The Women Reframe American Landscape exhibition at the New Britain Museum of American Art is yet another in a litany of Guerrilla Girl muggings of vulnerable and weakling American Art institutions. In this case, they co-opt valuable museum wall space with disingenuous curation and intent.
The pretense of this exhibition claims that Suzie M. Barstow is having a first retrospective (woo hoo!) and the reason is that, well, she provides the plausible pretense that the Ever-Victimized American Woman Artist can be tightly coupled to a male group of painters who became known as the Hudson River School.
The problem with this disingenuous marketing backbone is that Barstow's art constitutes less than half of the show though her work recognizably has something observably having to do with what I hope we can agree upon is landscape.
The lion's share of this show however is a crapscape of identity politic drivel that no legitimate aesthetic gatekeeper for a museum should ever allow this junk pile of nonsense to occupy. This is not a recentering of women anywhere. This is a multi-gallery spaced petri dish for the cultivation of the Woke Mind Virus whose anti-intellectual tentacles are strangling fine art appreciation on a global scale.
By now our shared bullshit detectors are all tingling at the same time. We are are being told straight faced that George Orwell warned you about these weasel words deployed from the mouths of politicians.
Everything the project claims not to attempt, it attempts pathetically to accomplish over and over and over. Let's put a clothespin on our noses and start with the Guerrilla Girls entry.
Yes. Yes. We are led to believe that the GGs"were galvanized by research and statistics" on women *in* the Hudson River School and something about reality. One can only image a bat-signal like beacon shining from the campus art building declaring "Guerrilla Girls Assemble!" - we need a poster!
And so a poster was manufactured. These posters represent one of a number of defamatory techniques that are standard fare for projects such as these. The white male artist(s) who will get mugged need to be softened up patriarchal style. They must be held responsible for 21st century progressive Democrat, politically correct expectations about neo-history. The ritual dry-humping of their previous reputations by the Guerrilla Girls is perfunctory to make the neglected, historically abused, and otherwise victim's victim to look that much more *marginalized*.
In their "poster" they take an axe to the HRS artists.
The allegedly criminal behavior of the Hudson River School painters were that they were an all-white, all-male, who shared a cohort of patrons. Aiiiiieeeeeee! This was about the time of the civil war.
So Edward Mitchell Bannister lived and worked in the Boston, MA/Providence, RI geography not the Hudson.
Robert Duncanson is considered a second-generation member of the Hudson River School (typical of GG "research"). He too might be geographically challenged in having a beer on the Hudson because he worked in Ohio. From Wikipedia before the thought police eliminate the reference: "Inspired by famous American landscape artists like Thomas Cole, Duncanson created renowned landscape paintings and is considered a second generation Hudson River School artist.["
The Guerrilla Girls successfully use race-baiting to promote the smashing of the patriarchy that is point of these projects. But their poster couples even more allegations worth deflating.
Again, Guerrilla Girl scholarship is nonexistent in these allegations. The Hudson River School art is more or less a romanticized vision of an American Eden along the river. The *noble indigenous indian* rhetoric is a magical thinking, manufactured historical narrative. The American continent was not populated by millions of nation park natives who performed any such inhabitation, cultivation, or protection (from what?).
Indians, like all of the rest of humanity, exercised their culture and governance all over the Americas. the migration of Europeans to the Americas changed that. The unspoken truth is that innumerable wars have been fought on this continent against fellow European governments and against Indian populations. The art of Hudson River School painters has nothing to do with any of that.
Indians were not relocated to the moon. They relocated to continental reservations where they run casinos, watch TV, and vote.
Nobody is immune to disease. Sexually transmitted diseases from Indians afflicted Europeans. The likely disease being implied by this photograph is malaria that sickened everyone it afflicted.
The United States judicial system is better place than an art museum to established claims of ownership. The GG unsubstantiated allegations that these claims have any legitimacy is based on a romantic fantasy that history can be unwound to somehow undo what's done. To criticize the romanticism of the HRS painters for human progress is a fool's errand but the Guerrilla Girls are promoting this grift as plausible truth. It's not.
The photograph used in this indictment poster is by Seneca Ray Stoddard who photographically documented the industrialization of the Hudson not necessarily its eventual degradation at the hands of masses of tourists and commercial arts and crafts landscape painters such as those featured in this show. A show of his photography would be a breath of fresh air here.
And their conclusions about the area becoming a mess is predictably inaccurate as well - profoundly so. A Bill Moyers PBS show on the Hudson documents the GG inaccuracy.
"MCKIBBEN: What’s really interesting about this place is that it’s a story of redemption. It’s a story of Eden lost and then, at least partially, regained.
ACTOR READS WORDS OF SENECA RAY STODDARD: East, West, North, South, limitless, numberless, a confused mass of peaks and ridges. Pen cannot convey the idea of its sublimity. The pencil fails to even suggest the blended strength and delicacy of the scene. The rude laugh is hushed, the boisterous shout dies out on reverential lips, the body shrinks down, feeling its own littleness, the soul expands, and rising above the earth, claims kinship with its Creator, questioning not his existence.
MOYERS: These words are from a young painter named Seneca Ray Stoddard who worked as an artist for a company in Troy that built railway cars. Elegant ones with beautiful scenes of mountains and streams painted on them. Work of this kind was a school and a day job for many Hudson River Painters. Seneca Ray Stoddard did very well with the railroad cars but longed to be near the scenes he was painting. He gave up his job in Troy and became a photographer. He clambered over rocks and through the brush, high into the uncharted Adirondack Mountains, trekked the trails and canoed the rivers and lakes with his enormous view camera and its fragile glass plates, finding the beauty in that special light called luminance, said to be coming direct from God’s heaven.
MOYERS: Stoddard’s photographs are little-known American classics, typical of the pioneering photographers of the late-19th Century who gave America a new way of looking at itself. Unlike the romantic paintings of the Hudson River School, Stoddard’s landscapes included people - Human Nature.
MOYERS: Stoddard earned his living as a writer and publisher of Adirondack Guide Books to entice New Yorkers and Bostonians to make the arduous journey into the mountains. His elegant drawings graced the pages of the little books. His writing was whimsical.
ACTOR READS WORDS OF SENECA RAY STODDARD: I will point out places where it is considered eminently proper to go into ecstasies over scenery, etc. I’m not going to write a history, however, because the wear and tear on the ordinary brain must be immense and moreover, the country is full of them.
MOYERS: Well, that’s Stoddard, the photographer. And that’s his boat, “The Wanderer.” He wanders all over the lake, taking views. And money.
MOYERS: Seneca Ray Stoddard focused his camera on the tourists, who came to the wilderness to find peace and quiet, to escape the dirt, heat and strife and diseases that spoiled summertime in the city. They came to the wilderness to hear the evening cry of the loon and 21 smell the pines and enjoy the cool, clear lakes. They learned to come in August and not before because the mosquitoes and black flies would feast on them. They came for the cool shade because ladies didn’t want to risk their complexions at the seaside. And to the wilderness they brought their habits from home. They didn’t sleep on pine boughs or a leanto in the woods, but preferred the new hotels with their fancy dining rooms and elegant service.
MOYERS: Hotels in the Adirondacks grew like weeds on the lake shores and competed to be the biggest and best. Prospect House was the first hotel in the world that had an electric light in every room. Thomas Edison, himself, came to supervise the installation.
MOYERS: They would dress for dinner and dress for tea, expect to hear music from a fine orchestra while they enjoyed the sunset. The time in the woods where the Hudson was born was a beloved and cherished time, especially for generations of children who came to think of their summers here as the best part of their lives. For them, nature was a thing of curiosity and fun. And the waters of the Adirondack lakes spawned a life-long reverence for the mysteries and the majesty of the natural world.
MOYERS: But no matter how far they ventured into the deep woods, they couldn’t escape a growing dilemma. How much of nature do we consume to sustain the good life? And how much do we leave alone? -a dilemma brought home to the ladies of the Horicon Sketch club when the quiet of the morning was shattered by the sound of the axe.
MCKIBBEN: Once people found a place they found it with a vengeance. There was an insatiable need for wood in this country."
The Moyers interviews not only dispel the innuendo that a sinister white male patriarchal conspiracy was formulated to somehow prevent women artists from getting ahead.
"MOYERS: The story is that on Cole's first trip up river he was so inspired that he came back with three paintings just like that.
ALEX BOYLE: And he made front page news of "The Daily Mirror", September October 1825. Front page news.
MOYERS: How come?
ALEX BOYLE: Because Colonel John Trumbull was the leading American painter of the day, he painted "The Battle of Bunker Hill", he painted the Saratoga surrender image. He just looked at it, he was about 70 years old, and said: "God, I have struggled all my life and this kid has topped me immediately." So Trumbull bought one, William Dunlap who was a major critic of the time, and Asher Durand who was a young, successful engraver bought it. And they all just said: "This guy's the next great thing." GODEL: It was like a singer in the 20th Century. You just got discovered.
ALEX BOYLE: A star was born. In 1825.
GODEL: The artists were not only celebrities but they were into the commerce. They had a famous building called the 10th St. Studio and they used to have big studios with pictures there so that the collectors could come around and see what the different artists were doing.
ALEX BOYLE: Ten thousand people would look at the latest Bierstadt or Church.
GODEL: They brought opera glasses to see the work and the critics raved about them. And the thing about Church and Bierstadt was in the days before TV and radio and popular magazines, these artists were celebrities. And they were on the front page of newspapers and their travels to different parts of the world were reported upon. They took a special and important place in society.
MOYERS: I didn’t realize that.
ALEX BOYLE: They made us realize that we weren’t just backwoods country bumpkins anymore. That Americans were capable of doing something.
MOYERS: So this art really fed the American imagination, our identity…
ALEX BOYLE: And its ego.
MOYERS: The pictures were deceptively simple. Lovely scenes of natural settings painted with skill and fascination with the complex details of nature. These were scenes that Americans recognized as their own, unlike any in the world. American Art. And they suggested a noble and fruitful land, unspoiled by commerce, a world Americans would prefer to remember. In this time before movies, TV and photography it was America getting to look at itself- at its very best. Dozens of talented artists followed Cole’s lead and the copies of the pictures began appearing on parlor walls throughout the young country. The International art world took notice and voted its approval. American landscape art flourished for fifty years until going out of fashion toward the end of the Century. The term “Hudson River School” was applied by a caustic critic in the New York Tribune who found the landscape pictures sentimental and naïve. Paintings which sold for enormous sums of money plummeted in value and 11 disappeared into attics and cellars - some were sold for the price of their frames. But the old landscapes made a comeback - now they can be worth millions - to find a good one is to find gold.
ALEX BOYLE: So, what did you get?
GODEL: An early, early painting by Thomas Doughty on panel.
ALEX BOYLE: What's it of?
GODEL: You won't believe it. It's a fisherman by a stream. It’s gorgeous. I don't want to get it wet. It's just gorgeous. Early, 1820's
ALEX BOYLE: It's survived 180 years. Where do you think he got it from? Just had it in the bins? "
This interview also mentions the embarassing fact that women had their own club - The Horicon Sketching Club - and men were excluded. From the link:
"The Adirondacks became the hot destination for aspiring wilderness artists – among them the ladies of the Horicon Sketching Club, a group of well-heeled Manhattan women who canoed across the lakes to find the most picturesque vistas. They painted in broad bonnets and immaculate white cotton dresses, their packed lunches carried in wicker “Adirondack baskets” by robust guides. Then, in 1871, Dr. Thomas C. Durant of the Union Pacific Railroad completed the line to the Adirondacks – or “a Central Park for the world”, as the New York Times called it, now that it was so easily reachable from Manhattan. America’s first accessible wilderness was open for business – with perfect timing. Just as industrialization was roaring across the nation, ripping open the landscape for mining, despoiling it with mills, chimneys and factories, so Americans woke up to the romance of their disappearing countryside. The Adirondacks were under particular threat as they were progressively stripped for their timber. However, in 1894, the park was granted state constitutional protection, ensuring that the territory would be “forever wild”. The lodge and camp owners were determined to preserve their holiday retreats, setting up the Association for the Preservation of the Adirondacks in 1901."
Had this show had an honest aesthetic broker for a curator rather than a political cohort of apparat-chicks the show might have a lot more veracity in the consideration of the period artists.
I will review the work in subsequent entries.
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