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The Cultivated Landscapes of George Inness
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11575 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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9 / 1986 |
3,021 Words |
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James F. Cooper
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An exhibition of sixty-three paintings by George Inness (1825-1894), the American nineteenth-century painter, opened at Washington's National Gallery of Art on June 22, 1986. The paintings have been brought together from private and public collections, and have previously been displayed during the past twelve months at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This is the first major showing of Inness' work to be seen by a national audience in nearly forty years.
The exhibition, which was organized by Michael Quick, Curator of American Art at the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, covers a span of fifty years in Inness' career, revealing the development of several artistic styles that evolved initially from a highly realistic one to the impressionist genre for which he is perhaps best known.
Comparing Twilight, painted by George Inness in the year 1860, to his later work The Clouded Sun, painted in 1891, does not merely produce a confrontation between a product of youth and one characterizing the artist's full maturity. Rather, it juxtaposes a vision that is primarily American and idealistic - that revels in its creative intensity, is as formally composed as a seventeenth-century painting by Claude Lorrain, and is infused with a compelling personal vision of Nature's grandeur - against a work of atmospheric vagueness that precludes formal design and rendered detail, emphasizing instead brush work and impressionist color over content and personal expression.
Understandably in our contemporary era, the impressionist works by George Inness are the ones that draw much of the critical acclaim and public attention accorded his work. Not that these later paintings are not to be admired for their sensitivity and intelligence. There is quality enough to justify how this extraordinarily gifted artist, despite his old age, could grasp the elements of a new art style and guide the course of American art so the twentieth century prepared to relinquish homegrown aesthetics and philosophical values, and accept succeeding waves of European Modernism sweeping across our shores.
Indeed, the genius of George Inness was such that without any art training to speak of (except for some brief lessons lasting a total of three weeks), he mastered several styles during a career that spanned some fifty years and which encompassed the realism of the Hudson paintings by Frederick Church, Jasper Cropsey, and Sanford Gifford; European landscape painting by the Old Masters exemplified by Claude Lorrain; the French Barbizon School of plein aire landscape painting developed by T. Rousseau, Millet and Corot; the English pre-Impressionism of Turner and Constable; and finally the Impressionism of Pissarro and Monet.
Modern theoreticians conclude that Inness' evolvement form tight realism to Impressionism was a natural and hierarchical development. However, there is cause to suspect that Inness, despite his master of tonalism and color-field harmonics, shared with the German Romantics of the nineteenth century an inability to reconcile the dilemma Impressionism posed for most industrial nations - namely the divorcement between the eye and the spirit. Cezanne's observation that Monet had "only an eye," underscores the malaise that would eventually undermine Impressionism's continuing development in all countries but
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