Sense and Sensibility

Art Can Be Funny, Can’t It?

Humor hurts.

It stings worthwhile targets – hypocrisy, vanity, licentiousness and pride. But the bite that sends the rest of us into paroxysm of laughter generally comes at someone else’s expense.

Fortunately, they usually deserve it.

“A Touch of Humor,” now on exhibit at the William Benton Museum of Art at the  University of Connecticut-Storrs, is a peculiar assortment of prints and paintings that are, if not rip-roaring funny, at least amusing and occasionally worth a chortle or two. This limited exhibit includes works from the 17^th century to the 20^th and is particularly rich in the work of Adolph Dehn, a print artist whose arch, cutting works appeared in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

Not all of Dehn’s work focused on fat nuns and dimwitted priests, but that’s what’s on display here and, in light of recent disclosures of sexual abuse, seems particularly pointed.

The line between satire and humor is a bit like the line between wry and ribald, and the exhibit tends to float clumsily between the two. Its first images ‑17^th century French engravings of a Frecnh woman beating her husband and, its companion, a Frenchman beating his wife, are unsettling enough to underscore the disturbing current that runs through this exhibit and its companion, the more sinister “Punch & Judy: Handpuppets, Politics & Humor.”

Violence is a disquieting companion to humor‑ whether Punch is clobbering Judy to death or a lodger is dumping his chamber pot onto William Hogarth’s disreputable English crowd below. No exhibit on humor would be complete without Hogarth, but his misanthropic perspective is so unyielding that it can be souring. Old biddies sneering superciliously at flamboyantly dressed Frenchmen is one thing. But Hogarth scoffs, too, at the prudish French Hugenots filing soberly out of their humble church as he does the black man fondling a white woman. Even the starving urchins ravaging pie crumbs from the street fall under his censure.

Daumier, with his brilliant, sardonic flair, had a far less damning sense of humor. He was helped in that by his brilliance at caricature – and by the era in which he lived, so flush with flaneurs. He makes great sport of one here, getting smacked in the eye by a snowball, but it’s all in fun. One wishes the exhibit had a bit more of Daumier and a bit less Hogarth and Dehn.

Dehn, at least in this incarnation, saves all of his derision for the Catholic Church. His humor is less ironic than sarcastic. Nuns and priests paint in the outdoors, blind to the beauty of naked women or satyrs around them. Two clerics in the Bois de Boulogne attempt to advise two luscious vixens, steeling themselves for temptation or ready to pounce (with Dehn, these things are unclear).

Outside of religion, the most fertile (ahem) topic for satirists is sex and there are a few good representatives here, including Dane’s image of a lanky, maladroit teenager with an equally gawky girl, with the caption, “You Know My Dad Seems To Know Quite A Lot About Sex.” Today, that’s a caption with a frisson of “American Beauty” attached. But George Hughes’ painting “Company Arrives Early,” is much funnier and less disturbing. Hughes bisects the painting vertically in this image of a split-level at twilight. Downstairs, a boy on a black-and-white tile floor calls up to his parents that company has arrived. From the thick-waisted, staid appearance, it looks like the boss in his wife. Meanwhile, following a black, snake-like banister toward a scarlet red upstairs, a wife in her black garters and a just-showered man in his rather louche bathrobe, react with horror.

This piece, like Frank DiGioia’s “Wedding Feast,” which looks like a still for “My Big, Fat Greek Wedding,” reminds us of the great human appetite for silliness. Camp works.

But not quite as well the gratuitous cruelty of Punch & Judy. Nearly every European country has its version of Punch & Judy, which emerged from the Italian Commedia Dell’ Arte in the 17^th century, which says something about the public’s appetite for impenitent villainy. The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry has lent several dozen gorgeous, colorful Punch & Judy puppets, all vividly creepy. There’s Punch, with the pointed Renaissance hat, crooked nose, jutting chin and hunchback, dropping his baby to his death. There’s his wife, Judy, rapping him about the head for the murder, to which Punch responds the only way he can, by stealing the stick and clubbing his wife to death. He then goes off philandering with his paramour, Miss Polly.

All of that might be iniquitous enough – to say nothing of Scott Peterson-esque ‑  if not for the slew of authority figures who try to penalize Punch. The fact that Punch subverts all of them – the cop, the judge, the devil, death and even the hangman – says something about our vexatious relationship with authority. The fact that Punch & Judy has been making people laugh for more than three centuries says perhaps more than we want to know.

 Contact: Tracey@TraceyOSh.com.

Hudson River School’s Unsung John Frederick Kensett

In the summer of 1872, a feverish sense of possibility infected John Frederick Kensett. In what would, fatefully, be his last summer, the Hudson River School painter seemed to perceive landscapes with a clarity and precision absent in his earlier Hudson River School canvases. His prodigious output that summer– nearly 38 works – glisten with a purity and lucidity that borrows as much from the emerging Barbizon school as it does from his own powerfully unfettered vision.

One of those works “Sunset on the Sea” is as clean, crisp and pellucid a landscape as Kensett produced. It is one of three Kensett works lent to the New Britain Museum of American Art by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while it renovates its American Paintings and Sculpture Galleries. The Met has lent New Britain seven of its prized Hudson River School works and while most eyes will gravitate to Frederick Edwin Church’s “The Parthenon,” it is the late Kensett works that should command attention.

That’s not to deride Church’s grandiloquent achievement. The six-footer “The Parthenon” is a majestic achievement, particularly if you prefer your art at high and xenophobic decibels. New Britain’s own, earlier Church, “West Rock, New Haven ” is a far more compelling and well-balanced work, devoid of Church’s overwrought lionization of the Ancients.

But the most stirring works here belong to Kensett, the Cheshire native long saddled with the moniker “second tier” Hudson River School painter. The distinction is unfortunate, but apt. Kensett never had the bravura of Church or Alfred Bierstadt and he lacked the innovation and sublimity of Thomas Cole. But Kensett possessed a captivating sense of the tranquility, as opposed the muscularity of nature.

Even in his works from the 1850s, like “Hudson River Scene,” (1857), Kensett balances the sense of nature’s power with a Claudean sense of pastoral serenity. The crusty hillocks on the banks of the Hudson become curtains that unveil the still, pewter river sprinkled with sailboats. In the dense, richly textured foreground, lichen-coated rocks secure tall, mottled oaks that lunge thirstily toward the water.

This is a more placid, less brawny work than the works of Durand or Cole, nearby. While Durand was able to give his work a pious potency, Kensett’s luminosity, which grows purer with time, reaching its apex in Kensett’s stirring “Eaton’s Neck, Long Island.”

Inaugurated by Englishman Thomas Cole, the Hudson River School saw in the country’s vast grandeur a sense of divine providence. Wilderness moved from the haven of deviltry to the font of holiness. Artists like Cole, and Asher B. Durand, who believed art was meant to promote “the moral perfection of mankind” invested their landscapes with a sublime sense of providence – the gargantuan icecaps of Frederick Edwin Church and the august benevolence of Kensett’s White Mountains – were signposts for the omnipresence of God.

Of course, with that tacit blessing of the Almighty, came a sense of political sanctity. A country so abundantly blessed could do no wrong.

Except, of course, that it did.

The Civil War brought Americans sense of divine providence to a crushing coda. The bombastic, deified landscape not only did not play in a country bloodied by fratricide; it looked ridiculous. Perhaps realizing the absurdity, Church took off for more consecrated grounds and came bounding back with al sorts of images from the Andes to the Acropolis.

But artists like Kensett, and Winslow Homer, whose magnetic “Harvest Scene” has also been loaned to New Britain, stayed put. Like many Americans, he began to search out a private retreat as a kind of balm for the physical and psychic mayhem the war engendered.

That is what brought him to Contentment Island in 1867. Kensett’s friend, artist Vincent Colyer, had bought land along Long Island Sound the year before. The years spent by the Sound had an almost redemptive effect on Kensett; his paintings grew more luminous and limpid, and his output more prolific. His resplendent “Sunset on the Sea,” a reductive and radiant image of the dimming tangerine sun dissolving into the calm, caressing waters of the Sound epitomizes the still, ruminative peace we seek along the water’s edge. It is one of the 38 images Kensett painted in that productive summer of 1872.

In November of that year, as she was crossing a causeway to Contentment Island, the carriage that carried Colyer’s wife overturned. Her skirts were caught in the wheels of the carriage and she struggled under the weight of her dress in the icy waters. Kensett, who never married, came upon the scene and, horrified, plunged in after her. His efforts were in vain; Colyer’s wife, Mary Lydia, drowned. Exhausted by his efforts, Kensett contracted pneumonia. Recovering enough to return to New York, he set up a studio in the YMCA, and died later that day of heart failure. He was 52.

The exhibit continues at the New Britain Museum of American Art through 2010.

Yeah, But What Is It Worth?

Inside the Rose Art Museum.

Earlier this year, when Brandeis University voted to close its celebrated Rose Art Museum and put its works up for sale, art connoisseurs were apoplectic. Established in 1961, the Rose Art Museum is one of the great prizes of the Waltham, Mass., university and hawking its collection to the highest bidder seemed not only impetuous, but indecent. Where was the reverence, to say nothing of the gratitude for a collection begun with a $1 million gift from magnanimous donors?

Gratitude, to say nothing of decency, collapsed along with the stock market. Brandeis, like everybody else, has seen its endowment crumple under the weight of the economic downturn. Its endowment, like those of individuals and foundations, has dipped 30 percent in the past year. It faces a budget gap of nearly $79 million and has been madly trying to staunch its financial hemorrhaging by raising tuition and fees, paring expenses and not filling positions. But that hasn’t been enough. Like destitute Americans losing their jobs and struggling to pay their bills, Brandeis is looking to pawn the family jewels to keep the house afloat.

Nobody who has watched the contemporary art market over the last 10 years can be astonished that anybody with a collection of paintings by the likes of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Wharhol would try to hawk them to pay the bills. The same folks clutching their chests in incredulous revulsion helped the art market spin crazily out of control, making masterpieces by the world’s greatest artists unaffordable to the world’s greatest museums.

Throughout history, monarchs who have been up against it have dipped into the state treasury and hocked their jewel-encrusted baubles for a flash of solvency. It’s hard to reproach Brandeis for its rashness. And after all, somebody’s going to get those Willem de Koonings and Helen Frankenthaler. One man’s loss is another man’s fortune.

But the size and scale of the Rose sell-off is unprecedented. And precedent is what’s at issue here.  If one school can cannibalize its museum to sustain its student center, what’s to keep other, more august universities – like Princeton, Harvard or Yale – from doing the same? Moreover, if a university makes a habit of auctioning off its art works, why in heaven’s name would anyone ever donate a piece of work to such an institution again?

The predicament at Brandeis may seem arcane to those who have never been in an art museum, or those who have little use for the contemporary American works in which the Rose specializes. But the Rose predicament encapsulates the pickle in which most of us find ourselves in these recessionary days. Something has got to give – the massage or the meat.  We have been forced into a frugality whose dynamics reveal our values. What really matters to us? “Our deeds determine us,” George Elliot wrote, “even as we define our deeds.”

Marsden Hartley.

When the National Academy Museum in New York decided to sell two Hudson River School paintings for $15 million, art lovers went berserk. Recently, the New York State Legislature introduced a bill to prohibit museums from selling art to fuel their operation expenses. Many in New York have still not recovered from the indelicacy of the New York Public Library selling Asher B. Durand’s iconic “Kindred Spirit” to that brazen upstart, Walmart heiress Alice Walton, for $35 million in 2005. One museum curator I talked to could barely contain a sob at the mention of the sale.

Those of us who benefit from university museums such as those at Yale or the University of Connecticut, will obviously be wounded by Brandeis’reckless and ultimately counterproductive decision. But the real losers are universities, where so much of the painstaking, penetrating and innovative research in art incubates. These researchers discover and help define how we look at art, as much as what art we look at. Take a walk through the engrossing exhibit on Darwin and the visual arts at the Yale Center for British Art, or the Picasso and Visual Language at Yale University Art Gallery. These exhibits are of the sort, as Holland Carter has noted, that are too small and specific to be housed at larger museums.

One of the most freakishly engrossing exhibits I’ve seen was one on Adolph Hilter’s years as a painter in Vienna. The exhibit was at Williams College Art Museum and it was chillingly perceptive. It was also preposterous to imagine seeing the exhibit at a larger institution.

The family of the Rose Art Museum’s benefactors has already objected to the “plundering” of its collection. The Massachusetts Attorney General is looking into whether the sale would violate the family’s will. Perhaps the art work will be saved – or perhaps we will be looking at the first in what may be a sustained attack on the body of art that is testament to our greatest possibilities.

Contact: Tracey@Traceyosh.com

Miracle on the Hudson — or Not

On Jan.15, at 3:25 in the afternoon, US Airways flight 1549  lifted out of LaGuardia with 155 passengers and crew. Seconds after liftoff, a collision with a flock of birds crippled the plane’s ascent. The pilot, seizing the controls from the co-pilot, instantaneously evaluated the peril and swiftly tracked a course along the Hudson River, into whose icy currents he directed the aircraft.  

We all know what happened next. The jet didn’t sink. The passengers, including an infant, were safe. The incident has grafted itself into our national mythology and granted the hero of the hour our most esteemed bequest: a spot on the 50-yard-line at our venerated national bloodbath: The Super bowl.

Almost immediately after the discovery that all 155 aboard the plane survived, the media had baptized the marvel: “The Miracle on the Hudson.” Suitable for framing.

This is the season for miracles in a country starved for them. Hope, the buzzword of the new administration and the beacon of a new generation, is virtuous and temporarily satisfying. But for sustenance, for girding our loins for the treacherous road ahead, we need a miracle. Just one.

Lent is about many things – sacrifice, empathy, repentance, surrender. But miracles are the tempo that builds the Lenten story. Christ cures the blind. He animates the lame. He opens the ears of the deaf and, perhaps best of all, he exorcises the demons that gnaw at us. In many ways miracles are the intercessors of the ambivalent. They upset the apple cart of faith, and are remarkably effective at gathering adherents. They offer what faith never can: Certitude in world drenched in doubt.

I cannot have been the only one in America troubled by the use of the term “Miracle on the Hudson.” Perhaps it is inevitable that the persnickety would wince at a term so freighted as “miracle.”

C.S. Lewis

Before you answer, a suggestion from Aristotle, particularly useful in my own profession: “Those who wish to succeed must ask the right preliminary questions.”What, then, was the miracle?

Perhaps one of the most familiar miracles in the Gospels is the multiplication of the fishes. We were all taught this story in Sunday school. Jesus is confronted by a vast throng, savaged by hunger. His disciples suggest that Jesus dismiss the crowds so they may return home to get something to eat. “No need,” Jesus says, and gathers five loaves of bread and a couple of fish, blesses and breaks the food, giving it to his disciples to distribute. Five thousand, Matthew tells us, “ate their fill.” And when the fragments were gathered up, they filled 12 baskets.

That, you see, is a definitive miracle in the way we were raised to appreciate them. From very little, Christ creates a banquet. Miraculous, right?

But for me, the miracle happens just before. If you read the 14^th chapter of Matthew, you will find the story of the death of John the Baptist. Herod has had John arrested because John had the temerity to tell Herod “It was not right” for him to live with the wife of his brother. This ticked Herod off, but not as much as it incensed his wife. So, on Herod’s birthday, his wife’s daughter, Salome, performed what we have come to  believe was the notorious dance of the seven veils. So taken was Herod by Salome’s erotic – err, exquisite – dance, that he tells the young woman she can have anything she wants. And what, prey tell, does little Salome want? Prompted by her mother, she wants John’s head on a platter. Herod waffles, but agrees, thus killing Jesus’ cousin and closest confidant, and not incidentally ushering in a cliché that plagues us still.

It is in the moments after Jesus learns of his cousin’s death that he is greeted by the hungry crowds. When Jesus heard this, Matthew tells us, “He withdrew by boat from there to a deserted place by himself.” This is one of many, many times in which Jesus absents himself from the mob, reminding us of the sustenance and urgency of solitude. The only man in the world who understands him, the one to whom he has submitted, the one, Luke tells us, who jumped in his mother’s womb at the arrival of Mary to his mother Elizabeth’s house – is dead. How many of us have endured the anguish of losing our most intimate friend?

And yet at this moment of vulnerability, with the wound still seething, the crowd confronts him—thirsty for his words, hungry for his solicitude, desperate for his grace. And Jesus? Who wants, more than anything, a moment to assuage his grief? What is Christ’s response. “His heart,” Matthew tells us, “Was moved with pity, and he cured their sick.”

If you are a working parent, this is a scenario too familiar to you. You have  been up to your eardrums in crises at work. You have missed deadlines. You have forgotten the Olive Oil at the Stop & Shop. Your car needs gas. You have just lost your closes friend in the world and you would like to tell that world to go straight to blazes. You want only to close your eyes and breathe in some stillness and indulge your reverie and mourn your friend.

But your husband has thrown out his back. And your daughter has a book report due – which is news to you. You have a PTA meeting and your dog has clearly ingested something non-organic.

And anybody would be entirely within their rights to say, as my mother often did, “Calgon, take me away.”

But Jesus. Doesn’t. Say This. His heart moves instantly to pity. His reflex is compassion. This, of course, is what makes him Christ and the rest of us believers the  haplessly devoted. You can look at Matthew’s story and tell me that the miracle is the multiplication of the fishes. But I look at that and I see that the miracle is reflexive compassion. For Christ, kindness is not a virtue; it’s an instinct. And our work as Christians is to make it instinctive for us, too.

I don’t think that God turned that U.S. Airways jet down the length of the Hudson River any more than I think he sent that flock of geese into those engines. I don’t think that a pilot who trains for decades for just this event is a miracle worker. But I do think that when that plane landed, and those passengers tended to one another, grabbing infants, and old men and hurling anxious women over their shoulder, that was miraculous. On the wing of that plane, as ferry boats pivoted on the water and raced to the needy, we saw people whose instinct was to help. We saw people, without regard to their welfare, wrench power out of places they never knew, keep their wits in the midst of fear and understand that survival is for everybody.

Does it take divine intervention to achieve such a miracle? I believe it does. I believe that the greatest miracle God achieves is the turn in our hearts, the expansion of our souls, the swelling of our compassion, the understanding that the way out of despair is too frequently as available to us as a neighbor’s need.

We are in the depths of a national crisis whose denouement is obscure, but whose victims will be legion. For many of us, the world will tatter in ways we can neither fathom nor evade. A thousand little cuts besiege the 300 million people of this country. When hope runs thin, they will look for miracles. And when they look for them, remember this: The miracle begins with you. You are the miracle, and have been since your birth. How tempting it will be to look for pyrotechnics when, we must remember, God spoke to Elijah in whisper.

Don’t look for the miracle. Be the miracle. The miracle is you.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s blinding empathy

He was ugly and he was sickly.

His eyes were too close together. His lips were too thick. His dwarfish body was freakish in its asymmetry. Perhaps those garish dames with their lurid green skin, the ballerinas with the brawny calves, the sylphs with their pointy noses and jutting chins were a kind of revenge. The revenge of the hideous over the beautiful.

One could make the argument that Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was little more than a mischievous imp, a malicious asterisk on the wrong side of the Impressionist movement. It’s certainly easy to see Toulouse-Lautrec that way, in part because of his aristocratic pedigree, which perversely diminished his accomplishment (best to have your artists poor), and in part because he eludes categorization. That has been enough to marginalize Lautrec to an adorable freak [Dash] puckish, clever and suitable for framing.

A new exhibit of more than 80 works by Toulouse-Lautrec at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., makes it hard to dismiss the assessment. Something about Toulouse-Lautrec, scion of an aristocratic brood that could trace its lineage to Charlemagne, inclines to the deviant. It is not just the lascivious leer of  “The Englishman at the Moulin Rouge,” a gray lothario inclining toward two tawdry women. Or the beefy jowls of the matronly sister in “At the Moulin Rouge: La Goulue and Her Sister.”

It is that even the pretty women, stars of the theater like Jane Avril or Yvette Guilbert, can look pinched and drawn, depleted and dodgy. It is no wonder that the standard cliché has been that Toulouse-Lautrec was merely projecting his own physical grotesquerie on women he could never possess. Toulouse-Lautrec, of course, only added to the mythology, proclaiming “To think I would never have painted if my legs had been just a little longer.”

But the truth is undoubtedly more complex. And as the Clark exhibit makes clear, what can look like perversion may have been a kind of tenderness. After all, Toulouse-Lautrec, a gifted painter who studied in the academic tradition, had access to the doyennes of society and might have made a nice living for himself paying homage to them a la John Singer Sargent. But instead, he went slumming, to Montmartre and the cabaret, to the music halls and debauched world of the demimondaine which he so salaciously chronicled.

That, of course is what he did. Toulouse-Lautrec’s work is as much reportage as it was artistry. He captures the vitality and carnality of late 19th century Paris, with its infatuation with the prurient and the freakish. So bawdy and outlandish are Toulouse-Lautrec’s subjects that it’s easy to loose sight of his vigorous economy and masterful use of line and color. Many of his most powerful works, including his popular “Jane Avril,” are conveyed by the simplest, most sensual of lines, executed with three bold colors – inky black; buttery yellow; tangerine. What Toulouse-Lautrec does is strip away the hurly burly and slice to the essence of personality-in Avril’s case, the voluptuous curve of her wasp waste. In the case of Yvette Guilbert, the long black gloves and lanky legs.

The Clark wisely begins its exhibit with an arresting portrait of a working-class girl, “Carmen,” painted in 1884 when Toulouse-Lautrec was only 20. The red-headed woman (Toulouse-Lautrec had a fondness for red-heads) he painted is brutish and vulnerable, saucy and fragile. She is a beautiful girl with high cheekbones and suspicious eyes, which look over the viewer’s shoulder warily. Her mouth is hard and defiant and the straight-on composition gives this sullen working girl dignity and presence.

“Carmen” is one of only four paintings on view and it whets the appetite for more. It is a telling piece and talismanic guide to this show, which breaks no new scholastic ground, but exposes Toulouse-Lautrec as a far more nuanced and empathetic artist than he is often credited as being.

Born in 1864 in Albi, France to two first cousins whose ancestors had long intermarried, Toulouse-Lautrec was afflicted with a hereditary bone disease. After breaking both legs as a young teenager, he stopped growing, never topping 5 feet. To his father, who considered falcons and dogs his most loyal companions, the disappointment was devastating. His mother, a religious hysteric, poured all her energy into him and he ever after referred to her as his “sainted lady mother.”

Well-liked and self-deprecating, Lautrec frequented brothels and absinthe bars, developing habits that would eventually kill him. His comfort in the debauched life of Montmartre was facilitated by a fetishistic nymphomaniac who called Lautrec her “clothes hanger.” It may have been his own self-mockery that led Lautrec inevitably into art that is at once a send up of Salon sensibilities and a satire of the decadence in which he delighted.

Edith Wharton liked to call the fin-de-siecle the “age of innocence,” but there was little innocence in the wantonness of cabaret life. Lautrec is a gifted satirist, sharper than Thomas Rowlandson, more economical than Daumier, more inventive than Hogarth. His own deformities must have made him acutely aware of how much of social life was about looking and being looked at. Many of the early lithographs here [Dash] real tour de forces of color and line [Dash] magnify the insolence of staring. “At the Concert,” with its perverted perspective and gaping observers is only a tad less cutting than “The Balcony with a Gilded Grotesque Mask.”

The latter, an acerbic image of a well-dressed woman peering prudishly through her opera glasses, is both a marvelous play on words and an ingenious composition. Who [Dash] or what [Dash] is the grotesque mask, the Medusa-like ornamentation on the balcony, or the ridiculous woman with the black plumed hat above it?

Toulouse-Lautrec obviously did not enjoy being looked at and his most biting images turn the tables on the gawkers. Often these are women, but very often Toulouse-Lautrec depicts libidinous men, drooling over women half their age. In one early lithograph, a gentleman approaches a girl in the street and asks her age. “Fifteen, sir,” she replies. “Already too old,” he complains.

Is that humor or is that disgust? For Toulouse-Lautrec, it must have been a bit of both. Many of these cabaret stars, like Avril, were his close friends. Avril, in fact, becomes the lens for the empathy that Toulouse-Lautrec disguises with saucy humor. An image of her walking alone, her face hard, with a tint of a lurid yellow-green that suggests spotlights or the ubiquitous absinthe, is laced with compassion. This is Avril after the show, decompressed and sullen, a candor that moved Toulouse-Lautrec, a man well-acquainted with loneliness.

Actresses outside of the limelight, prostitutes at ease [Dash] these subjects brought out the tenderness of Toulouse-Lautrec. The show ends with a series of lithographs that Toulouse-Lautrec did of prostitutes in their brothels, a tantalizing manuscript that scarcely sold. Perhaps no one really wanted to see prostitutes as Toulouse-Lautrec did, girlish and exposed, ordinary, frightened, coltish and depleted. But this series, with Lautrec’s trademark twitchy lines, abundant use of white space and psychological insights are among his most tender and most honest. He is at home here, among the whores and matrons, understanding the artifice that must be summoned to tackle each day.

God, Mammon and the art they wrought

The worst that can be said of the Wadsworth Atheneum’s “Faith and Fortune,” a sprawling survey of 500 years of European art, is that it is too big.

The best that can be said is that that is too bad. Everybody should see it.

“Everybody” in this case, refers to anybody who has never set foot in a museum before as well as those for whom the return of Giovanni Paolo Panini to the Wadsworth walls inspires a devotional pilgrimage. That’s because the pleasures of “Faith and Fortune” are multifarious. It is at once a magnificent primer on art before the modern age, and a sobering reminder of the diminishing role of sacred art, which has been supplanted by the ascendancy of the individual.

For that reason, a pithy sub-title for the exhibit might be “How fortune replaced faith as a manifestation of divine intervention.” Or perhaps, “How I got over my guilt over money and learned to love my dough.”

In the scope of 400 years, the individual has elbowed his way first into the artist canvas and, by the end of the 19^th century, conquered them. In the last gallery, filled with wall-to ceiling life-size portraits, the sitter needs little more than a single prop or icy stare to signify his own steely dominion — over his destiny and that of others.

The Wadsworth doesn’t explore this conquest, for obvious reasons. Instead, it sticks to it’s the art, a splendid assortment of paintings, sculptures and decorative objects, spanning centuries and countries for as rich an compendium of art works that one is likely to see in this state. All of them are drawn from the Wadsworth’s own collection, which should make them feel cheeky. Still, what is fascinating is how humility evolves into hubris. In the 15^th century, when Renaissance rediscovered antiquity and thus the power of the individual, sacred art made way for a new kind of art: genre paintings and landscapes, showing individual pleasures and naturalistic vistas. What’s intriguing is how artists convey the aristocracy in ways that aroughly mirror the way they treat sacred figures. Alessandro Allori’s “Portrait of a Noblewoman and her son,” presents the figures in their luxurious garments but their formalized faces reveal a humility and passivity that roughly mirrors the typical treatment of the Virgin Mary with the Baby Jesus. There are plenty of these in the exhibit, of course, but one of the most moving is the marvelous della Robbia Madonna and child with its blazing ivory white against a cerulean background. This is the type of ornament a middle-class Florentine would have in his home.

Fortunately, the exhibit is flush with eye-popping ornaments no ordinary person could conceivably own. There include pieces of porcelain so fine and delicate that they seem constructed out of some confectionary whim, as well as pieces of silver, including one garlanded silver centerpiece, animated with a center tier set piece of musicians playing as in a gazebo, that is worth the price of admission alone.

Viewers are first greeted with the indulgences of the 16^th and 17^th century – scientific knickknacks from the natural world. The Wadsworth has displayed precious curiosity cabinets, including one formidable ebony and ivory one, in which wealthy patricians would display everything from minerals, fossils, scientific instrument, to the jaws of enormous fish or skeletons of ghoulish sea creatures. These are the Renaissance equivalent of curio cabinets, except that instead of showcasing your fondness for, say Hummels, the Kunst-und Wunderkammer, as they were called, signified your degree of modernity, and therefore enlightenment.

There are so many of these stunning objects throughout the exhaustive exhibit that it’s tempting to wish curator Edward Zafran had relegated decorative objects to a separate room. But the further one goes into the rooms, the more canny the decision becomes. These objects, whether silver candlesticks or fancy new telescopes, not only were ostentatious; possession of these things begin to animate the canvases and the minds of the owners and artists. The Kunst-und Wunderkammer in particular sp

eak to the increasing primacy of empirical evidence, a tendency that begins in the 12^th century with Roger Bacon and continues with Francis Bacon in the 15^th.

The tension between these drives – the desire to know by rational, observable evidence and the inclination to know through faith are the warp and woof of the era. So, too, is the issue of wealth and how it reflects, or dilutes the its bearer’s faith. The Dutch, surprisingly, were among the worst to worry about the effects of too much wealth on burghers desperate for salvation. That may be because the Florentines spent so much of theirs on sacred art and the newly established Dutch Republic was Calvinist and dismissed religious art. But it may have been because the Dutch got so rich so fast.

A work like “Allegory of Worldly Riches,” 1600 captivates with its shimmering pieces of gold, silver goblets and ledger books – until one looks in the corner to see the wealthy owner selling his soul to some amphibious-looking devils. Lots of allegories of the fall of man animate Italian painting, but a Dutch master like Gerard Dou can make the point with such subtlety and sobriety in “Still Life with Ourglass (1647) a small horizontal work of an inkwell sitting on an artist drawing, while a the cinnamon grains from the auburn hourglass sift unremittingly in the corner. Art will stay, says Dou, and writing. But what of the rest of us?

By the 17^th century, not only Luther, but Calvin and others had begun to drain the authority of the Catholic Church, but Rome fought back, with vigorous artistic commissions that insisted on the duality of Jesus’ nature, focusing increasingly on his humanity. The Baroque art it engendered blazed through central Europe with an immediacy, grittiness and ferocious humanity. Leading the charge was Michelangelo da Caravagggio, an artist whose insistence on the earthy, crude, dirty, but ultimately divine spirit of man ushered in a new definition of beauty that continues to resonate today.

The Caravaggio the Wadsworth has here is one of the best, and to get an idea of how revolutionary it is, compare Caravaggio’s “Saint Francis,” (1595) to Francisco Ribalta’s “The Ecstacy of St. Francis: The Vision of the Musical Angel” (1620-25) nearby.

Ribalta’s saint is overstuffed and feathery; his ecstasy is crowded and frothy. Caravaggio’s is spare, bleak and and transcendent. His Saint Francis is all alone and we do not see what he sees; only the Angel, whose arms support the swooning Francis and whose gaze, so rich with compassion and patience, is as close to divinity as an artist could reasonably capture. This is a saint who is ordinary, and yet extraordinary, whose sees visions while we see only inky blankness.

Caravaggio was a murderer and a blackguard, but he painted like an angel. The Fra Angelico “Head of an Angel” on display is beautiful and exotic, but removed. Caravaggio bridged the gap between the sacred and secular, and his influence continued to dominate Europe for centuries. Francisco de Zurbaran’s “Saint Serapion,” in which the martyred saint is shown hanging by his wrists in a Christ-like pose, could not have been possible without Caravaggio. The treatment of the saint’s flopped head, his gnarled hands and the play of light and dark on his creamy linen robe, all suggests Caravaggio.

So, too, with the Dutch painter Michael Sweerts, who appropriates the dynamic interplay between light and dark, the inherent beauty in an ordinary boy, a reductive simplicity of composition- all of that is found on his canvases. So emotive and crepuscular is the Flemish painter’s “The Burial of the Dead,” part of his Seven Acts of Mercy series, that one would swear it was a Caravaggio. But the landscape is too articulated and the faces just slightly too obscure. It remains one of the most haunting works in the collection.

The convenience of dividing up these 400 paintings as Zafran has done allows visitors to pick and choose. Those are interested in Italian Renaissance art are able to make a bee-line to the lucidly painted, gruesome narrative of “The Feast of Herod,” by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Or the balletic grace of Lelio Orsi’s “Noli me Tangere,” whose weird colors and dramatic posing recall El Greco. Dutch masters, porcelain and still life is given its own gallery. For the English landscape enthusiasts, there is a swirling Turner seascape and a small but evocative John Constable. There is even a weird Joseph, Wright of Darby that seems right out of Fuesseli. And there is plenty of breathless, feathery confections of French art, largely from the rococo period that encouraged frivolity, lightheartedness and pleasure.

Increasingly, the spiritual is less literal and more suggestive. We’re aware that Louis Leopold Boilly’s “The Mockery,” a coy seduction scene, is as much titillating as it is cautionary. Neoclassicism replaces the mystic with the mythic, but, in the end, the point is very much the same. It is, all of it, gorgeous art work. Whether divinity is its object or humanity is, the beauty and power to move remain poignantly similar.

c. Republican-American

In Gainsborough’s hands poverty looks good

There is nothing pretty about poverty, but in the capable hands of Thomas Gainsborough it could be beautiful.

That facility has not always worked to Gainsborough’s advantage. His critics – and there are many – have accused Gainsborough of whitewashing the grinding poverty of 18^th century British peasantry for the sentimental divertissement of the rich. Still, on closer inspection, Gainsborough’s urchins look pretty filthy and their living conditions appallingly. Gainsborough’s stunning cottage images have viewed seen as exemplars of the rustic idyll, “Walden” meets Real Simple. His peasants look so pretty! His cottagers look so cute! Who needs asbestos when there’s a thatch alternative?

It’s easy to blame Gainsborough for ushering in the cloying sentimentality of the 19^th century, whose overwrought sensibilities are with us still.

So the Yale Center for British Art’s “Sensation & Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s ‘Cottage Door’” is a well timed riposte to the antics of schlock-meisters as Thomas Kincaid. Cottage doors, this ambitious exhibit reminds us, were not always employed for such shtick. But why they’ve become so iconic is a tantalizing question that likely says more about us than it does about the artists who invoke them. That is a question the otherwise splendid exhibit, curated by Ann Bermingham of the Huntington Library, is at pains to address.

Gainsborough was the first to coin the cottage door as a cultural motif, but he was hardly the last, as anyone trapped in a Holiday Inn can attest. Whether it is fair to blame him for this unremitting kitsch is not nearly as interesting as why the burgeoning British gentry glommed on to the image when they did. Because at the time that Gainsborough painted his first cottage door piece – 1768– the British were doing all they could to tell the peasants they could go to the devil. A series of public acts, called the Enclosure Acts, were steadily encroaching on agricultural practices the peasantry had taken for granted for centuries. With the rise of the British Empire came the notion of private property, which meant that peasants who had farmed common lands for generations were kicked off what became private estates. What’s surprising is that not only that British could stomach this upending of cultural convention but that they would actually want to buy pictures of the very people whom they are dispossessing.

“Sensation & Sensibility” does a good job of explaining why they did. Conventional wisdom has it that the British assuaged their collective guilt because they bought into Gainsborough’s propaganda – But the peasants are so happy, so hearty, and so cute. The British Museum goes a step farther, tapping into the moral sensibilities of the period, and underlying Gainsborough’s dramatic genius with a diverting sidebar on 18th century theatrics.

Gainsborough undoubtedly was in the right place at the right time, but it’s hard to dismiss his stunning facility with the brush, his luminous color technique and the sheer brio with which he handled paint. Gainsborough was a master of theatricality, a proficiency he employed to lucrative effect in his sumptuous portraits. Despite his success in portraiture, his soul was always in the land, an inconvenient affection for as ambitious a painter as Gainsborough who lived at a time when history painting was esteemed above all else. Gainsborough’s cleverness was in discovering a genre that was his exclusively and that married his love of the land with his exceptional portraiture skills. His genius was allowing his considerable empathy for the poor to germinate on his canvas at a time when it was expedient to do so.

“Sensation and Sensibility” wisely focuses on the intersection of Gainsborough’s career and the rise of a philosophical introspection, which, like cottage doors, is with us still. Passion – its genesis, its development, its cause – was all the rage in the late 18^th century, a time of rococo, gothic novels and Jean Jacques Rousseau. The man of feeling, or sentiment — in the 18^th century lexicon, sensibility – was considered morally virtuous. No stiff upper lip for these Brits. The man seen weeping over Coleridge or swooning under a harvest moon — was esteemed for his empathy. “Nature,” said Lord James “which has designed us for society, has connected us together by a participation in the joys and miseries of our fellow creatures.” David Hume argued that sympathy for others has salubrious civic effects. Gainsborough fused two crucial 18^th century movements, one philosophical and the other scientific. Moral sensibility and advances in optical understanding were two undercurrents in Gainsborough’s oeuvre and in his five cottage door paintings, the two fused to produce a narratively dense and visually bewitching artistry.

“Sensation & Sensibility” is built around what is arguably Gainsborough’s most talismanic piece – his huge 1780 opus “The Cottage Door.” The British Art Center has inventively displayed it as its owner, Sir John Leicester did in 1818, under a circus-like tent, surrounded by mirrors and candlelight. The lights here are electric, of course, and so is the effect. Gainsborough always said that one should look at his paintings both close up and far away. Ensconcing the work in mirrors allows the viewer to make that optical shuttle.

J.M.W. Turner, hardly a softie, was bewitched by the work, calling it a painting of “pure and artless innocence.” Is it innocence or is it indigence? The enormous work, suffused with a leafy green forest that forms a halo around Gainsborough’s women and children, is as stunning for its naturalistic detail as for its compelling narrative. Who are these raggedy children tugging on this stunning but distracted woman? As in so many Gainsborough landscapes, the beefy forest seems to devour the cottage. The cottage does not so much anoint the woods as it is swallowed up by it. In the handsome catalog that accompanies the exhibit, Susan Sloman convincingly argues that the women in these images were likely wet-nurses. The gentry commonly consigned their progeny to country foster-mothers who nursed them until they were brought back home to be educated. So, while it looks like the women of these images were frolicking with their brood, it’s likely they were renting their breasts out, which accounts for their abstracted air. That’s particularly obvious in “The Woodcutter’s Return,” a charming image of three women tending to six children while a man returns from collecting faggots for the hearth.

The women in these cottage door paintings are bewitching, hardly likely under such oppressive circumstances. But Gainsborough loved women and painted them with a sense of awe and delight. Even his arch-rival Joshua Reynolds conceded that Gainsborough’s peasants had “such a grace” and “such an elegance…as are more frequently found in cottages than in courts.” Most of the women sit by the door, babes in arm, an archetype that has done wonders for the women’s movement. Home equals woman, equals nourishment, equals warmth. It’s a simple equation that as Sloman suggests, doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny. Nevertheless, the women in these images have become as much a cultural icon as the cottages they inhabit.

What’s fascinating is that while Gainsborough endows the women with an ethereal, quasi-religious air, the children in the images are bedraggled and drawn, tattered and grimy. For an artist who loved painting children, the melancholic desperation of the children is a key to his sympathies. Gainsborough was not a political man. He stoped exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1782, four years before his death, and frequently complained about the need to do society portraits. But it’s hard to look at these waifs in such threadbare conditions and not see where Gainsborough’s sympathies lay. If this is the simple life, bring on the progress.

c. Republican-American

Illustrators at war with the canvas

Leonardo da Vinci is said to have held that all art begins with drawing, but he failed to say whether it also ends there. Since the 15^th century, drawing, as the genesis of an artist’s vision, has been an esteemed category of fine art, a position that, alas, defied translation in the New World.

Perhaps if the artists whose works make up “Double Lives: American Painters as Illustrators, 1850-1950,” had lived in Renaissance Italy, they would not have suffered so much torment over their often bewitching turns as illustrators.

Illustration is not, of course, drawing, and as the New Britain Museum of American Art makes clear, that is part of the problem. The 38 artists gathered in this engaging exhibit toggled between commercial illustration and fine art, often striking an inelegant balance between idealism and pragmatism. Art had grown less pantheistic since the time of Leonardo, and industrial advances meant that art could be reproduced and disseminated with rapacious zeal. For an artist, that meant their work could be seen by more people than ever before. It also meant that they could be seen as sell-outs.

“The National Academy looked down on these illustrators as pariahs, as hacks,” says Douglas Hyland, executive director of the New Britain Museum of American Art. “They had almost prostituted themselves to commercialism.”

Of course, art has always been prostitution of some sort. In Europe it was called patronage; in the United States it was called capitalism.

The problem with commercialism is its tinge of crassness. If everybody likes something it can no longer be the exclusive privilege of the elite few. That is why Jonathan Franzen balked when Oprah Winfrey anointed his “The Corrections” with her imprimatur. Sure, it meant money. But money, to a few effete holdouts, is bad. Anything subject to the whims of the boorish rabble must be, by definition, pedestrian.

Once he had scored with his evocative anthems to ambiguity Edward Hopper distanced himself from his days as an illustrator. “Illustration didn’t interest me,” he sniffed. “I was forced into it in an effort to make money.”

What makes “Double Lives” so scintillating is that friction. Boyle writes that fine art is to illustration what poetry is to prose. But a better analogy might be that of journalism to literature, two genres inextricably bound to illustration. Illustration grew up with journalism. American literacy grew exponentially in the period “Double Lives” examines, and with it came a deluge of newspapers and magazines, all of which needed artists to enhance their products. For artists, like Winslow Homer, that meant a sure and steady paycheck, but the deal they struck was Faustian.

Homer’s trajectory was typical. He began his career as a Civil War illustrator for Harper’s Weekly, capturing montages of war from domestic duress to battlefield exuberance. Homer was brilliant at capturing the emblematic moment, inaugurating a filmic tradition in American illustration that extends to John Ford. But once Homer’s canvases, like his menacing “Skirmish in the Wilderness,” began to sell, canvases began to sell, he abandoned illustrations. Most artist, from John Sloane to Frederick Remington, did the same. Some, like Childe Hassam, scarcely mentioned their illustrations. One is on view here and its graphic sentimentality – a regrettable hallmark of too many 19^th century illustrations – explains Hassam’s muteness.

While many artists, like Maxfield Parish, Henry Francis Farney and Edwin Austin Abbey moved fluidly between art and illustration, other artists, like N.C. Wyeth, seemed fatally condemned to it. A Wyeth illustration, such as the two striking examples from “The Yearling” and “Treasure Island” could add cachet to a volume, in the same way Wyeth selling it could detract from his reputation.  

The dreadful reality, as Wyeth’s wan “Dying Winter” canvas attests, is that the artist’s oils lack the strapping zeal of his illustrations, like his dynamic illustration for “Treasure Island” on view here.

Most of the artists, from Reginald Marsh, to Thomas Moran, to Frederic Remington to Everett Shinn, create illustrations in keeping with their more celebrated paintings. The real surprises here, are the painters like Robert Frederick Blum. His “Two Idlers,” is so dazzling, with its dabs of primary color hammock fringe accentuating the primal nature of an encounter between dashing roué and indolent victim, that one is surprised he illustrated at all. He seems born for the canvas.

What makes Blum’s resplendent piece stand out is a quality underappreciated in illustration that had a potent effect on painting and, later, film: Its narrative quality. American painters and illustrators tune in to the quintessential depictive moment – the second when the can-can girl lifts her skirt and the base player leers, or when the last bison sheds his first drop of blood on the frozen plane– so that the works have a narrative edginess.

So influential was this dimension on the work of directors John Ford and  Clarence Brown, that Brown used seven of N.C. Wyeth’s illustrations from “The Yearling” to frame scenes in his film of the same name. That should have been a signal to Wyeth of the vibrancy of his illustrations, but it did not. He killed himself in 1945, a year before “The Yearling” was released, believing he was a failure as a fine artist.

The exhibit continues at the New Britain Museum of American Art, 56 Lexington St., New Britain, through   . For more information, visit www.nbmaa.org.

Alexander Calder’s wild jewelry

Angelica Huston in one of Alexander Calder's creations

Nobody could be a wallflower in a piece of Alexander Calder jewelry.
It was a sure remedy for reticence. Wearing a piece of Calder turned one into a mobile, and often into something more martial and primal, a Masai goddess or Celtic chieftain.
Calder, who spent the bulk of his artistic life in Roxbury, was celebrated for breathing air into sculpture, with his three-dimensional mobiles and stabiles. But his contribution to jewelry has been overlooked and underappreciated. A new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art hints at why that might be. Culling from the more than 1,000 unique pieces of brass, silver and gold ornaments, the Met has come up with a representative sample of 90, the first time they have been exhibited exclusively.
That is more than enough to convince viewers of Calder’s transgressive approach to fine art. These bent, twisted, coiled spirals of hammered metal say as much about the artist’s fetishistic devotion to primitive art as they do about his own pilgrim spirit. Calder didn’t simply want art to move; he wanted people to move with it.
These are sinuous designs that hypnotize you with their enormity and elasticity. They twist and pivot, suspend and support, twist and swerve. Only a few are gold – including a stunning ring of a spiral curling into a double-helix – most are brass or silver and all are bruised by Calder’s hammer. Most were made for friends; although it’s clear Calder had a broader audience in mind. These works, particularly the gifts, are leavened with Calder’s pun-heavy humor, soldered with his breathtaking manipulation of formal images. (While courting his wife, Louisa, he created a bracelet fashioned out of brass wire that read “Medusa,” a reference to Louisa’ untamed ringlets)
Calder’s puckish sense of humor, vividly displayed here with his fish, pig, lizard and initialized brooches, can sometimes undercut the bravura nature of his art. Strangely, in these smaller, mesmerizing pieces, his broader ambition becomes more evident. Whether in mobiles, drawings or steel sculptures, Calder was blurring distinctions between high and low, primitive and precious, art and craft and even surrealism and modernism, whose concepts he deftly straddled.
To achieve that in the international art scene was but no means a cinch, but to do so in the realm of jewelry heightened the intimacy of his quest. This was a man who created jewelry out of scrap metal during the glittering jazz age and put it on heiresses and socialites. And they wore it – even if it hurt.
Peggy Guggenheim, in particular, was an admirer and a picture of her in her Calder earrings, which are on display nearby, demonstrates how overwhelming (and uncomfortable) the pieces could be. Guggenheim poises delicately, looking a bit like she is about to be impaled by their exuberance.
But Guggenheim loved the earrings, and boasted among her friends, that although they had brooches, bracelets and necklaces, only she had a Calder mobile hanging from her lobes (She also had a Calder headboard for her pied a terre in Venice.)
Calder began creating jewelry out of scrap parts as early as 8, when he cobbled together some electric cables he found to make a ring for his sister’s doll. He began creating jewelry in earnest beginning in 1928 and kept at it throughout his career. Jewelry seemed to give him the opportunity to explore the archetypal power of ancient symbols in a more tangible way. After moving to Paris in 1926, Calder had clearly been influenced by the primitive art he saw at Le Musee d’Ethnographie du Trocadero (Today Le Musee l’homme). He was particularly captivated by late-Bronze Age Celtic ornamentation, which he

As his grandson, Alexander S.C. Rower said, “The jewelry is an invitation to join him in a utopian view that he had in which you don’t have to wear pearls and jewels. Why not wear brass and ceramic plates?”
Why not indeed? As his friend, the British surrealist Stanley William Hayter said, “In the early days in Paris, everybody was wearing Calder jewelry.”
A Calder collar signaled Bohemianism of the most primitive sort.

copyright, Republican-American

Our Landscape Heritage to the Rescue

Now is a good time for a pep talk.
Or perhaps a tonic for our national malaise, this disequilibrium that has afflicted us and turned the economy into our national invalid. Apprehension can turn to machismo and chagrin with the flick of a paint brush, which is only one of the lessons the Hudson River School of painting continues to impart. The re-hanging of 28 pieces from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art’s unparalleled collection comes at a propitious time – for the Wadsworth, the city of Hartford and the country as a whole. That’s because the Hudson River School is not only the first, but also the most emblematic of American art movements and when one is unsure where one is going, it helps to remember where one has been.
It also helps to reconnect with our own national morality tale, and the Hudson River School is surely that. It is the place where American self-mythologizing begins, the place where its tall tales are rooted and its aspirations incubate. Its parables continue to define and edify us, even as its principles teeter on the hyperbolic.
It was always – even at the beginning when Thomas Cole, an Englishman, turned the mirror on America and underscored its magnificence – a lie, its best features sexed up and its worst fudged. But Americans believed it, and that intractable conviction became integral to the country’s identity.
The Wadsworth is celebrating the return of its Hudson River School works from two years of being on tour – mostly in Europe where undertones of American rapacity continue to resonate and for many Wadsworth habitués, the homecoming is more than welcome. Like the story the Hudson River landscapes tell, the Wadsworth’s future has been subject to great reaches of pomposity and retrenchment – it has lost three directors, two expansion plans and nearly 100,000 visitors in the last 10 years. It will now neither move nor expand but simply renovate its warren-like galleries, looking into its holdings to flaunt what it has, a bit like Thomas Cole insisting that the wilderness was not savage and exploitable, but sublime and indispensable.
Cole is justifiably credited with beginning the Hudson River School, the impassioned landscape style that dominated American art from 1825 to 1870, but from the beginning it was fraught with apprehension. Cole had been raised amidst the “dark satanic mills” of Bolton, England, and his genius was to see in his adoptive land the unspoiled wilderness and purity of nature that Europe had so vigorously corrupted.
Cole never actually tramped through exotic wilderness. It is part of the poetry of his story that the sights he depicted – like the lush Kaaterskill Falls (1826) on display here — were already being exploited for the emerging tourist class that chugged up the Hudson River Valley.
“Kaaterskill Falls” was the great tourist spot of the early 19th century. Cole puts the viewer inside the dank cave over which the Falls spill, but, by the time he painted it, a tourist stand, picnic area and concession stand rose above the meandering stream. Kitsch had invaded and with it the degradation Cole most feared. Cole’s decision to expunge them is at once artistic and political. “Kaaterskill Falls” is, like all Cole works, a celebration and a warning.
It’s this tension between Arcadia and arcade that unnerves Cole and gives rise to his greatest, if overwrought, “The Course of Empire,” now at the New-York Historical Society. This is a rags-to-riches-to rags tale that hits a little close to home. The Wadsworth has graciously provided “Mount Etna from Taormina,” (1843), dashed off the same year, as an antidote and it’s all here – Cole’s ruined civilization in the foreground, dwarfed by the puissance of Mount Etna smoldering ominously in the distance. All that’s left of the glory days are a few ruins – the Hartford Times building, Sage-Allen, G. Fox – and a meandering shepherd.
“What is potent is nature,” explains Elizabeth Mankin Kornheiser, the Wadsworth’s Curator of American Painting and Sculpture. “This was his warning in ‘The Course of Empire.’ If we loose sight of God and his natural creation, that’s what we’re going to end up as. In many ways, he was right. A civilization engaged in excess and greed. Everything is too much. Too much military. Too much luxury. We have forgotten about God and nature and our planet.”
Cole was giving Americans their first religious paintings. Europe could have its gaudy ecclesiastical excess, but America’s defining characteristic was land, a resource endangered as early as 1827, when Cole painted “View of the White Mountains,” an image of a single, axe-wielding settler, sauntering down a hideous laceration of land in an otherwise glorious wilderness.
So abrupt and certain was the “consciousness of destruction, of quick and inevitable change, “as Alexis De Tocqueville wrote that “one is in some sort of hurry to admire” what remained of the solitary American landscape.
The tale the Atheneum tells in this tidy exhibit is a tight and instructive one. Cole had been discovered by John Trumbull, the great American history painter, whose hideous “Niagara Falls from an Upper Bank on the British Side” reminds viewers of the radical innovation Cole undertook. Trumbull may have been a ham-fisted landscape artist, but saw Cole’s talent and introduced the Englishman to Daniel Wadsworth, who, in turn, introduced the precocious Frederic Church to Cole. Church became Cole’s pupil, but the tone in which he painted was, in many ways, the antithesis of Cole’s custodial tenderness toward nature. Where Cole was tender, Church was tempestuous; where Cole was apprehensive, Church was boisterous. Cole wanted to remind viewers of the sacred trust they had to preserve; Church wanted to impress on them how much capital they had to spend.

It’s telling that when Kornhauser showed Church’s “Coast Scene, Mount Desert” (1863) to her Australian counterparts a few years ago, the Australians flinched. “Too Texan,” they scoffed. In other words, too bombastic, jingoistic, boastful – too macho.
But that machismo, the bracing sea crashing against the jagged rocks, spewing whorls of sea foam into the air, is equally a part of American identity. So much so that Alfred Bierstadt was unable to contain his enthusiasm over the majestic Yosemite Valley and, in “In the Mountains” threw in the Alps for good measure.
But Bierstadt and Church add a new dimension to this celebratory self-satisfaction. Divine Providence, in the guise of a beatific and guiding light, infuses paintings like Church’s iconic “Hooker and Company Journeying through the Wilderness in 1636 from Plymouth to Hartford” (1846). Here, Rev. Hooker and his party flee into the bosom of the Farmington River Valley like the Holy Family on the flight into Egypt. In Church’s fulsome narrative, not only to the trees have ears (and mouths and noses) but so do the rocks, roots and every other natural accessory in the family’s path.
So brazen and hysterical is Church in his xenophobia that his brilliance as a painter is often overlooked. His Mount Desert scene may have a dash too much testosterone, but the radical way in which Church composed it, thrusting the viewer bodily into the churn of sea spray id a dazzling display of bravura painting and innovative cropping that presages Degas.
All of this brio ended, of course, with the self-sabotage of the Civil War, which forever maimed the country’s ability to see itself as divinely blessed. What’s fascinating is how post-Civil War painters like John Frederic Kensett and Sanford Robinson Gifford sought to assuage American guilt with tight, tranquil images of natural idylls. This time, nature is not evidence of the country’s supremacy, but a balm for its tranquility. Church’s divine conceit has been replaced by a contemplative, vaguely melancholic rumination.
All of this – the stewardship of Cole, the swagger of Church, the introspection of Gifford and Kensett – is part of the yeasty American narrative, from which we draw inspiration — and chagrin.