Took another trip down to Hartford today with my friend Robert.  I made a trip down to the Wadsworth Atheneum a couple months ago, I guess it was, but he had not seen the American Splendor show there yet, which closes at the end of the month.  It's definitely worth the hour-and-a-half drive down, if you have yet to see it yourself.



Along with breathtaking meditations on light and space by Bierstadt, and the exotic, fantastical vistas of Thomas Cole, are those spectacular sea- and skyscapes by Cole's prize pupil Frederic Edwin Church.  For me, Church's Coast Scene, Mount Desert (Sunrise off the Maine Coast), 1863, is the acme of achievement among Hudson River School painters:


Good Morning, Sunshine! I love this painting, but then I'm a morning person.  I think this is the one in which Church's ability to capture the sun is most powerfully displayed.  Church was also a cheerleader for Manifest Destiny, and some critics have trashed the Hudson River artists for romanticizing a philosophy that led to (and justified) atrocities like Wounded Knee.  But my awe of his artistic ability and achievements is fairly uncomplicated.  Personally, I don't see an agenda in Coast Scene.

What is so impressive about "American Splendor" is the number of works from the Hudson River School the Atheneum has assembled—78 works over a fifty-year span.  Walking through the galleries you can get a real sense of not only individual artists' development, but their contributions to the School's development, as well. 

Cole, considered the founder of the Hudson River School, has never been one of my personal faves. I have always found his tendency to soak his pictures in literary, sometimes Biblical allusion, and his insistence on peopling them with tiny stick-figures, distracting. 

Aside from Church (the movement's Schubert, though infinitely more appreciated in his time) and Bierstadt (its Beethoven, though far less cranky, by all indications), Kensett is probably my favorite, and an altogether different type (more of a Chopin, I'd say).  Twentieth Century art historians classify his meditative Coast Scene with Figures, 1869...

 
...as a work of "Luminism". (I have written a bit about Kensett and other Luminists' works on display at the PEM in Salem, here.)  The label was devised after the fact to describe works, mostly by Hudson River School painters, that were more tranquil in mood than the typical Church or Bierstadt, but with the same attention to light.  To me Kensett's pictures seem closer to the spirit of Transcendentalism that is so often said to have animated the work of Hudson River School artists. 

There is a room dedicated to depictions of Niagara Falls, a favorite site and subject among artists, for obvious reasons.  (Church's spectacular, ginormous Niagara, 1857 is, unfortunately, not on display here—you'll have to visit the Corcoran Galley in Washington, DC, to see it.) One of the earlier works in the collection, Thomas Chambers' naive landscape Niagara Falls, from 1835, caught my eye:


This is a lovely piece, and, like the others, a treat to see "in person." 

If "American Splendor" is just too spendiferous for you, a companion exhibition,“Shifting Terrain: Contemporary Landscape Photography,” tempers the over-the-top enthusiasm for discovery and conquest of the "American Eden," with the not so splendid ravages of our Manifest Destiny.  But that is another story, altogether.

After we'd taken in the exhibition, Robert was interested in lions.  There were several prowling around the grounds that I quite liked:


I especially liked the sort of wide-eyed, ditzy-looking one in pictures three and four above.  If I had a lion for a pet, that's the one I would want.   

While I like lions alright, I don't need to trek all the way to the wilds of Connecticut to see them.  I can watch them from the comfort of home on Animal Planet.  No, I go to the museum for the beefcake. 

I had not been up to the Atheneum's Twentieth Century collection, but I liked what I found waiting for me there, particularly Gaston Lachaise's eminently fondleable Statue of a Youth, from 1926:




So nude (waxed or shaved? I wonder).  And so serious!  Dear me.  Probably not a good combination.  I think he's asking for trouble, myself.  I mean, the fact that he was standing there in the altogether, so statuesquely, with nothing but his little scowl to guard him, and such a tastefully stylized little todger so irresistably close at hand:


Well, I know I'm not the only one to be tempted to get a little interactive with this, erm, piece...


But, come on. Who can blame us, when right around the corner you've got something like Paul Manship's Centaur and Dryad, 1916:


Anyway, I restrained myself admirably, despite the mixed messages (apparently it's OK for art objects to touch each other—harrumph). Love of an art-lover for his objet d'art has to be somewhat restrained, after all.  Even if you think you're falling in love with one, or just wouldn't mind taking it home for a cuddle, or, alternatively, a spanking session—looks like this Youth is craving discipline, doesn't it?—you have to remind yourself, "it's art."  And like real life youths, it can't really love you back.  And anyway, it'd be way too much of a hassle to get it up the stairs and into your second floor apartment.