So what is the point of this show again?
The pretense of this show - the excuse for yet another Guerrilla Girl sorority occupation of a major American Art museum - is that 19th century women landscape painters are somehow under-exposed under the curatorial framework of Hudson River School artists. Untangling the poor documentation of the Hudson River School legacy requires also wearing wading boots through the further GG's swamp of obfuscation and convoluted misdirection.
Who are the Hudson River School?
First understand school as if it were a school of fish. It is a fluid and highly diluted term for an increasingly growing subset of all American landscape painters regardless of identity politic persuasion. However, money and subliminal political blackmail talk loudly and my earlier comments in Part One and in Part Two speak to my opinions and concerns.
Curatorially and traditionally, prestigious museums attempt to represent the finest examples of the subject(s) they may be exhibiting, researching, or promoting the discovery of. In more recent years, the assault on these institutions has crippled the ability of these institutions to ethically and professionally function.
So it is up to critics such as myself to research and educate patrons of the arts as to the veracity of shows such as these that smell of dubious quality.
Let's narrow candidates who belong on the short list of artists who can be recognizably identified as members of the Hudson River School (HRS) of artists as those listed in Wikipedia's short list. Susie M. Barstow, among other females (not that this show has anything to do with sex!). So that's not a bone of contention.
Something that is argued by the curators of this show however is that Barstow has been historically abused. This drips with irony as Barstow's work constitutes abut half of the third of the show dedicated to 19th century women artists who made art during that period. The aesthetic floggings continue - poor Susie.
So, What's the Geographic and Temporal Context for this Part of the Show?
More precisely, the historically bounded Hudson River School's important activity happens between 1825 and fading by 1875 - a fifty year run though many of the artists lived and worked longer to diminishing or changing interest.
The artists in question begin working not much sooner than 50 years after the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 is still a fresh memory.
In 1825 there are 24 states in the Union. In 1875, ten years after the Civil War, there are 37 states in the Union and by 1890 there are 44.
The effects of the Industrial Revolution arrive in America from 1830 to 1840. This includes the proliferation of tourist steamboats out of NY City up the Hudson River. The Catskills become early vacation and tourist destinations for the wealthy. In 1837, the Adirondacks are mapped and by the 1870's routine access to the Adirondacks broadens the geographic scope of these artists.
The temporal sweet spot for the production of HRS artwork by its most famous practitioners is 1830 - 1860. There's nothing absolute about this as there is an original cohort of artists followed by a second-generation whose work is closely coupled to the HRS profile and prescription. The National Academy of Design becomes a proxy for the HRS artists during this time.
Portable metallic tubes for oil paint are invented in 1841.
Thomas Cole who starts the historically significant HRS landscape painting movement dies in 1848.
Barstow would have been 12 years old at that time. By 1860, Barstow is 24 and so she is clearly a second generation artist in this category and any claim that she is being marginalized really needs to explain away how she could be confused with the first generation of artists who defined the genre.
Nine years after Cole's death, in 1857, the 10th Street Studio is opened In New York City. This is where both male and female, famous and wannabe HRS artists establish studios. Cole spent most of his career living and working in Cedar Grove in the Catskills.
A publication called The Crayon is published between 1855 - 1861 and essays in it prescribe very specific instructions for the creation of HRS paintings. By now, innovation within HRS practice is discouraged and rejected.
It should also be noted that landscape painting is unrivaled during these few decades. Google has created a very good timeline of the scope of work.
The NBMAA HRS Collection
Gallery 5 on the first floor of the museum holds a rich and varied collection of HRS works and it should be made much more obvious that these works complement the WRAL show upstairs. For grins and giggles let's see what the museum has to say about them.
IMO, this is pretty thin gruel. It reads like the summary paragraphs of a high school essay assignment.
And its very little help in attempting to ground any of the women artists upstairs. A more detailed timeline and nuanced explanation of likenesses and differences in style would be far more useful considering the richness of the collection.
Where Susie Barstow Fits
The body of work that we get exposed to in the Suzie Barstow section of the show is a sparse sampling. The majority of pieces do not stand out even as HRS candidate pieces. They are plain, sometimes dull, and not particularly interesting nature snapshots.
The pieces that do distinguish themselves, distinguish themselves in aesthetic sweetness. Barlow, unlike many of the other artists involved, seems to have developed a color scheme that amplifies the landscape colors. Rather than sublime the landscape colors pop in both impossible and irresistible ways. Barstow's best work is well-crafted, commercial quality illustration.
And, based on the samples exhibited the paintings emulate the HRS look, they never achieve the spirituality that Cole, Church, or others succeeded in projecting. Nor are her pieces particularly atmospheric (see: Inness or Bridges work in the galleries). In fact, for Barstow and many of her circle the compositions and problem space are boilerplate, compositionally centered and predictable outdoor scenes.
The scenes consist of a stream or pool of water surrounded by banks of paper birch trees. Light effects are redundant from one painting to another. Whatever abstraction exists within the paintings appear to be the byproduct of efficiency and economy rather than experiment or improvisation.
The larger issue is that much of the pedestrian HRS look and feel is being produced at the end of the century seems to be homogenized. This may speak to the demands of the remaining patrons who had not yet abandoned the genre or it may simply speak to a long tail commercialization that in scarcity required ever sweeter and domestic cosmetic changes.
And the rhetorical descriptions that bookend her work as well as the others is that they were outdoors doing all the same stuff the male artists were doing. That's true. But is it exceptional for women at the time and the answer is no. In fact one of the accusations about the HRS painters is that their work became a tourist magnet to the area that eventually despoiled the landscape.
In other words, *everybody* who could afford it vacationed or traveled up the Hudson, into the woods, and, because photography was a new and not ubiquitously available, people either sketched or bought prints of the places they visited - a perfect storm for the commercial success of the HRS cohort.
Barstow simply conducted a train the trainer business - teaching teachers the HRS principles and selling the resulting craftwork.
Unpacking the Rise and Fall of the HRS
Thomas Cole and those he influenced most greatly were romanticists first and foremost with a heavy dose of, let's call it Dark Nouveau - darker mythological themes found in the more decorative Art Nouveau genre.
His paintings would include American Indians who were no longer occupying the territory, fairies, Biblical allusions, and dystopian visions of nature trampled by the march of progress. While the GGs argue that there is no Eden and Eden never existed, they disparage the evidence of Cole's art.
Cole and others shared a sacred vision of nature - a religiously colored gaze. Cole is not painting actual representation - not plein air. Sketching Clubs (male, female, and coed) existed because sketching was the more effective and efficient way to capture scenic information. And these paintings were taken as the best knowledge available for urban populations to actually see and dream the New World.
Cole's paintings are exercises in transcribing his sketches through his religious memory gaze of the, now, composite landscape scene. There is little botanical accuracy involved in his work and he will be criticized for these very reasons much as he is aesthetically valorized for the same reasons.
In this context, Barstow and her generation of landscape painters explore the same intellectual territory as Cole's cohort with the added advantage that the geography is well documented, the ability to paint plein air is much easier due to tube paints, and the formula for the HRS landscapes is already baked.
For patrons then and now, the accuracy of Barstow's botanical studies, her craft of picture-making, and her understanding of the formula are as good, better, and good enough to admire and love regardless of their historical or intellectual ranking.
The Fall
There's an unfortunate generalization about the demise of the HRS genre and that is that a criticism of the work appearing in a New York newspaper unexpectedly and conclusively diminished the value and prestige associated with the work of these artists. More truthfully, the piece was a broadside by Impressionist challengers to the status quo.
A second, far more important, complementary barometer of change, can also be found in the NBMAA collections and that is the art of Marie Cassatt whose conversion to Impressionism is compelling and disruptive. The artistic changes in her art signal as well as anyone's the advent and ubiquitous conquest of the French Impressionists and multiple waves of Modern Art that will submerge and swamp any market for previous generations of American art - HRS being no exception.
The stagnation and relatively old-fashioned landscape narrative gives way to figuration at home and aesthetic revolution abroad. The women exhibited in this show remained forever anchored to this fashion. The as now, American educators are the last to learn or change.
The Pyramid Scheme
HRS paintings are rebounding in value by leaps and bounds. As with so many mediocre women artists who are disingenuously being promoted as individuals far more significant than they really were or are - buyer beware. The wake of GG advocacy seems to be a pump and dump aesthetic behavior that really needs some examination. Museums who should and in many cases do know better are selling off masterworks to acquire work out of the car trunks of less than credible dealers who manufacture and depend on identity politics to leverage their wares.
Barstow has been compared to Jervis McEntee. The art of the two is distinctly different. What is worth noting and comparing is the fact that McEntee is a lesser known HRS artists and that he, like Barstow, continued painting well after the HRS declines in popularity.
His journals deserve research funding more than another GG episode of Mr. Peabody and Sherman rewrite American Art History.
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