colonial era ended, it fell into disrepair. However, in a seven year restoration project, it was transformed into an art museum while preserving the exterior architecture. It was a pleasure to stroll around the landscaped grounds and observe the building. It is particularly commendable for the government and people of the Bahamas to have made such a commitment to art. Few other nations in the greater Caribbean have made such an investment. However, not only does the NAGB provide a vehicle for cultural self-examination by Bahamians but it also lets visitors see that this is a multi-faceted country with great creativity. “David Hockney” is a retrospective exhibit of the works of David Hockney. It has previously been at the Tate Britain in London and the Pompidou Center in Paris. We saw it at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Britain's best known living artist, David Hockney was born in Yorkshire in England in 1937. After studying art in Bradford, he moved to London in 1959 to study at the Royal College of Art where he achieved a reputation as a superstar. A trip to Southern California in 1964 resulted in a lifelong fascination with California where he has lived on and off for 50 years. Now 80, Hockney continues to produce art each day. The exhibition presents 60 canvases, 21 portrait drawings and a number of other examples of his work arranged in eight galleries. They are grouped roughly in chronologist order. A retrospective exhibition allows the viewer to survey the artist's body of work and learn something about the artist that you cannot learn by just viewing an individual work. For example, although Hockney achieved success at an early age, he did not just stick with that winning formula. Rather, the exhibition shows a willingness to experiment with different ideas. But this does not mean that he abandoned everything when he moved from one idea to another. To illustrate, Hockney's early work was abstract. Abstraction was the style that the art establishment endorsed in the early 1960s and so it is not surprising that a young artist of that era would do that type of work. On the surface, Hockney would seem to have abandoned abstraction in favor of a more figurative style when he progressed to his California swimming pool works (probably his most famous works). But, his use of geometric shapes (i.e. rectangles) in those pictures recalls Modernist thinking. Still later, his landscapes have the flavor of artists such as Picasso and Matisse, not only in the choice of colors but in the use of shapes. We also see Hockney's predominant form of work move from abstraction to realistic genre scenes, to portraits to landscapes. With regard to portraits, the exhibit presents both examples of his famous double portraits and examples of portrait drawings. The double portraits are on a monumental scale and the figures seem to be isolated with invisible defensive walls separating them from each other. The portrait drawings are smaller and more revealing of the sitters' personalities. The walls are down. Yet another characteristic that comes through in the exhibit is Hockney's willingness to experiment with different media. He is best known as a painter, first using oils but then becoming one of the foremost users of acrylics. However, he has also experimented with watercolor, etchings, photography, photocopiers, fax machines and more recently digital art. In fact, the exhibit has three examples of works that he did on iPads. Major exhibitions of drawings seem to be proliferating. In recent weeks, I have reviewed such exhibits at the Morgan Library and Museum, the National Portrait Gallery in London and now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This attention is well-deserved because as the Met correctly says “drawing is the foundation of all the visual arts.” “Leonardo to Matisse” is a survey of European art from the Renaissance to the 20th century. It is done through works from such masters as Leonardo, Rembrandt, Duerer, Tiepolo, Renoir, Van Gogh, and Matisse. Moreover, because it is done utilizing works from the collection of one person, viewing the exhibit is a conversation with one connoisseur about art. The works on exhibit are from the Met's Robert Lehman Collection. Robert Lehman graduated from Yale University in 1913 and by 1925 he was the head of the family-business, the investment banking house Lehman Brothers. He expanded that firm, bringing in outside partners, and made it into a financial powerhouse. Mr. Lehman's interest in art began at an early age. His father and mother collected art and by the time Robert was a teenager, he had begun collecting on his own. Over the years, he accumulated a massive collection focusing on European Art from the 14th to the 20th century. By 1962, it had become so massive that he used the townhouse that he grew up on New York's West 54th Street solely as a repository for his collection. It was not just a large collection but an important collection. Parts of it had been exhibited by the Louvre in Paris, the first private American collection to be so honored. Lehman took advice from experts in making his purchases but he also simply purchased what he liked. Following Lehman's death in 1969, the Robert Lehman Foundation bestowed the collection of some, 2,600 works to the Metropolitan, where Mr. Lehman had been a trustee and chairman of the board. A new wing was constructed to exhibit the collection in order to follow his stipulation that the works be exhibited together as a collection. There were more than 750 drawings in the collection. This exhibit presents some 60 works, which the Met describes as presenting “the full range of Robert Lehman's vast and distinguished drawings collection.” We can see from this exhibit that Mr. Lehman was interested in a broad span of European art. Although the signage tells us that his first interest was in Italian Renaissance drawing, the works include sheets from other times, other parts of Europe and a wide range of styles. Indeed, the works extend up to Modernism and Neo-Impressionism. Some of the works were acquired directly from living artists. Lehman also preferred finished drawings. This is not to say that all these works were finished in the sense that they were meant for public display. To the contrary, many were clearly done for the artist's own benefit in preparation for a painting or sculpture or to work out some problem of proportion or lighting etc. Indeed, Durer's self-portrait is on a sheet with a large study of a hand and Degas' dancer has other drawings on the reverse side. Rather, they are finished in the sense that the artist completed the concept. Few of the works are hasty sketches. Most of the drawings are relatively small. Consequently, they require close viewing which in turn creates an intimacy with the work. A collector would not have purchased these to decorate a large room but rather to examine from time-to-time. Very few of the drawings have color. Most are drawings done in black, brown or sometimes a combination of black, white and red chalk. Only one, a delightful tiny watercolor by Renoir, makes use of vibrant color. The exhibit is on the lower floor of the Robert Lehman Wing. Many of the paintings that Lehman collected are on display on the upper floor. While the drawings are excellent, they are overshadowed by the paintings, which include masterpieces by Ingres, Goya and Raeburn and the Impressionist masters Monet, Pissaro and Renoir. “Frederic Remington at the Met” is a small, introductory exhibit presenting some 20 paintings, sculptures, works on paper and illustrated books relating to Remington. Although famous for his depictions of the Old West, the artist lived during much of his life in the New York City area. It is known that he came to the Metropolitan Museum (the "Met") to study works. In addition, several of his works came into the Met's collection during Remington's lifetime.
Frederic Remington was born in upstate New York. His father, who was a colonel in the Union Army during the Civil War, hoped that his son would follow a career in the military. However, when Frederic entered Yale in 1878, he choose to study art. More interested in playing football than studying, he left Yale after only three semesters. With the idea of investing the inheritance he received after his father's death in a mine or a ranch, Frederic set out for Montana in 1881. Although his investment plans did not pan out, it was an experience that would shape the rest of his life. Remington was captivated by the spirit of the Old West and sketched the cowboys, soldiers and Native Americans that he encountered. He would return to the West again and again throughout his career as a source of inspiration. Remington sold his first sketch to Harpers Weekly in 1882. This was the beginning of a successful career as an illustrator. In addition to numerous magazines, Remington would go on to illustrate books by Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister as well as Remington's own novels. Returning east, he moved to Brooklyn and to build his artistic skills enrolled for three months at the Art Students League of New York. He also studied works on display at the Metropolitan Museum, particularly those of the French academic painters. The exhibit gives a glimpse of Remington's work as an illustrator. There are examples of published works as well as one of his preliminary sketches made on the scene for a work that would be completed in the studio. However, the most interesting of these works are monochrome oil paintings. At first glance, these appear to be black and white photos of paintings. However, you quickly see that they are the original paintings. They were done in black and white to facilitate their reproduction in the magazines of the day. Remington was not satisfied with being an illustrator. At that time, illustration was considered a lesser form of art or, in some circles, not really art at all. In illustration, it was argued, the objective is to support the written words, the concept and inspiration thus coming from the writer rather than the mind of the illustrator. Moreover, illustration was viewed as too commonplace and too commercial. To achieve recognition as a serious artist, Remington began exhibiting paintings in 1887 and had his first solo exhibition in 1893. Although his works were popular, he remained somewhat dissatisfied and later in his life he burnt many of his early works. A highpoint of the exhibit is Remington's painting “On the Southern Plains.” One of Remington's later works, its color and style reflect the artist's movement away from French academic painting toward a more impressionistic style. It shows a group of cavalry soldiers, guns drawn riding to meet some unseen foe. They are not formed in a battle line like cavalry soldiers preparing to attack did in those days. Rather, they ride as a group of individuals - - very American. As throughout Remington's works, the people depicted are noble and engaged in a worthy pursuit. Whether that is a historically accurate portrayal of the Old West is irrelevant. Like a John Ford movie, it has a romantic, heroic appeal and that is good for the soul. In 1895, the sculptor Frederick Ruckstull taught Remington how to do sculpture. Remington went on to create some 22 different bronzes. The exhibit has several of them on display including his first statue, “The Bronco Buster.” Remington's statues are small rather than monumental. There are no busts of famous men. Rather, the statues are of the common people of the Old West. While the artists of the Hudson River School and other artists who depicted the frontier were interested in its wondrous landscapes, Remington was interested in people. And the bronzes depict people in action - - whether it is a cowboy on a bronco, a mountain man going down a steep slope or a Cheyenne warrior speeding along on a horse, there is motion in these statues. Tragically, Remington died at the age of 49 due to complications arsing from an appendectomy In those days, it was the fashion for successful men to overeat. As a result, the once lean athlete was some 300 pounds when he died. Moreover, health problems brought on by his weight prevented him from working outside the studio towards the end of his life - - something he very much desired to do as he became interested in the work of the Impressionists. |
AuthorRich Wagner is a writer, photographer and artist. Archives
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