ART REVIEW; A Volatile Master Who Made Nature's Splendor His Religion
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: January 13, 1995
THOMAS COLE (1801-1848) is often referred to as the father of the Hudson River School, but the family resemblance is only skin deep. One looks to his followers Frederic Edwin Church and John Frederick Kensett for bravura visions of pure idealized beauty. In Cole himself, one finds an art of messages and admonitions, a nose-to-the-grindstone style and a temperament swinging between elation and despair.
This dynamic runs like a thread through "Thomas Cole: Landscape Into History," the striking retrospective exhibition of the artist's work that opens today at the Brooklyn Museum. The show, organized by the National Museum of American Art, not only offers an encyclopedic look at Cole's career, but also shows him to be a darker, more difficult artist than he is often thought to be.
He wasn't American by birth. He came here from England -- with its teeming cities and skies already blackened by factory smoke -- at the age of 17. And he looked to America for a Romantic ideal come true: mountains higher, rivers swifter and valleys deeper than anything in Europe, astonishing stretches of unpeopled space, a possibility for the world to start afresh.
He learned oil painting from an itinerant artist in Ohio and by the time he got to New York he had cobbled together a hybrid of European styles already going out of fashion: part Claude Lorraine's lambent, nostalgic pastorals, part the operatic turbulence of Salvator Rosa. Often he simply spliced elements of the two together. In "View of L'Esperance on the Schoharie River" (1826-27), for example, the sky is clear on one side and and dense with clouds on the other, leaving the viewer to guess whether a storm is passing or coming on.
A similar mood of uncertainty marked America itself during the course of Cole's career. In the 18th century, the nation had been united around the goal of independence and the work of establishing democratic principles for all the world to see. By the early 19th century, however, it had the harder task of putting those principles into practice as waves of immigrants arrived, industry overshadowed an agrarian way of life, and the tensions that would lead to civil war sharpened.
The resulting sense of perturbation colors Cole's landscapes, with their rapid shifts between darkness and light, and would doubtless have taken more explicit form if the artist had done the kind of work he really wanted to do: history painting on the patrician European model, with its elevated sentiments. But he was in the wrong place. American history -- with its guerrilla skirmishes and rough-and-ready heroes -- was unpromising material. So Cole turned his attention to the most inspiring subject at hand, the land itself.
He was lucky in his timing. The old Puritan view of America as a New Eden, a New Jersusalem, a land with a divine destiny to fulfill, still had currency. Characteristically, Cole took up that myth and complicated it, infusing it with his own urgently felt conviction that God spoke through nature.
This belief is the subject of virtually every one of the 60-plus paintings in "Landscape Into History." They make up a varied output -- from Neo-Classical Arcadian idylls, to genre scenes, to delightful combinations of the two, as in "The Pic-Nic" (1846) -- but they have a distinctly American feel. Never does Cole's work look extraterrestrial like that of Turner, his English contemporary. However exaggerated, Cole's landscapes are grounded in on-the-spot observation and executed with a home-grown realist's hand, with folk-art blending of the literal and the fantastic never far away.
Of all his work, though, it was the ambitious five-part allegory titled "Course of the Empire" (1834-36) -- history painting on the Old World model -- that Cole was most proud of. On loan from the New-York Historical Society, it is the centerpiece of the retrospective. (The Historical Society's ties with the work of Cole, a New York artist, are long and close. The prospect of that rich association ending is only one of countless reasons to view the society's possible demise with regret and dismay.)
It is a fascinating work, a moralizing history of civilization, visually packed and ultimately ambiguous in meaning. All of the basic ingredients of Cole's oeuvre appear here in concentrated form, from the Romantic wind-whistling wilderness of "The Savage State," to the classical cityscape titled "Consummation of Empire," crowded with toga-clad extras, to the post-nuclear nocturne of "Desolation."
The show's catalogue, edited by William H. Truettner and Alan Wallach, interprets the cycle as a conservative reproach to Jacksonian democracy. Yet the term "conservative" when applied to Cole bears re-examining. If one remembers that in England he knew the dark side of the Industrial Revolution as a reality and the French Revolution as a vivid nightmare from the recent past, his political caution does not seem simply one-sided or knee-jerk. And his Cassandra-like vision of a materialistic society squandering its natural resources and creating the conditions for its own demise might strike conservationists today as prophetic.
During the latter part of Cole's brief career, America was swept with a great tide of revivalist religion; Transcendentalism was also on the rise, and Cole's painting, increasing laced with a fundamentally pessimistic nostalgia, moved in overtly religious directions. This is most dramatically evident in the "Voyage of Life" (1839-40), a monumental, four-panel depiction of the ages of man, which hangs in a chapel-like room at the end of the Brooklyn installation.
Like so much of Cole's work, this series grows odder the longer one considers it. Its image of life as a perilous sea journey, from the placid waters of childhood, through the squalls of midlife, to the light-shattered mists of old age, is just the stuff one would expect to fire Cole's imagination. Yet one good look at these paintings confirms that he was no visionary. The paintings are ingeniously detailed and serious, but Cole's guardian angels are merely Victorian schoolgirls, the narrative itself is a lumbering piece of machinery, and the artists he cribbed from are easy to see.
Yet the blandness of "Voyage of Life" serves to confirm the kind of poet Cole really was: not an inspirational lyricist like his Hudson River progeny, but an anxious moralist with an epic bent. It makes sense that the last painting in "Landscape Into History" is on a theme drawn from Aeschylus' "Prometheus Bound." Many of the features that make Cole endearing are here. The nude figure chained to a mountain peak has a folk-art roughness; the evening sky is a gorgeous, dreamy blue; the tiny bird of prey swooping up, almost invisible, from below provides the cannily delayed narrative thrill.
Most important, though, is the idea of the tension between vulnerability and moral strength that the painting sets up. It is the tension that charges Cole's best work, and makes him such a crucial and provocative starting point for so much American art that followed.
"Thomas Cole: Landscape Into History" remains at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, through April 2.
Photos: A detail of "The Pic-Nic," an 1846 oil by Thomas Cole in the retrospective of his work, "Landscape Into History," at the Brooklyn Museum. (Brooklyn Museum) (pg. C1); Cole's "Consummation of Empire" (1835-36), from a five-painting allegory at the Brooklyn Museum. (The New-York Historical Society) (pg. C25)