Date: Fri 02-Oct-1998

Publication: Ant

Author: CAROLL

Quick Words:

Landscapes

Full Text:

New Worlds From Old: 19th Century Australian & American Landscapes

HARTFORD, CONN. -- Through January 3, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford is

exhibiting "New Worlds From Old: Nineteenth Century Australian and American

Landscapes." This is the first show to compare the distinguished traditions of

two nations.

At the dawn of the Nineteenth Century, Australians and Americans confronted

alien wildernesses in vast and expanding "new worlds." Their artists

creatively recast European and English landscape conventions for their own

purposes. At the century's close, when the transition from pioneering

settlements to industrial urban societies was complete, artists had recorded

on canvas the quickly evolving relationship between their countrymen and

nature. Scenery once regarded as foreign, often formidable, was later

integrated into the national consciousness and championed as a symbol of

national identity.

"New Worlds From Old" is arranged by chronological themes, opening with

"Meeting the Land," "Claiming the Land," "In Awe of the Land," "A Landscape of

Contemplation," and concluding with "The Figure Defines the Landscape." The

exhibition reveals thematic and stylistic parallels and expressive and formal

concerns shared by Australian and American artists. It doesn't lose sight,

however, of their divergent social and political origins.

Over 100 paintings, roughly half from each nation, have been loaned by 32

American, 11 Australian, and two European museums and galleries. Major works

by 37 American artists -- including Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Albert

Bierstadt, William Merritt Chase, and Winslow Homer -- are featured. Nearly

all of the historical landscapes by the 23 Australian artists featured have

never been shown outside the continent.

Organizers include Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, chief curator and Krieble

curator of American painting and sculpture, Wadsworth Atheneum; Elizabeth

Johns, Silfen term professor of the history of art, University of

Pennsylvania; and Andrew Sayers, director, National Portrait Gallery,

Canberra, Australia.

Parallel Traditions

During the first half of the Nineteenth Century, travelers and artists in both

America and Canada explored the landscape in search of an understanding of the

physical and spiritual aspects of nature. At the beginning of the century,

feeling a sense of their own insignificance in the face of a vast wilderness,

these explorers relied on a set established ways of looking at nature in order

to make the unfamiliar landscape of the "new world" comprehensive to European

eyes.

As a new nation attempting to define itself, America celebrated in its art the

novelties of its landscape -- its scale, its freshness, and variety --

approaching the scenery as a tourist would. The wilderness, which had been

feared in the Eighteenth Century, was now viewed as the country's most

distinctive feature, a symbol of the nation's potential as well as the

country's history.

Australian attitudes toward their own wilderness landscape were different.

Settled first as a penal colony in 1788, Australia did not let go of the image

of its lands as harsh and unforgiving, even ugly. And yet the exoticism of the

place, its flora and fauna, and its native peoples, had a singular appeal.

Picturesque Travel

In the late Eighteenth Century, English landscape painters adopted certain

structural principles from the idealized landscapes of the Seventeenth Century

French artists Claude Lorrain and Gaspar Poussin. The landscape was broken

down into three zones: a background; a strongly lit middle distance; and a

darkened foreground. In addition, the scene was to be framed by foreground

trees, a tree and ruin, or mountains at the sides. This dark foreground frame

was a way of heightening the impact of the central view, just as one might cup

one's hands around one's eyes to cut the glare of the sun. This method of

framing a landscape on canvas became a way of looking at the natural

landscape.

Similar terminology was used to discuss nature, and landscapes that resembled

those on canvas were sought out. This new landscape aesthetic was a dramatic

shift from the earlier topographical tradition that had dominated American and

Australian landscape painting in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth

Centuries.

Picturesque travelers, such as artists William Guy Wall in the United States

and Joseph Lycett in Australia, read the work of the English writer William

Gilpin (1724-1804) and others who defined the picturesque in their various

books on the subject.

The picturesque traveler visited sites in the new world on an itinerary of

natural scenery that was published in guidebooks and passed on by word of

mouth. Artists both documented and contributed to the popularity of these

sites by painting them.

Through paintings and through print portfolios such as Wall's "Hudson River

Portfolio" and Lycett's "Views in Australia," they also influenced the way in

which the public viewed landscape.

Sites along the American picturesque tour included the Hudson River,

Kaaterskill Falls, and Niagara Falls. In Australia, Bathurst Cataract in New

South Wales and Wentworth Falls were on the list of places to visit.

Claiming the Land

Much of the landscape imagery of the first half of the Nineteenth Century

celebrated the settlers' progress in transforming the landscape, of claiming

and settling the wilderness. In the early decades, Americans laid claim to the

land through ownership. England served as a cultural model. The tradition of

country house painting was applied to the more modest American counterpart.

Likewise in Australia, artists celebrated the impact white settlement had on

the land. City and town views were important in both Australia and America as

evidence of progress, of the taming of the wilderness toward what Europeans

considered productive ends. At the same time, this meant the loss of land for

Native Americans and Australian Aborigines. Both groups were pushed off their

land in order to make way for the Europeans.

New World or Old

The phrase "new world" traditionally refers to the United States or Australia,

while the phrase "old world" usually refers to Europe. However, America and

Australia were new worlds only to the newly arrived Europeans who settled

there. They were old - indeed, ancient - worlds to the people who already

lived there, Native Americans in the United States and Aborigines in

Australia.

One of the themes of this exhibition is the depiction of native peoples by

European-Americans and European-Australians. Artists depicted natives in each

country in ways that ranged from seemingly specific and accurate accounts of

their ways of life to generalized, romantic symbols of an irrecoverable past.

Artists such as George Catlin in the United States and John Glover in

Australia recorded the natives they met and read about much as some artists

recorded the distinctive and exotic flora and fauna of the "new" world.

The Anglo-American Thomas Cole, on the other hand, never claimed that his

images of Native Americans were ethnographic. For Cole, the figure of the

Native American served a symbolic purpose in landscape painting. In the

Catskill Mountains in New York State, for example, neither Native Americans

nor wilderness existed at the time Cole was there. By 1825, natives had been

pushed out of the Catskill region by white frontiers-people and industry, and

wilderness had been settled or was overrun by tourists.

Landscape of Association

Many Americans admired European landscapes for their rich associations with

historical events. European settlement in the United States was comparatively

recent and so the American landscape did not hold a large store of historical

allusions for the new Americans.

For new Australians, the landscape held even fewer associations. John Glover

painted sites associated with the removal of Aborigines, but there were few

references to European-Australian history.

Awestruck

By mid-century, artists sought to come to terms with their nation's

landscapes, by this time transcending pictorial tradition to capture the

essence of nature, including new scientific understandings regarding nature's

process and new ideas of the sublime.

In the United States, artists employed bigger canvases to capture their

expanding notions of landscape; the entrepreneurial spirit among leading

painters resulted in "the great picture."

American artists honed their marketing skills, seeking patronage amongst

railroad magnates and robber barons, as well as looking to London and Europe

in search of an international audience.

By the middle of the century, the European culture of Australia was developing

strongly and the discovery of gold in the early 1850s added considerably to

the booming economy. There was an element of opportunism in the landscapes

artists chose to focus on, and views of landscapes that prospectors hoped

might be a source of wealth were in demand.

Humboldt's Gift

Alexander von Humboldt was a German naturalist and traveler. In his day, he

was one of the world's most prominent intellectuals. His five-volume Cosmos ,

published between 1845 and 1862 (the last volume was published posthumously),

influenced an entire generation of scholars and artists, including Frederic

Church in the United States and Eugene von Guerard in Australia.

Humboldt's belief in the mutual reinforcement of art and science was a

compelling one for these artists. In his writings Humboldt emphasized that

landscape painting was an important means of expressing one's love for nature.

He also stressed the importance of accurately recording details; but did not

advocate topographical landscape painting, believing that the artist's

emotional and intellectual response to nature was necessary for a successful

work of art.

Humboldt's idea that nature was constantly changing was a revolutionary one.

Scientists theorized that the continents had been built up primarily by

volcanic action, only to suffer erosion from rain and wind. The same forces

that shaped nature throughout history were still at work. Consequently,

artists turned to mountains and waterfalls as particularly appropriate and

moving subjects for landscape art.

To Contemplate

In the 1860s and 1870s, artists sought training and inspiration in Europe as

their patrons became more cosmopolitan in their taste. Several new trends

rooted in European art began to have an impact in America and Australia

including French Barbizon landscape painting, the Munich school, and the

British-inspired Aesthetic Movement. Advancements in photography threatened

landscape painters' dominance over the newer, more "truthful" medium.

These changes signaled a transitional phase in landscape art. It was in the

late 1870s that the term Hudson River School was coined to emphasize what was

now perceived as the American school's provincialism. The precise detailed

work of Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church was rejected in favor of an art

that focused more on mood and atmosphere. In Australia too, the specificity of

Eugene von Guerard's work was succeeded by the more generalized, poetic, and,

indeed, nostalgic art of Louis Buvelot and W.C. Piguenit.

Figure Defines

By the end of the century, humans' changed relation to nature - from subject

to master - was revealed in landscape art. American artists returning home

from European sojourns in the 1870s and 1880s found that the earlier agrarian

society had rapidly shifted to an industrialized and increasingly urban

culture.

Artists turned their attention to depictions of modern life, capturing

fleeting moments, as well as to subjects that reflected the need to retreat

from the fast pace of life in the city. Images of people enjoying nature in a

controlled environment - the city park, the resort, or the garden - replaced

earlier views of figures overwhelmed by the natural world.

By the 1890s, nationalism was on the rise in Australia as the country

approached federation in 1901. Landscape painting was deeply linked to

cultural nationalism in Australia, and the work of those artists who engaged

with these broader cultural ideas increasingly came to be seen as the

"national school." Romantic images of stockmen and gold prospectors symbolized

a simpler, agricultural Australia that was now subordinate to the city.

Catalogue

The National Gallery of Australia and the Wadsworth Atheneum have published an

illustrated catalogue of the exhibition, with essays by Elizabeth Johns,

Andrew Sayers, and Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, and contributions by Amy

Ellis, assistant curator of American paintings and sculpture, Wadsworth

Atheneum. The book is distributed in the United States by Thames and Hudson.

After being seen at the Wadsworth, "New Worlds From Old" will travel to The

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., from January 26 through April 18,

1999.

The Wadsworth Athneum is at 600 Main Street, telephone 860/278-2670.