On Art

...Whatever their persuasiveness, however, all the conjectures offered at the Modern are marred by a certain ideological neatness, and, more important, a tendency to see the past as a trial run for the present...

...George Catlin's two oil sketches of backgrounds intended for use in paintings of Indians and buffalo are attractive as well...

...They are delicious studies of clouds and plains, freely brushed in high-keyed colors...

...Viewed on its own, the show is almost a graph of artists' enthusiasm for the vast, virginal New World...

...Inside every art historian lurks a sensibility that Whitman himself might have found too yeasty...

...The theory is that although artists do not paint the land anymore, they continue to be deeply affected by it...

...Among the other small works that stand out are Bierstadt's oil of the Blue Grotto in Capri, its greenish-black forms faintly lit by the sun coming through the entrance, and a gouache of green iceberg against a brown sea and sky—one of a series by Church...

...This is not a show of "Peaceable Kingdoms," as the title seems to imply...

...Funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and directed by Kynaston McShine, a curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, the exhibition is accompanied by a well illustrated, although rather confusingly laid-out, catalogue ($7.95...

...So, in a much more appealing fashion, does Joseph Stella's Tree of My Life (1919...

...No slouch at rhetoric himself, Wilmerding finds in Newman's canvases "echoes of Heade and Church monumental scale and raw visual power, the measured disposition of forms across luminous space, the aspiration toward metaphysical harmony...

...It shows a sailboat on a glassy river flanked by globular haystacks that stretch to a flat horizon...

...It is sunny, decorative and a little childlike...

...He quotes Barnett Newman at his worst, claiming that the first man was an artist who "traced the stick through the mud to make a line before he learned to throw the stick as a javelin...

...It has been suggested, too, that if dreams of Manifest Destiny deeply affected BC art, their realization after World War II might have been a factor in the new esthetic movements...

...Yet that is the impression they give, and it is therefore upsetting to read Wil-merding referring to this school's "ruminations on the powerful forces of Genesis, on the heroic drama as well as the pathos of human mortality...

...The Natural Paradise is worth attending for the fine pictures it contains, but it is a questionable educational experience...

...One would have thoroughly enjoyed—like a pacifist with a weakness for martial music —a pleasurable wallow through 19th-century bombast...

...As is usual with such surveys, some conflict emerges between what is on the walls and what is in the explanatory text...

...They are notable for being early exponents of a peculiarly American surrealism (Andrew Wyeth is a later example...

...The artist has turned the early evening stars and the clouds of a fiery sunset into a vision of the Stars and Stripes floating over a distant mountain range, its "flagpole'' a blasted tree in the foreground...

...Similarly, the Charles Burchfield watercolors of trees and houses turning into demon faces seem somewhat mad...

...But McShine has, on the whole, tightly reined the period's exuberance, causing some ambivalence in this reviewer...

...But the catalogue depicts the paintings as an illustration of the maxim plus ca change...

...Noticeable for appearing un-American is James McNeill Whistler, with three lovely English seascapes...

...The graph peaks in the second half of the 19th century and declines thereafter, presumably because the landscape became too familiar, photography too efficient and artists too sophisticated...

...Its guiding principle, Romanticism, is "easier to feel than to define," as Rosenbloom says...

...Another example is provided by one of Ralph Blakelock's especially fine moonlit glades dating from the 1880s, without the usual brown-gold patina of varnish...

...Hanging near them is another pleasing exercise by Bierstadt: a stippled mass of cloud rising against a brilliant orange and green sky...

...Epitomizing this are a characteristic Albert Pinkham Ryder ship at sea, and his strange portrait of Diana, scarcely visible on its craquele leather ground...

...Although the chronological boundaries of the exhibition make the Abstract Expressionist room an inevitability, it still comes as a shock: It almost seems to belong in another show...

...An intelligent case for continuity could have been made...

...Both are conspicuous at the Modern, despite their not being particularly well represented: Homer stands out for his macho style with paint in an 1890 snow-scape, Eakins for his integrity and sobriety in a view of a New Jersey meadow (circa 1882...

...One of the more remarkable pieces here is the last one on view —a small lithograph by Frederic Church from the 1860s...

...While neither Window Homer nor Thomas Eakins had followers of any distinction, in gatherings such as this one they invariably look like the start of something rather than the end...

...By not making a meal of the heroic side of 19th-century America, McShine has brought out the mysterious, fanciful side of the national character...

...This is a large, slightly Persian-looking fantasy of brightly colored birds and butterflies lurking in the foliage of a treelike symbol...

...Even Rosen-bloom, in an otherwise reasonable essay, proposes that earth artists "have found yet another way to establish contact with the deities of American landscape that have reigned for two centuries...

...Entitled Our Banner in the Sky, the print—which is, incidentally, quite beautiful?would have been a logical keynote for the show...

...In any event, there must be a better way of reconciling the two eras than a resort to the ineffable...

...Since commercial design has traditionally stolen from high art, saying these pictures look brightly specious and commercial is in a sense unfair...

...Martin Heade and Fitz Hugh Lane—designated as Luminists, a subdivision of the Hudson River School—also reflect this strain...

...And there is Louis Eilshemius' Fauve-like study of an Easthampton beach occupied by a solitary shore bird and some pebbles...

...The links they have established are often tenuous and occasionally preposterous—for instance, seeing in the late works of Turner and Monet premonitions of Abstract Expressionism...

...Unhappily, such an immersion never takes place...

...In fact, judging from some of the outlandish statements accompanying this exhibition, they frequently replace it...

...Thus The Natural Paradise: American Painting 1800-1950, a modest display of 157 works that will run through November 30...

...Nonetheless, concentration on the unflamboyant has not excluded some memorable pieces...

...But his most impressive effort here is Twilight Salt Marshes, a virtually black-and-white chalk drawing from the '80s very reminiscent of Seurat...

...Now the hunt is on for specifically American roots, a trend that should please at least those who set store by genius loci...

...True, we are given several examples of grandiosity, including sizable Niagaras by Church and George Inness, a 10-foot high picture of redwoods by Albert Bierstadt and the Thomas Moran blockbuster, The Chasm of the Colorado...

...As Rosenbloom notes, the mythology constructed around Abstract Expressionism used to imply "two drastically different eras, a kind of BC and AD chronology...

...And there is no doubt that one feels terminal Romanticism here, as it has been expressed in most of the strengths and styles of the past 150 years of American art...

...Scholars and critics have been attempting to unite the two for over a decade, reexamining various BC artists for signs and omens of post-World War II modernism...

...The darkening sky is broken only by a skein of waterfowl and a few slivers of cloud...

...Heade, who was born in 1819 and lived to be 95, produced wonderful, menacing scenes of unnatural calm before storms...

...In his current book, Art and Act, Peter Gay takes art critics and historians to task for following Goethe's dictum that "every perception is a theory...

...Great artists have, of course, used their surroundings as a point of departure...

...Rosen-bloom sees in the last two "an almost Druidic imagination in the way earth, tree or animal quiver in response to the luminous magic of primordial solar or lunar energies...

...The Museum of Modern Art has found the only possible solution: placing the focus on Romanticism, a principal begetter of the avant garde...

...Consider, for example, the religiosity that afflicted artists of both centuries...

...Perhaps the problem should be stated the other way around, for today the theories too often precede perception...

...There are essays by Robert Rosenbloom and John Wil-merding, "collages" of pertinent quotations assembled by Barbara Novak and McShine, and a chronology of the main esthetic and political events of the period...

...it is a general selection of mostly landscapes, with more than half of the canvases from the 19th century...

...Except for Edward Hopper and Milton Avery, the 20th century has produced no straight landscapists of any stature...

...But the Expressionism of, say, John Marin and Marsden Hartley places them outside the genre, just as the marvelous idiosyncracies of Georgia O'Keefe and Arthur Dove put them beyond the category...