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Visions of Paradise: The Hudson River School
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12012 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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12 / 1987 |
2,278 Words |
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James F. Cooper
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This autumn a breathtaking new retrospective opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. American paradise: The World of the Hudson River School is the first major exhibition in forty years to display the landscape paintings of the Hudson River School. This stunning collection of nineteenth-century masterpieces by Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederic E. Church, Jasper F. Cropsey, John F. Kensett, George Inness, Sanford R. Gifford, and others provides a rare opportunity to gain a cultural overview of a past era. Simultaneously, it offers inspiration for our own times.
In contrast to the existential alienation that characterizes so much of twentieth-century American art, the works of the Hudson River School shine with spiritual Order and Beauty. The astonishingly high attendance at the exhibition--5,700 on the first day alone--sends a definite message: This is clearly art that people are longing to see.
American paradise is as much about religious and moral values as it is about the poetic grandeur of America's vast wilderness. Even though the exhibition abounds in beauty, what most strikes our contemporary twentieth-century sensibilities with pleasure is seeing the American landscape used as powerful symbol for the Divine presence nature.
To the teenaged Thomas Cole, newly arrived from Lancashire in 1818, the New World appeared to be a veritable Garden of Eden offering mankind a second chance for salvation. During solitary walks through the wilderness of the Catskill Mountains above the Hudson River, the former engraver made numerous detailed studies of the terrain that he later transferred to canvas in his New York City studio. In 1825 these Romantic, agitated, startlingly original works initiated the movement that was later dubbed the Hudson River School.
Cole aspired to be more than--in his words--a "mere leaf painter." Instead, he created vast Arcadian landscapes that he infused with a spiritual passion. A poem by Cole reflects his intense rapture over the American wilderness of the Catskills:
Let me transport you to those wild, blue mountains
That rear their summits near the Hudson's waves.
Though not the loftiest that begirt the land,
They yet sublimely rise, and on their heights
Your souls may have a sweet foretaste of heaven.
The New Eden
A lecture by Cole before the New York Lyceum in 1835 summarized the doctrines of what became the guiding ideology of the Hudson River School. The American landscape, Cole said, possessed qualities unlike any landscape in Europe (which had long been the model for American landscape painters). America's wilderness was "still a fitting place to speak of God." It offered scenery that combined the picturesque, the sublime, and the magnificent in a way that was unparalleled anywhere in the world. To artist and poet alike, it offered a visual analogy to the early days of the creation. "We are still in Eden," Cole concluded; "the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly." Anticipating the developments that were to come thirty years later, Cole cautioned
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