Oh Panama! Jonas Lie Paints the Panama Canal - Softcover

Bartholomew F. Bland; Kirsten M. Jensen; Hudson River Museum

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0943651476 ISBN 13: 9780943651477

Publisher: Hudson River Museum and James A. Michener Musuem, 2016

Synopsis

One hundred years ago the Panama Canal linked east to west, opening for the first time in history a water passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Now the Panama Canal Expansion Project, slated for completion in 2016, will open a new water lane to more and larger ships. Celebrating today s Panama project, Oh Panama! looks back to the determined and spirited efforts of the architects and crews who accomplished the 1914 canal that was captured in paintings by Jonas Lie from the West Point Museum Collection, United States Military Academy. Lie s paintings continue today to impress viewers as a sublime and beautiful document of man s relentless quest to conquer nature and harness its riches.

Norwegian-born painter Jonas Lie (1880-1940) inspired by a motion picture documentary of the construction of the canal visited the Panama Canal Zone for three months in 1913. He was enthralled by the feats of engineering required to dig the Culebra Cut, as well as the sublime visual qualities of the massive trench being carved across the Isthmus of Panama. Working tirelessly in the intense tropical heat, he produced oil sketches and drawings and took careful notes on the technical aspects of the canal construction.

Recognized by his peers as a scientist and a poet for his depictions of New York City, Lie s canvasses were both historical documents of technological progress and dramatic interpretations of the urban environment. The thirty known pictures he made of Panama are lively and colorful, capturing the spirit of that endeavor as well as its heroic quality and monumental scale. Lie recalled the Panama experience as a pivotal moment in his career, one from which he received national recognition for his work and also developed the aesthetic and technical strategies that influenced his landscape compositions from that point forward.

When Lie returned to New York, he exhibited twenty-eight paintings from the Panama cycle at the Knoedler Gallery; two The Conquerors and Culebra Cut were purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts before the exhibition embarked on a national tour in 1914. The exhibition was very popular with broad interest in Lie s paintings fueled by publicity photographs, news reports, and the release of documentary films following the canal s progress, such as the Edison Company s The Joining of the Two Oceans, The Panama Canal.

About this title

About the Author:

Bartholomew F. Bland is Deputy Director 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, Industrial Sublime: Modernism and the Transformation of New York's Rivers, 1900-1940; Westchester: The American Suburb and Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture. 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.

Kirsten M. Jensen is co-curator of Oh Panama! and the Gerry & Marguerite Lenfest Chief Curator at the James A. Michener Art Museum. Her exhibitions include "Philadelphia in Style: A Century of Fashion from the Robert & Penny Fox Historic Costume Collection" and the upcoming "The Death of Impressionism?: Disruption & Innovation in Art" Kirsten served as the Director of the John F. Folinsbee Catalogue Rasisonné, working to bring attention to this important American Impressionist painter. Kirsten holds a Ph.D in the History of Art from the City University of New York, and has curated exhibitions for the Woodmere Art Museum; Cedar Grove, the Thomas Cole National Historic Site; and the Greenwich Historical Society.

Review:

Mr. Bland s enthusiasm for scaffolding, hard hats, winches and pulleys can be explained by a visit to Oh Panama! Jonas Lie Paints the Panama Canal, an exhibition that began in February and runs through May 8 at the museum in Yonkers.

The exhibition, curated by Mr. Bland and Kirsten Jensen, chief curator of the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pa., where the show will travel next, follows a burst of creative energy that gripped Mr. Lie (pronounced Lee ), a New York landscape artist, in 1913. Giving Mr. Lie s painting spree liftoff was a documentary on the near-completed Panama Canal.

Lie went to a New York movie house and saw a very, very early color movie called The Making of the Panama Canal toward the end of 1912. He was so intrigued by it he was convinced he had to get there, Mr. Bland said on a recent tour. A 1913 book of hand-colored photographs illustrating images Mr. Lie might have seen in the film massive machines entrenched in muck and mosquitoes thousands of miles from civilization, terracelike steps down to a 40-foot deep canal bed where men laid tracks and placed dynamite is among a few dozen artifacts arranged in glass cases in the show. So is a postcard that was on sale to Panama City tourists that shows Hercules prying open the earth.

Mr. Lie, who was born in Norway in 1880 and died in New York in 1940, was not the only one who packed his bags and his paintbrushes and headed to Panama to witness what is still considered one of humankind s most ambitious feats of engineering.

For those with a tenuous grip on the history, a primer: The construction of the 48-mile Panama Canal across the Isthmus of Panama linked the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. France began the project in 1881, but it was taken over by the United States in 1904 after tropical diseases including malaria flattened French work crews, killing more than 20,000 people and bankrupting the project.

The building of the canal was undertaken to allow ships to avoid the lengthy Cape Horn route around the southernmost tip of South America, creating a shorter route to the West Coast of the United States and to countries in and around the Pacific Ocean; those ports and countries could then be better integrated into the world economy.

For Mr. Lie, the near-completed canal of 1913 presented an opportunity to build on a budding reputation as an artist of the moment.

Between 1910 and 1915 was a peak time for him, Mr. Bland said. Before then, Mr. Lie was painting traditional landscapes of countryside and harbors. He had been to Paris in 1906 to see the Impressionists, who may have influenced him; works in the show are muted though vibrant. Those paintings were popular, but there was this sense of excitement around a transforming metropolis that Lie was starting to feel.

At the start of the new decade, Mr. Lie had shifted his perspective to dramatic cityscapes and scenes of urban construction. The new focus placed him at the vanguard of American art, Mr. Bland said, noting, He was by then very involved in the New York art scene.

"This was a nice little moment in American art, but Lie is an undervalued artist within it. He was a major figure in his time, Mr. Bland said. But not anymore. After World War I, his star faded. He started to seem old hat, as almost every artist does after they speak to their moment, Mr. Bland said. I hope the show helps him have a critical renaissance. --The New York Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Hudson River Museum and James A. Michener Musuem
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0943651476
• ISBN 13: 9780943651477
• Binding: Perfect Paperback
• Number of pages: 100