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- [00:09]
A
Welcome to the Hillsdale College online Courses podcast. I am Jeremiah Regan, and I am very pleased to again be joined by Professor Emeritus of Art, Sam Knecht. Sam, today we're Talking about Lecture 2 of American Paintings, Landscapes and Cityscapes. What do depictions of the American countryside and cities help us understand about our country?
- [00:30]
B
Well, we live in our country every day, every waking hour, whether we're driving along or in a workplace or out on the farm or who knows what. But we are creatures that are conditioned by our environment. And from the get go, Americans have not only subsisted with the land and with the ocean, lakes and rivers, but they have noticed it. And their livelihood, their existence, depends upon knowing the nature that surrounds them. So it was. It was quite an easy chore for artists to decide to depict our nation's environment, even before colonial times. But once the nation was established, artists wanted to celebrate it, the scene of many a struggle, many a life and death, whether in battle, in war, or in just everyday existence. So they started to make paintings of the land and the sea and the sky to celebrate this land, to see it as a kind of an American Eden. The course of landscapes and cityscapes actually starts with a seascape, a Boston harbor scene by Fitz Lane, which shows some three masted clipper ships and so on. And I led off with that painting because of its attention not only to glorious effects of sky, weather, time of day and so on, but because the artist knew the nuts and bolts of those three masted ships. He actually grew up in a sail maker's shop in Boston, and so he knew the details and the fitting together of all those incredible parts of wood, canvas, iron, bolts, and more. And that painting has a glorious sky. American painters of the landscape became highly celebrated for their understanding of weather and the effects of sunlight on the land and in the sky with its cloud formations and more. So there's something glorious and celebratory in these paintings which suggests that this really is a kind of promised land, a new start in every sense, not just politics and economics in the visual arts.
- [03:09]
A
As well, and appreciation for the soil, which is somehow special. There's soil all over the world. There's mountains and waterfalls and rivers, but these are our mountains and waterfalls and rivers. And we can go see with our own eyes. We can behold Niagara Falls, which we also have depicted by Cole and Church and others. We can see the Rocky Mountains, which Bierstadt paints for us so magnificently. But on the other hand, we also have a picture of America as it was and is no Longer we're able to see some things that the painters recorded for us that don't exist in that way anymore.
- [03:47]
B
Yeah, good point, Jeremiah. I think there is a kind of a wistful sense of nostalgia that permeates some of these works, or at least gets into our heads and hearts as we look at them. The vanished landscape. But also there was this penchant for truth, this insistence on fact to nature that drove many of these painters. They were expected to be almost scientific.
- [04:16]
C
In their observation of the flora and.
- [04:19]
B
Fauna, not just the huge mountainscapes and so on. And so this kind of uniquely American insistence upon visual truth permeates so many of these works right up until maybe about 1900 or so, when styles start to shift a little bit in painting and kind of dynamic brushwork starts to take the place of meticulous detail.
- [04:45]
A
And we see some of that in the companion to the Landscapes, the Cityscapes, which I think is just a brilliant inclusion by you in this lecture. We see the natural beauty of our country, as you've said, the places that we live and the air we breathe and experience. But many Americans do that in cities, which are also worthy of attention. So tell us a little bit about how you look at the American painting record of our cities.
- [05:15]
B
Well, it's a fascinating shift in focus. It doesn't mean that cityscapes eclipsed landscapes.
- [05:22]
A
Good point.
- [05:23]
B
But I think it's worthy to find a balance in a course like this and even in college teaching of art history, to see that the shift from an agrarian population to an urban, more industrialized population is echoed in what you see in paintings and photography as well. But in painting, the move to the city, the development of huge, thick, populous neighborhoods, tenements and so on, in New York City and beyond all of this, instead of being felt to be unpicturesque, artists started feeling like, well, okay, this is our new landscape. The city scene, the immigrants that have flocked to southern Manhattan and more, and the engineering that was triumphing, like the Brooklyn Bridge, for example, that was a subject for a number of artists, whether they were doing it very faithfully to its appearance or even taking liberties, like one artist, Joseph Stella did, with something that almost looks like a stained glass window in its geometry and bright cathedral like qualities in color. But I think the American artists that I love to study and re experience.
- [06:51]
C
They were always reporters, they were observers.
- [06:54]
B
And they wanted to share American experience not just with faces, but with places.
- [07:01]
A
Well, thank you, Sam. And we're so pleased to be able to bring your. Your teaching and the beauty and insight that American paintings provide in our lives with this course. The mission of Hillsdale College is to teach all who wish to learn. And that often starts with teaching about politics, something Hillsdale is well known for teaching with our Constitution courses and our readers, and helping Americans understand the political system in which they operate. We also teach literature, help students, help readers to delve into these great works and better understand the human condition and their relationship with God and with other men, as great authors explain these things to chemistry and music. And we're able to share much of this teaching through our online courses. We are pleased that they are free to any American who wishes to learn, and we ascribe or we aspire to keep them that way. It would be naive to think we could produce these types of works without support from our friends. And so while we never wish to twist anyone's arm, and I'm certainly not here, I do invite those who are willing and able to support us in our mission of educating all who wish to learn, of enriching their lives, providing them knowledge and wisdom and growth in happiness, to consider donating to us and supporting the cause at hillsdale.edu course to make a tax deductible donation to Hillsdale College and help us to teach all who wish to learn. Go to Hillsdale. Edu course. Now we'll turn to Professor Knecht with lecture two of American Paintings, Landscapes and Cityscapes.
- [08:45]
C
Welcome back. This lecture is about landscape painting. I sometimes think of this as the land of promise. It's an old concept still resonating to the minds of some. The Promised land is a land for God's chosen people, and that images of it have a sacred overtone. But there's a parallel view that this is the land of opportunity, where anyone with a gumption can get ahold of some farmland, some woodland, and take resources from it and gain wealth. It's helped by the fact that America is full of natural wonders, whether the spectacular scenes of the west or the quieter scenes of the Midwest and New England coast or what have you. Now, among the people that have been inspired by the American scene are painters. We'll start with actually not a landscape, but a harbor view. Here we find ourselves in a painting called Boston harbor by Fitz Henry Lane. It's a very serene painting done around 1850. Many of us feel that Lane is America's first great marine artist. Lane grew up in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and he knew tall ships well. His father was a sailmaker with a big business for that in Boston. But we also know that Lane was, was from birth, paralyzed. His legs didn't work. So it's tempting to presume that Lane was hired to work in his father's shop. And as such, he had to spend long hours sewing, patiently stitching things right. That was good practice for someone who eventually turned his talents to making paintings. But for all of Lane's focus on details, he I think what gets us the most about this painting is the sky, this sunset, which fairly glows as if light was actually coming out of the canvas itself, projecting, even though it's simply dry oil paint. Lane could paint all those details of fine rigging and more. But the sky, with its delicate blends from oranges and yellows near the sun itself on up into a spectral change of pinks and oranges and even greens and into soft blues as well. You could suggest some religious overtones in this. Because of that quality of light. Lane was not alone in striving to capture effects of light. People would even say, oh, there is an American light. As if somehow the atmosphere and light was different in the colonies and the States compared to Europe. This whole movement in painting skies gave rise to a term luminists. And that also appealed to transcendentalists like Emerson, who felt that this manifested God's great glory. And in the end, a painting like this, with so much devotion to the glorious, never ending sky, minute details of the ships, this is a phenomenal kind of work and worthy of our attention. As our course continues now, we will continue to look at scenes going inland with a landscape that is of a very rugged scene, possibly the Allegheny Mountains. This is a painting called Daniel Boone sitting at the door of his cabin at the great Osage Lake. It was painted in 1826 by Thomas Cole. The newly explored lands inland from the coast not only lured settlers, but painters too. Soon they paddled west, hiked west beyond the mountain ranges. And what they saw gave rise to a movement called the Hudson River School. And that included Thomas Cole, who, along with other artists intent upon painting wilderness, became loosely known as the Hudson River Painters. It's basically a term that applies to artists wanting to paint wilderness, especially before it disappeared or was taken over and civilized into farmland. Thomas Cole ranks chief among this group of Hudson river artists. Though born in England, he came to America as a young man with a degree of talent, started roaming New England forests and rivers. He deployed big canvases to communicate the sweeping scale of these vistas. Now, in this painting, he depicts a hero of the day, Daniel Boone, known as a great pathfinder and someone who led People through the so called Cumberland Gap to get beyond the mountains into other lands. I've seen many Thomas Cole paintings and there is a formula to them. It's a very successful and nicely varied formula. A knowledge of skies, weather, forest and different types of trees, species of trees, and especially effects of great distance. One of the things we notice in a Cole painting is what we painters like to call atmospheric perspective. That's where the great distance toward the horizon involves forms, whether they're mountains or forests or what have you that are very light, very pale, almost bluish, nearly melting in with the color of the sky just above. As you move forward in the space through the middle ground and into the foreground, the tones of the landscape elements get progressively deeper and richer and warmer in color. And finally, the artist, like Cole, knew that you kept your farthest background devoid of detail, just a kind of careful blur of color tone. But in the foreground was where you should pick out very meticulous details. And that's true in Cole's painting of Daniel Boone. Here Cole joins dozens of artists who painted Niagara. This is his so called distant view of Niagara, painted circa 1830. Despite the actual colossal size of that waterfall color, Cole, interestingly enough, chooses a vantage point miles away. It's another example of Cole's love of long vistas, spacious views where woodlands near and far compete with the falls for our attention. There's so much in this broad panorama to take in. Well, that movement in nature, that flux we see. Coal is playing not only with the clearing sky, the movement of clouds and bright sunlight, but with the movement of the water of the falls. Of course, the cascading of water, the great steam that's kicked up by splashing. Wonderful treatment of reflections in the water, which glistens and moves a little bit on its own. But also notice that the landscape is changing. The trees are decked out in autumn colors of red and rust, and only signaling to us that those leaves will fall, that winter will happen. And yet, if you look ahead, winter always yields to spring and rebirth. And in a way, God's grace bestowed once again on land and on Americans by association. Here we go to Church. Well, literally an artist whose name was Church, Frederick Church. This is Frederic Church painting Niagara canvas that he did in 1857. Church grew up in Connecticut and spent two years training with Thomas Cole. That shouldn't come as a great surprise. He shared Cole's love of deep space landscapes. Let's now take a closer look at the details in this painting. In Church's Niagara, one critic Said, this is the greatest depiction of moving water ever done in the history of art. Notice how the water rushes over shelves of rock here, creating little ribbon curtains as it goes on its way, then kicking up in front of froth. There's a kind of a zigzag movement of the different sections of this, depending on the rock structures beneath the river. It gets especially frothy and active near the brink here, that terrifying, dangerous brink. If you were pulled by this current into and over the falls yourself, you would be doomed to certain death. But look how beautiful all of this is with these glowing qualities of off whites, gray greens and so on. And treated especially with this magnificent, miraculous rainbow, caused, of course, by the mists of Niagara. Other things I'd like to point out is the use of color in this painting. We've got all those greens and grays of the moving water, except for the froth. And that's an important color note that he has observed. But also upstream from that, we see woodlands, and they're decked out in autumn foliage, these soft oranges. And above all that is this tremendous, spacious sky with its glowing colors that are a little warmer toward the horizon and get a little more bluish up toward the top. And very delicately, he is putting in cirrus clouds that help to frame that opening. The emptiness of the sky here accords with the emptiness of the chasm beneath the falls below. It's as if there's a kind of cosmic harmony between sky and landforms and water. The emptiness, the danger inherent in this chasm below, the unknown, the danger that lurks if you tip over the falls to your death. The quality of that that we see in this painting accords very well with the movement of romanticism, 19th century romanticism, which, among other things, put a lot of stock in drama and emotion. And taking that even further, it suggested that the universe is made up of cosmic forces, energies that are beyond control by humans, beyond their grasp or their knowledge. And the ordinary human, in the face of that grandeur, can be frightened and disturbed by that, while at the same time noticing incredible awe, inspiring beauty. The sense of dread and danger is heightened in this picture by the absence of a foreground, a ledge on which we might feel we could safely stand. Remember that Cole would use that scheme in his paintings as a device for helping to create depth, and also as a platform for. For his typical small human observer. The urge to paint a rainbow as we see here, is a tour de force of technique. The artist skillfully used bright color glazes to create the Effect that that was not paint with texture and weight, but rather evanescent mist and air and color in the air. One critic that looked at this painting actually claimed later that he had to go to a nearby window to make sure that it wasn't a refraction of light from a window, from sunlight hitting the painting. And then he realized, no, that is part of the magnificence of this artistic technique. All of these elements taken together make this a true masterpiece in American painting. With the success of his Niagara painting, Church went on to paint other vast panoramas elsewhere in the United States, but also venturing into South America and abroad into Egypt, the Holy Land, even made a big painting of the Parthenon. He achieved great wealth and fame and built a fabulous exotic house overlooking the Hudson river toward the end of his days. The example and success of Church's painting may have been on the minds of this next artist, Albert Bierstadt, who painted this canvas of the Rocky Mountains, Lander's peak, finished in 1863. Not counting the frame, this canvas measures 10ft wide by 6ft tall. The original practically engulfs the viewer. Now, a word about Bierstadt. He's become associated with grand Western landscape paintings. He was German born, but we claim him as an American because the bulk of his life was spent here. He was born in 1830 in German Prussia. As a toddler, his family brought him and his brothers to the United States, where they stayed except for a time when Bierstadt traveled back to Germany to study art in Dusseldorf. That was a place where the art teachers were achieving great talent with painting the Swiss Alps. Bierstadt returns to the United States and starts painting landscapes, mountain scenes in northern New England, but became tantalized by the prospect of going out west. In 1859, he asked and was accepted to join an expedition to accompany Frederick Lander on an expedition to search and map out the Rocky Mountains in the Wind river area of Wyoming. Now, in doing so, in tagging along with the expedition party, Bierstadt had to bring along paints, brushes, all kinds of material that way, plus photographic equipment. Bierstadt had already learned to operate a camera along with his two brothers who specialized in doing stereoscopic photos. And that was the kind of photo technology that Bierstadt likely used in his travels out West. When they got out to their destination, Bierstadt started doing studies, small studies with oil paint on cardboard. He painted little sky paintings, all doing research and so on. We're going to show you now a painting of a surveyor's wagon with mountains in the distance. I love this painting because it has a real ring of truth to it. The feeling of atmosphere in the air, which also tends to shroud the distant mountains. This is a fine example of that quality of atmospheric perspective. You see, the most distant peaks are very light, and they get progressively deeper in tone as we come to the foreground. And notice the shift from cool bluish grays in the distance to the warm colors of the foreground. Notice, too, this tiny little surveyors figure far in the distance beyond that center horse. I'm going to show you a way of doing some blending now with the idea that I might set up a sky on a clear day. And believe it or not, it's not just a single shade of blue, and it's not blue alone. It will involve some other mixtures involved. So I'm going to just start knifing in a little bit of a pale mixture of white and yellow ochre. And you see that I put in a few marks here before we started. That's so that I can imagine I'm. That I'm Albert Bierstadt and doing a mountain scene. Okay, Just knife that on so we get something to work with. And then we'll start with the blue. And I'm just going to block this in, juice up the paint a little bit, and get that going. Gonna have to get something on the canvas to work with. Now I'm going to switch to a very broad brush and start dragging this paint together. In fact, I'll take a different brush and revisit the ochre mix. This is a very pliable brush and allows and facilitates a softer blend. And when blending, you can just start smashing the bands of flat color together.
- [27:05]
B
If the.
- [27:06]
C
If it's too abrupt, you can start pulling across wise across the blend and then take in some smoothing strokes. Now, that gradation and the color shift are part of what gives a sky a beautiful glowing quality. So this is how an artist like Bierstadt was able to get a beautiful glow to his sky. It's not just light and dark of one color, but a color shift from cool blue into lighter, warmer ochre mixtures. Next, let's deal with atmospheric perspective. Just dirty that blue a little.
- [27:49]
B
Little bit.
- [27:54]
C
The effects we're going to aim at require getting the paint to go on quite densely. It's a device used to create the illusion of great depth. Even though everything's on a flat canvas, it requires that we see that distant objects get lighter and bluer. And as you come progressively forward in space, things get a little Bit deeper, stronger bluish quality, and even warming eventually as you come into the middle space in the foreground in the long run. So we're going to create an imaginary mountain scene with the farthest back mountains. First we're going to go light to dark. I'm just making this up somewhat, and with so much of deep space landscapes, there's a feeling that the. The distant forms flatten out. Instead of having detail, everything gets sort of flattened as if everything was a vertical plane, like a stage flat. I'm just going to flatten that out with the brush and do a little bit of blending into the sky blurring. That also aids in the illusion of falling back in space. Next, I'm going to go to a mixture, same kind of blue, only a little bit deeper. The key here is to get a. An edge going between the first lightest blue and then what you're creating in the next portion, the next plane. We'll give that a little character and just bring that down again. The idea here is flat planes. You could do a little bit of a glow thing in it near the bottom of the progressive planes, just to suggest a little M. All right. Third plane. And we're advancing forward in space. So it's depending on what we call value contrast, which means relative lightness or darkness. Right now, my blue for the third mountain range, the closer one, is only about midway between white and black. It's a middle tone, and that can permit some. Some more work to be done in the middle distance and even down into the foreground. Just to finish this off, I'm going to throw in a little bit of. Of what could be foothills, using a more brownish tone. I'm going to dirty it with a little bit of blue so the color jump isn't too radical. So there you see the strategy for creating deep space that Thomas Cole, that Frederic Church Bierstadt, as well deployed as they built their canvases, when it came to the objective of creating a spacious, infinitely deep landscape and with a feeling of truth and light without depending on close details. All the research that Bierstadt had done, skies, mountains, even Indian heads, teepees and the like in his small paintings, all of that was rolled into the preparation of this huge canvas. A closer look now at this painting. It's a superb example of the use of atmospheric perspective. We'll start in the foreground here with deep greens and browns, the Indian village and so on. And as we go up and further back in space, we see that the tones of the landforms get lighter, a little grayer and more bluish as we go, and especially as we get up into the summits here in the distance. This is Lander's Peak right here, dominating and crowning the composition altogether. You can pick out the snow that never melts on it and how it lords over the whole scene. Beyond that, notice the whole movement of the near foothills that sweeps completely to left and right in the painting that links the whole space together. Creates a meaningful boundary between near and far. And of course, a color and value change as well. And the deeper tones in the middle landscape here, the middle distance, are quite useful in framing this burst of light on that distant waterfall. And notice how the golden tones of the rocks and boulders in that region are brought out so well with a raking light that flows in from the right, passing over that, skimming a few other features as we go. All that brilliance of light is also found in this quiet lake and a beautiful handling of reflection. The waterfall and the other landforms. Another transition that is valuable in this painting is the movement from vague, slightly cloudy and foggy and cool in tones in the mountains. Not much detail. But then moving progressively forward in the space of the painting, more and more definition of form and detail emerges, especially culminating in the reporting of things in the foreground here. The Indian village, a dog running around. There are Indian ponies and skins on tripods that are being dried. All of this is the kind of thing that would excite the interest and enthusiasm of an Eastern audience that would would see this once it was back in New York. The finish of the painting coincided with the unfortunate death of the surveying captain, Frederick Lander. After the expedition he'd become an officer in the Union army and he eventually died of wounds suffered in the battle. And the news was spreading around the east coast in the northern areas as a result. So it couldn't have been a better time for Bierstadt reveal this painting because it was a canvas which honored Lander. The tallest peak there above that sun drenched waterfall area. The tallest peak was named in honor of Frederick Lander. We're pretty sure that Bierstadt cleverly and subtly exaggerated the height of all of these mountains. We wanted to provide a more magnificent effect. It sold for $25,000. Calculated in today's dollars, that would be about a half a million. Not bad work. After this painting, he continued to paint panoramic western landscapes, venturing to the areas of Yosemite, of Yellowstone and the Pacific coast. He left behind a brilliant legacy of American grandeur and incredible devotion to American scenic landscape painting.
- [36:20]
D
This show is a part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to your favorite. You'll get brand new episodes of all your favorite shows sent right to your device, and you'll help us know that you're out there listening. Never miss another episode by going to Podcast Hillsdale. Edu subscribe. That's Podcast Hillsdale Edu subscribe or click the Follow or Subscribe button on Apple podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. Hey there, it's Scott Bertram, host of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour on this week's program. It's Halloween weekend, so John J. Miller joins us. He's director of the DOW Journalism program here at Hillsdale College. He'll tell us about great ghost and horror stories. What makes them so good and why do we crave them, not just around Halloween. Plus, Benedict Whelan from Hillsdale's English department joins us again to conclude a series celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Great Gatsby. We talk today about the novel's long lasting legacy. All that this week on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Find it at Podcast Hillsdale Edu or wherever you get your audio.
- [37:53]
C
We now turn to another western subject, but not exactly the Rocky Mountains, but rather the American Southwest with an action packed painting by Frederick Remington. It's called A Dash for the timber, painted in 1889. Now, in this we see a band of cowboy soldiers, actually, who are desperately outrunning a band of Apaches. This is the kind of painting that excited a ready audience back East. Remington was doing pictures for magazines and illustrated newspapers such as Harper's Weekly. And this is a painting that spreads its soldiers across the canvas with a magnificent handling of horse action and riders in all kinds of turning, twisting poses, trying to fend off or escape from these Indians. Well, what about this artist, Frederick Remington? I know he's popular among many and for good reason, not only for his paintings, but from his sculptures, especially of horses. He is one of the best painters of horses in the history of art. Well, his beginnings were interesting in that he grew up in a east coast prosperous family and he went to Yale University. And then he got tired of the academic instruction having to draw from plaster casts. He decided to go west and live in with the cowboys and to observe Indian activities and so on. And that gave rise to painting such as this. Now, if we analyze its composition, I first want to point out that the horses and riders fill up the foreground. There's a little bit of empty space, equal empty space on either side, but they Operate like a freeze, spread laterally. Heads pretty much on one level and so on. Horse and riders on the left are spreading leftward. And, you know, the. The center of that group is going full tilt toward the viewer. And this was exciting. It was as if this group of horse and riders was going to run you over. The knowledgeable among you. If you know your westerns are well aware of this kind of setup of a shot in Western movies such as those by John Ford with John Wayne and others. Very, very clever. Let's point out that any of the horses that you look at here are understood with exceptional handling of their anatomy and how that's brought out in light and shadow. Details like bridles and saddles and so on add to the mix. Notice that some of those horse hooves are off the ground. And that suggests to us, maybe even proves to us, that Remington was well aware of new photographic studies of horses in motion. There was a California photographer in the 1870s was able to capture horses in motion. His name was Edward Muybridge. And Muybridge became famous for his studies like the ones you're seeing now, which in one frame especially shows that in a Gallop, a horse will bring all four hooves off the ground. At the time, the wealthy governor of California had made a $10,000 bet that he could prove that this was a fact in Horse Gallop. His companion in the bet saw it otherwise. He was sure that a horse always had at least one hoof touching the ground at every second. Back to Remington. You see that the action that he handles here is not just side profile views like we see in the Muybridge studies, but they show horses from all angles. And that is the product not just of possible dependence on reference photos, but more on exceptional observational skills. It's almost as if he could memorize and paint or draw a horse from any angle in every conceivable action. Add to that, as we gaze at the painting, notice even the shadows on the ground seem to move dynamically. And look closely and you notice those shadows have color in them. It's sort of a bluish cast, in great contrast to the warm tans of the desert sand in sunlight. How can that be? Well, that blue comes from the blue light of that clear sky. In other words, it's a secondary light source, other than just the sun that brings its color quality into those shadows. Remington's mastery not just depends on his handling of. Of horses and people, but also on effects of sunlight and shadow and color. We now turn away from epic Western landscapes and horse and rider action, rural scenes and so on to an urban subject. This is a painting called the Bridge, Blackwell's island, from 1909, painted by George Bell. Bellows, like so many artists at this time, was making a halfway decent living as an illustrator making pictures for newspapers and magazines. He was someone who was painting for an urban audience. New York City and the boroughs, Queens, Brooklyn and so on. That led him to experiment with making this painting, which shows the 59th Street Bridge jumping from Manhattan across the river to Queens. When you look at the painting, it almost feels like it's something that is not composed. It's not purposeful. It's like something you'd see out of the corner of your eye. It might appeal to a New York audience in a New York gallery. But what about this handling of shapes, the shape of the river, the bridge and so on? Well, we see that Bellows was experimenting with a new idea in painting composition that we call cropping. Cropping is where you push your major forms around and allow the frame to cut them off. Sometimes it seems unexpected. Could be claimed that Bellows created a kind of counterbalance in this picture of the massive form of the bridge. What we see of it contrasting and balancing with a loaded barge in the lower left foreground and a dark, silhouetted group of people on some kind of elevated overlook on the right. Let me call your attention to the way Bellows put paint on a canvas. This is a far cry from the intense detailing of a Fitzhenry lane. Bellows loved to load up his brushes, sometimes even painting knives, and apply the paint in very heavy textures very quickly to work decisively with white hot speed. And his penchant for buttering paint on in thick textures is something that we call impasto. There are thousands of different strokes the oil painter can deploy in making any kind of painting, whether it's a portrait, a still life or a landscape. I'm going to show you now just a few of the varieties so you can get a sense of what the options are. I'm loading up with some dark paint so that will be easier to see as we do this. I have a broad brush here, and I'm going to sweep that across. And you notice that there's some character to this, some drag marks, which are characteristic of working on a canvas. Artists can select different types of canvas texture according to their taste. You can get really smooth for close portrait work, or very coarse and nubby for an aggressive landscape, for example, if you want a lot of texture. Speed of the brushstroke also matters. That was quick. If we go more slowly and adjust the pressure, the character of the stroke changes. You can juice it up also and get a more filled stroke.
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Such as.
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We see there, or work back with it to fill it in more. Of course, the selection of the brush matters. Just use a smaller brush. Once again, speed. The loading of the brush makes all the difference, and the tool too. Not just changing a brush size, but there are times when the painter decides to go all in and apply it.
- [47:35]
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With a palette knife.
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Loading it up. It's a. It's a way to get a fast block of color on in a hurry. Which doesn't mean you have to make your whole painting with the palette knife, but rather it just gets you something to work with, allowing you to spread that around and play with it. Bellows joined a whole group of painters at that time in New York that loved to paint less noble subjects and more everyday subjects, back alley scenes. And that's given rise to a label for this group, the Ashcan School. You know, it's as if they thought that garbage cans were as worthy of art as a beautiful person. Bellows was successful and survived well as an artist in making paintings like this. But he also did New England landscapes and did wonderful, warm, sympathetic portraits of family members, even his spinster aunts. Now we'll take up one of my favorite paintings of all. This is nighthawks. 1942 was its date. It was painted by Edward Hopper. I would imagine that many of you have seen this painting in one form or another. What a bold statement to make a five foot wide canvas of an utterly ordinary street corner. But Hopper has called it to our attention with his artistic chops, his command of painting, architecture, people, light and shadow especially. Edward Hopper was well familiar with the Ashcan School painters like Bellows. He even studied for a while with a New York artist teacher named Robert Henri, who encouraged his pupils, his proteges, to get out and to paint what was interesting to them, not just what felt sales worthy or important. Hopper is a master of loneliness, of moods, of isolation, of maybe alienation as well. This somehow seems symptomatic, what was going on in the country historically and in the arts at the same time. 1942, World War II was in full swing about a year into the war. So the country's vision was clouded by shadows of uncertainty. Fighting a war on two global fronts. But here at home, what was life like? Well, Hopper gives us a glimpse of. It's the kind of thing that he could have seen one night because he lived in Washington Square region of New York City, lived in the same apartment with his wife, Jo, for many decades. And he was fond of just wandering around with a sketchbook and noticing things like this. He was also fond of going to the movies, loved going to those black and white movies that were the thing in the. The 1940s. And that, of course, associates his paintings with a movement in. In film called cinema noir or film noir. That is, as you may know, was a great trend in drama, in filmmaking, in the use of bold shadow patterns, which would lend attention a sense of possibly dread or ominous dangers lurking in the scene. Visually, the light and dark contrasts of black and white films were something that obviously excited Hopper, and he would build many of his paintings with strong contrasts of light. He especially liked to reduce architecture to very simple plan of flat color or flat tone. Some of that you see here in the red brick of a building, probably lit by lamplight across the street. But the big action of this painting, if you could call it that, is the diner window, which slices like a wedge of strong light through the canvas. And piercing the darkness, that light spills out onto a sidewalk below. And it's part of what grabs our attention. Notice the composition here is oblique. There are diagonals moving this way and that. Now, diagonals tend to pull the eye into depth, and that's a clever device for moving the eye around from one side of a picture to another. To the contrary of this approach, if an artist prefers stability and extreme calm, the artist will emphasize horizontals and verticals. But I think you can see that the wedge of the diner as a whole, not just its light, moves as powerfully toward the left, and that's counterbalanced by the perspective of the far street with its buildings and pavement, which move our eye back to the right. So there's a dynamic equilibrium of shapes happening in this painting. So in the final analysis, Hopper has taken the most ordinary, everyday of scenes and turned it into an iconic American painting. So memorable. And it's the centerpiece of an exhibit day after day in the Art Institute of Chicago. Let's look at the bridge. It's the Brooklyn bridge, painted in 1939, just a few years before Hopper's Nighthawks. But I want to show it now because it gives us a different twist on painting style and composition. Now, this is another bridge across the East River. We've already seen the 59th bridge in the Bellows painting, but this is the Brooklyn Bridge. And as Stella painted it, he did something very arbitrary, not so reportorial or realistic. He's turned the Brooklyn bridge into a kind of futurist cathedral. Now, ordinarily, so many of us painters like not to center things to avoid symmetry, but that's exactly what Stella has given us in his bridge painting. It's almost like the two halves are exact mirrors of each other. The Brooklyn Bridge has stone ramparts, or arches that are pointed, which helps to suggest the idea of a cathedral association. Here, notice the sweeping forms that zoom toward the eye of the viewer in the foreground. And simultaneously, this eye backward in space. These are like the twisted steel cables that support the suspension bridge with its elevated decks. Now, in empty spaces between the stone pillars and the cables, we see a fascinating fracture of spaces, light and dark and with gradations of color, little blends that are spectral and glowing in hue, like little compartments and closets of colored space. This is a kind of fracturing of empty space that was being explored by modernist idea painters, not only in America, but especially in Europe. It looks like a cubist take on subject matter, Cubism being that style and attitude about painting generated by Picasso and Braque in the early 1900s in France. Well, Americans were interested in following suit with cubist renditions of American subjects, kind of morphing of Europe and America ideas at the time. And what we have is something that is amazingly precise in its painting. Every edge of every shape is painted with pristine precision. In fact, that gave rise to a label for this type of painting by Stella and others, a label of precisionism. It's almost as if the painting was done by a machine rather than a human hand. You know, hands can falter. The material of paint can get out of control and a little squishy. But everything is exceptionally tidy in Joseph Stella's painting. And so it seems to almost transcend reality, becomes a kind of geometric abstraction. Hold it. The professor calls this a landscape. Well, I consider it a poetic landscape. It's something called mahoning, painted in 1956 by Franz Kline. Of course, it's abstract, whatever that word means. I look at it and I see that it's a kind of poetic scene that has overtones of landscape. We'll get to that in a moment. This is the kind of work that technically we might call non objective. In other words, no recognizable object. But it begs the question, does this have any connection to nature at all? Well, I would agree that it's a thin connection, but considering that we all can see very stark scenes, whether city or country, in the winter especially, that might be a trigger leading to an impulse like this painting. Now, paintings always have Horizons, it would seem. Notice that big slash of black near the top of the canvas. It goes from edge to edge and it's tilted a little bit, canted, if you will. And it could serve as a kind of abstract horizon line. But what about all the action below? As I mentioned in the Hopper painting of Nighthawks, diagonals, which we see in plenty here, diagonals create movement, movement into depth as well as movement across a space. Now, in the period Following World War II, artists of some sort were experimenting with painting imagery. And Klein through his career had gone through an evolution of picture making, representational works early on that you could recognize. And gradually, it wasn't like he was losing his mind, but gradually began to experiment with different ways of applying paint. He did lots of ink and brush studies, black ink. We have one that we can show you that is titled Locomotive. If you look carefully at the locomotive picture, in the welter of strokes, you'll see a locomotive engine, a railroad engine, maybe even pulling a coal car, appropriately enough, lots of black with coal. As time went on, Klein began to just take painting imagery one step further and dispense altogether with recognizable subject matter. But you could make a case for paint strokes being the subject matter, the protagonist of paintings like this. And one thing is for sure, you feel a sense of speed, of unleashed energy. Call it insane, call it random, it's still a powerful image that registers sharply on your sensibilities. There were other artists, Jackson Pollock, you know, who would make imagery, wouldn't call it subject matter or painting, but imagery with splattering and dripping paint on canvases. And that was one of the many variations in a movement of painting called Abstract Expressionism. Let's turn now to a canvas called cityscape number one. It was painted in 1963 by Richard Diebenkorn, a California painter. Now, some of the movement that we saw, the celebration of spontaneous application of paint in the Klein's painting, seems to reappear in Diebenkorn's Cityscape Number One. The paint is applied in very heavy, impasto style strokes. The subject matter now is recognizable, but it has some of that power of shape and action and tone contrast that is a little bit reminiscent of the Klein Mahoning painting. Now, this is a picture which treats a suburban city scene quite creatively, preferring sharp edged, geometric shapes of buildings and cast shadows. We can recognize the movement of a street from bottom to top, which, interestingly enough, shears off very abruptly at the top of the street. This is either a contrivance on Diebenkorn's part, or maybe a street in San Francisco where you have those scenes where a street will crest a hill and disappear. But it has the effect of suggesting that the landscape is tipped up somehow. We know that Diebenkorn actually started out with a photographic reference for this picture. There it is before you. And now you see some recognition of the buildings on the left and especially those powerful shadow shapes that drape across the road. On the other hand, since artists are known to take artistic license, Diebenkorn took liberties with the photograph disposition, decided not to follow it slavishly, but completely bulldozes and dispenses with the buildings on the right side of the road. So the result is a conglomeration, a fascinating one, I believe, of big, powerful shapes. The shadows, the fields, the dirty brown sand lots, what have you, that creates the structure of this painting. While little glimmers and suggestions of details, very minimal, maybe just enough to suggest windows in buildings or phone poles, pavement markings and so on. This is a painting by Richard estes done in 1975, titled Central Savings. You get a glimpse of what's figured in the title in a view through the windows we're looking at to assign for Central Savings. Now I have to think that this is a kind of painting that would remind viewers and artists of the Ashcan School, believe it or not, not in style, but rather in the treatment of city forms. Where Bellows was slathering paint willy nilly in his bridge painting and Hopper creating some gloomy, light drenched paintings at night, Estes gives us a painting here which is very much everyday, but it's the kind of scene that you could see walking most anywhere in Manhattan. But in depicting this, Richard Estes has treated this in a fashion that's labeled photo realist. No surprise there with that term. Photorealism is steadfastly, doggedly dependent on making paintings that are laboriously copied from photographs. What the artist has done is describe every possible shape of sign, of brick buildings, stone buildings, pavement, you name it. Every shape here is rendered with hard edged precision. Flat colors too, put on with signpater craft, you know, no sloppy brushwork, no heavy textures of paint or impasto. It is in its own way a geometric abstraction and has some kinship in subject matter with the Ashcan School and with Hopper, but also in technique with Joseph Stella and a precisionist approach to craftsmanship. Now it's realism, which is undeniable, should remind us again of that recurring American trait, that love of honesty. If you feel that the Klein painting is not very honest, well, it might have been honest to the impulses and feelings of the artist, regardless regarding subject matter, even though he took great liberties with it. But here we have a painting which is steadfastly involved in searching for the truth. And yet people, when you look closely at, becomes a kind of quilt of geometric shapes painted with great craftsmanship. I'm going to show you two paintings, one after the other, as we draw toward our conclusion. These are paintings done by artists who can loosely be labeled with the phrase plein air. Plein air is a French term which means painting in the open air. Starting with Skip Whitcomb and his Granite Cathedral, which is a very recent painting. These plein air painters love to paint on location and to paint in a very lively, loaded brush technique of getting information of a scene, whether noble, like the Rocky Mountains, or every day like a backwoods scene or a back lots scene. To paint it, capturing the scene in one setting. To paint at lightning speed and to get it all down on the canvas with a truthful rendition of light and shadow, color, time of day and weather. It's all a race to the finish as they try to capture truthful optical effects before the conditions change. Now, of course, you can't just pump this out in a few minutes. Typically, a plein air painter, and I've done this kind of work myself, might want to stay on location for three or four hours to do a canvas of modest size, maybe 16 by 20 inches or 18 by 24 and so on. But these painters strive for a love of the natural scene, the observed scene, while playing with paint, of putting paint on in ways that are dynamic and spirited and remind you as viewer that these are not photographs, but they are actual paintings. And I think this plein air movement is to be celebrated because of its vitality and how it has encouraged a continuing enthusiasm among Americans for landscape painting. The last painting in our series on American landscape painting will involve a brief look at an oil painting done on location by Cincinnati artist Carl Sampson. This is his Chianti Vineyards, done not many years ago in Tuscany Italy. But Carl, of course, is an American painter and he very much subscribes to the value of painting on location and getting at the truth of color, light and shapes in nature. You see in his vineyards painting that there are bright purples of clusters of grapes interacting with the greens of the landscape. Beautiful blue of a sky and a horizon that slants interestingly over to one side, counterbalancing the perspective of the vineyard rose. As we've seen, American painting has a great deal of range of subject matter, of style, from the loose to the tight to the deliberate to the unleashed energy. I'm excited about the plein air movement and feel that American landscape painting is open for the enjoyment of all as either audience or participants in the act of painting, and that it will continue into the future unabated.
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