States of grace: Barbara Novak on "American Sublime" - The Vault Preview - Thomas Cole exhibit

ArtForum, Jan, 2002 by Barbara Novak

The European figure who most resembles the Americans is Friedrich, who was not known to them but whose philosophical roots are to some extent shared by the American Transcendentalists. Goethe was a cult hero in America, frequently quoted in The Crayon, the mid-nineteenth-century equivalent of Artforum. The Tate exhibition, however, is fully justified in stressing the American interest in Ruskin, who even wrote a Dear Abby-style colunm for young artists in Crayon.

It is didactically useful to emphasize the commonality between American landscapes and works by such British predecessors as John Martin (for Cole) and Turner (for Cole, Church, and Moran). But when "A New World," a superb show of American treasures, was shown at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1984, French viewers walked past John Singleton Copley's magnificent portrait of Paul Revere (ca. 1768-70) and Eakins's Gross Clinic, 1875, were mesmerized by Bierstadt (American Western myths always hold in Europe), and much preferred derivative American Impressionist works to anything else.

Do viewers only appreciate what they already know? How do we achieve the next step--willing acceptance of American parity with the great European landscapes, along with a recognition of what that nineteenth-century British critic called "originality"? Judging from the exhibition checklist, filled with classic masterpieces of American landscape art, this will be the most comprehensive and potentially enlightening landscape exhibition yet offered to European viewers. It is probable that the American landscapes will be welcomed most readily into the Western canon if they "fit" into an already prepared matrix of assumptions. It is the differences, however, that most properly define the nature of American landscape painting. [n addition to a detailed introduction, we are promised a catalogue essay on landscape and national identity in America and Britain. Hopefully, this will aid British viewers to look beyond the comforts of familiar influence to those properties American artists brought freshly to the landscape art, properties integral to American cultural attitudes that remain to be understood and appreciated by a European audience to which they have too long been Other.

"American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820-1880" will be on view at Tate Britain Feb. 21-May 19; travels to Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts, Philadelphia, June 17-Aug. 25; and Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Sept. 22-Nov. 17.

BARBARA NOVAK is Helen Goodhart Altschul Professor of Art History Emerita at Barnard College and Columbia University. The author of several titles, including Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875 (Oxford University Press, 1980) and the novel Alice's Neck (Ticknor & Fields, 1987), Novak is currently at work on a book about the idea of the self in American culture, to be published by the University of California Press. Last month the Cooley Gallery in New York exhibited a group of watercolors on paper by the self-proclaimed "lady flower painter." For this preview issue's "From the Vault" column, Novak considers "American Sublime," an exhibition of nineteenth-century American landscape paintings opening next month at Tate Britain.