TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010890/0108400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.3 KB | 169 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 66

Blockbusters of an Inventive Showman


American master Frederic Edwin Church's spectacular 19th century
landscapes were the CinemaScope of his age

By ROBERT HUGHES


    Fires, floods, volcanoes, crags, waterfalls, roaring or
expectantly hushed seas -- this imagery of nature as spectacle,
the romantic sublime, has never gone out of style in America,
though it migrated to the movies in the 20th century. In the
19th, however, it was still firmly ensconced in painting, and
at its zenith -- the 1850s and 1860s -- its star was Frederic
Edwin Church, whose admirers compared him (for various reasons)
with Lord Byron, Balboa and J.M.W. Turner. When Church showed
a single landscape, Americans would turn out to see it in the
kind of droves that require the pull of a whole retrospective
today. In 1859 he made $3,000 in three weeks -- at 25 cents
a ticket -- by displaying Heart of the Andes, his enormous
image of mountains, gorge, valley, river and jungle, in a
studio on Tenth Street in New York City.

    No previous American artist had touched both highbrow and
middlebrow in this way, and few would manage to do so later.
Church was an inventive showman. Heart of the Andes, more than
5 ft. by 9 ft., went on view in a trompe l'oeil architectural
frame built, literally, like a picture window, so that one sat
down on a bench and had the illusion of gazing from a Victorian
living room into sublimity, complete with palms, parrots and
Andean campesinos adoring a cross. If his other paintings
prefigured CinemaScope, this one was the ancestor of the
big-screen home VCR.

    Set in a mock-up of this Pharaonic piece of now lost
joinery, Heart of the Andes is at the National Gallery of Art
in Washington through March 18, along with 48 other paintings
by Church. Most of his single-image blockbusters are also
there, including his series on Cotopaxi in Ecuador; The
Icebergs, 1861; and the picture that made him the most famous
artist in America and amazed even John Ruskin -- the stupendous
view of Niagara Falls from the Canadian side, the green glass
water sliding faster and faster toward the edge and into the
clouds of white vapor.

    Finely curated by Franklin Kelly, this is the first
full-dress Church exhibition in 25 years, and it gives us the
man whole: his poetic eye, his formidable ability to marshal
vast quantities of visual data, his passion for botany and
geology -- and his flashes of provincial vulgarity too, his
shameless playing to the gallery. If one wants to understand
the 19th century appetite for pictorial mastery as a metaphor
of the conquest of "untrammeled" nature, this is the show to
start with.

    Born in Connecticut in 1826, Church had the good luck to be
taken on as a student by Thomas Cole, whose slightly stilted
allegorical landscapes had made him the most famous American
artist of the 1840s. Like Cole, he painted scenes along the
Hudson River and in the Catskills, in a manner much indebted
to Claude Lorrain: peaceful arcadian vistas with the silver
glint of lakes under evening skies. Church's valediction to his
dead master, To the Memory of Cole, 1848, with its rose-wreathed
cross on a mountainside between two emblems -- the tree stump
(death)  and the evergreens (posthumous fame) -- carries the
Claudean stereotype into America. The billows of pink and white
cloud on its far horizon predict the grand effects that
Church's later work would seek as it moved from Claude to a
closer model, Turner.

    Church adored Turner, the greatest theatrician of landscape
who ever lived, with his cloud arches and burning
transparencies, his glooms and veils of color. Church had seen
a few Turners, which had found their way to America by then;
he was also much influenced by the vast apocalyptic paintings
of John Martin, The Great Day of His Wrath and The Last
Judgement, shown in New York soon after they were painted in
the 1850s. Church wanted to stun and to instruct, to absorb the

Ruskin's writings.

    Turner had been to the Alps. Church would go to South
America. He made, in fact, two trips, in 1853 and 1857, and
discovered his great motif, the volcano of Cotopaxi. He painted
it dozens of times, and in the end the effort of grappling with
the utterly unfamiliar landscape of the Andes forced him to
maturity as a painter. By 1866, when he set down the glittering
double-arc rainbow that spans from bare mountain to jungle in
Rainy Season in the Tropics, he had attained a rhetorical
grandeur of painted space that was all his own.

    Church's desire to go south was sparked by his reading the
German explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt
(1769-1859), who had  traveled in Central and South America at
the turn of the century. Humboldt was not only a scientist but
a great popularizer. As Stephen Jay Gould points out in an
excellent catalog essay, the first two volumes of his work
Cosmos were seen by their 19th century public as the last word
on nature and its origins. Humboldt's ideas were what Charles
Darwin's On the Origin of Species overthrew. For Humboldt, like
Linnaeus before him, saw the natural world as a pyramid of
unity, "one great whole animated by the breath of life" --
cooperative within its prodigious variety, with more room for
God than allowed by Darwin's harsher scheme of battle and
chance variation. The artist must see like a scientist; the
scientist, alert to the lessons of the sublime, like an artist.

    Our own century abounds in attempted marriages between
science and art, but none of them have had the intensity and
completeness with which Church absorbed Humboldt's ideas, acted
on them and gave them pictorial form. In a sense he did indeed
become, as the New York Times announced in 1863, "the artistic
Humboldt of the New World," come to fulfill Humboldt's prophecy
that "landscape painting will flourish with a new and hitherto
unknown brilliancy when artists . . . shall be enabled, in the
interior of continents, in the humid valleys of the tropical
world, to seize with genuine freshness . . . on the true image
of the varied forms of nature."

    There is not a made-up leaf or an ornithologically
unidentifiable bird in Church's South American paintings;
though they were all done back in his New York studio; every
hair on the tiny llamas looks right. Yet those who thought
Church's paintings of Cotopaxi were faithful to the primal
scene of nature were wrong. They were more than faithful; they
were, so to speak, ecstatic. Nobody could call the view of
Cotopaxi dull, but when Church saw it in 1853, it completely
lacked the palms, writhing creepers, streams and waterfalls he
would later give it. "The big mountain," he wrote to a friend,
"grimly secludes itself in an immense circle of volcanic and
comparatively barren country." The nearest palms were a hundred
miles away. But without foreground vegetation, there was no
hope of making the volcano look like a painting -- bringing it
into the scheme of heroic Claudean and Turneresque landscape,
the motif framed by arches of trees or cliffs in the
foreground, with pictorial incidents unrolling back in space
toward the distant peak. So, like all landscape painters, he
"improved."

    The vistas were highly edited pastiches, ecological
anthologies. But this enhanced their power for the 19th century
viewer, who wanted epitomes of nature, filled with moral
messages. These Church supplied in abundance. He never actually
saw his volcano erupt -- it did so on Sept. 13, 1853, three
days after he left the area -- but when he painted Cotopaxi in
1862 in full eruption, he could not have left much doubt that
this scene also held a lesson for an America plunged into
hatred and despair by the Civil War. The morning sun rises
through the plume of smoke and ash, irresistibly, its disk made
lurid but not extinguished by the subterranean fires, its light
mirrored in a tranquil lake. Catastrophe will not wipe out
nature; in the foreground of the volcanic plain, new plants
spring to life. This, as the art historian David C. Huntington
once remarked, is about as close as American painting in the
Civil War period ever came to the Battle Hymn of the Republic
or the Gettysburg Address.