Under the Open Sky

Landscape painting, like abstract art, goes on forever. Today abstractionism is the height of fashion, but thousands of housewives and businessmen amuse themselves by painting surprisingly competent pictures of vacation scenes. A century ago, landscapes were all the rage with the professionals--but then the hobbyists mainly contented themselves with abstractions such as hooked rugs and patchwork quilts, or semi-abstractions such as duck decoys. Last week the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, N.H. staged a 19th-century landscape exhibition called "Artists in the White Mountains" that was bound to draw praise from contemporary amateurs and scorn from fashionably "modern" painters. The pictures were not, on the whole, outstanding, but they showed the early history of an American painting tradition that flourishes today at the grass-roots level. Nothing can down it.

Raise the Umbrella. Around 1830, the rise of Jacksonian democracy created a new pride in the rural American scene, and artists began flocking outdoors to record it. A group of writers backed up and inspired the painters' nature worship: James Fenimore Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, John Greenleaf Whittier and William Cullen Bryant ("Go forth, under the open sky, and list to Nature's teachings"). Painter Thomas Cole listened closely to the exhortations of his friend Bryant, trudged up the Hudson River with easel and umbrella to paint the wild Catskills, and founded the so-called Hudson River school of like-minded artists.

The school's top painters--Cole, Asher Durand, John Frederick Kensett, Thomas H. Hinckley--were all represented in last week's New Hampshire show, for they all painted the White Mountains as well as the Catskills. Winslow Homer, one of the very few geniuses in the history of American painting, added his fellow artists to one New Hampshire scene to produce the small canvas (see cut) that was easily the best picture in the show.

Stop the Train. The Hudson River school suffered from a passion for the picturesque. Cole's The Pass Called "The Notch of the White Mountains" is a brilliant picture marred by Wagnerian theatrics and stage lighting. Asher Durand's White Mountain Scenery, Franconia Notch sacrifices sharpness to size. He assumed such a grand scene should be painted in the grand manner; the result is sentimental, vague and declamatory. Perhaps the poets of the age did such artists more harm than good; told that nature was simply grand, painters inclined to view her through a haze of awe.

But they succeeded in communicating their awe to contemporaries, did much better financially than American abstractionists do today. In 1858, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad dispatched Asher Durand and some of his colleagues in an excursion train, which stopped when any of the artists expressed a desire to sketch the view from the windows. The 600-odd canvases in John Kensett's studio brought $137,715 at auction after his death in 1872.

Start the Emotions. Soon afterwards, the Hudson River school fell from favor. Even its most grandiose productions came to seem thin, brown and finicky. They had prepared the way for equally realistic but less pretentious and literary painters--Homer, George Inness and Thomas W. Eakins. "The true purpose of the painter," said Inness with perfect assurance, "is simply to reproduce in other minds the impression which the scene has made upon him. A work of art is not to instruct, not to edify, but to awaken an emotion." Inness' Delaware Water Gap (see color) goes on awakening pleasurable emotions in visitors to the Montclair, N.J. Art Museum. Painted in 1859, it is the museum's most popular picture.

The fresh-air fiends among painters nowadays are chiefly amateurs having the same fault that plagued the Hudson River school: a weakness for the picturesque. To their predecessors, the picturesque meant towering cliffs, rushing streams, deep woods, mists and rising storms. Contemporary landscape painters look for a different, milder set of cliches: red barns, spreading elms, old wharves and the like. Professional modernists, for their part, do not set foot out of doors, send their models packing, pull the shades down tight, turn on the light, and paint abstract patterns uninspired by anything.

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