Date: Fri 02-Apr-1999

Publication: Ant

Author: JUDIR

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Gallery-Section

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Gallery Section 4/23 For AA & AWEB Roads Less Traveled

With 5 cuts

BIRMINGHAM, ALA. -- Only a handful of artists who take up a paintbrush ever

become part of the public domain: someone whose name is instantly recognized

and whose work is universally known, admired, exhibited, chronicled and

collected.

Beneath this stratospheric layer is often a group of artists who are lesser

known, but whose work possesses great charm and beauty and insight. It is this

group of American artists from the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries

who are the subject of "Roads Less Traveled: American Paintings, 1833-1935" at

the Birmingham Museum of Art. The exhibition derived from an important private

collection, will be on view from May 2 through July 4 in the Jemison

Galleries.

The exhibition features 69 paintings by 67 artists from this definitive period

in American art and culture. The works are presented in several mediums,

including oil on canvas, pastel and watercolor, and they are divided into four

sections: landscape, marine and coastal, figurative, and still life paintings.

Almost half of the works are landscapes, reflecting the enormous interest in

landscape painting both among artists and collectors during this period.

A number of the artists such as Frank Duveneck, Herman Herzog and John

Frederick Peto are already represented in the museum's permanent collection.

Visitors to the exhibition will find a treasure trove of works to be

discovered. The title of the exhibition, "Roads Less Traveled," refers to the

path chosen by the collector in searching out these lesser known, but valued,

artists. As stated in the exhibition catalogue, "All (of these artists)...once

had a following. Some were quite popular and a few were even famous. Yet, from

1910 to 1965 almost all of them fell out of favor as the schools of American

painting they represented were swamped by a rising tide of modernism. With the

gradual revival of Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century American painting in

the last three decades, some of these have regained their former cachet. Many,

however, still wait to be discovered."

Landscape Painting

The 29 landscapes in this exhibition, spanning the years 1859 to 1934,

evidence a major shift in emphasis in American painting from portraiture and

history painting to landscape. During this period, the evolution of American

landscape painting may be seen to move through the following phases: the

Hudson River School, Barbizon, Impressionism, and Tonalism.

One will see landscapes ranging from the elaborately composed, spectacular

panoramas of the Hudson River School (John W. Casilear, Herman Herzog, Jervis

McEntee) to the more intimate glimpses of nature in Barbizon-inspired works

such as "Haines Fall, Catskill, New York" circa 1880s, by Hendrik Dirk

Kruseman van Elten. Mood and atmosphere as suggested in the narrow range of

color and simplified compositions of Tonalism are beautifully depicted in

Henry Farrer's late sunset view of a Long Island estuary, "Sunset in the

Wetlands," circa 1890s, and in Arthur Hoeber's impressions of a misty moonlit

pond, "A Spring Moon Rising," circa 1890s. An American version of

Impressionism can be observed in the brighter palette and impasto brush

strokes of works by Chauncey Foster Ryder, Guy Wiggins and Walter Granville

Smith.

In 1913, the New York Armory Show ushered in modernism, which soon made

American Barbizon, Tonalist and Impressionist painting seem old fashioned.

Although Impressionism was still favored by art schools as an academic style,

and has recently become popular again with collectors and museums, American

Barbizon and Tonalist painting, unlike the Hudson River School, have yet to

regain their former standing in the art world.

Marine And Coastal Painting

The ten works on view in this section range from the realism of George

Harvey's sensitive 1854 "Coastal Sunset" to the near abstraction of George

Elmer Brown's moody, Impressionistic moonlit harbor scene, "Fishing by

Moonlight," circa 1920s. Despite their stylistic differences, both works

express a growing need of many American artists to free themselves from the

anecdotal traditions of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Dutch and English

marine painting that dominated the genre until the middle of the Nineteenth

Century.

An increased emphasis on light and atmosphere in the works of many artists

after 1850 is mirrored in the spacious Luminist coastal view of "Ship Aground

Off Gayhead, Massachusetts" (1873, by Lemuel Eldred. After the turn of the

century, Impressionism and Tonalism began to give way to more modern styles as

Expressionism and abstract art came to the fore in American marine painting.

This tendency culminates in the exhibition not only in the aforementioned work

by Brown, but also in Frank Duveneck's sunset coastal view, "Gloucester

Seascape" circa 1900, and in "End of Gerrish Island," circa 1916, by Charles

Herbert Woodbury.

Figurative Painting

Although only eight works of figurative paintings are on view in "Roads Less

Traveled," they cover a broad spectrum, including portrait, literary and genre

painting. American professional portraiture started in the early Eighteenth

Century, but it did not reach maturity until John Singleton Copley and Gilbert

Stuart established it in the public's imagination in the decades following the

Revolution. Thomas Sully also flourished at this time, and his "Portrait of

William Brown," 1933, is one of the highlights of the exhibition. With the

advent of photography in the 1840s, however, painters strove for greater

verisimilitude and many stressed technical facility at the expense of

character study and personality exploration. Many painters no longer felt it

worthwhile to become portrait specialists and mostly abandoned the goal of

photographic accuracy, turning out occasional fine examples in whatever style

they happened to favor. Viewers will thus see the Impressionist self-portrait

from 1917 by Florence Julia Bach, painting herself as a challenging

no-nonsense woman, while about ten or 15 years later Hilda Belcher, in a much

more academic vein, captured the shyness and hesitation of her five-year-old

subject who stands on the stairs about to meet unanticipated visitors.

The formerly popular, but now neglected, field of literary painting is

represented by two examples in the exhibition: "Lady Macbeth," 1864, by

Christian Schussele, and "The Meeting of Hetty and Hist," circa 1857, by

Tompkins Harrison Matteson, depicting an episode in James Fenimore Cooper's

then popular novel The Deerslayer. Over the years, the field was "downgraded"

by successive generations of less well-read critics and art lovers; indeed

these two paintings would have been much more easily identified by average

contemporary viewers in the mid-Nineteenth Century than by audiences today.

Until fairly recently, genre painting has also been neglected by collectors.

Because it elicits the pleasure of recognition in (selectively) reflecting the

cultural ideals and social myths of the time, genre has always been one of the

most popular forms of painting, although relegated near the bottom in

traditional categorical rankings. Before the 1840s, rural life was celebrated

in objective and humorous portrayals of farmers and pioneers, but by the

1850s, attention focused on urban life. Paintings of children were especially

favored, although real hardships among urban immigrants and children were

ignored in favor of sentimental depictions of the innocence of childhood. Such

idealization may be seen in "Newsboy Eating a Pie," circa 1885, by Karl

Witkowski. The museum has a similar genre scene on view, "Three for Five," by

John Brown from 1890, which depicts a street urchin selling flowers.

Elihu Vedder, almost alone among Nineteenth Century American genre painters,

avoided the humorous and saccharine mode, opting rather for somber views, as

evidenced by such works as "The End of a Misspent Life," 1867, in which he

examines the ultimate isolation of the human condition.

Still Life Painting

The development of American still life painting from the mid-Nineteenth to the

early Twentieth Century can be seen in the following two paintings: George

Foster's 1858 "Fruit, Birds's Nest and White Mouse," punctuated by meticulous

detail, and the free brushwork of Anna S. Fisher's circa 1935 "White Petunias

in a Vase." These two still lifes, among the 18 on view, illustrate a shift

from the realist demand for fidelity to nature to the Impressionist goal of

suggesting it.

Unlike the other branches of American painting, still life painting did not

achieve critical favor until well after World War II. From the Eighteenth

Century well in the Twentieth, art critics relegated still lifes to the bottom

of an aesthetic hierarchy ruled by meaning, morality, and instructional value.

Still life was not an aesthetic hierarchy ruled by meaning, morality, and

instructional value. Still life was not regularly taught in any American art

institution until the 1890s, and only in 1921 did a history of the genre

appear. However, throughout the Nineteenth and into the Twentieth Century, it

was popular among art collectors.

Like other types of paintings at the time, still life fell into two general

stylistic categories. One precise and highly finished, relied on small, often

invisible brush strokes and emphasized the play of light and shadow upon

surfaces, as seen in Paul Lacroix's 1868 "White Grapes." The other style,

which began to develop after the Civil War and especially after 1880, took a

softer, more painterly and less illusionistic tack. Artists who traveled to

Europe brought back new, exotic styles of painting such as Barbizon, Art

Nouveau, and Impressionism. The evocation of mood became more important as

seen in Edward Gay's "Apple Blossoms."

The dramatic shift in subject matter of still life painting is also seen in

the exhibition. Until the mid-century, flowers were largely ignored in favor

of fruit. However in the 1850s and 1860s, botanical illustrations and John

Rushkin's insistence on truth to nature led to meticulously executed still

lifes of flowers in natural settings. Although many kinds of flowers were

depicted, roses surprisingly were not one of the most popular. Emily Spaford

Scott, however, realized their charms and made painting them her speciality as

"Roses in a Vase" circa 1885-1905, clearly reveals.

In the last third of the century, manmade objects entered the repertoire of

American still life. John F. Peto took this subject matter to the brink of

modernism; his forms and surfaces frequently radiate a sense of mystery and

abstraction, as seen in his 1889 "Books and Ink Bottle."

Much of the material in this article is derived from the exhibition catalogue

Roads Less Traveled: American Paintings, 1833-1935 by Frederick Baekeland,

1998 Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.

This four-color, fully-illustrated soft-cover catalogue has 163 pages and is

available in Museum stores at $30. To order the catalog, telephone

205/254-2777.

The Birmingham Museum of Art, 2000 Eighth Avenue North, is open Tuesday

through Saturday, 10 am to 5 pm, and Sunday, noon to 5 pm. Telephone

205/254-2565.