Lucid Dreaming
by Beth Elaine Wilson

Dreaming of the Promised Land

Landscape is a subject that inevitably looms large in the mid-Hudson Valley. The confluence of the Catskills and the river provided the inspiration for what may be the most famous landscape painting movement of all time, Thomas Cole’s Hudson River School, and the artistic great-grandchildren of that movement still provide what must be the most profitable sector of the art market in the area today. While I’ll readily admit that I’m not much interested in most of the neo-romantic, wistful-but-pretty sort of work that hangs nicely over the couch, there are some more challenging approaches to the genre that can be refreshingly different.
At Albert Shahinian Fine Art in Poughkeepsie, through most of the month, will be a tandem show of photographs by Eric Lindbloom and paintings by Thomas Sarrantonio that illustrates a downright modern approach to the question of landscape. Lindbloom will be showing a selection of images from a larger project in which he photographed the salt marshes and shorelines along the tip of Cape Cod near Provincetown. The black and white images concentrate on the textures and movement that can be teased out by focusing and carefully framing close sections of vegetation, rather than creating broad vistas. In the examples I have seen, the intensity of his focus on the purely photographic potential of his subject results in some quite beautifully textured prints that find the abstract, formal structure of the world, the play of darks and lights not usually evident to the casual observer. In a similar vein, Sarrantonio’s one by one foot paintings done en plein air in local meadows and fields find their fascination in discerning the purely painterly possibilities of the landscape. Again, in this series of paintings there is no horizon line, just a closely cropped view of a small patch of ground just beneath the artist’s feet. In this radically stripped down version of landscape, he finds the painterly and colorful equivalent of Lindbloom’s photographs. Before seeing Tom’s work, I’d never really noticed the frequency with which purple loosestrife congregates with complementary-colored goldenrod in disused fields. And similarly, just looking at the landscape in person cannot prepare you for the revelation of the skillful, sinuous language of the brushstroke that plays across the surface of these paintings.
But Lindbloom and Sarrantonio are, in their own ways, ultra-modern standouts from the larger landscape tradition. The time-honored method of approaching landscape is one which features grand views organized according to artistic principles like the “Golden Mean” (which is why you aren’t supposed to put the horizon line through the center of your composition), and separating the flow of the landscape into a logical structure of foreground/middle ground/background. The precepts for this sort of painting were developed in the Renaissance, and continued without much challenge until the Impressionists started breaking all sorts of rules in the late 19th Century.
An exhibition at Vassar’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center explores some of the finer points of the academic endgame of landscape painting, focusing on paintings, watercolors, and prints drawn from the Elias Magoon collection, which was purchased and donated to the college at its inception in 1864 by Matthew Vassar. “Humanizing Landscapes: Geography, Culture and the Magoon Collection” would appear, on the face of it, to be a fairly sedate, even genteel exhibition, examining as it does the differences between American landscape art of the 18th and 19th Centuries and its English counterpart. The works themselves are small in scale, ranging from medium sized easel paintings to some fairly tiny watercolors and sketches, which lend themselves nicely to the intimate proportions of the Loeb Center’s exhibition galleries. The day I visited the show, the audience consisted of a few small knots of senior citizens, most of whom seemed content to enjoy the various, often idealized views of nature afforded by the work. The major exception to this was a woman who came in with a teenage boy who obviously chafed at being dragged through a bunch of boring paintings, and who threatened to bolt given the first chance, pacing back and forth in the gallery like a confined lion.
He seemed especially irked when my careful attention to one work interrupted his fitful speed-reading of the wall labels in the last room of the show, I suppose thereby delaying his final departure. But as it happened, the painting I was examining provided fuel for a different sort of fire in me. Victor de Grailly’s View from Hyde Park, an elegant if somewhat formulaically picturesque landscape, presents a view of the Hudson from the estate of Dr. David Hosack, which happened to be right next door to Matthew Vassar’s Springside. What captured my attention is the fact that de Grailly was a Parisian copyist who had never traveled to America—and that his painting was in fact based on an engraving published in the book American Scenery in 1840, which in turn had been based on a drawing by American artist William Henry Bartlett, who presumably had actually made his sketch on the site. Suddenly the process of translation inherent in all representation hit home with me, despite the 19th Century penchant to call for the artist to study Nature directly. In 1843, John Ruskin emphatically demanded in his Modern Painters that artists “go to Nature in all singleness of heart, …having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remembering her instruction, rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing.” Yet there is no such a thing as a direct transcription of Nature—all the images created, and that we continue to create of it, depend upon the cultural matrix that produces the significance of what we call “Nature.”
In the 19th Century, there was a great deal of moral philosophy predicated on particular views of the natural world (just think of Walden Pond), which was precisely why the work in this exhibition was considered appropriate consumption for the respectable young ladies who would be attending Matthew Vassar’s new college. Nature was consistently rendered in the feminine (Ruskin’s call to “penetrate her meaning” gets a little creepy here), and these representations of “Humanizing Landscape” would have served well to instruct Vassar’s young charges in how to locate the genteel order in what might otherwise be seen as the chaotic rough-and-tumble of wild Nature.
One work in the galleries of the permanent collection had caught my attention just before entering this show, and helped inspire some of my critical distance to the theme. It too is a landscape, but of a different sort from those in the exhibition. Unlike the artists in the show, this one is not by a white, European male, but rather by an African American artist. Henry Ossawa Tanner’s A View in Palestine, painted in 1898, presents a barren landscape of brownish-tan hills, crested with green scrub, a dark sky, and an inexplicably large light patch on a hill in the distance. This oil sketch was made on one of his several extensive visits to do first-hand research on the Near East and its people, in order to provide greater veracity to his paintings of biblical subjects. Unlike most of the works on display in the “Humanizing Landscape” exhibition, there is no clear focus, no picturesque aesthetic framing the view. Rather, the paint flows across the surface, tone into tone, giving the hills a certain movement, a kind of definition without definition. It struck me that Tanner was finding himself face-to-face with the Promised Land that his minister father had told him about as a child, the “land of milk and honey” that was in physical reality at least, a barren and unforgiving place.
For someone like Tanner, who had escaped to Paris for artistic training and relative freedom from the racist social constraints he had suffered in America, the experience must have been a bit disorienting, and I would like to read out of the painting, evidence of that process of sorting out for himself what it meant to be a man without a country. For what we see in a place, and in particular how we choose to represent it, has much more to do with who we are (or who we think we are) than with any objective topographic reality. Thinking about this loose meditation on the Holy Land by a man whose mother had escaped slavery on the Underground Railroad, radically changed my appreciation of the social forces lurking behind the quintessentially Victorian values presented by the collection of the Reverend Elias Magoon—and leads me to ask once again, just what is so proper about such “propriety”?

• Eric Lindbloom and Thomas Sarrantonio, duo exhibit open through November 25 at Albert Shahinian Fine Art, 198 Main Street, Poughkeepsie, 454-0522.
• “Humanizing Landscapes: Geography, Culture and the Magoon Collection,” open through December 20 at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, 437-5632 or http://vassun.vassar.edu/~fllac/ for more information.