Lisie S. Orjuela "flowershells & honeycombs" oil on canvas, 2007, 60” x 63”

What a day it was Tuesday, April 27, 2010, to visit the Lisie S. Orjuela exhibit at the New Haven Public Library.  En route to the exhibit, thick grey, ominous clouds suspended in the sky and then suddenly, the sun split the skies on the eastern horizon and for a minute or two the sky was evenly split between utter darkness and utter light...and there I witnessed the Divine's manifestation of what the artist Orjuela conveys so vidividly in her canvases namely "The World of Paradoxes."

 

As I entered the exhibit, I first encountered "Still Gathering/Enough" (50" x 68" oil on canvas, 2007), an oil on canvas triptych.  Before my eyes could comfortably settle upon some of the more restful colors in the first and third panels, my eyes shifted to what appeared to be a face which manifested in the mid-panel bearing jaundiced eyes...and one could sense the darkness and struggle coexisting amidst the pinks and muted landscape of the panels.

 

Against the far wall, I experienced "Flowershells & Honeycombs," (60" x 63" oil on canvas, 2007), another oil on canvas triptych.  The dimension and texture of this painting up close is remarkable.  Through the layering of paint, I really got a sense of the expiration of time...as the black especially appeared to have been applied at the very last, I sensed that time itself was responsible for bringing "struggle" and "contradiction" to this otherwise restful and fluid place where flowershells and honeycombs did abide.

 

And, indeed, in "Blown Through," (60" x 65" oil on canvas, 2009), an Orjuela diptych, the "disruption" and "disconnect" is achieved sequentially.  Whereas in the first panel, the birds appear upright, I found their fate turned upside down in the second panel where the glass is "blown through."

 

In "Milonga in Violets," (12" x 16" oil on canvas, 2001), light and the figure's connection to the earth really seems to prevail but for the deep red/maroon that lurks at the figure's back...And even in "Abandon," (12" x 16" oil on canvas, 2001), although we see a female nude figure in repose, dark maroon circles and streaks surround the figure seeming to manifest the possibility of "disruption" and disquietude and we cannot fully "abandon" our thoughts to the figure alone.

 

And, this is what I find so remarkable about Orjuela's paintings.  Whether the "disruption" or "disconnect" is achieved through layers and layers of paint or whether the "disruption" or "disconnect" is achieved sequentially over a course of two or more panels, "the world of paradoxes" is never far away...and whether it consistently coexists in each and every life situation or whether it merely lurks on the horizon is perhaps a matter of personal interpretation but the struggle is ever present and brilliantly captured in Orjuela's oeuvre.

 

Thank you again, Johnes, for introducing another high calibre artist.  As an artist and art lover, who has followed most of your shows from the old York Square Cinema to new spaces including the New Haven Public Library, I am ever thankful for how your sophisticated eye has kept the New Haven art scene fresh and new.

 

Cordially,

Donna Marie Joyce

After receiving several art invitations this fall, I’m sorry I was unable to attend the final art opening before renovation of the gallery area in the New Haven Public Library and reopening in spring 2010.

 

Nonetheless, I did stop by to view the Dr. Felix Bronner exhibit this past week. As usual, it was another inspiring set of works.  I noted a palpable feeling of particles/ matter/ energy in all of the works. With the restful and calming primary color of seafoam green, “Seascape” was a great way to start the exhibit.  “Roaring Over Print” is fantastic to me – it’s an apt metaphor these days for my state of mind, and equally well depicts my office space.

 

Finally, I enjoyed “And What Can You See?” .. I’m still not precisely sure what I did see .. Every time I glanced at the work during my short visit, the experience was different – but it was a great adventure!

 

Hope to see you in 2010! Thanks again for continuing to include me on your art opening invitations list.

All the Best,

Donna Marie Joyce
November 16, 2009

 

 

Home is where the truth lives.   Where all affects are removed,we live with ourselves (and possibly others) along with our flaws and our triumphs. For many, this is a place inside a building.  For others, this is a feeling deep inside our conscious.  When pondering the topic of“home,” in the context of a gallery, it seemed opportune to discuss the work of an artist whose attempt to depict this subject transcended particular places, but speaks of the internalized meaning of “home.”  The artist who really “hits home” for me is Philip Guston, and I want to discuss one of his final paintings, “Wheel” painted a year before his death in 1979.

 

         In Guston’s later works we see his  self-portrait emerge as a Sad Sack, schlumping along the surface of the earth, his stubbly bandaged face,his Cyclopean stare.  His gaze sees his world, his problems with himself and with the act of painting.  He also looks at the problems in our world in its time.  If you’ve ever painted or struggled with creating something, Guston’s hand will tear at your heart.  Gooey, thick pink blobs, peach and red, crudely rendered black lines and tan mushy, gushy paint resists casual flow and shows us that the artist has been humbled in making his mark.  I could wear his reddened paint as a skin, or I could dive into its viscous depths, traveling to the internal workings of his all-too-human heart.  It’s his self-portrait, but it speaks to anyone who has ever felt like that Sad Sack, unable to ignore the siren’s call of paint and surface, to attempt transforming the intangible into the palpably tangible over and over again.

 

         Guston’s Everyman is a trusted observer, reporting on the way it feels to question one’s own abilities as well as the authorities in charge of our lives.  Fearlessly honest about his position in this life, underwhelming on the outside, this grubby, stubbly man goes along unnoticed and unhampered.  We are invited to take the journey with him, through the course of his ugly, raw paintings. To paint about the life of Everyman, and possess an ounce of truth, we have to submit to showing it’s ugly side. Guston shares the company of history’s heavyweights:  Hugo, Goya, Bosch, Joyce, Bukowski and Kerouac.  We know his Sad Sack to be, atleast in some small way, ourselves.

 

         As Guston’s paintings evolved, the self-portrait externalized and became more universal. Symbolism is the way to abstraction and Guston’s Everyman became a Wheel.  After working my way through his oeuvre at the Met years ago, the last canvases stopped me cold.  The simplicity, the palette – born of flesh,blood and bone, and his beating heart, rang so true that I couldn’t stop my tears.  These canvases, printed themselves upon me and gratefully, have never left my memory, still remaining powerful and immediate.

 

         That wheel was going “home.” Guston suffered from a near heart attack that same year and death was a question he undoubtedly explored.  The sky is darkening in this painting.  The wheel is monolithic, its rustic bolts and crude wooden construction heavily outlined in black.  The rough wood glows yellow (like a halo?).  The moon rises to the left of the half-buried wheel from the horizon line of a deep scarlet earthen road (or is that a turbulent sea?). The moon rising is reminiscent of mythology.  The reflection of the moon on the earth/sea surface shows us the path to the Underworld or the Spirit World or redemption.   It signals that death is imminent. 

 

         Going “home” might entail a final judgment before God prior to being granted entry into Paradise.  “Home” is the place to die and put the earthbound body to rest.  The Wheel is a timeless metaphor every tribal storyteller, shaman or folk musician has passed down.  Through Jerry Garcia, Johnny Cash, mountain music, gospel songs and spirituals, and eastern religious practices, The Wheel of Life keeps turning.  No one can get off; it keeps going ‘round.  The fact that Guston evolved in his painting to the point where he, too, entered that storytelling tradition shows anyone brave enough to look with an unblinking gaze, that “home” is very real, very true, and that we, too, will one day be that Wheel.  Slowly turning, revealing its face to the viewer, resolute in its direction with the moon rising in the horizon, half stuck, no longer able to hide flaws, like Guston,we are on a path to “home.”

 

Ellen Hackl Fagan
efagan4@optonline.net

 

 

On a recent studio visit to Valeriu Boborelu’s studio on Roosevelt Island, NYC, I was fascinated   to view and analyze the direction and concepts in his new art pieces:   A large new diptych was absorbing and mesmerizing…  

 

 

To preface an understanding of his new work, Mr. Boborelu had sent me an outline and diagram of the 5 Buddha Families and the 5 Realms of Samsara, representing the transcendent, brilliant, & compassionate states of Mind and Reality . . .

 

In a large diptych of four fitted panels in black and white only, totaling 8 feet high by 12 feet wide, Boborelu has created what I’d describe as a "geometric object field” : a painting in which black fractal objects on a white ground vibrate beyond the visible animation of objects into a deep spiritual contemplation.  These forms capture a momentary / instantaneous Space / Time Continuum.

 

In another painting, measuring 40" x 40", flowing currents of bright red, green, yellow, and blue

paint move diagonally downhill across the canvas from upper left to lower right.  This motion seemed to create a flowing bridge of colored space which juxtaposed this piece and the diptych

together.

 

The sensation of this bridge connected over a kind of open space, and this space seemed to occur in the time frame between my initial impression of the artwork and the moment in which the smaller painting then carried me into the threshold of a Buddhist state of Contemplation. This sensation then proceeded to a second threshold, in which the black and white fractals and the colored animation took on an energy of Matter, such as a vision of the conception of Life.

 

It would appear that in his spiritual explorations Mr. Boborelu has discovered a means to trace, and in many instances, create a syncopation in the flow of Time.  His artwork in this way orchestrates a form of music.

 

 

~ Johnes Ruta, independent curator

New Haven, CT

Gallery RIVAA, 527 Main Street, Roosevelt Island, NYC.

October 18 - November 23, 2008.  Published 11/24/2008.

 

Review written by Johnes Ruta,  22 Willard Street, New Haven, CT 06515

Creative writer; Independent curator, since 1988. Art Director New Haven Free Public Library.  

http://azothgallery.com/ 
azothgallery@comcast.net

 

 

At the Gallery RIVAA on Roosevelt Island, artist Georgette Sinclair has mounted a wide-ranging
and impressive exhibition of small pastel landscape paintings, in which she shows a distinct
and diverse talent to transport the viewer into peaceful dimensions of soft  pastel light, using

contrasts of color and scale -- Sinclair's views of fields, woods, and country roads of the

Scotland, Burgundy, and Vermont  places where she periodically travels.

 

Even at mid-day, only faint eastern light filters into the store-front windows of the Gallery RIVAA

from the Roosevelt Island city street, even further remote behind low embankment seating

of the showcase area.  But the interior space is moreover a comfortably-lit complex of open

and long rooms, ambient walls, and display spaces both wide and narrow.

 

 

Georgette Sinclair  "Burgundy France"  pastels on paper,  15"w x 11"h.

 

The gallery space is normally conducive to a variety of frequent group shows, and is a popular
and well-supported artists collective.  But as the sole artist on display, Sinclair's work poetically

fills the entire space and easily engages the viewer into her world of both deep and bright

color hues of blue, orange, yellow, and brown:   In pieces like  "Sunrise Isle of Skye, Scotland,"  
"Mists of Burgundy,"  "Corn Field in November,"   and  "Nocturne -- Queady Lake, NY,"  visible
strokes of the artist's pastel brush upon white paper provide a subtle undertone which 
seeps into the viewer's consciousness rather as reflected surfaces of light.  





Georgette Sinclair  "Island of Skye, Scotland"  pastels on paper,  15"w x 11"h.


In "Sacre Coeur, Paris" a cathedral rises against a darkening sky,  shadowy trees line

the embankment of the Seine along which people stroll quietly in their own evening worlds.

 

In "Passing Storm, VT,"    green lake water reflects the lavender twilight sky, soft and cloudy;

the landscape recedes from detailed perspectives into unfocused distant horizons of 
blue and turquoise mountains.   In "Pasture,"  a S-shaped bright green field curves between

dark green woods along both sides.  

 

Ms. Sinclair, also an Audiologist, was a 1980's émigré from Romania. She says that she is

fascinated by the beauty of nature and finds poetry in scenes which express a mood by freezing

a moment. Indeed, her landscape expressions capture the moods and fragments of time.

 

 

Georgette Sinclair  "France - Sunflower Field"  pastels on paper,  12"w x 5"h.

The following is an essay by 
Dr. Janice E. Patten, University of San Jose'  
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/patten/sublime.html 
This URL is linked as a literary resource on AzothGallery.com
and precipitated a series of philosophical Comments which follow.

The Sublime

 

Longinus: "On the Sublime"

Longinus, writing in the classical historical tradition says that the sublime implies that man can, in emotions and in language, transcend the limits of the human condition. Longinus's approach is contradistinguished from Plato's declaration of poetic inspiration as dangerous divine madness or the poet as liar. Yet like Plato, Longinus feels that the human was the art or technical aspects, while the sublime was the "soul" or that which eluded our experience of art. In order to understand the sublime, we must have some notion of what exists beyond the human, empirical experience. Longinus explains that this "beyond" is comprehended in terms of metaphor, or in terms of what is absent from the empirical world. Our sense of the sublime is an illusion, which draws the reader to new heights, to the realization that there is something more to human life than the mundane, the ordinary. In fact, the sublime entails a kind of mystery. The sublime is that which defeats every effort of sense and imagination to picture it. It is that whose presence reduces all else to nothingness. It can be defined and described only in symbolic terms, which ironically defies the pictorial arts to sketch it. It remains only for the art of the metaphorical language of poetry to give the suggestion of the sublime.

Longinus's contribution to conceptions of the beautiful/sublime also includes the poet's "joining" with this vision of greatness. We gain a greater sense of freedom, by our sense of our capacity to join in this greatness. Hence when we speak of Longinus we think of verbs such as "transport," "transcend," "awe-full," "flight," "amazement," and "astonishment." One particular quotation summarizes this idea: "For, as if instinctively, our soul is uplifted by the true sublime; it takes a proud flight, and is filled with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself produced what it has heard."

Longinus centers also on figurative language, discussing the great writers of the past and their importance, our "possession 'by a spirit not one's own. . . . The genius of the ancients acts as a kind of oracular cavern, and effluences flow from it into the minds of their imitators." He holds Plato up as a model and an ideal of great literature, thereby answering and defending Plato's style against his critics. The decline of letters in his day is due not to despotism, but slavery to pleasure and greed. He shows us that great thoughts have been uttered by men of the past and can be uttered again. Sublimity becomes, for him, the source of the distinction of the greatest poets and prose writers, something like a thunderbolt that could strike anywhere. Because of his belief in sublimity, he also believes in the privileging of mental processes. He holds in an almost mystical way that the composer is identified with what he describes; and because of the excitement of the moment of inspiration, the hearer or reader is also a participant in the feeling of sublimity. And so it was that Longinus first brought passion and the concept of readerly complementation to the study of literature.

 

Edmund Burke: "A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

Burke is clearly in the debt of Longinus, but his fundamental orientation is different. Drawing from the empiricism of John Locke, Burke assumes all our knowledge comes by way of sense experience, combing simple impressions into more complex ones. Imagination, for Burke, is more closely aligned with Coleridge's conception of "fancy." It operates in two ways, by "representing at pleasure the images of things in the order and manner in which they were received by the senses" and by "combining those images in anew manner, and according to a different order." Therefore, according to Burke, the imagination cannot create anything "new"; it can only reorder and combine basic sense perceptions.

More important than taste are distinctions involving the sublime. The sublime applies to large, grand parts of nature while the beautiful is evident in small parts. In addition, Burke associates the fear of death, dismemberment, terror, and darkness (e.g., a howling wilderness) with feelings of sublime. Locke does not think that darkness is sign of terror, but Burke feels an association of utter darkness makes it impossible to ascertain one's safety, sensing immanent danger evokes a feeling of the sublime. He sees a difference between what the mind expects and what occurs in any given situation. Part of his thesis involves the fact that fear robs the mind of reason, hence evoking the sublime. He says:

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure.

In Burke's terminology, the "passions which concern self-preservation, turn mostly on pain and danger" (55). To make circumstances appear terrible, however, obscurity is necessary. "All privation is great because they are all terrible: Vacuity, darkness, solitude, and silence. Low and intermittent sounds and shadows bring about feelings of the sublime. Above all, the actions of the mind are affected by the sublime."

Sir Uvedale Price considered the nature of the sublime, but argued in a line consistent with ideas of the picturesque.

Kant says that sublimity does not reside in anything of nature, but only in our mind, insofar as we can become conscious that we are superior to nature within, and therefore also to nature without us (so far as it influences us). Everything that excites this feeling in us, e.g., the might of nature that calls forth our forces, is called then (although improperly) sublime. Only by supposing this idea of the sublimity of that Being which produces respect in us, not merely by the might that it displays in nature, but rather by means of the faculty which resides in us of judging it fearlessly and of regarding our destination as sublime in respect of it. ("Of the Dynamically Sublime in Nature"; Adams, Critical 396). In Kant, "the mind feels itself set in motion in representation of the sublime in nature; this movement, especially in it inception, may be compared with a vibration with a rapidly alternating repulsion and attraction produced by one and the same Object. The point of excess for the imagination is like an abyss in which it fears to lose itself." ("Analytic of the Sublime" 107, qt'd in Thomas Weiskel's The Romantic Sublime 105)

 

Wordsworth on the sublime and the Beautiful: in speaking of seeing the mountains of Langdale pike--

Let me then invite the Reader to turn his eyes with me towards that cluster of Mountains at the Head of Windermere; it is probable that they will settle ere long upon the Pikes of Langdale and the black precipice contiguous to them. If these objects be so distant that, while we look at them, they are only thought of as the crown a comprehensive Landscape; if our minds be not perverted by false theories, unless those mountains be seen under some accidents of nature, we shall receive from them a grand impression, and nothing more. But if they be looked at from a point which has brought us so near that the mountain is almost the sole object before our eyes, yet not so near but that the whole of it is visible, we shall be impressed with a sensation of sublimity.--And if this analyzed, the body of this sensation would be found to resolve itself into three component parts: a sense of individual form or forms; a sense of duration; and a sense of power. . . . A mountain being a stationary object is enabled to effect this in connection with duration and individual form, by the sense of motion which in the midst accompanies the lines by which the Mountain itself is shaped out" (351-2). . . .Individuality of form is the primary requisite; and the form must be of that character that deeply impresses the sense of power. And power produces the sublime whether as it is thought of as a thing to be feared, to be resisted, or that can be participated. To what degree consistent with sublimity power may be dreaded has been ascertained; but as power, contemplated as something to be opposed or resisted, implies a twofold agency of which the mind is conscious, this state seems to be irreconcilable to what has been determined, exists in the extinction of the comparing power of the mind, & in intense unity.(356).

"Imagination . . . so called / Through sad incompetence of human speech" (Prelude 6.592-93). Human sight rises in intensity from memory through salience tot he occlusion of the visible. Imagination also rises "like an unfather'd vapour" to target man's fight to remain autonomous and self-reliant.

"Mount Etna from Taormina"  Wadsworth Athenaenum, Hartford, CT, USA

When Thomas Cole died in 1848, his reputation, both in the art world and among the general public, was enormous: probably higher than has been attained by any other American painter, before or since. Generally recognized as the founder of the "Hudson River School", the first really distinctively American movement in the visual arts, he had (largely by his own untutored efforts) virtually invented a new style of landscape, specializing in views of the wilderness which in those days could still be seen (though already requiring some effort to get around the touristy trappings) in the Northeastern States: especially in the valleys of the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers, and in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. At the same time, Cole (who was always working restlessly at improving his technique and diversifying his subjects) had also produced a large body of work more obviously derived from older European models: "Arcadian" pastorals in the tradition of Claude Lorrain; melodramatic renditions of Biblical and other literary themes, which owed a lot to John Martin; elegiac views of Antique ruins, mostly in Italy; and a handful of unclassifiable paintings which (at least to this untutored eye) look like uncanny anticipations of Surrealism. Yet more significant than all these, in the estimation of both Cole himself and most of his contemporaries, were those works generally described, for want of a better word, as allegories -- which Cole sometimes called "epico-historical", and which he always regarded as "the higher style of landscape". These were groups of pictures conceived and executed as consecutive series, illustrating in a clearly sequential narrative mode some moral, philosophical, religious or historical lesson. Pre-eminent among these sequences are The Course of Empire, The Voyage of Life, and The Cross and the World. These widely admired works were, Cole felt, his highest achievements, the strongest supports of his standing as an artist and a visionary.

But hardly less phenomenal than the scale of Cole's reputation during his life was its steep and sudden decline shortly after his death. (I can't help feeling that Cole himself would have derived some melancholy enjoyment from this, pre-occupied as he so often was with spectacles of the transience of human accomplishment.) He was, to be sure, never completely forgotten; but in respectable opinion Cole's work was soon taken seriously in only one of its many facets - the "pure" landscapes, especially of "wild" scenes - and even these were often treated with a patronizing benevolence not far short of contempt. As for the paintings dearest to Cole's heart -- the religious allegories, the historical epics - they were dismissed or ignored as an embarrassment, just the kind of faux pas likely to be committed by an awkward bumpkin unaware of the true nature of his own genius - or of his proper station in life. By the beginning of this century the 11th Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, that priceless repository of Late-Victorian wisdom, summed up the prevailing view of Cole's "higher style" thus:

"The work, however, was meretricious, the sentiment false, artificial and conventional, and the artist's genuine fame must rest on his landscapes, which, though thin in the painting, hard in the handling, and not infrequently painful in detail, were at least earnest endeavours to portray the world out of doors as it appeared to the painter; the failings were the result of Cole's environment and training."

 

Of course, none of the modernisms that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth had much use for the programmatic, narrative or illustrative dimensions of painting, tending to view them as a kind of contaminant to the purely formal, and increasingly abstract, visual or "painterly" elements. So it is understandable that Cole's reputation suffered from this change in the climate of artistic fashion, because he always was, in the manner fashionable in his own time, a thoroughly literary painter, who always assumed that the visual arts refer to some range of concerns beyond themselves - and who had no problem, by the way, in sometimes addressing those concerns in writing as well as in painting. As recently as 1962 James Thomas Flexner clucked disapprovingly over Cole's "dangerous literary gifts" - as if he would have been a better painter had he been illiterate, a kind of idiot savant!

But more recently, fashions have been changing again -- is this one of the more beneficent effects of post-modernism? - making possible some steps toward rehabilitation. The most recent of such steps (and probably the biggest so far) is Thomas Cole: Landscape into History, a major exhibition organized at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC by William H. Truettner and Alan Wallach, displaying about 70 of Cole's paintings and accompanied by an illustrated catalogue (more useful and informative than such publications often are) including essays by J. Gray Sweeney, Christine Stansall and Sean Wilentz, as well as by Wallach and Truettner themselves.

This exhibit is especially welcome because it makes a serious effort to get beyond that conventional wisdom of the past century or so, and to consider all facets of Cole's work with a more integrated and comprehensive view - closer at least to the painter's own intentions. Wallach, Truettner and their colleagues have also done much to place Cole in his social, political and cultural context in early nineteenth-century America. Their particular interpretations here must still be regarded as limited and tentative - no single formula could encapsulate so protean an artist as Thomas Cole - but there is no question, I think, that they are on the right track in trying to re-integrate "the two Thomas Coles" (as Professor Truettner titles his essay) and in taking Cole seriously as that rarity of the modern world, an artist who actually thinks: about nature and history, life and literature: about humankind and its place in the world.

And as for how all that thinking inflected Cole's work as a painter - well of course, some of his works are technically better than others, and some are more derivative than others; and yes (the conventional wisdom was right to this extent) he developed his most original insights by working closely with some of the particular features of American scenery - features which were then still largely new to European eyes - but then going beyond this, he applied that insight to something both wider and deeper, developing (to invoke a pair of Cole's own favorite terms) a historical "vision" as well as a painterly "view." And that, one might say, is what landscape art, in its most authentic sense, is always trying to be about. For although landscape may sometimes seem to be a naive genre of painting, in reality it is not. Historically, both in China and in Europe (the only two cultures so far to have fully developed landscape at all) it arose very late in the artistic tradition. Only after many centuries of representing more or less distinct individual figures did people begin paying serious attention to the background in which those figures were placed, to the connecting spaces between them: in short, to their total environment. And it seems probable that such developments always depend on, but in turn contribute back to, parallel developments in such other fields as science, philosophy, religion, history and literature. In China, where painters were at least officially expected to be literati, a relation between landscape painting and both religious and philosophical Taoism, for example, has long been taken for granted. In the West (where of course our whole landscape tradition is much younger) such connections have been more problematic; but it is helpful to keep them in mind when trying to understand Thomas Cole, who was so passionately (and sometimes profoundly) religious, literary, and historically-minded a painter: in all of his work, even the most superficially "naive" of his wilderness scenes.

No, there were not "two Thomas Coles"; but there is an unresolved duality within Cole himself, and within his work: a division too glaring to be ignored. Toward the end of his own essay in the catalogue Professor Wallach approaches this division, rather diffidently, when he writes:
" . . . if a fault line runs through Cole's art, it lies between the historical and
the ahistorical, between the landscapes and allegories that in a more or less
fragmentary way evoke the stages of history and 'mutation of earthly things'
and the religious allegories and related paintings. Yet even this division is in
a sense unnecessary since, as we have seen, the historical and the ahistorical
were themselves closely connected.."

I would put it rather differently. Virtually all of Cole's work is historical; but the difference between, say, The Course of Empire and The Cross and the World is between "natural history" and "supernatural history" - what German theologians in the nineteenth century were already beginning to call Heilsgeschichte ("the History of Salvation") and which they represented as the central theme of all Biblical religion. Another way of describing this "fault line" might be to say that his work was always religious - but that Cole actually believed in (or at least tried to believe in) two different religions at the same time. Christianity (to which, given his own historical origins, Cole could scarcely escape having at least a nominal commitment) co-existed in him with his personal version of that fully religious reverence for Nature which he seems to have believed in most strongly - which has actually been around, in one form or another, a good while longer than Christianity itself, but which was just re-emerging with special force and intensity in Cole's own Romantic period - and which was the real source of Cole's strength and originality as a landscapist.

I'm not sure how conscious Cole was of the tension between his two religious loyalties - my suspicion is that he could not admit it to himself, and kept trying, out of a dogged sense of duty, to impose his familiar but somewhat shop-worn Christianity onto his more impassioned but less articulated Naturalism - but its effects show, often quite painfully, in his more didactically Christian pictures. Few things in the history of art can be more literally excruciating than those crosses glowing like neon signs in the desert -- a "prophecy" come literally true in our time, which Cole, had he lived to see it with his eyes of flesh, would certainly have abhorred! - or those insipidly phosphorescent figures of Christ and of angels (anemic, attenuated derivatives of Raphael and his successors, the bane of so much post-Renaissance Christian art . . . ) which seem to have dropped down like aliens out of a UFO (often accompanied by unnatural laser-like light effects) into an otherwise passably naturalistic landscape in such paintings as The Pilgrim of the Cross at the End of his Journey, or the Angels Ministering to Christ in the Wilderness. Of course one could always argue that such gauche intrusiveness is a respectable artistic convention, meant to suggest the absolutely transcendent and supernal power of the Divine; but such an argument would have already conceded the most important point: that at least in its symbolic language, Cole's Christianity is always referring ultimately to some source of value which does not co-exist comfortably or harmoniously with anything we can readily recognize as "nature", that is, with the world as we know it on Earth. And it could also be argued that much of the awkwardness in these Christian paintings results from a much simpler and more technical cause: Cole's notorious weakness in handling the human figure. It is true that his figures are often inept; but not uniformly so. Generally they are at their worst when Cole seems not to have a clear sense of how his humans fit naturally into their surroundings, when he just sticks them in for more or less clearly arbitrary and symbolic purposes. He sometimes did this even in his "pure" wilderness scenes. (Truettner and Wallach give one especially egregious instance of this: when Cole painted The Falls of the Kaaterskill in 1826 it was already a busy tourist attraction, with the usual clutter of hotels, walkways and protected bridges overlooking the Falls. Cole omitted all that from his painting; instead, he placed a solitary Native American in the scene. This poor Indian is stuck there, quite awkwardly and unaesthetically, leaning against his bow on a bare ledge right in the middle of the painting. Clearly, he serves here only as a self-conscious sign or label, as if one had written a caption: "THIS PICTURE REPRESENTS AMERICA BEFORE THE WHITE MAN".) But cases like that are extreme, and rare. Cole's level of technical accomplishment varied considerably from time to time, but he could and did paint human figures credibly enough when he had reason to: when this was clearly demanded by his conception, and supported by what we would call the "human ecology" of his design.

In his Arcadian pastorals, for instance, human beings (and their artifacts) tend to fit happily into their natural settings. These pictures probably represent Cole's most Utopian vision, the clearest personal declaration of his idea of the Good Life, the True and the Beautiful. For although Cole fully deserves to be recognized as one of the nineteenth century godfathers of the modern environmental movement; although he genuinely loved his wilderness scenes, and certainly contributed largely to that positive re-evaluation of the very idea of "the wilderness" which (in such contrast to the Biblical attitudes of dread and hostility) has been one of the great revolutions in values accomplished over the past couple of centuries; still, Cole would not have qualified as an "environmental extremist", even by the most polemical of definitions current today. He did not assume an irreconcilable antipathy between "Man" and "Nature"; he had none of the misanthropy that sometimes infects the wilder fringes of Deep Ecology. Wallach and Truettner characterize his general attitude as "pessimist conservatism", which is fair enough as far as it goes; but it really doesn't take us very far toward understanding the deepest ranges of Cole's yearnings, his aspirations or his fears. He did fulminate, in writings such as American Scenery, against the "ravages of the axe" in his beloved woods, but his "conservatism" always allowed for a fitting measure of progress, and held out the hope for a harmonious co-existence of the human and the natural: a vision, finally, of Man as an essential (but not tyrannically domineering) part of Nature, hopefully respectful of, and always subject to, the limits of the natural world. This is the vision realized most idyllically in those Arcadian or pastoral scenes, where the boundaries between the natural and the human worlds are shown clearly enough, but generally in soft and mutually yielding contours, not in the harsh lines of a radical confrontation. (Such softness of outline, we should notice, is both a real physical feature of the geologically ancient mountains of Eastern North America, and an instantly recognizable visual signature in most of Cole's paintings; just as those almost incredibly vertical - but equally real - Chinese mountains portrayed by the painters of the Northern Sung School are an equally characteristic "signature" of their work.) In these pictures, Cole's painterly vocabulary begins to express something of the idea of "bio-regionalism" - a term perhaps more familiar to ecologists than to art critics, but one which seems singularly appropriate to the vision of Thomas Cole. These landscapes have been "humanized", it's true, compared to the "wild scenes"; but the humans in them (and their works, especially in the pictures of ruins) have themselves become more integrally a part of the natural scene. And in The Course of Empire - which after all is teeming with human figures - the "fit" is accomplished even more effectively: because it is the over-arching theme of the whole series.

One might almost say that Cole handled his human subjects best when he was able to treat them -- legitimately - as part of the scenery. "Scenery" always was a favorite word of his; and while its theatrical connotations may make some of us uncomfortable, there really is no way around it: Cole's art was theatrical in almost every way. He was well aware of this trait in himself and, not without humor, he sometimes indulged in some fairly broad self-parody about it. In The Architect's Dream (unfortunately not included in this exhibit) he presents us with a fantastic heap of conflicting architectural styles - all framed by a mass of tasselled ropes and drapery clearly suggestive of a stage-curtain. Looking at this picture, I find it impossible not to believe that Cole was having a bit of fun, both with himself and with Ithiel Towne, the architect who commissioned it. (Towne seems to have thought so, too; but lacking Cole's humor, he refused to pay for the picture.) The Architect's Dream is not really typical of Cole's work -- and yet the picture of his which it most closely resembles, in its proto-Cecil B. de Mille monumentality, is The Consummation of Empire, the oversized centerpiece of Cole's best and most personally characteristic series, The Course of Empire - which Wallach and Truettner justly offer as the pièce de résistance of their exhibition.

In this grandest and most completely realized of his "epico-historical works, Cole presented his synoptic and secular vision of the situation of Man-in-Nature, bringing together nearly all his familiar themes and deploying all his painterly styles and vocabularies. In five successive scenes he shows us a civilization progressing from the condition of primitive hunters in the wilderness, through an agrarian/pastoral Arcadia to the megalopolitan pomp of the Consummation - a neo-Classical nightmare suggesting Washington, DC, as it might have been re-designed by Albert Speer - which is then destroyed by war in the fourth scene, to subside into a remarkably tranquil and beautiful set of ruins in the fifth, the only picture of the set from which living human beings are entirely absent. ("Desolation" is the title of this piece, but somehow one does not feel that Cole really felt all that desolate while painting it: this view of the natural world placidly reclaiming its territory from the fallen city is the most hauntingly beautiful picture of the series.) Constant through all these scenes are two features of the natural setting: a precipitous mountain, always visible in the distance, and the long narrow bay around which the city eventually grows. "Mountains and water" - clear symbols of an elemental duality; and, according to Chinese ideas (which Cole may never have heard of, but which he so often seems to have paralleled in his own way) the defining terms of landscape itself. . . .

It is pretty clear that Cole regarded the urban proliferation of the Consummation as a pathological excrescence on the face of the Earth. The really interesting question is, at what level - social, political, cultural, religious or technical - did he believe this pathology to be rooted? Wallach and Truettner stress the political dimension: a warning, rooted in Classical Republican theory, against the "excesses of democracy", mob rule and Caesarism in Andrew Jackson's America. In a way, this re-iterates (though of course with much more scholarly depth) the reviewers of Cole's own time, who tended to focus on the question, "What does this work say about the prospects for our Republic?" (Cole was, among other things, a nationalist artist, and himself a formidable symbol of national pride, at least to the more culturally minded of his compatriots. This accounts, after all, for a large part of the fame he enjoyed in his lifetime.) But while I'm convinced that Cole did devote some of his attention to such political concerns, that is really only the most parochial side of this truly ecumenical artist. Ultimately, The Course of Empire is a religious work, but not a Christian one. Christianity is an explicitly human-centered religion, and in some ways even an egotistical one, fixated on the fate of the individual soul. But if The Course of Empire preaches anything, it preaches something more like the ancient Greek admonitions against hubris, the baneful excess of human ambition, against which the only defense is a scrupulous observance of the intrinsic limits of all things. To mention only one poignant sign of this lesson, Cole plays a fascinating game with his own signature in The Course of Empire. He works it into each of the first four scenes as an inscription on one or another of the stones, growing larger and more elaborately self-assertive in each successive view, until at last in the Destruction it flares out in grotesque and agitated lettering on the base of the colossal headless statue which dominates that composition - and then, among the ruins of the Desolation, it is nowhere to be found. I read this as one of Cole's more transparent allegories: against the rampant egotism which can infect all of us, even Christians and artists. . . . Such moralizing was often enough typical of Cole, and not always accomplished with the same finesse; but at its strongest his vision went much deeper than his Whiggish politics, and deeper than his Evangelical Christianity: to an apprehension of humanity as a species fully embedded in its natural matrix, which we may violate in our arrogance and egotism, but only at the risk of our own extinction.

Copyright (c) 1995 by Carl Pfluger.
Piopolis, PQ  Quebec, Canada GOY 1H0 
This essay first appeared in THE HUDSON REVIEW, Winter 1995. Reproduced with permission.

One young British soldier killed in action one week before the war ended was the poet Wilfrid Owen, aged 25, killed at the Battle of the Sambre on November 4, 1918. The news of his death reached his family just as the town's church bells rang out the peace.

My great-grandmother and aunt aged 3 named Esperanza ("Hope") were killed in the Austrian shelling of Farrara, Italy in 1916. How many millions of lives were never lived because of this war ? Growing up in the 1950s, my mom taught us to observe a Minute of Silence at 11 AM on every November 11, to pray for the millions who died. This war was a catastrophe beyond "Biblical proportions."

"The Parable of The Old Man and the Young" by Wilfrid Owen.

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.


(Wilfred Owen's poetry on the realities of trench and gas warfare stands in
stark contrast to both the public perception of war at the time, and to the confidently patriotic verse written by Rupert Brooke and others.)

After the Serbian assassination of the Austrian Archduke in Sarajevo 1914,
Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria-Hungary, Czar Nicholas II of Russia (ally of Serbia), King George V of England (ally of France), and even Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany (ally of Austria), being friends and cousins, were not themselves keen for war, and corresponded to cool down the furor of the Serbian incident. But these rival colonial-industrial powers were hottly competive for foreign colonies and their resources. The upward chain of alliances sucked them all into the maelstrom: the Kaiser's ministers pushed heavily to employ the munitions manufacturers with whom they colluded, and their military command had waitied since 1905 to execute their strategic Schlieffen Plan to again attack France.

In France, "The Front" quickly became a merciless killing-field to which millions of young troops were marched from all sides to be slaughtered with never the advance of a foot of territory ! The Treaty of Versailles demanded immense "Reparations" payments from Germany which led directly to the collapse of the German Mark in 1923, and so to the despair and bitterness that set the stage for Hitler, and so to the next catastrophe.