Landscape
This past Saturday, Sara and I drove to Catskill to the Thomas Cole National Historic Site to view the exhibit “Women Reframe American Landscape.”
Entering the Visitor Center, we were greeted by a poster created by the Guerilla Girls, an anonymous group of feminist female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. Here is part of the text of the poster:
“It wasn’t a school, it was a club! . . of white males who painted the American landscape, hung out together, and sold their work to many of the same collectors. Female painters like Susie Barstow and Sarah Cole were welcome to tag along with the guys but couldn’t expect the same recognition. They would have to wait 150 years for shows like Women Reframe American Landscape. Black landscape painters like Edward Mitchell Bannister and Robert Duncanson could admire the Hudson River School, but never join the club.”
I fell in love with the Catskill mountains on my first trip to Albany, coming to interview for a job at the University, driving down the Northway to Western Avenue, seeing three peaks in the distance. For years I had an office whose window framed a similar view. I hung a reprint of Frederic Church’s “Above the Clouds at Sunrise” sunrise on a wall I painted Sunset Rose. My office faced west and in winter as the sun set I was bathed in a landscape of my own creating as the rays of sun hit painting and wall at the same moment making them one.
Sara and I regularly visit Olana, the home of Frederic Church. We bring our chairs and we sit on the lawn and we look down the hills, across the fields, at the view of the distant Hudson. I have a watercolor of this view, purchased many years ago at a fund raiser for Olana and given prominent place in the living room. The view, of course, indeed the entire landscape of Olana, comprise one of Church’s greatest works of art.
Besotted as I was, it never occurred to me to look further than the roster of males who constituted the “school” – Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Jasper Cropsey, Asher Durand, Sanford Gifford, John Kensett, and others, all male.
I spent 20 years of my academic life recovering the work of 19th century American women writers systematically excluded from the canon of American literature by the male creators of that canon. I should have been prepared to discover the same phenomenon in art. I wasn’t.
Somehow my passion for the landscape put my radical feminism to sleep.
Of course there were women who were part of the Hudson River school of painting and were successful and respected in their day, just as there were women writers successful and respected in their day. As was the case with women writers, the obliteration is an affair of the makers of the canon.
The primary artist featured in the exhibit was Susie Bartow. I was particularly enchanted with a small work titled “Pool in the Woods.” Painted in 1885, it was purchased by Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, one of the 19th century women writers whose reputation I had worked to restore. It currently hangs, when not on loan, at Stowe’s home in Hartford. The connection delights me.
As a woman, Barstow faced serious obstacles in realizing her dream of being a painter but she early on expressed her determination to succeed. At age 20 she declared, “I will overcome every barrier to success and make myself a name and a position that will influence the whole world.” Perhaps her preference for women – she had a two-decade partnership with another woman painter — helped her succeed; certainly her class and race privilege worked in her favor. Still I am in awe of such self-assurance.
She used it to help others.
“Barstow lectured widely on the value of experiencing nature directly. She taught and traveled with female students to give them instruction en plein air in the northeastern landscape while advocating for progressive ideas such as women’s suffrage and access to study the nude male model as part of women’s late nineteenth-century academic training. As a professional artist, Barstow exhibited at major venues alongside male colleagues and realized comparable prices for her paintings. Furthermore she commanded the physical landscape of the Hudson Valley, the While Mountains, the rigorous terrain of Yosemite, the Alps– actually any mountain range she encountered that offered stunning vistas and marvelous views – all the while altering her long skirts and hiking garb so as not to be incumbered on those rugged explorations.”
I was struck particularly by her help with the outfits!
At the exhibit, we encountered a series of cards placed throughout the house – in chamber pots, by the door, in the reception area, by a water bucket – asking the question: who emptied, who opened, who served the food, who brought the water from the well. For even women painters are likely to have been served by unnamed and often unacknowledged others. Most certainly the men were. I was reminded again that there are two questions we must always ask of everything we witness: first, cui bono? Who benefits? And then, who did the work?
Driving home, I asked Sara what landscapes she would want to paint if she were a painter. This led us to ponder what constitutes a landscape. As we imagined the terrains that Susie Barstow tramped, concluding they were what is meant by the term “landscape,” we wondered if we could get access to such sites today. For is it not the case that the landscapes painted by the Hudson River School, whether male or female, present themselves as unowned by anything but the eye? “American Paradise” is the title the Metropolitan Museum of Art gave to its 1994 exhibit of the “World of the Hudson River School.” Nobody owns paradise.
Except, of course, reality is far more complex. Cole himself despaired at the destruction of the very landscape he loved by those who took legal ownership and began the endless chopping of trees. Church purchased his landscape, 250 acres of it, in order to control it, and those who seek to preserve Olana have fought long and hard to keep the viewshed from being destroyed by the “wrong” owners.
But still what engaged my thinking as we drove back to Albany was the absence of any representation of human ownership in the work of this school/club. As if indeed paradise depends upon such absence.
Because, I thought, after feasting on the views of spaces presented as unowned, what a bizarre thing it is to own a piece of land? I had so taken this relation of land to person for granted that, like the presumed fish in the presumed water, I had never noticed it. Yet it constitutes the fundamental reality of my situation. I built my garden, my own landscape, my own bit of paradise, because I owned a piece of land.
If my current delight, indeed happiness, depends upon my owning a piece of land, why am I so drawn to paintings that present nature as unowned and indeed as unownable. Is it possible that I am having these thoughts because my time for being on this land could end at any moment? Is it possible that I am having these thoughts because I know the next person who gets title to my 2/3 of an acre will most likely uproot much of what I have planted? Is it possible that somewhere inside me lies the desire for a different relationship to this bit of land?