Landscape Art and Landscape History: Some Recent Works on North American Landscape Painting

Abstract

As readers of Forest & Conservation History surely know, the North American landscape has been studied from a variety of historical perspectives. Forest history, agricultural history, conservation history, history of science, history of technology, and history of land use policy are only some of the scholarly disciplines that have been brought to bear on the study of landscape. What readers of this journal may not realize, however, is that this multidisciplinary perspective has seldom been extended to the study of North American landscape painting. Rather than consider landscape painting as an aspect of landscape history, art historians have preferred instead to consider it within the context of traditional histories of art, focusing their discussions on moral, stylistic, and iconographic concerns of the paintings (and the painters) themselves. The reasons for such scholarly insularity are complex, involving the development of the profession of art history and its relation to curatorship. Broadly stated, however, they entail the idea that aesthetic value transcends the mundane realm of society, economics, and politics. This idea both underlies and reinforces the creation of museums and galleries as sacred spaces in which art can be worshipped apart from the profane space of the world outside. In the past decade, however, scholars in the humanities have come increasingly to challenge this traditional idea of aesthetic value. The revisionists argue that aesthetic categories do not transcend but are inseparable from the social, economic, and technological practices that have come to be grouped under the rubric of "ideology." The five books under review here reveal the strengths and weaknesses of both traditional and revisionary approaches to North American landscape painting. In so doing, they indicate what the revisionary treatment of landscape painting has yet to learn from the variety of disciplines that have come to constitute landscape history. The Early Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church, 1845-1854 comprises the catalog for the exhibition of that name held at the Amon Carter Museum (in Fort Worth, Texas) from 9 March-29 April 1984 and transcripts of the Tandy Lectures delivered at the museum on 10 March 1984. Although revisionary in their focus on the first decade of Church's career, the exhibition and lecture series were inspired by traditional arthistorical questions concerning the title, date, provenance, and exhibition history of an early Church landscape acquired by the Museum, New England Landscape (Evening after a Storm). To answer these questions, the museum called on Franklin Kelly and Gerald Cam who delivered the three lectures that make up the first half of the book and (with the guidance of Church scholar David Huntington) prepared the exhibition catalog that makes up the book's second half. Kelly's two essays, "The Legacy of Thomas Cole" and "Visions of New England," mine traditional art-historical veins. The first essay is essentially a stylistic and iconographic study of how Church developed his "mature style" by transforming "the raw material he inherited from Thomas Cole into a distinct and personal manner" (p. 51). In the first essay, Kelly focuses on Church's early allegorical and imaginary landscapes. In the second essay he focuses on Church's turn to actual American landscapes, but his overall treatment is the same: he reads the actual landscapes primarily for their iconographic significance. Thus the two essays may be taken as a single argument, both reading the significance of Church's early landscapes as the expression in paint "of his youthful faith in America" (p. 75). Like Kelly's essays, Carr's discussion of "Frederic Edwin Church as a Public Figure" proceeds from fairly traditional art-historical assumptions. But in focusing on the way in which Church the businessman constructed a compelling public image of himself as a great landscape painter, Carr furnishes an example for further investigations of the relation between aesthetics and economics. He recounts Church's strategies for marketing such major paintings as Niagara Falls and Heart of the Andes, strategies that included the mounting of extremely popular exhibition tours and the planned publication of thousands of chromolithographs. Carr supports his discussion of Church's public career with analysis and illustrations of window advertisements, "newspaper ads,