Going Native

The Neutral Paradise—Painting in America 1800-1950 is an uneven, fascinating, sure-to-be-controversial exhibition which may do a lot to recoup the Museum of Modern Art’s reputation as an institution that encourages its visitors to think about what they’re seeing. Not that they’re asking us to cope with a new “ism” (it’s generally agreed there aren’t any at the moment). Rather, their Bicentennial offering is an attempt to explain an older, now nearly historic “ism,” namely Abstract Expressionism, which exploded unexpectedly in the immediate postwar years and, for the first time, put American artists on top of the international heap. These artists— Pollock, Gottlieb, Rothko, and the rest —boasted that they had made a total break with America’s past, since, as their self-proclaimed spokesman Clement Greenberg put it, “This country had not yet made a single contribution to the mainstream of painting or sculpture.” Of course, no artistic movement has ever been born pathogenetically, and critics soon started tracing the Abstract Expressionist phenomenon to various School of Paris figures who had been in New York during the war. Now, however, the Modern is contending that far from being a European offshoot, Abstract Expressionism was a native product with roots in the Romantic strain that has pervaded American painting almost since its beginnings. By surveying this strain, which starts with Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School, continues through the nineteenth century with luminists like Martin Johnson Heade, panoramists like Church and Bierstadt, and, in more modern times, such markedly individual talents as, among others, Ryder, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, John Marin, and the nearly forgotten Augustus Vincent Tack, the exhibition tries to demonstrate the continuity of this tradition down to its most recent flowering in the 1950s.

The very existence of American Romanticism, though now pretty much taken for granted, was long ignored by art historians and critics. In their own time the romantic leanings of the Hudson River School and later landscapists were unquestioned; they were praised for the “sublime effects” (“sublime” is a cant word of Romanticism) in their portrayals of the American wilderness which they, like so many European observers, saw as a natural paradise undefiled by the corrupting hand of man, a manifestation, as Emerson put it, “of the moral and inner life of the world, of the Eternal mind . . . which is revealed alike by the small and great, in each as in all.” Thus no detail was too insignificant: Heade’s tropical orchids were as much reflections of the Almighty as Bierstadt’s Yosemite Valley, which he painted as a kind of natural cathedral bathed in transcendent light from above.

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Ruth Berenson

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The Neutral Paradise—Painting in America 1800-1950 is an uneven, fascinating, sure-to-be-controversial exhibition which may do a lot to recoup the Museum of Modern Art’s reputation as an institution that encourages its visitors to think about what they’re seeing. Not that they’re asking us to cope with a new “ism” (it’s generally agreed there aren’t any at the moment). Rather, their Bicentennial offering is an attempt to explain an older, now nearly historic “ism,” namely Abstract Expressionism, which exploded unexpectedly in the immediate postwar years and, for the first time, put American artists on top of the international heap. These artists— Pollock, Gottlieb, Rothko, and the rest —boasted that they had made a total break with America’s past, since, as their self-proclaimed spokesman Clement Greenberg put it, “This country had not yet made a single contribution to the mainstream of painting or sculpture.” Of course, no artistic movement has ever been born pathogenetically, and critics soon started tracing the Abstract Expressionist phenomenon to various School of Paris figures who had been in New York during the war. Now, however, the Modern is contending that far from being a European offshoot, Abstract Expressionism was a native product with roots in the Romantic strain that has pervaded American painting almost since its beginnings. By surveying this strain, which starts with Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School, continues through the nineteenth century with luminists like Martin Johnson Heade, panoramists like Church and Bierstadt, and, in more modern times, such markedly individual talents as, among others, Ryder, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, John Marin, and the nearly forgotten Augustus Vincent Tack, the exhibition tries to demonstrate the continuity of this tradition down to its most recent flowering in the 1950s.

The very existence of American Romanticism, though now pretty much taken for granted, was long ignored by art historians and critics. In their own time the romantic leanings of the Hudson River School and later landscapists were unquestioned; they were praised for the “sublime effects” (“sublime” is a cant word of Romanticism) in their portrayals of the American wilderness which they, like so many European observers, saw as a natural paradise undefiled by the corrupting hand of man, a manifestation, as Emerson put it, “of the moral and inner life of the world, of the Eternal mind . . . which is revealed alike by the small and great, in each as in all.” Thus no detail was too insignificant: Heade’s tropical orchids were as much reflections of the Almighty as Bierstadt’s Yosemite Valley, which he painted as a kind of natural cathedral bathed in transcendent light from above.