Finishing the Hudson River School. Part. 1 -Apprehensible Reality, Abstract Unreality & Lessons for the House of Lies. Plus Thomas Moran, American Genius
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Thomas Moran, The Golden Hour, 1875, oil on canvas, Blanton Museum of Art
Time to try and wrap this Truth in Apprehensible Reality series. It was never as coherent as some earlier multi-parters, because it wasn't intended. The initial plan was to use a Hudson River School catalog from the Met to show how art slowly inverts as an abstract concept while keeping the same representational terminology. And to consider how the constinctive relation between Abstract and Material Reality plays out in the composite Apprehensible Reality. As we were laying it out, it blew up into a much bigger set of things. It took two posts to trace out the issues and get just over half-way through the art [click for part 1; click for part 2]. Opting for heavier picture use adds more supporting text too. Then the Trinity / Ultimate Reality became enough of a preoccupation to use as a different type of example, and it ballooned into a huge speculative post [click for a link]. Now while we have some momentum, we'll finish the Hudson River School / BAN [Beast Art Narrative] part with the back half of the movement and some legacy. Like we did with the last one, we'll skip the extensive recap and jump right in.
Julie Hart Beers, Looking Upon the River, 1880, oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago
This female member of the Hudson River School is mostly unnoticed in the catalog. It's hard not to be facetious. She was only the younger sister of James McDougal and William Hart - making them the only three-sibling act in the movement - and one of the first American women to forge a successful career as a professional artist.
It's hard not to be harsh given the historical profile. But that implies real interest in the people, social contexts, and networks that this art appeared in. Real history. Figures like this complicate the cosmopolitan progressive / slack-jawed yokel false binary the BAN depends on.
The back end of the Hudson River School is covered by the last essay in the catalog called "The Hudson River School in Eclipse". Here's the catalog link. It does a thorough job of unintentionally documenting the transition to [Art] and the imposition of the BAN. There is some vague talk of the cosmopolitanism of the "public" after the Civil War, but it's mostly quotes from critics. It's interesting to read with modern eyes next to modern photos. The blatant misrepresentation, presumption of logically-absurd "rules", and weird mix of smug unctuousness scream Gamma.
Keep the incoherent "critical" points in mind when looking at the actual art. Look for lack of feeling, unoriginality, inept technical bravura, overemphasis on technical bravura, lack of thematic unity, too much fantasy, too much realism, and all the rest. As they pile up in the imagination, consider the real pattern of what's being rejected. How it unfolds the BAN we just talked through in a way that can actually be seen. The point is to show narrative creation in another way.
Reality is always the tonic for lies. Historical deceptions are no different.
They attack for not doing it the new way. Then when you do it the new way, they attack for not doing the new way the right way. The pattern is familiar in modern culture...
It's [you] they don't like.
The supposed reason is the excuse, not an actual problem. Propose a solution and a new, more strident issue appears. They don't want you to fix it. They want you to go away.
"They're lying" is something well-meaning FTS-2 seems incapable of comprehending. The fact that they still bleat about hypocrisy indicates it's intrinsic - like a cognitive limit or head injury. But mass idiocy has no bearing on reality or we wouldn't be here now. And the reality is that culture was jacked by people that hate it long before most of the aware even realize. As we go through this swill, be attentive to the inconsistencies. They are lying. Constantly. Just look at the pictures. Here's the earlier Johnson painting in question...
David Johnson, Near Squam Lake, New Hampshire, 1856, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art
It's not the most impressive picture and the color looks off. It's not on display, so we've never seen it, and this is the only photo online, so it's hard to say. It's a basic Cole-style landscape with rougher detail fading into sublime light. The optimism shines through.
Here's the later one that the Gamma accuses of being a French pastiche...
David Johnson, Bayside, New Rochelle, New York, 1886, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art
It is relatively similar to Dupré, superficially at least. The big difference between the Barbizon and Hudson River Schools was technical. The French painted en plein air or outside instead of working up plein air sketches and drawings in the studio. There are inevitable consequences to the two approaches. Working outdoors lets the artist capture specific light and atmosphere conditions with immediacy that memory can't replicate. It also forces speed - there's only so much time in a sitting, and the light is continually changing. A studio painting can take months or even years. The overall effect is fresher but simpler - more monodimensional than complexity elevated to higher unity.
Jules Dupré, Fontainebleau Oaks, around 1840, oil on canvas, Minneapolis Institute of Art
As far as aesthetic preference goes, we don't see much to be concerned about. All three are appealing in slightly different ways, and none of them point to perverse taste. The approaches accomplish different things. We would argue that this is an example of the organic creativity within L+T that is the source of the greatness of the arts of the West. But in satano-idiotic binary world, technical difference and aesthetic options become oppositional poles with philosophical implications.
Bringing us to the Abstract-Material truth split. “Art” as a concept is an abstraction. Some abstract truth given material form is not an obvious physical category. And since it’s defined inductively, based on observed practice, the category is necessarily contingent on (arbitrary) organic cultural factors. Once defined, it becomes constinctive – structures based on real art by real artists responding to structures. Within a common socio-cultural area defined by the elements making it up called art. Whatever particular forms this takes.
Thomas Cole, Scene from Byron’s “Manfred”, 1833, oil on canvas, Yale University Art Gallery
Cole learned to paint in oil in a traditional Western way. His choice of artistic influences, interest in sublimity in Creation, the relation to God and organic community, his love of dramatic poetic themes and allegory are all personal reactions to the culture available to him.
He developed an art that is stylistically complementary to his subjects and an extension of his own personality. The Abstract component is the Logos - the Truth - that he conveys.
Western art had a notion of Progress! well before the Enlightenment. Starting in the Renaissance, there was an awareness of artistic improvement. All the big movements – Renaissance Baroque, Neoclassicism were built up around some idea of restoring good art. But the classical notion of beauty and the humanist concept of artistic genius presumed some metaphysical foundation. Beauty was a rational, harmonious idealism that led the mind to Ultimate unity. Genius was an unlearnable divine inspiration that enabled feats of superhuman creativity. Standards fell back on ideas of higher, immaterial Truth. The problem for the beast is that this contradicts its own defining illusion.
Hein Kever, Artist in his Studio, 1874, oil on canvas
The reality is the techne part of art is qualitative. More literary than mathematical. Just look at how different the art looks between cultures that have some concept of aesthetic appeal. But it isn’t purely subjective. There are universal tendencies. Not in everyone, but crossing cultural and temporal lines. You’ve experienced it when seeing something beautiful from an alien culture. Preferences seem to be conditioning laid over natural response patterns. In any case, Western art has elements of judgement based on preferred standards since the Greeks. And maybe the Egyptians.
The Enlightenment changes things with secular transcendence. Older artistic progress was organic. Even Annibale Carracci, who consciously combined schools in an academic way in the last art post, had students go in all different directions. And there was always debate. Florence vs. Venice, Dutch vs. Classical, color vs. line, etc. This was acceptable when the Abstract Truth component was properly situated ontologically. But secular transcendence doesn’t allow for God or any sort of coherent metaphysics.
So the metaphysical part had to be imagined into the material world. And that leads right to those absurd Modernist claims about the "essence" of art being the way it is made or what it's made of. Without metaphysics, there is no other basis for a pseudo-truth claim. The institutions of art were only getting stronger, so throwing out the ancestry wasn't possible. Instead, take the old logical foundations and pretend their consequences continue without them.
And Techne becomes the repository for secular transcendence.
We've kept our terms very loose because we're casting a comprehensive net. L+T catches the entire process of art production in one letter. Even limiting T to the artist or team that physically designs and makes the work lumps several things together. There are two big components relevant to the secular transcendence inversion - the physical materials or media and formal qualities. Both refer to how the artwork is "made".
Formal qualities cover all the ways and things the artist is supposed to paint.
Jacques-Louis David, Andromache Mourning Hector, 1783, oil on canvas, École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris
This is where Renaissance blathering and Academism fit. We'll see that the BAN critics of the Hudson River School do too. David is a great French Academic Neoclassical painter so he's a good example
This category takes for granted that art has certain accepted media - painting, sculpture, and architecture being the post-Renaissance Western standards. So the fake essence becomes "correct" subject matter, style, models, etc. For David, that's figures from Poussin and Raphael, sharp realism, and total dramatic subordination to a higher theme. The fake narrative tell is that the preferred formalities keep changing but the language doesn't.
High-res clos-up shows academism's strengths. Superb techne in the realism and mastery of the right models is a must. Huge amounts of time were spent drilling, studying, and experimenting with the fundamentals. Emotion and thematics are harmonized and well-communicated. There is a risk of slipping into staginess, but they'll err on the side of that to make sure the message is clear.
All these technical elements were things any style of art could use. Composition, lighting effects, manual skill, expression, etc. are pretty much universal.
William Sidney Mount, Winding Up, 1836, oil on panel, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City
Take this American genre painter and contemporary of Cole. The Academic polish isn't there. But the figures form a harmonized group that communicates their relationship - in the scene and bigger picture. Diagonal perspective gives depth, and the focused light makes the central figures stand out against the dark background. They're both idealized in a more folksy way, though the woman has some Academic classical beauty. And above all, a deeper human truth comes through the specific moment.
Technical fundamentals of visual messaging are not style - or even medium - specific. You might prefer the David or the Mount for personal aesthetic reasons. Perhaps classical gravitas and maximum technical virtuosity are more admired. Perhaps sincere human warmth and direct appeal are preferable. They're both perfectly fine paintings techne-wise, with clearly transmitted logos. Liking one over the other is what we mean by art having a subjective, organic component. But if [denying the necessary foundations of truth] is your defining ideal, subjective preference has to be pressed into anchoring pseudo-objective value judgments.
Physical materials is the Modern turbo-idiocy that autonomous art must be "about" what it's made of.
Benny Collin, Red Abstract, 1991, acrylic on paper on canvas
There's a whole school of nonsense dogma around the essence of art being [lines and colors on a surface]. Or [forms in space] for sculptures. Abstraction makes that the "subject" with variations like the fractal limits of perception. Abstract art isn't inherently retarded. It becomes so when it's assigned greater ontological truth value because it only depicts it's "vocabulary". It's akin to defining the essence of literature as [text string]. Which happened. Just not for so long.
Cy Twombly, Untitled (Lexington), 1951, oil-based house paint on canvas, Cy Twombly Foundation
This metastasizes out of the first with the dictate that art is only its own materials. No representation or illusion. The Impressionists are reimagined as emphasizing "paint" instead of a new way to replicate optical processes. Then comes full inversion. According to one shill, "each line and color is infused with energy, spirituality, and meaning". The parenthetical title lets them "deny meaning" and give it a name....
The point is that Techne gets elevated when Logos gets degraded. And materialism disappears logos with any first letter. And this explains the weird cult of plein air and "authenticity" in the early BAN. There are a few parts to this too.
The first is that whole House of Lies tale about Modernity as Freedom! from daddy God Academic oppression. Since the Academy method meant careful study, objective refinement, and masterful idealism, those were bad. "Objectively" in the BAN meta-delusion bubble. Realism was heralded as the morally and ontologically correct response to the evil old regime of qualitative elitism and reality. Limiting art to "reality" eliminates all the intellectual, spiritual, aspirational, moral, and other poetic and philosophical qualities that make art culturally essential. It's a metaphorical lobotomy. And the enshrouding of what should be as boundless as human creativity in a fake moral binary.
The nature and strengths of plein air painting made it necessarily realistic relative to Academic art. The limited time made a fast brush necessary and loose paintwork always feels more expressive. Probably to do with the blurred quality. But whatever the reason, it tied into all the sentimentality nonsense that was a waystation between high objective standards and do what thou wilt.
Corot was one of the best of the Barbizon School. The blurry, quick style is the "unity and feeling" the BAN shills blather about.
Two types of secular transcendent techne. Catalog BAN Barbizon-fluffing is the earlier kind - it's still assumed that art is representational painting, but different formally. Blurry "feeling" is good, sublime majesty bad, because it's more "real" as in [not ideologically Academic] and creatively gelded in terms of content. Two inrelated and incoherent things that get included in the same fake pseudo-narrative. And if that calls to mind costumed high-schoolers arguing over who's who's keeping it realer...
There's a huge Gamma streak in beast [Art] world and the House of Lies in general.
Consider how secularism has answered no ontological questions despite insisting on the objective non-existence of God. Putting aside “there is no God” being a long-running claim that a logically impossible faith can replace a logically possible one. Again, alienatingly stupid.
Multiverse nonsense "theory" combines unverifibility with [not addressing the problem]. It's what the first chapter of the book describes as not being able to answer a foundational question by adding more ontologically inadequacies. The base problems of infinite regression/recursion and aggregation aren't addressed at all.
Apprehensible reality has to be logically consistent and materially existent. Progress! and perfection are logically contradictory as well as impossible. The whole nonsense cult is based on nothing more than blind faith that [thought experiment X] = teleological utopia. Only while denying the existence of teleology because that constrains doing what thou wilt. The result is every figment declaring itself a manifest ideal. Workers paradise! Land of the free! and so forth.
This does a few things. The proclaimed end state can't ever actually happen, but fruit fly tier memories erase the whole thing. Wash rinse repeat. What the cycle does create is an endlessly renewing structural path to personal authority for liars. Every critic can claim their answer is the Ultimate One! For art, this turns into the parade of movements. Endless beast new beginnings around some random new fake dogma. It was perfect for the evolving House of Lies Art! system. Simple trends like fashions based on endless novelty and filtered centralized channels. Ideologically centralized. Buzz for galleries, schools, Academies, critics, collectors, etc.
Franz Kline, Chief, 1950, oil on canvas, MOMA
Think about the BAN-Barbizon-feels fetish then read how this pantheon-tier inversive "convey[s] the emotion embedded in the act of painting itself". According to the title link, "Chief" was a beloved childhood train with lines "that imply speed and power as they rush off the edge of the canvas". The artist claimed to paint "not what I see but the feelings aroused in me by that looking," When a small child shows you a scribble and calls it a choo choo, it's endearing...
The BAN binary is “new way” vs. old way. The fake dialectical at the root of the whole avant-garde structure of cultural vandalism.
Weird binary rules and hostility towards creativity brings out the Gamma side of BAN. This is another example of the utility of the SSH. Recognizing the presence of a familiar pattern shows what's going on beneath the surface narrative. The critical "consensus" the early modern version of an SJW swarm, backed by globalist money and media control. Public opinion is irrelevant. The agenda will be driven, and if art ceases to be something widely enjoyed, good. The money is independent of aesthetic appeal. And actively hostile.
In a recent substack, we likened the House of Lies to a societal-scale Gamma delusion bubble. Interlocking lies and institutional capture create a a sort of "psyche" made of deception and projection. We see the aggressive overrunning of a cultural space and its transformation into something very different. At this point, the larger culture wasn't sufficiently degraded for the repulsiveness of modern inversion. It's ideological foundation. Nonsense discourse and low-wattage posturing redefining the essence of "Western art". A lot of the new crap from Europe was pretty good. But once the tether to reality is severed, the repulsiveness isn't long following...
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Oscar Bluemner, View of Lehnenburg, Pennsylvania, 1914, gouache on paper, Avery Galleries, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania
The BAN demands something all delusion bubbles do - don't ask too much into the facade. Delusions are incoherent because they're clusters of lies, so there's nothing there to support questions. In this case, it's imperative to pretend the BAN is merely a naturally-occurring turn of events in the long, continuous march of human culture. That there's no difference between orchestrated and deceptive critical campaigns and natural good taste.
Interesting that the notes neglect to mention who this critic was. Mariana Alley Griswold Van Rensselaer, aka. Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer - street tag, Schuyler-V - was a scion of one of America's apex Gilded Age families. The very proto-globalist elite we've seen using vast asymmetric resources to tear down organic culture. We generally don't cite Wikipedia, but her Wikipedia page is appropriate here.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer (Mariana Griswold), 1888, cast 1890, bronze, Metropolitan Museum of Art
In what's beginning to resemble a pattern, there is no way the museum was unaware of Schuyler-V or her agitprop. According to their own tag line, she donated this Renaissance-style bronze self-portrait to the Met in 1917. The inscription reads animvs non opvs [the spirit, not the work] and refers to "Van Rensselaer’s high-minded aesthetic ideals". It's exactly the same nonsense in the BAN elevated to the preposterous truthiness of a maxim.
It's likely it never even occurred to the writers. The world of Art! is an incestuous bubble, but the denizens take it for reality. Where Schuyler-V really is a caring soul given to empower the culture of the nation she totes doesn't disdain.
And some more pearls from Schuyler-V on Gifford. Apparently he couldn't manage a brush as well as every art school student. Seriously. We aren't making it up. She is literally that stupid. Now consider those following her at the time or treating he as a source of anything other than unintentional comedy.
What is she even talking about? The words form sentences, but the content doesn't rise above [idiotic blathering of a pampered doyenne]. If we take it seriously at all, it's watered down Vasari - make up a straw man, pretend it's the past, then attack it with lies.
Given the Griswold and Van Rensselaer money and role in New York [Art], brownnosing sycophancy also plays a part. The contrarian thought experiment is to read her drivel, look at Gifford, and find an alternative accounting.
Sanford Robinson Gifford, Twilight in the Wilderness, 1861, The Athenæum, Hartford
Recognizing the SJW-Gamma swarm pattern puts the "criticism" into perspective. Obviously obsessive commitment to any single type of art is a problem. But that doesn't align with solipsistic atavism and authoritarian posturing. Readers can appreciate the Gamma snark...
Trost Richards wasn't actually part of the Hudson River School, though he's often thrown in as an adjacent. We are told he sucks because of failure to "convey general effect". You can be the judge of his aesthetic efficacy.
William Trost Richards, Cliffs and Coast of Cornwall, late 19th century, oil on canvas
The big difference from the Hudson River School was more realism and less fantasy. It's a relative distinction though. Richards' rugged coastal seascapes with their mist and magic light clearly fit the sublime.
Our judgment is that he is one of America's greatest and most underrated real artists.
The Gamma minnows continue spraying logical nonsense and outright lies to build a fake reality.
This may actually contradict Schuyler-V's brush management training, though it's hard to tell because she is so incoherent.
We've quoted at length to give a sense of the repetitive swarming nature of the objectively-inane talking points.
When assaulted with a cloud of obviously scripted nonsense, pull back and look for the meta-patterns. What is the agenda or deception that the lies add up to? Forget about coherence - we've already determined the narrative is fake and can be disregarded. The pieces won't come together into anything where they're all true. What they will do is map out a direction that can be used to induce real intent. The two big recurring themes are solipsistic "feeling" and simplified "realism". Obviously contradictory as ideals. What do they share?
They reject refinement, technical virtuosity, and moral, spiritual, or philosophical intellectual content. Any kind of pro-social messaging, culture building, or sustained, disciplined effort. The entire treasure chest of tradition goes out the window.
It follows from what we've seen of the beast system. One big arc across the House of Lies is stripping away the nobility, beauty, and the higher abstractions that elevate the human spirit. Either the anti-heroes or Watchmen-SSH-r/K post is a good introduction. It's necessary for people to mass self-degrade for moral entropy to flow unchecked.
Licking beast fingers for a ticket is nothing new either. Here are some more non-sequiturs with another "source" that just floats by.
We were curious about the "widely read commentator". Once again a moisture film deep dive was all it took. Among her various cultural atavisms, Mary Gay managed to find time for a puff-piece on Schuyler family matriarch, Catherine Van Rensselaer Schuyler. It appears to be her most significant claim to fame...
We have too much respect for our time to go further. But the gushing summary reads more like fan fic than history.
We'll just point out that the whole "phenomenal" thing is irrelevant if you listen to Schuyler-V on the wrist.
And it only seems fitting to give the king Gamma the last word. Turns out it was the realism all along!
"The merit of pure objective rendering". Not poetic feeling.
Anyone familiar with the SSH is chuckling while thinking about right hooks for no reason at all.
And here's Bierstadt.
Albert Bierstadt, Mountain Brook, 1863, oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago
We understand Gamma Ray was Dunning-Krugering about a specific painting. It's also clear that he's trying to create a characterization of something he knows nothing about.
Anyone who has spent time in the woods knows this hazy light is insanely accurate. It's not a technical ability question. It's getting rid of the past for whatever made-up reasons come to mind.
Do the same thing as before and look for the pattern under the nonsense. What comes through is lack of real substance. They all start with a negative position and make up whatever to justify it. It's the reverse of an actual reasoned judgment. And how you know that this is real-time narrative engineering and not an organic reaction.
Take one more excerpt to sum up this problem.
Why is this even an acceptable setup for a thriving artistic culture? It's creatively straightjacketed for reasons with nothing to do with making art. We know the answer is the narrative needs simple binaries. Though that's not a real answer.
There are a few things going on. There is a natural tendency for art to form styles, schools, or other collective identities. Partly because training passes on standard tendencies to everyone passing through the shop or academy. Options are always limited by resource base. Stylistic change is personal and organic, so even the most radical students depart from the same base. Since preference tends to clump for any number of reasons, the popular option tends to perpetuate until something new shakes it up. Even the reaction isn't simple. Art reflects taste, but it also influences how people think of things.
This complex interaction doesn't really simplify to a concept diagram. We tend to point out real art is organic and leave it at that.
Thomas Moran, The Lotus Eaters, 1895, oil on canvas, Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine
The delusion bubble incoherence of the BAN means the pieces don't have to connect logically or add up. It's adherence to reality that gives history coherence and lies are defined as not adhering to reality. Old pontifications retain "weight" long after all the cultural assumptions supporting them are rejected. We saw the old Renaissance humanist tactic of strawmanning opponents as ignorant, crude, or unlearned already. It's how soaring cathedrals became "Gothic". The rhetorical appeal lasted long after the historiography collapsed.
The more insidious part of the BAN is the secular transcendence that we've posted on a lot. Mythical rules made up by logical imbeciles and backed by rich dolts. The logical imbecile part isn't just invective either. Renaissance humanism gained traction against Scholasticism by arguing the superiority of rhetoric over logic.
Again, the tell is that the preferred art and surrounding contexts keep changing but nonsense authority structure stays. Medieval glories, Baroque visions, Sublime landscape - all just crude, barbarous, deviations from the true path. Clouds of self-righteous irrelevancies like Schuyler-V, flickering in and out of existence to tear down heritage. Over and over.
The BAN obviously wasn't being pushed by the sharpest tools in the shed. And lies are hard to keep track of. So the pattern became a series of One True Ways, each framed in similar ways. And once beast materialism removed the fake metaphysics, "up-to-date" and "old-fashioned" slid in as objective quality metrics. But the end result - a conga line of fake imperatives - is constant.
Art did get limited. But didn't have to be a choice.
Sydney Mortimer Laurence, Mount McKinley, before 1940, oil on canvas
Although that means acknowledging the real legacy of the Hudson River School and the existence of artists like the visionary painter of the Alaskan sublime.
So the problem with the Hudson River School was lack of material self-consciousness. And technical self-awareness. And lack of feeling, poetics, and realism. They went out of style because their pictures were detailed, and French art isn’t like that, and critics whined, and young hacks preferred smears, and big money was already starting a war on reality, and collectors were posturing dolts, and, no one of influence would show them, and gamma sneering at “sentimentality” made the broken feel cool, and…
This BAN is ridiculous. Because it needs some, any, ontological claim, it pretends the activity the creativity of the artist. It’s not yet full modernist inversion. It’s that early modern period of incoherence where “art” claims autonomy but accepts all the traditional ideas of artistic vocation. The thing is, you can do that if the rejection is limited to fake rules and not reality.
Pre-Rapahelite Romanticism wanted freedom from academic stricture and went into English poetics, history, and fantasy. Like any movement, they had some "principles" of their own. But they didn't include anti-human atavism and hatred of beauty.
Arthur Hughes, Ophelia, 1852, oil on canvas, Manchester Art Gallery.
A closer look at the figure make the point clear. Like all the Romantic movements from Friedrich to the Düsseldorf School, the Pre-Raphaelites wanted to pursue art outside Academic secular transcendent techne. They still sought logos and beauty - just on different terms.
Ophelia is not a classical Academic ideal, but hits a Gen X sensibility a bit harder. She's a lovely figure, with the right poignant doomed innocence for the part.
It's also easy to see what Hughes' goals were in choosing a different stylistic idiom. Academic art can do a lot of things, but this haunting poetic quality isn't one of them.
The Nazarenes were a German Romantic movement earlier in the 19th century that inspired the Pre-Raphaelites in some ways. They also wanted to escape what they saw as a stultifying Academic environment by looking back at a "purer" art. Nazarene painting is more obviously Renaissance revival though.
Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow, The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, first half of 1800s, oil on canvas, Städel Museum
French Realism was different. They wanted freedom from academic stricture, but rejected creativity as well. The ideology was as retarded as always - Modernity was ontologically different from any time previous, so [Art] is only permitted to represent banal, unvarnished modern subjects. Ideally in a way that reflects badly on society. But throwing out standards around content can easily degenerate into throwing out standards around quality. Who wouldn’t want to do what thou wilt rather than master a craft? It’s an entropic shuffle to no virtuosity. No techne. And literally, no art.
The Met is dutifully repeating the narrative that it puts itself as the hero of. “Rehabiliating” the Hudson River School lets them sagely restore this lost piece of American history. More subtly, it makes them the arbiters of acceptance. Just as older beast mouthpieces read them out of the BAN, the Met reads them back in. Institutional power in the House of Lies.
Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers, 1849, oil on canvas, Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden
This “masterpiece” turns up in just about every art summary and survey. It represents old-time gravitas applied to soul-killing modern banality. Beast 101.
International modern art is a manifestation of globalism. Look at the parameters. Erasing human imagination and cultural difference under a centralized elite narrative. The catalog teaches us America became “more cosmopolitan” after the Civil War. Of course it does. The original union of independent states was crushed into the federalist kernel of the Clown World Empire of today. You can actually see the narrative integration right here. The "cosmopolitan" new America is just beast narrative for socio-political globalism lining up with establishment of empire
Even their Hudson River School recovery is cloaked in terms of progress. Moving forward in their historical understanding and cleaning up old gaps. Not the reality, where a fake system powered by elite money allowed a cadre of grasping sociopaths to sever the American people from a wellspring of inspiring beauty. All styles run their course. But suppression of popular sublimity and the glory of Creation for dreary haze and amorphous blobs is not an improvement.
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William Trost Richards, Seascape with Distant Lighthouse, Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1873, oil on canvas, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
If art is an autonomous part of society worthy of resource support, works of art have self-evident value. They should resonate without any external commentary on why they’re important or significant or whatever. You’ve all seen a striking monument that’s worth a look without knowing what it is. Ironically, it was purpose built…
The demented atavistic impulse to tear down what came before is profoundly unnatural. Moving art from appeal to weird gamma rules and into degeneracy is similar to what we saw in comics in the last Apprehensible Reality-Truth post. It seems like a ubiquitous destruction vector now, but it only appeared with modernity. The catalog shows it landing in America for the first time, and lingering through the 20th century. As always, creation is a sextant, and the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, the course.
Lesser-known Hudson River School painter with a gift for picturesque Autumnal scenes with a sublime edge. The work didn't have to be ideologically polemical or radically innovative. There was room for those in an organic art culture.
The importance to the real arts of the West is obvious. But so is the larger inversion pattern. Somehow “art” unproblematically can encompass organic culture, visual representation, aesthetics and beauty, autonomous formalism, narrow institutional hegemony, moral inversion, technical virtuosity, raw solipsism, etc. There is no meaningful set that includes all these as material facts. So art is an abstract category without material verification. The manifestations are incompatible or even contradictory. The category fails logically. It must therefore be an internal man-made abstraction.
At this point, differentiating between Material and Abstract Reality would have smothered the whole inversive enterprise in the cradle. It certainly would have prevented the midwit humiliation ritual of wandering around an interactive IQ test and nodding sagely at the stops on the path of failure.
Pretty sure Dante listed it among his circles...
But the history of post-Enlightenment secularism is based on [reasoning we can do on a computer on a couch] never occurring to generations. Instead we got the ongoing pretense that a fake internal abstraction is as Real! as an objective external one. Or as bindingly authoritative in the moment at least. Until it isn’t.
But that’s the next manifesto. We’re told it finally solves the true path to art.
Gabriel von Max, Monkeys as Judges of Art, 1889, oil on canvas, Neue Pinakothek, Munich
The whole concept of "critical authority" and taste determination is insane with a moment's reflection. But most people are FTS-2 and think what they're told. A useful critic is someone who's tastes complement yours, not replace them.
Meanwhile, time for some central figures in the latter part of the Hudson River School. Keep the incoherent points in mind in front of the actual art. Reality is always the tonic for lies. Historical deceptions are no different.
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John MacWhirter, Ossian’s Grave, 1882, oil on canvas, Salford Museum & Art Gallery
In a reality-facing culture, sniffing out fakes is normal behavior. It's different when the truth-keepers belong to the House of Lies.
In the case of the catalog BAN, we just saw how the critic swarm used blanket talking points to construct an entirely fake notion of art. A big part of it is straw-manning what the artists were actually doing. The counter is to look at the actual art and cross-reference it against the [Art] delusion bubble. We can't do anything about the institutional stranglehold on resources. But we can reconnect with the reality of a vital creative heritage.
That all means a ton of pictures. We'll have to split it because the post gets unwieldy. We'll look at Moran though, as a reward for Schuyler-V, then continue in a follow-up with no preamble.
Thomas Moran (1837-1926) is the most significant of the later Hudson River School artists. He started out the usual way of painting the rustic Northeast before hitting his stride out West. He’s similar to Bierstadt that way, although his otherworldly mountain visions are different stylistically. His paintings may have triggered Gammas critics, but the public loved him. The popularity of his art was a big part of the creation of Yellowstone National Park.
Early Moran with a classic Hudson River School theme. Note the familiar foreground detail retreating to misty sublimity.
Thomas Moran, Valley of the Catawissa in Autumn, 1862, oil on canvas, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
Moran was born in England and grew up in Philadelphia. The year he painted Valley of the Catawissa in Autumn, he had returned from a several month trip back to England to study Turner. Interest in Turner's liquid magic light gave him a slightly different bent from the other painters in the group.
Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed, 1818, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
Early Turner is more classical, but you can already see the interest in light.
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Venice, from the Porch of Madonna della Salute, around 1835, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art
With mature Turner, light takes over, making him a precursor to Impressionism and other modern movements.
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Outside general Romantic sentiments, Turner might seem like an odd role model for an American forest and mountain painter. But real art isn't formulas. We saw a few posts ago how Cole started the whole movement by selecting things from tradition that he liked and putting them together in new ways. Raphael did the same thing. It's what artists do. How forms cross cultures. How tradition keeps revitalizing. Anyhow, Moran was into the British critic John Ruskin, and Ruskin was a champion of Turner. So two useful pieces to a Hudson River School painter. Ruskin pushed truth to nature - among other things, and Turner was technically innovative with light.
Valley of the Catawissa is the kind of Pennsylvania landscape Moran started painting back home. There was also this wonder that appears to have no information online other than some auction records. Attribution is solid though. It's like a Bierstadt nocturne, but with cleaner light.
Thomas Moran, The Water Party, 1862, oil on canvas, private collection
Two years later, he was in central Pa., painting the Juniata River cliffs - a Susquehanna tributary. Note that familiar structure of sharp foreground detail fading into beautifully-lit sublimity. And the tiny artist painting the scene.
Thomas Moran, The Juniata, Evening, 1864, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art
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You can already see glimpses of his monolithic cliffs. The link points out that his Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, and Southwest paintings were so revelatory and astonishing, his early work had been overshadowed until recently. We're glad they've come back to life. Think of the last couple of posts - it's a lot easier to see how he fits with the Hudson River School with these paintings available online now.
Here's another from a couple of years later. He's moving West, and mixing Turner's light with Church's and Cropsey's. We saw this for the first time researching paintings for this post. Seems crazy until you remember BAN. Then it doesn't. Or not as much.
Thomas Moran, The Shores of Lake Superior, 1866, oil on canvas, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
Moran is epic. It's where the comparisons to Bierstadt come from. But they're different beyond just stylistics. When we get to late Bierstadt, we'll see his mountain spectacles are only part of a diverse set of topics. He keeps moving around and painting different types of things. Moran seems more focused on Western grandeur, and just gets more experimental and abstract as he ages.
Not hard to see why the Western paintings grabbed attention. He painted this one from reports and his imagination before he traveled West, but it was a harbinger of things to come. Career-wise too – it hung in the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1867.
Thomas Moran, Children of the Mountain, 1867, oil on canvas, Private collection
According to one writer from the time who isn’t featured in the BAN, the children are not of human birth; but the cataract , the storm-cloud, the rainbow, and the mist... Henry Theodore Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, American Artist Life, Comprising Biographical and Critical Sketches, etc., New York, 1867, p. 568 [click for a link to the whole book].
It was the spring of 1871 that Moran saw the West for the first time. It must have been a mind-bending experience, because when he got back home, his art changed. His light and color were perfectly suited to this new landscape, that that spectacle-size Hudson River School scale suited the grandeur. Success followed soon after – in 1872 Congress bought his huge Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone for the Capitol. Before long, he became known as Thomas "Yellowstone" Moran.
Thomas Moran, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1872, oil on canvas mounted on aluminum, United States Capitol, Washington
It's worthy of Bierstadt or Church's scale at 84 × 104.8 inches.
It’s hard to do justice to the detail and technical aspects while appreciating the whole thing. Here’s a closer look that captures the jewel-tone water and the light and texture of the rocks. The tiny figures give a sense of scale.
Keep the BAN straw men in mind when looking at these achievements.
Recurring themes in his work show his artistic personality. The kind of scenes he was attracted to and how his visualization of them changed. The important thing for modern readers to remember is that the West was largely unknown to most Americans in the mid-19th century. Mostly tall tales or some rough sketches. The Hudson River School painters played a huge role in defining the image of the West in the public imagination. None more than Moran.
Take his long-term engagement with the Green River cliffs in Wyoming.
Thomas Moran, Cliffs of Green River, 1874, oil on canvas, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth
This sweeping panorama came shortly after the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Note how he’s spilling Turner’s light over the majestic forms. This is really all Luminism is – working with light glazes over sublime landscapes. The effect here is remarkable though. The land takes on almost a mystical appearance. Manifest Destiny could take visible form.
Here’s an artistic photo of the site today. Considering the superhuman grandeur Moran was able to convey, the turd blathering about “realism” probably should have been blacklisted from any further opining.
Moran revisited the site in his art again and again. Sometimes from different angles or under different light. Here he brings his sublime light to a pyrotechnic pitch…
Thomas Moran, The Golden Hour, 1875, oil on canvas, Blanton Museum of Art
Cowboys ride by in 1875...
Thomas Moran, The Cliffs of Green River, Wyoming Territory, 1875, oil on canvas, Cincinnati Art Museum
And again in 1881, this time under stunning evening light.
Thomas Moran, Green River Cliffs, Wyoming, 1881, oil on canvas, National Gallery, Washington 25 x 62 in.
The Hudson River School approach of making lots of studies and sketches allowed for almost endless variations on a theme. Moran did eventually open a studio in Yellowstone to be closer to the landscape.
Thomas Moran, Green River Buttes, Wyoming, 1879, watercolor and graphite with white gouache on paper, Gilcrease Museum
One of countless small sketches and drawing Moran made of his beloved West.
The whole point of revisiting themes is that people like them. The BAN concept of shocking and pushing envelopes cuts aesthetic pleasure, uplift, and taste out of the equation. Who cares if it’s not an “original” splattering of paint? True art brings truth and beauty into our experience that we couldn’t know otherwise.
Thomas Moran, The Cliffs of Green River, Wyoming, 1900, oil on canvas, The Diplomatic Reception Rooms, U.S. Department of State, Washington
That Turner light works so well in his larger style. Here he cuts loose with some more natural pyrotechnics and brings elements of the older paintings together. Note the date - Moran kept painting visions long past the point the BAN declared art ugly marks and smudges...
Thomas Moran, Afterglow, Green River, Wyoming, 1918, oil on canvas
And the reasons for our harshness and derision keep getting clearer.
Yellowstone is, of course, another recurring theme. It’s a good one for us, because he redid the same view as the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone a quarter-century later. A rare direct comparison to show how he moved into more fantastical visions.
It really does make you wonder about those critics.
Thomas Moran, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, from 1893 until 1901, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum
We’re limited to how many we can show, but here’s one more for that turbulent light and atmosphere he creates.
Thomas Moran, A Passing Shower in the Yellowstone Canyon, 1903, oil on canvas
Put the two next to each other for comparison. You can see his light and forms loosening up as he strives for transcendence. This is one painter over the span of part of his later career. Think of all the BAN nonsense about too much detail, feeling, realism, and all the other [note – looking for a word to encapsulate that degree of odious smugness and idiotic ignorance]. What are they even talking about?
The ability of FTS-2 to outsource thinking is how you get things like offshoring all your industry as Good!
Obviously we traced the emergence of the FTS model out of post-war House of Lies. But what is media liars manipulating urban dolts in the later 19th century? A more primitive iteration of the modern version. With newspaper for glowing screens, and the Civil War providing the blood sacrifice, societal upheaval, and opportunity to advance empire. The quality difference between their narrative alternative and ours reflects the earlier point on the inversion macro-arc [click for a link to our concept of societal direction over time].
A similar close-up of the glistening waterfall shows his light and air coalescing. At this point, when he’s brought all his influences into an organic maturity, the importance of Turner gets obvious. He’s not copying him directly. But he’s using air and light in similar ways.
The impact of Moran’s vision on the image of the West comes through in the promotional material.
Thomas Moran, YELLOWSTONE PARK / NORTHERN PACIFIC., 1924
There’s a pattern here that seems inevitable in a House of Lies fake reality. That’s when the narrative engineers present their interests as something morally unproblematic and encourage buy-in. Like “the pristine West” as tourist paradise. You don’t have to comment on the inevitabilities of civilizational clash to observe these historical facts. The territory wasn’t uninhabited. Yeah buts not required because the fact is all we need. The drivers were exploitative and economic, not metaphysical. Again, not commenting on the probity of commerce. Simply stating that so much future conflict, dispute, and misunderstanding comes from presenting things as other than what they are in the House of Lies narratives. There’s no fake mythology to deconstruct later if it isn’t installed in the first place. And an activity taken in the public’s name that the public couldn’t countenance of they knew should be a capital offence. Conquer if you must, but wear your empire openly.
Hiding behind a fake, secular transcendent moral paragon is repulsive. And the whiplash effect of old norms being demonized a generation later is a sign of no organic culture at all. Ultimately terminal.
The arrival of two big 19th century inventions – the railroad and the camera – drove the development of the West in the imagination. Trains were what made it possible for Moran to set up in Yellowstone and travel around. Photos let Gammas cry about various things but freed the artist from documentary drudgery. The dishonest stupidity of the BAN throwaway that photos made painting abstract is actually annoying. Photography put a premium on the things that can’t be photographed. Hudson River School paintings are as popular as ever in an age of CGI. Because this replaced Moran…
William Henry Jackson, Veta Pass, 1882, albumen print
Or why artists like Moran and fellow Hudson River School painter Samuel Colman were hired by the railways and other operators to produce publicity material…
It’s not the American West, but something similar was happening in Canada with railroads and tourists. This is a grand railway hotel intended as a destination resort for wealthy Eastern and European tourists.
Samuel Colman, Grand Hotel Banff, Alberta, oil on canvas
This confirms the appeal and popularity of traditional art was still well understood. The BAN was consciously deviating from that. For example, contrast what "America" wanted with a truly populist artistic endeavor like William Cullen Bryant's Picturesque America.
William Cullen Bryant, Picturesque America, 1872-74, New York: D. Appleton
From the link - Picturesque America was a conspicuous presence in the popular culture of the United States in the post-Civil War years. First published as a magazine series in Appletons' Journal, then as a subscription book, in parts, from 1872 to 1874, it reached a huge audience. It's voluminous text and over 900 pictures represented the first comprehensive celebration of the entire continental nation... Picturesque America is one of the most important sources for understanding how Americans thought about themselves, their landscape, and the rest of the world in the decade following the Civil War...."
Picturesque America is interesting because it came right before photography took over. The engravings were made by prominent artists, including Moran. This is one of his Yellowstone pictures in the second, 1874 volume.
It’s a lovely pair of books. Well worth snagging for any collector that comes across one.
The beauty of engravings or any prints is the reproducibility. Once a plate is prepared, many impressions can be made. Images from Picturesque America are still available online.
This is an older, hand-colored version of Moran’s engraving. Coloring was a common way to make prints more attractive, since they’re naturally black and white.
Moran was prolific, but a few examples can show the overall direction of his Western painting. The two Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone paintings give a preview. As Moran ages, he gets less precisely realistic and more expressive, even abstract.
This imprecisely dated one almost looks like an alien world.
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Thomas Moran, Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, 1892-1908, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Mist and atmosphere brought unprecedented sublimity to mighty rivers and falls.
Thomas Moran, Shoshone Falls on the Snake River, 1900, oil on canvas, Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa
It's just as impressive in vertical format.
Thomas Moran, Cascade Falls, Yosemite, 1905, oil on canvas, private collection
There’s a resemblance between some of Moran’s style elements and Herzog’s. Even as the Hudson River School ages and expands, there are commonalities that identify them as a group. Mainly how he’s using, bigger, almost flat, patches of paint for an impression of elemental timelessness.
Hermann Herzog, Voeringfoss, Hardanger (Norway), oil on canvas
For contrast, one of Herzog's Düsseldorf School era paintings. He’s less fantastical than Moran, but look at how they paint their rocks and landforms. Not drawing conclusions, just an observation that jumped out.
By the end of his career, Moran is completely outside the scope of the BAN Gammas. His reputation and clientele meant he could be financially successful all his life. Just on the personal level. [Art] meanwhile, was metastasizing into Art! – this was the year before the Armory Show.
The last echoes of Hudson River School sublimity as a fantasy landscape of memory. The dream that wasn't, but for a moment could have been.
Thomas_Moran, Grand Canyon with Rainbow, 1912, oil on canvas, de Young Art Museum
And one last Western picture because they’re so unique at this point. Sometimes old artists just let it fly near the end. Free of expectations, legacies set, a lifetime’s comfort with a brush… Schyuler-V's delusions notwithstanding. Moran resembles old Titian for paintings that fit their career arc, but are wildly free and creative in unique ways.
Before leaving Moran, we should have a look at his range. He built his name around Yellowstone and the West, but there was a lot more to him. A few paintings will show what we mean. Who wouldn't want to see more of what this guy could do? Oh right, the Gammas...
Anyhow, like Cole, he could design historical scenes around his expressive landscapes. Like this one, set in Florida. Misty forest is a different look.
Thomas Moran, Ponce de León in Florida, between 1877 and 1878, oil on canvas, Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, Jacksonville
This small painting has something of the English picturesque. It was sort of a third way to visual appeal alongside classical beauty and the romantic sublime. Something more down to earth but really lovely. “Pretty like a picture”, often with a sense of nostalgia or longing.
Thomas Moran, Punting on the River Cam, 1885, oil on board, private collection
It's only 14 3/8 x 11 1/2 inches. It resembles English picturesque landscapes of the 19th century, and the painting style looks to be simulating a bit of Constable.
Two more things to look at. A short string of pictures of Long Island make a nice counterpoint to his Western paintings. And his European pictures with the more explicit Turner light. The dates cover the same career range, and the style gets more imaginative and abstract. Not as much as those late Grand Canyons, but enough to see.
First the Long Islanders. Bucolic sublimity is an interesting effect. The tame landscape shows the settling of the East. Although thinking of the Hamptons as pasture is amusing.
Thomas Moran, A Cloudy Day on Long Island, 1891, oil on canvas
A couple of years later, he paints this more dreamlike picturesque. He’s probably incorporating some of the abstracting formulas of the BAN with his natural tendencies in that direction. The light is more Turner than Luminist haze or Tonalist sludge. Really original and almost shockingly beautiful. Funny the catalogue Gammas didn’t discuss this aspect of his work.
Thomas Moran, Near East Hampton, Long Island, 1894, oil on canvas
Nearing the turn of the century, we get the Hamptons version of The Golden Hour. It’s about as close as he gets to a Tonalist painting. And he’s still building it around dynamite contrasts despite low light.
Uniquely special artists come from or out of movements but tend to transcend them. Leaving them behind to follow their own creative imaginations. We suspect Moran might be in that tier. The independence is there. Leaving the talent to consider.
Thomas Moran, East Hampton, Long Island, 1897, oil on canvas laid on board, private collection
20th-century Moran brings that fantastical, almost alien quality from the Western scenes to the Hamptons as well. There’s something elemental here – timeless and imposing at once. Sublime.
Follow it to the end and he’s almost become Ruisdael. Primal landscapes that seem slightly unfinished or bursting with potential. Wall Street beach houses weren't what he had in mind...
Thomas Moran, East Hampton, 1916, oil on canvas
The final thing is Moran’s European-Turneresque work. We’ve seen how Turner was always a presence in his art. In these paintings he becomes much more prominent, making them seem homages to the older man. They’re still Moran when you look closely – hence Turneresque.
This early one came right after Moran’s first European trip. The site southwest of Naples on the Italian coast has mythological connections, being named after Odysseus' helmsman, Baius.
Thomas Moran, Bay of Baiae, Sunrise, 1867
Turner also depicted the bay of Baiae in his mythical The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and Sibyl. It's an early Turner, before he perfected the crystalline light Moran learned from him.
Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl, 1823, oil on canvas, Tate London
Moran returnes to the mythic theme, as in this one over 30 years later. There's that same mature move away from the real into a more abstracted sublimity that feels timeless and transient at once. Take a look at it, then consider Moran's own words following.
Thomas Moran, Ulysses and the Sirens, circa 1900, oil on canvas, private collection
This quote serves as Moran’s reply to all the BAN dolts. He literally explained how he used landscape as inspiration, more like a vision than an accurate transcription..
I place no value upon literal transcripts from nature. My general scope is not realistic; all my tendencies are toward idealization. Of course, all art must come through nature or naturalism, but I believe that a place, as a place, had no value in itself for the artist only so far as it furnishes the material from which to construct a picture.
We don't have to take his word for it. Look at these late Turneresque Venice scenes and see for yourself.
Thomas Moran, Venice Grand Canal at Sunset, 1906, oil on canvas, Birmingham Museum of Art
Liquid light over elemental forms gives way to the late stage swirl of atmospheric radiance.
Thomas Moran, Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice, 1915, oil on canvas, private collection
How is one to respond when they lay out their process, then are attacked for not accomplishing something else? It's how we know it's not about art or honest criticism.
The problem is the real artists no matter what they do. And that’s the take-home message.
It’s not what the beast mouthpiece says is the problem with you.
It’s you.
For artists, Moran did the only thing they can do. Try and succeed commercially outside the House of Lies institutions. And for the Band, there’s something mildly satisfying about methodically demonstrating intellectual vacuous liars, then hammering them until any defense is an admission of cognitive ceiling. The next post will continue with the late artists and the influence. Some big guns still to fire...
Albert Bierstadt, Mount Hood, Oregon, 1860s, oil on canvas
