Blockbusters of An Inventive Showman

By ROBERT HUGHES

Fires, floods, volcanoes, crags, waterfalls, roaring or expectantly hushed seas -- this imagery of nature as spectacle, the romantic sublime, has never gone out of style in America, though it migrated to the movies in the 20th century. In the 19th, however, it was still firmly ensconced in painting, and at its zenith -- the 1850s and 1860s -- its star was Frederic Edwin Church, whose admirers compared him (for various reasons) with Lord Byron, Balboa and J.M.W. Turner. When Church showed a single landscape, Americans would turn out to see it in the kind of droves that require the pull of a whole retrospective today. In 1859 he made $3,000 in three weeks -- at 25 cents a ticket -- by displaying Heart of the Andes, his enormous image of mountains, gorge, valley, river and jungle, in a studio on Tenth Street in New York City.

No previous American artist had touched both highbrow and middlebrow in this way, and few would manage to do so later. Church was an inventive showman. Heart of the Andes, more than 5 ft. by 9 ft., went on view in a trompe l'oeil architectural frame built, literally, like a picture window, so that one sat down on a bench and had the illusion of gazing from a Victorian living room into sublimity, complete with palms, parrots and Andean campesinos adoring a cross. If his other paintings prefigured CinemaScope, this one was the ancestor of the big-screen home VCR.

Set in a mock-up of this Pharaonic piece of now lost joinery, Heart of the Andes is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington through March 18, along with 48 other paintings by Church. Most of his single-image blockbusters are also there, including his series on Cotopaxi in Ecuador; The Icebergs, 1861; and the picture that made him the most famous artist in America and amazed even John Ruskin -- the stupendous view of Niagara Falls from the Canadian side, the green glass water sliding faster and faster toward the edge and into the clouds of white vapor.

Finely curated by Franklin Kelly, this is the first full-dress Church exhibition in 25 years, and it gives us the man whole: his poetic eye, his formidable ability to marshal vast quantities of visual data, his passion for botany and geology -- and his flashes of provincial vulgarity too, his shameless playing to the gallery. If one wants to understand the 19th century appetite for pictorial mastery as a metaphor of the conquest of "untrammeled" nature, this is the show to start with.

Born in Connecticut in 1826, Church had the good luck to be taken on as a student by Thomas Cole, whose slightly stilted allegorical landscapes had made him the most famous American artist of the 1840s. Like Cole, he painted scenes along the Hudson River and in the Catskills, in a manner much indebted to Claude Lorrain: peaceful arcadian vistas with the silver glint of lakes under evening skies. Church's valediction to his dead master, To the Memory of Cole, 1848, with its rose-wreathed cross on a mountainside between two emblems -- the tree stump (death) and the evergreens (posthumous fame) -- carries the Claudean stereotype into America. The billows of pink and white cloud on its far horizon predict the grand effects that Church's later work would seek as it moved from Claude to a closer model, Turner.

Church adored Turner, the greatest theatrician of landscape who ever lived, with his cloud arches and burning transparencies, his glooms and veils of color. Church had seen a few Turners, which had found their way to America by then; he was also much influenced by the vast apocalyptic paintings of John Martin, The Great Day of His Wrath and The Last Judgement, shown in New York soon after they were painted in the 1850s. Church wanted to stun and to instruct, to absorb the "Holy Book" of nature along with the Holy Writ of John Ruskin's writings.

Turner had been to the Alps. Church would go to South America. He made, in fact, two trips, in 1853 and 1857, and discovered his great motif, the volcano of Cotopaxi. He painted it dozens of times, and in the end the effort of grappling with the utterly unfamiliar landscape of the Andes forced him to maturity as a painter. By 1866, when he set down the glittering double-arc rainbow that spans from bare mountain to jungle in Rainy Season in the Tropics, he had attained a rhetorical grandeur of painted space that was all his own.

Church's desire to go south was sparked by his reading the German explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), who had traveled in Central and South America at the turn of the century. Humboldt was not only a scientist but a great popularizer. As Stephen Jay Gould points out in an excellent catalog essay, the first two volumes of his work Cosmos were seen by their 19th century public as the last word on nature and its origins. Humboldt's ideas were what Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species overthrew. For Humboldt, like Linnaeus before him, saw the natural world as a pyramid of unity, "one great whole animated by the breath of life" -- cooperative within its prodigious variety, with more room for God than allowed by Darwin's harsher scheme of battle and chance variation. The artist must see like a scientist; the scientist, alert to the lessons of the sublime, like an artist.

& Our own century abounds in attempted marriages between science and art, but none of them have had the intensity and completeness with which Church absorbed Humboldt's ideas, acted on them and gave them pictorial form. In a sense he did indeed become, as the New York Times announced in 1863, "the artistic Humboldt of the New World," come to fulfill Humboldt's prophecy that "landscape painting will flourish with a new and hitherto unknown brilliancy when artists . . . shall be enabled, in the interior of continents, in the humid valleys of the tropical world, to seize with genuine freshness . . . on the true image of the varied forms of nature."

There is not a made-up leaf or an ornithologically unidentifiable bird in Church's South American paintings; though they were all done back in his New York studio; every hair on the tiny llamas looks right. Yet those who thought Church's paintings of Cotopaxi were faithful to the primal scene of nature were wrong. They were more than faithful; they were, so to speak, ecstatic. Nobody could call the view of Cotopaxi dull, but when Church saw it in 1853, it completely lacked the palms, writhing creepers, streams and waterfalls he would later give it. "The big mountain," he wrote to a friend, "grimly secludes itself in an immense circle of volcanic and comparatively barren country." The nearest palms were a hundred miles away. But without foreground vegetation, there was no hope of making the volcano look like a painting -- bringing it into the scheme of heroic Claudean and Turneresque landscape, the motif framed by arches of trees or cliffs in the foreground, with pictorial incidents unrolling back in space toward the distant peak. So, like all landscape painters, he "improved."

The vistas were highly edited pastiches, ecological anthologies. But this enhanced their power for the 19th century viewer, who wanted epitomes of nature, filled with moral messages. These Church supplied in abundance. He never actually saw his volcano erupt -- it did so on Sept. 13, 1853, three days after he left the area -- but when he painted Cotopaxi in 1862 in full eruption, he could not have left much doubt that this scene also held a lesson for an America plunged into hatred and despair by the Civil War. The morning sun rises through the plume of smoke and ash, irresistibly, its disk made lurid but not extinguished by the subterranean fires, its light mirrored in a tranquil lake. Catastrophe will not wipe out nature; in the foreground of the volcanic plain, new plants spring to life. This, as the art historian David C. Huntington once remarked, is about as close as American painting in the Civil War period ever came to the Battle Hymn of the Republic or the Gettysburg Address.