Paintbox Leaves: Autumnal Inspiration from Cole to Wyeth - Softcover

Bartholomew F. Bland; Laura L. Vookles; William H. Gerdts; Michael Botwinick; Hudson River Museum

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0943651301 ISBN 13: 9780943651309

Publisher: Hudson River Museum, 2010

Synopsis

The fall landscape and paintings of its trees in full glory is often regarded as uniquely American. It was the Hudson River School painters who began the tradition of seasonal landscape painting, developing the notion of an American terrain enhanced by autumn color and the emotional response it provokes. But, while autumn landscapes celebrate color and bounty, they also foreshadow the bleakness of a winter to come, acting as scenic memento mori.

There is one season when the American forest surpasses all the world in gorgeousness, wrote Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole in 1835, that is the autumnal; then every hill and dale is riant in the luxury of color every hue is there, from the liveliest green to deepest purple from the most golden yellow to the intensest crimson.

Paintbox Leaves displays 19th-century art, including that of Cole and Cropsey, America s painter of autumn, alongside that of later American Impressionists and contemporary artists, who reinvigorated landscape painting. Their artwork lends itself to four themes: the Harvest and the Hunt, symbol of the fruitful domestication of the American landscape; the Visitor In the Landscape, reflecting man s evolving relationship with nature and tourism; the Leaf and the Magic of Color tracing artistic and scientific inquiry into the phenomena of autumn; and Autumn Abstraction, reflecting artistic influence on the depiction of natural forms.

Artists in the exhibition and accompanying catalogue include: Milton Avery, George Bellows, Thomas Hart Benton, Albert Bierstadt, James Renwick Brevoort, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Cole, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Charles Edouard du Bois, John Whetten Ehninger, Sanford Gifford, Stephen Hannock, Marsden Hartley, Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, George Inness, Yvonne Jacquette, John Marin, Thomas Moran, Grandma Moses, Maxfield Parrish, Robert Reid, Clive Smith, Andrew Stevovich, Worthington Whittredge, Andrew Wyeth, and Jamie Wyeth.

The exhibition includes loans from two dozen major museums and private collections.

The exhibition was organized by Hudson River Museum curators Bartholomew F. Bland and Laura L. Vookles. Noted scholar William H. Gerdts, Ph.D. contributed the introduction to the fully illustrated catalogue, the first published survey dedicated to the autumn landscape of 19th and 20th-century American Art.

About this title

About the Author:

Bartholomew F. Bland is Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Hudson River Museum, where he has organized a number of exhibitions related to the art and history of the Hudson Valley Region including, Westchester: The American Suburb and Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture, which was mounted in 2009 for New York s quadricentennial. He also curated A Field Guide to Sprawl for Arts Westchester, which examined of the impact of the suburban lifestyle on the physical environment, an exhibition that traveled to Yale University. Among his survey exhibitions for the Museum related to the Hudson River School are Paintbox Leaves: Autumnal Inspiration from Cole to Wyeth and Greener Pastures: Images of Arcadia at the Hudson River Museum. Bland has written numerous essays and articles on contemporary art and social history and is co-author of the book Merry Wives and Others: A History of Domestic Humor Writing, published by McFarland Press. In his former positions, he organized a wide range of interpretive projects for the Staten Island Museum at Snug Harbor Cultural Center and the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach.

Laura Vookles is Chief Curator of Collections at the Hudson River Museum. She has co-curated and written essays for Museum publications The Old Croton Aqueduct: Rural Resources Meet Urban Needs; Next Stop Westchester! People and the Railroad; Westchester: The American Suburb, Dutch New York: the Roots of Hudson Valley Culture, and Paintbox Leaves: Autumnal Inspiration from Cole to Wyeth. In the 25 years that she has worked at the Hudson River Museum, she has focused much effort on Glenview, the Musuem s 1877 Hudson River for which she who completed numerous furnishing, conservation, and interpretation projects.

Review:

Excerpt from New York Times exhibition review Fleeting Autumns, Captured on Canvas; by Sylviane Gold, published November 19, 2010

Arriving at the Hudson River Museum on a golden afternoon about a week ago, I felt compelled to pull out my cellphone and take a picture. Right above my parked car, vivid scarlet branches were overlapped with chromium yellow ones, backed by a pure-blue sky; the colors seemed to insist on being noticed and recorded before the winter or the next rainstorm erased them.

Albert Bierstadt must have had much the same sense in 1886, looking at a river view near Waterville, N.Y., where he painted Autumn Woods : there are those tomato-and-lemon trees, there is that sky, and, in the foreground, red leaves blown from the branches dotting the calm, dark water. Frederic Church felt the pull in 1856, and painted an orange canopy in Autumn Landscape, Vermont. Jasper Cropsey succumbed just north of the museum, around 1891 the evidence is View at Hastings-on-Hudson, with its coral clouds faintly echoing the brilliant foliage below.

But unlike the crude little image now preserved in my cellphone, these paintings, along with the 100 or so others in the museum s current show, Paintbox Leaves: Autumnal Inspiration From Cole to Wyeth, do more than simply fix a fleeting phenomenon.

There are moody gathering storms to counter every explosion of color. Plumes of smoke from steamboats challenge the vast stretches of primeval wilderness. Yes, children romp happily among the fallen leaves, but there are also sullen, enigmatic adults staring out at their own mortality.

The grand vistas represent the greatness of the American idea, the national energy that was systematically taming the wilderness. At a distance, Cropsey s gorgeous panorama looks like a glowing natural paradise. But draw a bit closer and you see farm buildings clustered on the riverbank, and boats plying the Hudson under sail and steam. The human activity that will result in the Hastings-on-Hudson we know today is clearly in evidence.

The Kaaterskill Clove, on the other side of the Hudson, was already a tourist attraction around 1827, when Thomas Cole painted a looming storm darkening its colored hills in The Clove, Catskills. But he chose not to see civilization on the move; in this image, which has been turned into the exhibition s calling card, he shows us the sublime power of nature having its way with gnarled, windswept trees and weathered crags. The little fall of water slicing through the rocks in the picture s foreground provides a kind of miniaturized rendition of the force that shaped the magnificent valley in the background.

Some of the artists in Paintbox Leaves are even more consciously mythologizing the past, as Grandma Moses did in the 1959 Pumpkins, with its horse-drawn hay wagon and three figures threshing wheat on the barn floor. If not for their dress, they could be in a medieval illumination. P> The paintings are as exhilarating as the season that inspired them. In Worthington Whittredge s 1861 Portrait of an Artist With an Easel, a painter works on a canvas in a little clearing in the woods, his auburn beard a match for the foliage. With his too-low stool and his too-low easel, it looks positively painful nothing like pointing a cellphone at a tree. He might well have returned home that night sorry about the way he spent the day. But you won t be. --New York Times exhibition review

About this edition

• Publisher: Hudson River Museum
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0943651301
• ISBN 13: 9780943651309
• Binding: Perfect Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 94