Taking the world by storm

11 April 2012
The Weekender

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Of all my first impressions of America only two remain undimmed - my sudden conviction that the Neoclassical architecture of Washington was the wonderful

ne plus ultra

The American landscape painter early in the 19th century carried in his portmanteau of influences two heavyweights of the 17th century, Claude Lorraine and Salvator Rosa. From Claude he learned the business of constructing the perfect composition, with strategically positioned repoussoirs and emphatic details to lead the eye into the distance, with trees both against the light and bathed in it, the sun dramatic in its rise and set, the shadows shafting and the colours subtly changing in intensity in the aerial perspective. Claude gave landscape painters the legacy of ideal serenity, an Arcady over which no storm clouds ever gathered, no winds blew, where the season was eternal summer and nothing more dramatic than dusk and dawn disturbed the pastoral calm. Rosa, on the other hand, gave landscape painters licence to try their hands at terribilit?, an awe-inspiring quality, even a sense of nature's savagery, in which rugged mountains and blasted fallen trees dwarf the men among them. With Claude the sense is of man at ease in Eden, with Rosa the sense is of unease, of man at odds with a world capable of blind malign hostility. Add the extraordinary machines of John Martin, biblical, cataclysmic, catastrophic, and the wind and weather fantasies of Turner, and we have the major physical constituents of European influence, but there was a lurking theoretical influence too - the idea of the Sublime.

The Sublime was an 18th century enthusiasm, an ancient Roman literary notion revived in the Age of Reason and Enlightenment by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, who defined it as a creature of transcendent vastness, scale, magnificence, immensity and any essentially natural phenomenon that might overwhelm man's puny presence and touch his soul with terror - darkness, fire and flood would do, so too earthquake and eruption, the insuperable mountain and unconquerable chasm, the rainbow and the thunderstorm. And if to these could be added some sense of man engaged with nature in exploits beyond the limits of human endeavour, man in isolation but not cowed, then so much the better, for man in adversity is noble, given to self-sacrifice, virtue and gravitas, and extra frissons of shuddering empathy could be induced by painters who embodied in their landscapes not only all these, but implications of hope, despair, endurance, suffering and survival-cum-redemption. How wonderful, the spectator thinks, to look at such a painted landscape and thank God one isn't there.

This is not to suggest that American artists set off into the unknown wilderness reciting passages of Burke and Kant, deliberately searching for the transcendent, the unparalleled, the unsurpassed, but that when they found these in the realities of landscapes that far outdid the fantasies of the Weltlandschaft paintings imagined by old European painters, they knew how to respond - painting was still, in the 19th century, a learned profession and painters were educated men. American Sublime was not an intellectual construct - it was thrust upon them and the more adventurous turned to ever larger canvases to capture the sheer scale of it, to communicate their awe, and some occasionally fell into the error of eliminating nothing, even indeed of adding details that were never there.

Albert Bierstadt's Storm in the Rocky Mountains of 1866, urgently sketched on the spot in 45 minutes, but wrought diligently in the studio over four months or so, is seven feet high and 12 wide, and yet is a detail of a landscape rather than a panorama, even a detail of a detail, as much concerned with the minutiae of rock, plant and animal as with the threatening grandeur of the approaching avalanche of cloud. At first glance it has little to do with Rosa and less to do with Claude, but the underlying formula is classical and the sense of distance ultimately very deep. It is an encyclopedia of landscape forms, a topographer's lexicon, not an inch deprived of interest, animal, vegetable or mineral, and is the perfect setting for a model railway or the toy regiments formed by Jake and Dinos Chapman for their nine circles of Hell. This is G?tterd?mmerung writ both very large and very small, sublimity lying less in the landscape than in the light, yellow against leaden grey, and in the mountain peak above the storm clouds, almost interpretable as a symbol of redemption.

Bierstadt did not always demonstrate detail to a fault; in many smaller pictures he adopted a more general approach and was less pernickety, less obviously German, more simply and directly inclined to the Sublime - indeed more Claudian - but his great Storm was a show picture designed to be exhibited alone as an eighth wonder of the world, and he put into it everything he could. He showed it for an entrance fee in half a dozen American cities before shipping it to London to hang in Haymarket, and sold it to an Englishman for $20,000. Bierstadt's slightly older contemporary, Frederic Church, had earlier and with great success exhibited his Icebergs in London - a Ruskinian triumph of meticulous observation but overborne less by detail than by a clumsy touch of Christian allegory embodying futility, hope and redemption, or, if one is a sceptic, redemption, hope and futility.

These are pictures at which the populace was meant to stand and stare, to feel the penetrating chill, the clap of thunder and the groan of ice; they were indeed a kind of conceptual theatre, the audience inducing its own empathy and catharsis in response to the painted information. We have grown unused to such Pavlov-dog responses but they were common enough in the 19th century and perhaps the whole purpose of attending such onework exhibitions. Delighted families spent an age "reading" pictures to each other; the icebergs they read as nature's cathedrals, the broken mast and crow's nest as a cross, the Arctic world as transitory, melting away even as they pondered, and the whole thing as some kind of allegory of man's relationship with God. Here indeed was evidence of human endeavour and the insuperable hostility of Nature - how the Victorian paterfamilias must have enjoyed his buttered crumpets when he was once more safely home. Church, the showman, quite certainly intended to arouse such responses, and yet would have liked his audiences to examine the picture through a

telescope, each of them a lookout from the bridge of a Titanic, stark realism having primacy over any spiritual interpretation.

Tate Britain's exhibition, American Sublime, is to be enjoyed, not used as a lesson in art history. Most of the painters are unknown to us, some of them even irrelevant to the theme, most of them represented by too few pictures to make art historical sense or judgment. Painterly sketches suggest that the working methods of these Americans were much the same as their European peers itinerant in Italy, recording effects of light, mist and volcanic eruption as though by working in small they made the large attainable - as indeed they did. Some painters kept to a much smaller scale and never approached the Sublime - John Frederick Kensett, for example, who developed a quality of exquisite repose contrasting with horizons often as tense as a taut string, very like the nocturnes of Whistler, some unfinished sketches by Degas, and even more like Thomas Eakins's paintings of oarsmen which suggest that one knew the other or the other knew the one.

The half-wit naiveties of Fitz Hugh Lane and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer absurdities of Thomas Cole's attempts at history painting have no business here where any descent into the ridiculous must disrupt our

perceptions of the Sublime. The exhibition must be judged on its sunsets, on its black and bloody skies, on its sense of virgin wilderness, its emptiness, its distances, its weather and its light, and of all these there is enough to make a stranger to these landscapes stand in awe. My first impression that American Sublime was traditional landscape's final magnificent fling is not one whit changed.

American Sublime: Tate Britain, Millbank, SW1. Daily 10am-5pm. Admission £8. Until 19 May.

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