Accueil
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/05/arts/art-the-american-pre-raphaelites.html
''PAINT the leaves as they grow! If you can paint one leaf, you can paint the world,'' wrote the English critic John Ruskin in his epic ''Modern Painters.'' And in the mid-19th century, a small group of American artists took the advice to heart, rendering Nature close up with such fidelity as to make today's Photo-Realism look - well, out of focus. They came to be known as the American Pre-Raphaelites, and their work - celebrating Ruskin's bless-every- blade-of-grass esthetic - left something of a mark on American landscape and still-life painting. Now ''The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites,'' the first show to study this short-lived movement in depth, has been mounted by the Brooklyn Museum, where it will run through June 10 before moving to Boston.
It's by no means a ''big'' show, rife with stirring, dramatic works. The artists involved tended to work small, concentrating on watercolor still lifes and landscapes rather than the complex narrative themes - mostly done in oil - of the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood that preceded them. The Americans sacrificed interpretation and imagination to obsessive reportage: one of the best-known of them, William Trost Richards, spent the entire summer of 1858 limning ''a blackberry bush in the open air.'' And technically dazzling as some of these paintings are, they lack the romantic grandeur of such concurrent American masters as Church and Bierstadt. What this exhibition, 15 years in the making, really celebrates is the scholarship that has rescued the movement - most of its works still unlocated - from near-oblivion and given it art-historical focus.
The American Pre-Raphaelites, also known as Realists or Naturalists, were led by Thomas Charles Farrer, an English expatriate artist and ardent Ruskin acolyte. In ''Modern Painters,'' Ruskin's insistence on long and earnest study of nature as the basis for art had inspired the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which aimed at reviving the ''purity'' of Italian art before Raphael. Yet the nostalgic, literary compositions of the English artists were fussily detailed and mannered, with bright coloring and high finish. The Americans picked up on the color, finish and detail, but they eschewed the figural for still life and landscape, already important genres here. Following Ruskin, they believed that spiritual insight came from diligent perusal of, and lenslike fidelity to, nature in the raw. And in 1863, under Farrer's leadership, a small band of them formed the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art. In their publication, ''The New Path,'' they pushed Ruskinian principles and brushed off the more painterly landscapists whose work was gaining favor.
The show in Brooklyn, organized by Linda S. Ferber, curator of American painting and sculpture there, and William H. Gerdts, executive officer of the Ph.D. program in art history at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, is mounted in three sections. The first presents work by Ruskin and William Henry Hunt, an English watercolorist whose supreme technical control Ruskin admired. His specialty was birds' nests (with eggs), and the one shown here is a very model of such studies, the nest lying among yellow blossoms on the ground, with three abandoned blue eggs, a meditation - one supposes - on the fragility of life. Also here is Ruskin's famous watercolor, ''Fragment of the Alps,'' a closeup view of boulders more rocklike than rock itself (he felt that stone was the artist's great challenge).
Works by the core group of American Pre-Raphaelites constitute the second section: among them Farrer, John William Hill and his son, John Henry Hill, Charles Herbert Moore, Henry Roderick Newman, Robert J. Pattison and William Trost Richards. Detailed close-ups - many of them exquisitely rendered - of leaves, trees, bushes, berries, blossoms, fruits, dead birds and birds' nests abound, along with some stunning landscapes and one or two English Pre-Raphaelite-style melodramas by Farrer. Outstanding here are Richards's 1861 oil, ''Sunset on the Meadow,'' a perfect meld of close-up detail and general view; Charles Herbert Moore's tiny, unbelievably meticulous canvas, ''Winter Landscape, Valley of the Catskills,'' 1866, and John William Hill's 1864 watercolor ''Pineapples,'' a pair of fruit lying on the ground, so realistically depicted you can smell them. Lovers of watercolor will have a picnic here.
Continue reading the main story
By 1870, the movement was over, but its coloristic principles and focus on detail had an effect on the course of American art. And the third section is devoted to less dogmatic painters who, though they may not have subscribed to the full Pre-Raphaelite message, were nevertheless influenced by it. Enhancing the show are works by Bierstadt, Church, Asher Brown Durand, Thomas Moran, Martin Johnson Heade and Worthington Whittredge, among others. The Pre- Raphaelites may not be the most exciting sub-chapter in American art history, but - thanks to this show and its scholarly catalogue - they are at last enshrined in it.
Also of interest this week:
Ned Smyth (Holly Solomon Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, at 57th Street): An interesting architectural sculptor, who makes both sober and exotic installations of archaized columns, church facades, altars and steles cast in concrete. Ned Smyth began to add mosaic to his surfaces about 1978, and for the last few years, he's used it in Byzantine fashion to portray the figure on flat or columnar forms (a large, elaborate pair of Smyth columns, adorned with a male and a female nude, is in the current Whitney Biennial show). The figures, too, have been archaic, of biblical- mythological extraction, seen in primal attitudes.
His current work is a mix of ancient and, well, contemporary-ancient motifs - a group of large mosaic panels (with the overall title of ''Male Interiors'') that portray an exotic belly dancer, life size, in grisaille relief against a lush, stylized Bible-land of colored stones and glass. In one called ''The Wind Below and Heaven Above,'' she is poised in a dance posture on a ground of big lotus leaves traced in gold with a few blossoms of bright blue; in ''Biting Through,'' she sits, surrounded by leaves and palm fronds, before a formal pair of gates in whose opening a lion's head appears. There is also a series of life- sized, black-and-white drawings of the dancer. The backgrounds are very elegantly realized but the woman's figure, drawn from life with almost photographic realism, hasn't been translated into mosaic with the same stylization. She looks too carefully drawn and realistic. And mosaic is not a medium that lends itself to realism. The overall concept is a bold one, but it doesn't quite come off. I prefer Smyth in the round. (Through April 20.)
Mary A. Armstrong (Victoria Munroe Gallery, 56 West 57th Street): A year in Italy studying early Renaissance predellas provided the impetus for these radiant, delicately painted panels by Mary A. Armstrong. Their small, iconlike format is a rectangle set in a wide frame; the rectangle carries the heart of the painting, but imagery covers all. In ''Solitary Tree,'' for example, a luminous rectangle of sky and water partially confines a stoutly branching birch of subtly nuanced white bark. But the branches explode into another landscape in which appear two orderly rows of tiny cypress trees and an ancient jar on which the big tree stands. The jar is a recurrent motif in the paintings, along with trees and ''sanctuaries'' made of ancient house facades. In the latest, more abstract work, of which ''Pierrot's Eye'' is an example, the tree shape bursts open to reveal a seed or heart form that seems to charge the atmosphere with celestial light. Armstrong's is a visionary talent, and like the old icons, her work invites meditation. (Through April 27.)
Irwin Kremen (Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn): With due respect for an intimate medium, Irwin Kremen keeps the scale of his collages very small, and the eye is seduced into very close scrutiny. They are constructed entirely of weathered paper, paint flakes and bits of cloth - ''experienced papers,'' as he puts it - scavenged from torn wall posters, ravaged billboards, and so forth. And to keep the integrity of their edges, the fragments are not glued but hinged together by tiny bits of Japanese paper, a painstaking method that requires special micro tools. But it's the uncanny way in which Kremen - a professor of psychology at Duke University - orchestrates these tatty street scraps that is cause for marvel. The marriages of tone and texture don't seem arranged, but unavoidable. No further adjustments could be made, for instance, to ''No-Name,'' 1982, a shaggy-feathery thing of shreds and patches whose birdlike brown tone, inflected by areas of black and pale gray-tan, seems essential to its ungainly grace. The torn, layered field of ''Prime Number,'' 1978, with its balanced range of blues and tans, holds in perfect tension the look of man's versus nature's artifact. What they stand for is mortal ruin redeemed by spirit. (Through May 13.)
-Grace Glueck, "Art: The American Pre-Raphaelites", The New York Times, 5 avril 1985.
https://www.nga.gov/press/exh/4104.html
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Burne-Jones
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Charles_Farrer
''PAINT the leaves as they grow! If you can paint one leaf, you can paint the world,'' wrote the English critic John Ruskin in his epic ''Modern Painters.'' And in the mid-19th century, a small group of American artists took the advice to heart, rendering Nature close up with such fidelity as to make today's Photo-Realism look - well, out of focus. They came to be known as the American Pre-Raphaelites, and their work - celebrating Ruskin's bless-every- blade-of-grass esthetic - left something of a mark on American landscape and still-life painting. Now ''The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites,'' the first show to study this short-lived movement in depth, has been mounted by the Brooklyn Museum, where it will run through June 10 before moving to Boston.
It's by no means a ''big'' show, rife with stirring, dramatic works. The artists involved tended to work small, concentrating on watercolor still lifes and landscapes rather than the complex narrative themes - mostly done in oil - of the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood that preceded them. The Americans sacrificed interpretation and imagination to obsessive reportage: one of the best-known of them, William Trost Richards, spent the entire summer of 1858 limning ''a blackberry bush in the open air.'' And technically dazzling as some of these paintings are, they lack the romantic grandeur of such concurrent American masters as Church and Bierstadt. What this exhibition, 15 years in the making, really celebrates is the scholarship that has rescued the movement - most of its works still unlocated - from near-oblivion and given it art-historical focus.
The American Pre-Raphaelites, also known as Realists or Naturalists, were led by Thomas Charles Farrer, an English expatriate artist and ardent Ruskin acolyte. In ''Modern Painters,'' Ruskin's insistence on long and earnest study of nature as the basis for art had inspired the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which aimed at reviving the ''purity'' of Italian art before Raphael. Yet the nostalgic, literary compositions of the English artists were fussily detailed and mannered, with bright coloring and high finish. The Americans picked up on the color, finish and detail, but they eschewed the figural for still life and landscape, already important genres here. Following Ruskin, they believed that spiritual insight came from diligent perusal of, and lenslike fidelity to, nature in the raw. And in 1863, under Farrer's leadership, a small band of them formed the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art. In their publication, ''The New Path,'' they pushed Ruskinian principles and brushed off the more painterly landscapists whose work was gaining favor.
The show in Brooklyn, organized by Linda S. Ferber, curator of American painting and sculpture there, and William H. Gerdts, executive officer of the Ph.D. program in art history at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, is mounted in three sections. The first presents work by Ruskin and William Henry Hunt, an English watercolorist whose supreme technical control Ruskin admired. His specialty was birds' nests (with eggs), and the one shown here is a very model of such studies, the nest lying among yellow blossoms on the ground, with three abandoned blue eggs, a meditation - one supposes - on the fragility of life. Also here is Ruskin's famous watercolor, ''Fragment of the Alps,'' a closeup view of boulders more rocklike than rock itself (he felt that stone was the artist's great challenge).
Works by the core group of American Pre-Raphaelites constitute the second section: among them Farrer, John William Hill and his son, John Henry Hill, Charles Herbert Moore, Henry Roderick Newman, Robert J. Pattison and William Trost Richards. Detailed close-ups - many of them exquisitely rendered - of leaves, trees, bushes, berries, blossoms, fruits, dead birds and birds' nests abound, along with some stunning landscapes and one or two English Pre-Raphaelite-style melodramas by Farrer. Outstanding here are Richards's 1861 oil, ''Sunset on the Meadow,'' a perfect meld of close-up detail and general view; Charles Herbert Moore's tiny, unbelievably meticulous canvas, ''Winter Landscape, Valley of the Catskills,'' 1866, and John William Hill's 1864 watercolor ''Pineapples,'' a pair of fruit lying on the ground, so realistically depicted you can smell them. Lovers of watercolor will have a picnic here.
Continue reading the main story
By 1870, the movement was over, but its coloristic principles and focus on detail had an effect on the course of American art. And the third section is devoted to less dogmatic painters who, though they may not have subscribed to the full Pre-Raphaelite message, were nevertheless influenced by it. Enhancing the show are works by Bierstadt, Church, Asher Brown Durand, Thomas Moran, Martin Johnson Heade and Worthington Whittredge, among others. The Pre- Raphaelites may not be the most exciting sub-chapter in American art history, but - thanks to this show and its scholarly catalogue - they are at last enshrined in it.
Also of interest this week:
Ned Smyth (Holly Solomon Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, at 57th Street): An interesting architectural sculptor, who makes both sober and exotic installations of archaized columns, church facades, altars and steles cast in concrete. Ned Smyth began to add mosaic to his surfaces about 1978, and for the last few years, he's used it in Byzantine fashion to portray the figure on flat or columnar forms (a large, elaborate pair of Smyth columns, adorned with a male and a female nude, is in the current Whitney Biennial show). The figures, too, have been archaic, of biblical- mythological extraction, seen in primal attitudes.
His current work is a mix of ancient and, well, contemporary-ancient motifs - a group of large mosaic panels (with the overall title of ''Male Interiors'') that portray an exotic belly dancer, life size, in grisaille relief against a lush, stylized Bible-land of colored stones and glass. In one called ''The Wind Below and Heaven Above,'' she is poised in a dance posture on a ground of big lotus leaves traced in gold with a few blossoms of bright blue; in ''Biting Through,'' she sits, surrounded by leaves and palm fronds, before a formal pair of gates in whose opening a lion's head appears. There is also a series of life- sized, black-and-white drawings of the dancer. The backgrounds are very elegantly realized but the woman's figure, drawn from life with almost photographic realism, hasn't been translated into mosaic with the same stylization. She looks too carefully drawn and realistic. And mosaic is not a medium that lends itself to realism. The overall concept is a bold one, but it doesn't quite come off. I prefer Smyth in the round. (Through April 20.)
Mary A. Armstrong (Victoria Munroe Gallery, 56 West 57th Street): A year in Italy studying early Renaissance predellas provided the impetus for these radiant, delicately painted panels by Mary A. Armstrong. Their small, iconlike format is a rectangle set in a wide frame; the rectangle carries the heart of the painting, but imagery covers all. In ''Solitary Tree,'' for example, a luminous rectangle of sky and water partially confines a stoutly branching birch of subtly nuanced white bark. But the branches explode into another landscape in which appear two orderly rows of tiny cypress trees and an ancient jar on which the big tree stands. The jar is a recurrent motif in the paintings, along with trees and ''sanctuaries'' made of ancient house facades. In the latest, more abstract work, of which ''Pierrot's Eye'' is an example, the tree shape bursts open to reveal a seed or heart form that seems to charge the atmosphere with celestial light. Armstrong's is a visionary talent, and like the old icons, her work invites meditation. (Through April 27.)
Irwin Kremen (Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn): With due respect for an intimate medium, Irwin Kremen keeps the scale of his collages very small, and the eye is seduced into very close scrutiny. They are constructed entirely of weathered paper, paint flakes and bits of cloth - ''experienced papers,'' as he puts it - scavenged from torn wall posters, ravaged billboards, and so forth. And to keep the integrity of their edges, the fragments are not glued but hinged together by tiny bits of Japanese paper, a painstaking method that requires special micro tools. But it's the uncanny way in which Kremen - a professor of psychology at Duke University - orchestrates these tatty street scraps that is cause for marvel. The marriages of tone and texture don't seem arranged, but unavoidable. No further adjustments could be made, for instance, to ''No-Name,'' 1982, a shaggy-feathery thing of shreds and patches whose birdlike brown tone, inflected by areas of black and pale gray-tan, seems essential to its ungainly grace. The torn, layered field of ''Prime Number,'' 1978, with its balanced range of blues and tans, holds in perfect tension the look of man's versus nature's artifact. What they stand for is mortal ruin redeemed by spirit. (Through May 13.)
-Grace Glueck, "Art: The American Pre-Raphaelites", The New York Times, 5 avril 1985.
https://www.nga.gov/press/exh/4104.html
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Burne-Jones
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Charles_Farrer
