Nature and Culture

...The new patrons of American art were not interested in a landscape tradition that had so little to do with success and power and so much to say about the wilderness and the immanence of God.mmanence of God...

...Especially in her opening chapters she is attuned to the fact that in a country without a past nature worship was a substitute for a reliance on history...

...For Cole and the landscape artists who came after him, it was not, however, enough to acknowledge that nature was, as William Sidney Mount observed, "a lecture always ready and bound by the Almighty...

...As virgin land, nature provided America with what Europe with its cities and overcultivated countryside lacked: a timeless vision of God's creation...

...Even a romantic such as Walt Whitman would in his 1856 "Song of the Broad-Axe" celebrate the axe as the harbinger of the new shapes of democracy, and by the late 1880s, the shift in American tastes was complete...

...It says as much about the originality as the borrowings of American art, and above all, it explains why nineteenth-century American artists so steadfastly resisted French impressionism with its emphasis on the genius of the artists rather than the magnificence of the "Grand Designer...

...The point of his art was to capture the sublime in nature, and to do this, he had to go beyond his private vision...

...In both cases the aim is - to quote from Asher Durand's "Letters and Landscape Painting" - to fill the observer with the kind of "right-minded, reverent feeling" that will let him appreciate "the Grand Designer...

...Art is the goal passing through the individual...

...What she omits - for example, the debt Thomas Cole owed to the religious paintings of his English contemporary, John Martin - is specific rather than generic and does nothing to diminish the cultural flow she is intent on tracing...

...As long as there was wilderness, Americans could point to the superiority of their country, and an artist such as Thomas Cole could insist, "We are still in Eden...

...It is Emerson's vision of the artist as medium, as a "transparent eyeball" who becomes "part or particle of God" as the "currents of the Universal Being" circulate through him that captures the spirit of the landscape artists Novak describes...

...Novak has done for America's seminal landscape artists what F. O. Matthiessen did forty years ago in his American Renaissance for a similar group of American writers-set the terms on which their work will be debated and judged...

...The quietism of Heade's Newbury marsh series of the 1860s and 1870s is not a religious falling off from the apocalyptic quality of Cole's 1836 series, The Course of Empire, where light is as dramatic and pointed as the finger of God...

...For the American artist, only the reverse could be true...

...For Novak this is a question that cannot be avoided, and she devotes the last quarter of Nature and Culture to providing what is so often missing from synoptic studies of American culture: a sense of its relationship to Europe...

...Novak is scrupulous about tracing the parallels between American and European art...

...Novak's starting point is not with the artists themselves but with the context in which their work flourished...

...The consequence of this for Novak is an American tradition in which the aim of the artist is not only to reveal God in nature but to instruct the viewer on how nature should be seen...

...So writes Barbara Novak in the opening sentence of her Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875, and what follows is the best book to date on the coming of age of American art...

...He knew that technique per se could not make him great or be an end in itself...

...Within their lifetimes the land they had devoted themselves to depicting began to be savaged...

...The task of the artist was to make sure that "the volume of nature" was rightly understood, and it was at this point that American artists departed radically from their European contemporaries who believed, "Nature is only the pretext...

...Nicolaus Mills "IN the early nineteenth century in America, nature couldn't do without God, and God apparently couldn't do without nature...

...The "ravages of the axe are daily increasing - the most noble scenes are made desolate, and often times with a wantonness and barbarism scarcely credible in a civilized nation," Thomas Cole complained in his 1835 "Essay on American Scenery," but by mid-nineteenth century, it was a complaint that the country as a whole was unwilling to listen to...

...In Nature and Culture the path that leads from the Biblical iconography of Thomas Cole's work, to the spectacular sunsets of Frederic Church, to the limpid calm of the luminist paintings of Martin Johnson Heade is an unbroken trail despite its aesthetic twists and turns...

...Indeed, for the artists Novak describes the real attack on their work came not from Europe but from the growth of their own country...

...What has changed is merely the kind of lesson the theological climate will allow...

...the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly...

...It is a picture that, to be sure, undercuts any inflated notion of the uniqueness of American art, but it is by no means a reductive picture...

...How original is such a landscape tradition...

...The result is that in the end Nature and Culture provides us with a telling picture of the way in which American painters took their European inheritance and changed it to fit the new world...

...She provides us with long sections on Claude Lorrain and the Hudson River School, seventeenth-century Dutch seascapes and American marine painting, Caspar Freidrich and American luminism...