Art

...It is difficult to think of a recent show on American art more deserving of the crowds it has drawn or more serious about the indigenous quality of nineteenth-century American landscape painting...

...What we have not had up to this time, however, is a major national art show devoted to the luminist movement and cognizant of the equally important fact: the principles of luminist thinking pervade nineteenth-century American culture...

...brushwork that left no sign of stroke but relied instead on "infinitely careful gradations of tone" to achieve its effects...

...The paradigmatic quality of luminism within an American context becomes evident when we move on to the Brace's Rock series of Heade's elder contemporary and fellow New Englander, Fitz Hugh Lane...

...But in Lane's case the kind of humility Thomas Cole imposes on his viewer in The Cove, Catskills or in Schroon Mountain is not present...

...Nor can we forget the sad fact that by the 1860s, when luminism was flourishing, what made the reassuring celestial melodrama of Frederick Church's Twilight in the Wilderness far more appealing to Americans than the cool radiance of luminist art was a bloody Civil War that would change American taste in all the arts and make luminism seem irrelevant...

...The deep, translucent water reposed at the base of the warm sunlit cliff like a great basin of glass, which I half expected to hear shiver and crack as our keel ploughed through it...

...Heade's haystacks are not mere shapes, not primarily the product of light...

...And how color and sound stood out in the transparent air...

...It was not until the 1950s, however, in an essay by John Baur, that the term luminism was coined to describe a style of American painting that, long before the Impressionist movement began, made "quietly poetic use" of light...

...Yet in the end it is not an elegiac feeling for luminism that American Light leaves us with...

...But these factors also explain the Americanness of Heade's luminist vision...

...Nor does he require a huge canvas to state his case...

...Twain's Huckleberry Finn —but also in such novels as James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer, where Lake Glimmerglass with its "mirrorlike surface" is the center of a scene in which "the whole visible earth from the rounded mountaintop to the water's edge" presents "one unvaried hue of unbroken verdure...

...They are clear, linear forms...

...Rather he invites us into a scaled-down world (typically, 10" x 15" for the Brace's Rock series) where hidden brush strokes and carefully modulated tones create a democratic aesthetic in which light is equally distributed and horizontal bands of rock, moving our Commonweal: 374 gaze from shore to sea, soften what might otherwise be a distancing vision...

...NICOLAUS MILLS (Nicolaus Mills will be writing regularly on art for Commonweal...

...In his case water is truly "nature's eye...

...A decade later, in her A merican Painting of the Nineteenth Century Barbara Novak, using Baur as a springboard, went on to define luminist classicism in more precise terms...

...Just the opposite...

...In contrast to the Hudson River painter, for whom wild and craggy mountains are so important, Lane, like Heade and other luminists, focuses his attention on still water...

...We are not left with an exhibition of American art in which the catalogue ignores cultural and political frameworks...

...Lane does not overwhelm us with rays Of light or blasted figure-trees that signal the existence of an omnipotent God...

...Looking at his Brace's Rock, Brace's Cove, we see a world in which mirror-clarity is the order of the day...

...It is instead a sense of how this short-lived, often fragile mode of perception evolved and how it remains a reference point we turn to when we wonder if any artist can still work with such profound confidence in his natural surroundings that he is willing to be a lens and to rely on his vision of nature rather than a cultivation of artistic personality...

...What luminism represents vis-à-vis European painting becomes particularly clear when we look at the Newbury marsh series of one of the principal painters in American' Light, Martin J. Heade and then turn, as John Baur and Barbara Novak have, for a comparative look at the haystack paintings Monet did in France during the 1890s...

...His artist-hero writes of a summer afternoon, "I shall never forget the wondrous stillness which brooded over earth...

...In Baur's eyes the luminists were the logical successors to Thomas Cole and the Hudson River school of painters...

...but for Novak, as for Baur, luminism remained "an attitude not only to light but to things in nature...

...In a 1954 article for Perspectives USA, he made his case for the uniqueness of luminism on the way in which the luminist artist used: light that was not atmospheric but radiant, part and parcel of every object in a picture...

...Luminism was a phenomenon, furthermore, going beyond specific writers, painters, photographers...

...In a century such as our own, when the closest we come to a luminist mode of perception is with the industrial landscapes of a Charles Sheeler, it is tempting to sentimentalize such a view of America...

...In American Light a luminist aesthetic is seen not only at the center of the photography of Seneca Ray Stoddard and Carleton E. Watkins but, above all, in American writing...

...In terms of American art history, recognition of luminism as a breakthrough has itself been a breakthrough...

...We cannot deny how far we have come from a world in which light and "natural" perception promised so much...

...and they sit in a field in which our eye moves from foreground to background so smoothly that we forget it is by artistic design—by lines of recession established through the discreet placement of the haystacks—that the overall harmony and lucidity of his world are maintained...

...But to their credit, the essayists of the American Light catalogue, especially editor John Wilmerding, the National Gallery's curator of American art, insist that "if luminism is a definable style, its principles ought to be recognizable in media other than painting...

...For it has allowed us to see how a number of once-overlooked artists — notably, Fitz Hugh Lane, Martin J. Heade, Sanford Gifford, and John F. Kensett— were able to go beyond the celestial opera of the Hudson River school painters and offer a view of America that reflected the direct and unmediated experience of nature Emerson had in mind when he described himself as a "transparent eyeball" through whom the currents of the Universal Being circulate...

...We see instead a landscape in which stillness and simplicity reign...

...Albert Gelpi sees luminist modes of thought emerging from such eighteenth-century theological works as Jonathan Edwards's Images and Shadows of Divine Things and continuing in the nineteenth century not only where we would expect to find it—in Emerson's "Nature," Thoreau's Walden...

...Fortunately, all that has now changed thanks to the exhibition only now closing at Washington's National Gallery and the publication by the National Gallery and Harper and Row of American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850-1875 ($40, 330 pp...

...In the endAmerican Light shows luminism as the logical expression of an "ocular age" in which seeing was prophecy and the representative American was neither a founding father nor a businessman but democratic man in the open air...

...That such a delicate, yet confident view of the land should manifest itself in American art at midcentury is alone revealing...

...With Heade it is not the transcience of the moment or light so complex that it can only be captured in multicolored brush strokes...

...luminist creativity rested with "a subjectivity so powerful that the artist's feeling is transferred directly to the object with no sense of the artist as intermediary...

...What draws us to Heade' s Sunset on the Newbury Marshes of 1862 orSunrise on the Marshes of 1863 is exactly the opposite of what gives life to a picture such as Monet' s Haystack at Sunset, Giverny...

...He saw them as "extreme realists" in their technique and "lyrical poets" in their sensitivity to mood...

...To take in Brace's Rock, Brace's Cove, what we must do principally is guard against impatience and accept a world in which quietness and limpidity are what storms and the changing seasons were to the Hudson River painters...

...The comparison stems naturally from the shared subject matter (haystacks) plus the interest both artists had in light...