From settlement to modernity
“The silent energy of nature stirred the soul to its inmost depths,” said American landscape artist Thomas Cole in the early 19th century. Such were the profound feelings the American wilderness aroused in its people: the soaring optimism and reverence, the idealism and pragmatism. These were the redemptive powers of nature, and it is this sentiment that forms the bedrock of America: painting a nation, showing at the Art Gallery of NSW until February 9, 2014.
Featuring more than 80 paintings from five US art and philanthropic institutions – including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Terra Foundation for American Art – America: painting a nation offers visitors a preview of American art, history and culture from before the Declaration of Independence to the mid-20th century. Moving beyond the confines of pure aesthetics, it introduces the journeys and discoveries – including those places within one’s self – experienced by the American people as they grappled to discover their national identity.
Using four curatorial themes that examine, in chronological order, settlement through to modernity, the exhibition features works by artists familiar to us all – including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Singer Sargent, and James McNeill Whistler.
There is also a range of artists who were instrumental in the development of art in America but remain relatively unknown in Australia. These include Charles Wilson Peale (1741-1827) – credited with painting more than 1,000 portraits in colonial America, Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), who was part of the impressionist revolution, and made inroads, with Whistler, for the modern movement of art in America, and Milton Avery (1885-1965), the great modern painter of colour, whose work, Adolescence (1947) with its simplification of form and mastery of colour, reveals his interest in European modernist artists.
Importantly, the exhibition uncovers a national narrative that was fuelled by discovery and the opportunity to inhabit new spaces. Indeed, space is a primary motif – from the discovery of the new world to the growth of the city, the paintings in this exhibition offer visitors the chance to engage with the epic landscapes and portraits that construct myth (The promised land – the Grayson family, 1850 by William Smith Jewett; Cole’s Landscape with figures: a scene from ‘The last of the Mohicans’, 1826) as well as understand the impulse to document (Henry Inman’s No-Tin (Wind), a Chippewa chief, 1832-33; Thomas Moran’s Hot springs of the Yellowstone, 1872).
Of the changing space of the 20th century – the cityscape, the industrial jaggedness; the different forms of built environments that required new demands from the individual – this is an exhibition that explores the many contradictions of modern life, particularly the idea of individualism that was often dwarfed by the need to conform. In Joseph Boston’s From shore to shore (1885), people from different classes travel silently across New York’s East River on a ferryboat. An industrial landscape can be seen in the distance, the inhabitants seemingly alienated from their surroundings as much as from each other. Almost half a century later, we see Reginald Marsh’s beautifully wrought Third Avenue El (1931), an intimate snapshot of working class New Yorkers travelling in a train car, the vibrancy and energy with which the artist has captured this tableau, striking. Yet it is Edward Hopper’s early work, House at dusk (1935), with its small, interior spaces set against the vastness of nature that surrounds it, that portends what is to come for many American urban and city dwellers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Other stand-outs moments include Pollock’s No 22 (1950), the vibrant Something on the eight ball (1953-54) by Stuart Davis and O’Keeffe’s Red and orange streak (1919) and Horse’s skull with pink rose (1931). Undoubtedly, the energy and brashness of the distinct American character of the early to mid-20th century bristles upon the canvases of these artists.
America: painting a nation is a rich survey of American landscape and portrait painting that belies the blockbuster hype. It is hopefully the first of many exhibitions that will see major American art institutions share their collections, and work with Australian curators to show us more about America’s rich heritage through its visual arts culture. One feels exhibitions with a focus on the Native American Indian perspective, the immigrant experience, and the fight against intolerance would be well-received in Australia, as would an incisive survey of American contemporary art practice.
As Elizabeth Glassman, president and CEO of the Terra Foundation for American Art recently said, ‘Our mission states, Art has the power to distinguish cultures and unite them.’ It’s a statement many would agree with.
America: painting a nation shows at the Art Gallery of NSW until February 9, 2014 as part of the Sydney International Art Series.
Images
1. Frederic Remington, The herd boy 1905 oil on canvas, 68.9 x 114.9 cm The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Hogg Brothers Collection, gift of Miss Ima Hogg – Photo: Thomas R DuBrock
2. Thomas Moran, 1837–1926. Grand Canyon of the Colorado River 1892/reworked 1908. Oil on canvas. Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of Graeme Lorimer, 1975, 1975-182-1 – Photo: Graydon Wood
3. Edward Hopper, House at dusk 1935. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. John Barton Payne Fund. – Photo: Thomas R DuBrock
