Eyeball and Earthly Paradise

By ROBERT HUGHES

The welter of museum activity provoked by the Bicentennial seems to have produced only two shows likely to be of lasting value in the study of American culture. One was "The European Vision of America" (TIME, Dec. 12,1975), seen last winter at the National Gallery in Washington. The other--a collection of 153 paintings entitled "The Natural Paradise: Painting in America 1800-1950"--opened last week at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Organized by MOMA's painting curator Kynaston McShine, it sets out to expose a hidden thread in American art, the umbilical cord that connects such abstract expressionists as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko with the landscapists of the 19th century, like Albert Bierstadt and Edwin Church.

Tropical Madness. The tradition of Romantic landscape, with its vistas of beetling crags, waterfalls and floods of primordial light, rose from the vision of untouched America as a new Eden, the manifest handiwork of God. "Artists," a journalist noted in 1859, "are now scattered, like leaves or thistle blossoms, over the whole face of the country ...

Some have gone far toward the North Pole, to invade the haunts of the iceberg with their inquisitive and unsparing eyes--some have gone to the far West, where Nature plays with the illimitable and grand--some have become tropically mad, and are pursuing a sketch up and down the Cordilleras, through Central America and down the Andes. If such is the spirit and persistency of American art, we may well promise ourselves good things for the future."

The "good things" are on MOMA's walls, in plenty, along with a number of revealing oddities. Who would have thought that George Catlin, that dependable journeyman who labored so hard to record the dying Indian tribes on his journeys across America in the 1840s, would produce landscape studies--a low band of earth, a luminous veil of sky--that look like Rothkos?

Who would expect Church, the most spectacular practitioner of the 19th century sublime, to paint as downright a piece of patriotic kitsch as Our Banner in the Sky, where a gaunt tree and a streaky sunset compose themselves into a double image of Old Glory streaming from its pole?

Inevitably, the big 19th century landscapes furnish most of the drama of the show. Their medium is light, perceived in elaborately religious terms as the direct speech of God. Very little in 19th century European painting, except for J.M.W. Turner and John Martin, prepares us for the burst of patriarchal radiance that Ms Bierstadt's Sunset in the Yosemite Valley, 1868. The sun is hidden by a crag as though it were the unspeakable name of Yahweh. When Frederic Church painted Cotopaxi, 1862, he deliberately invoked the creation of the world--a panorama of sifting red light, boiling vapors, lakes emptying over the abyss, and a volcano in the background. Even when it was less convulsive than a Mexican volcano or the sliding lip of Niagara Falls, American nature could and did provide feelings of intense religiosity. A painting like Sandford Gifford's Kauterskill Falls, 1862, with its vast panorama of woods dissolving in gold light, is a visual counterpart to Emerson's ecstasies in the forest three dec ades earlier: "1 become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the cur rents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God."

Heady stuff, but American transcendentalism was persistent and--so the exhibition argues--it survived the impact of modernism. The authority of the landscape remained, as did the artists' meditations on primitive nature and the origins of consciousness. Reams of exegesis have been devoted to the numinous imagery of Mark Rothko's paintings, with their feathery bars and rectangles of hovering light. The vital text, however, was unwittingly furnished by a popular American preacher in the 1920s, when asked to describe his vision of God. "I see him," said the evangelist, "as a sort of oblong blur."

Relay Station. The same Romantic awe at the rolling ocean that fills Al bert Pinkham Ryder's Toilers of the Sea, 1880, runs through the work of John Marin right up to his death in 1953. It also provides an essential clue to early Pollock. The immense, horizontal still ness of 19th century plains landscape floods the work of Georgia O'Keeffe:

"That was my country--terrible winds and a wonderful emptiness." The paintings of Augustus Vincent Tack (1870-1949), an artist ignored by the histories of American art, now seem the obvious relay station between the crags and glaciers of the 19th century sublime and the jagged forms of Clyfford Still. To a New York audience, Tack's extraordinarily subtle paintings, which mediate between abstraction and landscape imagery, will seem almost familiar --be cause they predict and predate so much American painting of the '50s. Even the rhetoric is familiar; one finds Tack in 1920 describing a 'valley . . . walled in by an amphitheatre of mountains as colossal as to seem an adequate setting for the Last Judgment."

So "The Natural Paradise" offers a most refreshing reading of American landscape in general, and abstract expressionism in particular. It will help dispose of what Art Historian Robert Rosenblum calls the "art-historical mythology" of modern American art --the idea that abstract expressionism amounted to a total break with earlier American painting, a leap from the clos et of fumbling provinciality. One can be lieve this only at the expense of ignoring what the pictures are actually about.

That happened in the 1960s, under the rule of formalist criticism, which ad dressed itself only to the form of art at the expense of its meaning. But a show like this forcibly argues that abstract expressionism was, in its way, as much an art of subject matter as was 19th century landscape--and beneath the differences of period dress, the subjects appear much the same.

Robert Hughes

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