Reading up on painters that were associated with the early American Landscape Art movement, the Hudson River School, (artists like Thomas Cole and William Cullen Bryant) I couldn’t help thinking of beliefs associated with modern day Marxist/socialist and environmentalist ideology and the new liberal “green” conscience movements in politics and government and everyday social circles.
In much popular, radically liberal talk it is the “rich and privileged” that are the harbingers of destruction and indifference to those around because of their relative separation from the crude workings of industry and production. It is believed that the workers are the ones that will bring true revolution and know the earth best because they work directly in it. Indeed, there is a romanticism that the “common man” can easily be framed around in contemporary times. And yet, in the book “Epics of American Painting,” I found myself chuckling at how history, especially art history, can be lead astray so easily by the trends of the time one is living in.
In reading the book I was looking for a way to critique and make fairly critical/cynical judgments on the entire genre of Landscape Painting as it seems it has become both the most cherished (by many art laymen) and despised (by many in art academia) painting tradition of America, much like generic Abstract painting has become. But the original Hudson River painters, considered “rich and privileged” men of their time, were critical of progress. They pointed to poor workers that abused the land as mere tools to expand and build their individual lives without deep concern or appreciation for godly beauty and conservation. Common workers would not bat an eye cutting down whole states of forests to trifles of furniture and some hard currency. The painters believed it was their duty to record, and so preserve, in their paintings the truly untouched American landscape before Manifest Destiny puked all over it with streets, buildings and notions of progressive civilization.
These painters believed nature was the closest manifestation of God, which I thought was another example of religious dogmatic oppression (the whole idea of injecting the christian god into everything like so much heroin and so many needy human veins). But instead of helping to elaborate my initial argument, reading about the painters’ intentions changed it. It is interesting as well how “conceptual” these original paintings are, in terms of curiously placed symbols, narratives, and allegories.
It seems the popularity of an original idea works to convert it to generic living room backdrops, many times in ignorance of what it meant, or what it could suggest about by being in this space now, more than a hundred years later. What does it mean for a “Course of Empire: Destruction” painting to be placed in the pool room of a lumber tycoon, or revered as vital American tradition in the offices of an oil business giant?
Maybe the landscapes still work, maybe more so, placed within our postmodern 3D glasses. What really are we seeing through the lenses of popular myth or historical prejudice? How do things change in a landscape by a colorful sheen of modern times…
