Hudson River School arrives

Crystal Bridges exhibit centers on work of landscape painters

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/JASON IVESTER --05/03/12--
Museum employees look over some of the paintings in the newly installed Hudson River School exhibit inside Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville on Thursday, May 3, 2012. The travelling exhibit opens to members today (FRIDAY) and to the public on Saturday. Reserved time tickets are required for the exhibit, which will stay through Sept. 3, and cost $5 for non-members or free for members.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/JASON IVESTER --05/03/12-- Museum employees look over some of the paintings in the newly installed Hudson River School exhibit inside Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville on Thursday, May 3, 2012. The travelling exhibit opens to members today (FRIDAY) and to the public on Saturday. Reserved time tickets are required for the exhibit, which will stay through Sept. 3, and cost $5 for non-members or free for members.

— Visitors who’ve admired Crystal Bridges’ iconic painting Kindred Spirits by Asher B. Durand will be treated to the first of two special exhibitions centered around landscape painters starting this weekend.

“The Hudson River School: Nature and the American Vision,” the first temporary traveling exhibition of the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, opensSaturday and will remain on view through Sept. 3 in the gallery that formerly housed its contemporary “Wonder World” exhibit of mostly inhouse works.

Organized by the New-York Historical Society, the new exhibition showcases 45 original works by masters of the so-called Hudson River School of painting, including Durand, Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt.

“It’s been a voyage of discovery,” said the historical society’s senior art historian,Linda Ferber, who was on hand Thursday as the Bentonville museum offered a preview to the media.

Ferber also is a vice president at the historical society and author of a book now on sale at Crystal Bridges that bears the same name as the traveling exhibition.

The historical society recently under went renovations and used its temporary closure as an opportunity to send several works out on loan. It is billing the traveling exhibit to Crystal Bridgesas the last time the works will be shown outside of its walls at 170 Central Park West in New York.

Crystal Bridges, whose permanent collection is free to the viewing public, is charging $5 for the special exhibition to non-members, but making it free for museum members and those 17 and under.

In the 1849 oil on canvas Kindred Spirits, Durand depicts fellow landscape painter Thomas Cole and the poetWilliam Cullen Bryant standing on a rocky promontory overlooking a stunning view of the Catskill Mountains.

The exhibition will give Crystal Bridges visitors plenty of context, since a number of Durand’s and Cole’s works are in it.

And they might do a double-take when they see Martin Johnson Heade’s 1872 oil on canvas Study of an Orchid.

It bears a slight resemblance to Heade’s 1875-1890 Cattleya Orchid, Two Hummingbirds and a Beetle, which is one of 45 Heade works in Crystal Bridges’ permanent collection (21 of which are now on view, said its curator of American art, Kevin M. Murphy).

“The show is arranged by geography,” Murphy said as viewers began a tour Thursday morning. “We start in New York City.”

The scenes of the paintings then progress to the harbor and up the Hudson River, and then to points west and south, he said.

Eventually the scenery moves to the Catskills and even to other lands, such as Italy.

Crystal Bridges said the scenes can be categorized as “the sublime, the picturesque and the beautiful,” and one display encourages visitors to later visit the museum’s trails and grounds, taking their inspiration from the exhibit to shoot their own photos and submit them to the museum for display on a monitor in the gallery.

Museumgoers expecting the traveling exhibit will feature only bucolic nature scenes might find themselves surprised that one of the landscape painters envisioned some mayhem.

Included is Cole’s fivepainting series The Course of Empire, in which he chronicles the rise and fall of a lavish, imperial civilization resembling ancient Rome. The paintings depict its undeveloped and pastoral beginnings to the height of its glory, to finally its destruction by war, pillaging and fire, and later its return to ruins amid a natural setting.

The Course of Empire paintings are subtitled The Savage State, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, The Consummation of Empire, The Destruction of Empire (in which a beheaded warrior statue figures prominently) and Desolation. The five were painted between 1833-1836.

In 1835, a tremendous fire that burned much of lower Manhattan made Cole’s images an almost prophetic event, or one of art imitating life.

At the time, Americans were already worried that their country was falling into the kind of excess that preceded the fall of the Roman Empire, not to mention the decline of civilizations such as Greece, Egypt and Persia, Murphy said.

“This was about 60 years after the American Revolution, and people were very concerned that we were becoming too decadent,” he said.

“For us in New York, these pictures have acquired a new resonance after the attack on the World Trade Centers,where the lower part of Manhattan was destroyed,” Ferber said.

Ferber and Murphy noted that in its day, the Hudson River School style of painting had its critics. In fact, Ferber said, the term itself was coined by one of the critics.

The critiques assailed the school as mimicking natural images too much at a time when Impressionism and other forms of art had connoisseurs valuing artists’ imagination and intellect above their ability to capture detailed images.

During Thursday’s tour, Murphy also pointed out several “studies” by Durand. In these oil paintings - measuring about 18 by 12 inches - Durand chronicled images of trees or rocks he spotted as he traversed the Catskills. He would later incorporate these “fragments” into larger “masterworks” such as Kindred Spirits that were more a conglomeration of severalscenes, unlike the real scenes captured in the studies, Murphy said.

So, landscape painters did in fact employ imagination, just in a different way than painters from other genres did.

Beginning May 12 and running through Aug. 13, Crystal Bridges visitors will get another chance to explore landscape painting and its birth through a previously announced partnership with the Louvre in Paris and two other American museums to stage the collaborative exhibit “American Encounters: Thomas Cole and the Narrative Landscape.”

The works in the inaugural installation are four by Cole, one by Durand and one by France’s Pierre-Antoine Patel the Younger, Crystal Bridges, Musee du Louvre and their other partners in Atlanta and Chicago said when announcing the collaboration back in December.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 11 on 05/04/2012

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