Lecture 14: ‘Contemporary Issues in American Landscape Art’

Key Ideas

1. The canonical landscape paintings of 19th century America have conventionally been read as neutral documentation

   • BUT tacit white perspective written into these landscapes

2. The American landscape tradition has become a potent basis for critique for contemporary artists & contemporary historians of American art

   • w/ relation to other contemporary issues (e.g. histories of settler colonialism; the current environmental crisis)

The Landscape Tradition in America

Time period

Key ideals/iconography (2)

Significance (2)

Time period

• 19th century

• Newly-formed United States (founded in late 18th century)

Key ideals/iconography

1. The sublime in nature

2. Untouched wilderness

Significance

1. Was identified as the 1st national school of painting in the US

2. Shaped American national identity

   • Landscape tradition fit w/ an emergent pride of place

   • Among the 1st popular expressions of cultural nationalism

Hudson River School

Historical context

Characteristics (3)

Historical context

• ‘School’ = school of thought

• 19th century

• America’s 1st artistic fraternity

Characteristics

1. Socially similar

   • All white men (some immigrants, but all lived in NYC)

2. Stylistically similar, shared approach to painting

   • Imbued the landscape w/ a narrative & moral weight

3. Shared mindset

   • America as a new world/Eden

     • Idea that America was a previously untouched wilderness

   • Merged ideas of nature & nation

     • Painting as a source of patriotic pride

Evolution of the American Landscape Tradition

Time period

Stages of development (3)

Time period

• 1820s to late 1800s

• BUT not always discrete (e.g. can have multiple themes in a single painting)

Stages of development

1. Critical romanticism

   • Imagined wilderness in opposition to modern industrial life

     • As 2 sides of the same coin

   • Art used to depict:

     • Expression of emotion

     • Human psychology/personal feeling

     • Drama of the natural world

   • E.g. River in Catskills, Thomas Cole (1843)

2. Middle landscape

   • Envisioned a future in which nature & industry could be sustained in balance

     • Reconciled OR at the very least held in balance in a way that’s stable & sustainable

   • Deliberate exclusion of Indigenous Americans

     • Who were actually the ancestral stewards of the lands depicted

     • This positioning is used as both an allegory for development AND a political position promoted through landscape paintings ⭐

   • E.g. The Oxbow, Thomas Cole (1836)

3. Preservationism

   • Promoted ideal of federal protection for undeveloped nature (and/or ignored the reality that this balance was tipping towards human settlement)

   • E.g. The Hayden Survey (1871)

Historical context (3)

Analysis

Interpretation (2)

River in Catskills (1843), Thomas Cole

Historical context

• Later painting - has seen the progress of industrialisation

• The 1st painted depiction of a locomotive in American tradition

• Cole moved to the Catskills in 1836

  • This was the landscape that he based his career on & was deeply connected with

  • BUT saw significant changes in development & logging

    • Loss of wild spaces that he valued

Analysis

• Close narrative foreground

  • Human figure standing amid tree stumps

    • Holding an axe himself

    • Bright red coat = clearly differentiated from his natural environment

• Deep vista into the distance

  • Pastoral ideal

• Middle ground: little smokestack from a passing locomotive

Interpretation

• Critical Romanticism

• More ambivalent about the progress of industrialisation

  • Questioning the human r/s to landscape

  • Causal r/s between development, deforestation, and humans

    Expresses trepidation about the virtue of industrial development

The Hayden Survey

Historical context (time period, goals, participation)

The usage of photography (2)

The distribution of photography

Historical context

• 1871

• Federally-funded geological survey exploring the region of northwestern Wyoming

• Involved:

  • Artists

  • Photographers

  • Geologists

  • Scientists

• Goals:

  (1) To preserve land for recreational benefit

  (2) To map a route for the transcontinental railroad & setting up a specific spur

  (3) Ulterior motive of disrupting the natural migratory patterns of buffalo

  • The indigenous Plains communities relied on these buffalo to sustain their ways of life

    = to displace Indigenous people from the land

The usage of photography

1. Depiction of seemingly neutral & unpopulated landscapes

2. BUT were actually embedded within the cultural priorities & values of the white individuals who made them

   • Structured tacitly around modelling a specific way to look at the American landscape

     • White cultural assumptions that overlaid, obscured & erased centuries of prior inhabitation by Indigenous Americans ⭐

     • To:

       (1) Facilitate a view of the US that naturalised European Americans & their perspective of nature

       • E.g. The Yosemite Valley from the Best General View, Carleton Watkins (ca. 1865/66)

       (2) Make the environment feel uninhabited, accessible, & friendly

       • E.g. using human figures in photos to demonstrate their massive scale

         = to encourage people on the East Coast to move westward & settle in these landscapes

The distribution of photography

• Marketing wilderness to tourists (eco tourism)

  • Photography as a commercial advertisement for experience in place

    • Showing places & views that needed to be experienced directly

    • E.g. reproductions in stenographic forms, paintings

    • E.g. guidebooks

    • E.g. special viewers

      = immersive & 3-dimensional

Visual analysis (2)

Interpretation (4)

Progress (The Advance of Civilisation) (1853), Asher Durand

Visual analysis

1. Dramatises the meeting of nature & civilisation as we move farther into the distance

   • Foreground begins in lower right

   • We follow a literal path of progress

     • E.g. pioneers w/ ox carts & hay wagons leave a small town w/ a single log cabin

     • Along the way, technology increases in sophistication

       • E.g. steamships are in a port exchanging goods in a global marketplace

   = industrial development as harmless, if not inevitable

2. Exclusion of Indigenous Americans from a picture of progress

   • 3 native figures in the foreground

   • Entirely disconnected from even the beginning point of the advance of civilisation

     • Denied access

   • In the darkest area most shrouded from sunlight

     = as if this portion of American identity is at its end, in order for the progress of Euro Americans to proceed forward

Interpretation

• Middle Landscape

• NOT just a landscape but a moralised narrative

• Allegorical celebration of progressive industrialisation

  • Pictures a world in which nature & industry could be uncompromisingly sustained & balanced w/ one another

• Indigenous Americans are NOT a part of the future he envisions

Related reading

Historical context

Analysis

Interpretation (3)

The Yosemite Valley from the Best General View (ca. 1865/66), Carleton Watkins

discussed in Martin A. Berger, ‘Overexposed: Whiteness and the Landscape Photography of Carleton Watkins’

Historical context

• Named the ‘best general view’ because it captured ALL the major geologic features of Yosemite Valley in a single photographic composition

• Original Indigenous people who inhabited the area were the Paiute & Sierra Miwok

  • Were driven out of Yosemite by US federal troops in 1851

Visual analysis

• Seemingly neutral & unpopulated landscape

• Captures distinctive geological features

  • Monumental, anthropomorphic, commemorative understanding of the landscape

    • E.g. honouring military leaders (El Capitan), culturally-significant pieces of clothing (‘bridal veil falls’)

  • Vs. Indigenous names

    • Descriptive, relational, ecological

    • Were more likely to note:

      • The locations of specific plants & animals

      • The sources of seasonal activities in specific regions (e.g. where hunting & resources could be found)

    • Some were preserved, BUT these were not visible in the photograph

      = what was important to European settlers was overlaying & replacing centuries of prior inhabitation

    • The few recorded were NOT recorded in connection w/ their actual definition

      • E.g. we know that Kai-al’-a-wa refers to some cliffs between El Capitan & Half Dome, what the name meant to the Miwok people was not recorded

Interpretation

• Preservationism

• Photograph is embedded within cultural priorities & values of the white individuals who made them

  • Embedded w/ white cultural assumptions that overlay, obscure & erase centuries of prior inhabitation by Indigenous Americans

  • Dissemination of such images helped cultural erasure AND encouraged more settlers from the East to move Westward

• Indigenous systems of knowledge were laid upon the land

  • BUT weren’t necessarily saved/preserved in reliable ways

Historical context (2)

Analysis (3)

Interpretation (5)

View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm/The Oxbow (1836), Thomas Cole

Historical context

• Oxbow lake

  • Unusual river feature: bends sharply onto itself

  • Resembles the yoke that goes over an ox’s neck

• Cole responded directly to English prototypes/compositions

  • Sketched/studied an illustration by Basil Hall, British naval officer

    • Published Forty Etchings from Sketches made with the Camera Lucida in North America (1827) after his travels in the US

    • Criticised American artists for not making better use of the landscape

Analysis

1. 2-part compositional structure

   • Left: dark side of raging wilderness

     • Departing, violent thunderstorm

   • Right: sweeping view of pastoral settlement

     • Sun shining gently

     • Plantations, buildings puffing with smoke

   • Contrast emphasises the future possibilities of the nation & landscape

2. Possibility of hebrew letters inscribed directly into the landscape

   • Right side up, ‘human’ perspective: Noah

     = the land as a promised land after the flood, given to Americans

   • Upside down, ‘god’s’ perspective: shaddai = Almighty

     = divine presence in American land

   • Given Cole’s investment in spirituality & landscape painting, not impossible

3. Tiny self-portrait on the wild (left) side of the painting

   • Set up for one of his sketching trips

     • Little parasol & sketchbook

   • Gazing at the landscape

   • The artist as:

     (1) Witness to wilderness

     (2) Intrepid, braving the climb to create this work

Interpretation

1. Middle Landscape

2. NOT just to scientifcally document the landscape but to capture visual experience

3. Sense of BALANCE between settled nature & the wilderness

4. Sublimated the narrative structure within the landscape form

   • Abandoned recognisable narrative

   • Combined the sublime w/ the pastoral in a single view (‘union of the picturesque, the sublime, and the magnificent’)

5. Believed that spiritual awakening could be found in wild places

   • Just as prophets & saints sought enlightenment in nature, solace could be found in industrial times by retreating into the American wilderness

   • ‘The american wilderness is yet a fitting place to speak to God’

     • A place he thought religious communion was still possible

     • In a Western religious context

Historical context

Analysis (2)

Interpretation (1)

Thom, Where Are the Pocumtucks (The Oxbow) (2020), Kay WalkingStick

Historical context

• Responds directly to Cole’s earlier The Oxbow

• Kay WalkingStick is an indigenous artist

Analysis

• Removed Cole’s self-portrait

  = removed evidence of Euro-American settlement

• Included geometric design over the landscape

  • From the Nipmucs

    • Were the original inhabitants of the valley

  • NOT included in Cole’s depiction

Interpretation

• Offers a corrective to art historical erasures that have happened in the past WITHOUT repeating the same wrong/violence

  • Restores visibility to those who were left out in the original version of the work

  • Seeks kinship w/ other artists who have found inspiration in American landscapes, BUT centres her own perspective as an indigenous artist