Hello everybody and welcome back to My Weekly Flickr.
Some time ago I wrote about the Berkshire Museum and its plan to sell 40 of its paintings and use the proceeds to increase its endowment, renovate its building and expand its programming. This goes against the unofficial museum code that art is never to be sold unless the proceeds are used to purchase different art. Not surprisingly the news engendered protests and a lawsuit; in particular to prevent the sale of a Norman Rockwell painting. You can read the article below which details that the sale will be allowed to take place although the Norman Rockwell must be sold to another institution so it will remain in public hands and not wind up in a private collection. I’m happy that the Rockwell will remain on view but I think the overall decision sets a bad precedent. Coincidentally a number of the paintings to be sold are from the Hudson River painters, a group which I will now discuss.
Massachusetts Agrees to Allow Berkshire Museum to Sell Its Art
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/arts/massachusetts-agrees-to-allow-berkshire-museum-to-sell-its-art.html This week I went back to the Met for their new exhibit, Thomas Cole's Journey, Atlantic Crossings. It’s a very large exhibit filled with masterpieces. My brother says it will be the sleeper hit of the season and I agree. The Wall Street Journal gave it a rave review which I’ve copied below. Cole is referred to as the father of the Hudson River painters, men like Frederic Edwin Church, Asher Durand and Albert Bierstadt, artists I’ve mentioned numerous times. As the WSJ predicts I was very surprised to discover that his designation as Father of the genre was meant to be derogatory, implying in the light of Impressionism that Cole and his followers were old fashioned. In addition to Cole’s work there are many paintings by his peers and followers as well artists he was inspired by such as JMW Turner, John Constable and Claude Lorrain. The number and quality of the works was a bit of a surprise until you find that the Met’s co-organizers in the exhibit are the National Gallery of London and a Yale University art professor.
This is a link to the Met website with an Overview of the exhibition and links to the exhibition galleries and all the objects in the exhibit.
https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2018/thomas-cole This is a link to the Met press release announcing the exhibit with two short videos, one concerning the life of Thomas Cole and the other which looks at two works using radiography to show drawings beneath the paint and also discusses Coles feelings about protecting the environment from industrialization.
https://www.metmuseum.org/press/exhibitions/2018/thomas-cole This is a direct link to all the objects in the exhibit. Everything in the exhibit is worthwhile visiting but I’ll make some selections and list them below.
https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/objects?exhibitionId=6d5e931d-aa7f-461e-bd51-f29337ff40d5#!?perPage=100&offset=0 Thomas Cole - From Nature – This is an early pen and ink drawing of an aged and weather-beaten tree.
https://tinyurl.com/y9b9dq3g JMW Turner – Leeds – Leeds was the first Industrial city in the UK and this watercolor was the first depiction of it.
https://tinyurl.com/y85vjdml John Constable – Stonehenge – Another watercolor. It is owned by the Victoria and Albert Museum in the UK. My brother tells me this is a very famous painting, he was surprised the V&A would loan it out, and I came across this discussion of it. “Constable painted this at a sad time in his life. Both his wife, Maria, and his closest friend, John Fisher, had died, and his two eldest sons had left home. He is perhaps expressing his personal unhappiness in the watercolor, for the image is certainly a melancholy one. The painting was exhibited in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1836. Some of the lines that accompanied this painting in the catalogue describe ‘The mysterious monument of Stonehenge, standing remote on a bare and boundless heath…’. Constable himself probably wrote them.”
https://tinyurl.com/y9xwm2j3 Claude Lorrain - Seaport with the Embarkation of Saint Ursula – Another very famous painting and rather different from the pastoral paintings of his that I’ve come across. This is a brief discussion of it. “According to legend Saint Ursula was a British princess who made a pilgrimage to Rome with 11,000 virgin companions. She returned with them to Cologne, where they were all martyred. St Ursula is shown here, in yellow and holding a flag with her emblem, watching her companions embark on the return voyage. The girls carry bows and arrows, the instruments of their martyrdom. The building at the left is based on the Tempietto di San Pietro in Montorio, Rome. The canvas was painted in 1641 for Fausto Poli, who was made a cardinal by Pope Urban VIII in 1643.”
https://tinyurl.com/y98jmyyr John Constable - The Opening of Waterloo Bridge ("Whitehall Stairs, June 18th, 1817") – This is a link to the Tate where the painting lives. It’s a very large painting and this is a better reproduction than at the Met website and there’s also an essay about it. The clouds are quite striking and it’s interesting that he painted the bridge itself in the distance and not the immediate focus of the painting.
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/constable-the-opening-of-waterloo-bridge-whitehall-stairs-june-18th-1817-t04904 JMW Turner - Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps – This is another very large picture and again the clouds and sky take up the bulk of the canvas. So despite the subject being Hannibal and his army they are very small figures at the bottom of the image.
https://tinyurl.com/yczjp4ds Asher Durand – Kindred Spirits – This picture pays homage to Thomas Cole showing him with his friend, the poet William Cullen Bryant. There was a major controversy over the way the Crystal Bridges Museum acquired the painting, through auction, from the New York Public Library. Many people and institutions wanted the painting to stay in New York and the Met and the National Gallery made a concerted effort towards that purpose but Sotheby’s held a closed bid auction which helped Crystal Bridges win the auction. You can read about that in the second link.
https://tinyurl.com/yb3ahqf5 http://www.artnews.com/2005/06/07/the-durand-sale-dismay-and-anger-linger/ Frederic Edwin Church – Niagara – This is a small version of the enormous painting of Niagara Falls that hangs in the National Gallery. It was painted the following year and is in private hands. The version in the National Gallery is an awe inspiring picture, I always say you can feel the water coming off it when standing in front of it. The second link is to the National Gallery website.
https://tinyurl.com/yadsjg8p https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.166436.html Thomas Cole - The Titan’s Goblet – A fantasy, it’s described on the website as: “The massive, vegetation encrusted goblet around whose rim are found classical ruins, and on whose glassy surface boats sail, has been linked to Norse legend and Greek mythology.” You see the water leaking out the sides cascading down below.
https://tinyurl.com/y7dqaczy Thomas Cole - Aqueduct Near Rome – Two wonderful paintings of Roman ruins that chronicle Cole’s interest in the rise and fall of civilization as ultimately depicted in The Course of Empire.
https://tinyurl.com/y73dxvgh Thomas Cole - Interior of the Colosseum, Rome
https://tinyurl.com/y8g6wkqb Thomas Cole - The Garden of Eden – Lush depiction of the origin of man, we see the small Adam and Eve standing in the unspoiled garden.
https://www.ancient.eu/uploads/images/7872.jpg?v=1515660880 Thomas Cole - The Oxbow – This is a paean to the beauty of the wilderness and a warning against deforestation and the advancement of industry and agriculture. You have to look closely at the bottom of the image to see that Cole has painted himself at work.
https://tinyurl.com/y94t643w Thomas Cole - The Course of Empire (5 paintings) – I’ve linked to Wikipedia for this as it has all five of the paintings available to see as well as a discussion about them. They’re owned by the New York Historical Society and hung in the second floor galleries for years. The really wonderful thing about this current exhibit is that rather than being hung high like at the
Society, all five paintings are hung at eye level in an alcove. You can move about in front of them and see the progression of man’s beginning to his destruction. A brilliant series, his masterworks.
https://tinyurl.com/h82dy2sThis is a review from the Washington Post.
https://tinyurl.com/yb3d7rj7 This is a review from the Observer.
http://observer.com/2018/02/review-mets-thomas-coles-journey-atlantic-crossings-exhibition/ This is a review from Antiques and the Arts
https://www.antiquesandthearts.com/thomas-coles-journey-atlantic-crossings/ There was so much great work in this exhibit that it really was hard to pick and choose but I chose what I considered to be the best items.
If you’re looking for the Flickrs they follow this review from the Wall Street Journal. I copied the actual review as the site is behind a paywall.
Andy G.
Wall Street Journal
‘Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings’ Review: Hudson River School Headmaster
Cole is so firmly identified with American painting that his oeuvre has rarely been considered in an international context—until now.
Barrymore Laurence Scherer
Jan. 30, 2018
New York
When, in 1848, the painter Thomas Cole suddenly died at age 47, his funeral oration was delivered by his celebrated friend William Cullen Bryant, the poet and journalist, who recalled the “enthusiasm awakened by…pictures which carried the eye over scenes of wild grandeur peculiar to our country…and into the depths of skies…such as few but Cole could ever paint.”
Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings
The Met Fifth Avenue
Through May 13
For those “scenes of wild grandeur” Cole is generally regarded as the father of the “Hudson River School.” The term has for so long designated America’s first indigenous school of landscape painting that many admirers today would be surprised to learn it was initially coined in derision. Cole’s dramatic imagery, like that of such followers as Frederic Edwin Church, Asher B. Durand and Albert Bierstadt, was being deemed old-fashioned compared to French Barbizon and Impressionist paintings. But without Cole there might have been no Winslow Homer.
Cole is so firmly identified with American painting that his oeuvre has rarely been considered in an international context. Now the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s deeply absorbing new exhibition “Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings” is doing exactly that.
Organized by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, the Met’s curator of American paintings and sculpture, and Tim Barringer, Yale professor of art history, with Christopher Riopelle, curator of post-1800 paintings at the National Gallery, London, the exhibition and its richly informative catalog depart from our traditional view of Cole chiefly as a home-grown American artist. Instead, for the first time, they examine the English-born patriarch of American landscape painting beside the European contemporaries and old masters whose works he studied firsthand during several voyages to England, France and Italy—especially John Constable, Claude Lorrain, John Martin and Joseph Mallord William Turner.
Cole was born and raised in a northwestern English village begrimed by the coal smoke of burgeoning industry. Among the first works in the show is Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg’s 1801 “Coalbrookdale by Night,” its rustic, half-timbered houses silhouetted against an infernal sky set aflame by the town’s iron-smelting forges. Such a scene formed the backdrop to Cole’s Lancashire youth, and suggests why he would later glorify America’s virgin, wooded landscape while implying a warning against its deforestation not just by industry but even by agriculture. This is the essential message of his beloved “View From Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow” (1836), also in the show.
Cole briefly worked for a Liverpool engraver whose prints of contemporary paintings may have introduced him to fine art. Intent on becoming an artist after immigrating to America with his parents in 1818, he was principally self-taught and began painting the Hudson Valley as he wished to see it—unmarred by development and dramatically tinged with his poetic fervor. The success of Cole’s initial landscapes, including “The Garden of Eden” (1828), prompted him, in 1829, to make his first European voyage.
In London, Cole made a beeline for the newly opened National Gallery, delighting there in Claude’s 1641 “Seaport With the Embarkation of St. Ursula,” its combination of figures, Classical architecture and soft, crepuscular lighting influencing his own work thereafter. At the Royal Academy, Cole was astounded by the stark ruins and sumptuous clouds in Constable’s recently finished “Hadleigh Castle, the Mouth of the Thames—Morning After a Stormy Night.” At Turner’s private gallery, Cole was awed by “Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps,” though not by Turner’s crude appearance and manner. Though he would later regard Turner’s more radical style with disdain, Cole virtually quotes Turner’s menacing arc of cloud as the departing storm in “The Oxbow.” And to come upon these great works—respectively lent by London’s National Gallery, Yale Center for British Art and Tate Britain—hanging together in the show is to feel Cole’s own wonderment and understand the challenge he faced in formulating his own aesthetic.
Cole’s ambitious pentalogy, “The Course of Empire” (1834-36)—lent by the New-York Historical Society—forms the exhibition’s centerpiece. Magnificently displayed at eye level in its own five-sided alcove, it invites viewers to examine every finely conceived detail of its grand and cautionary narrative. Here, the music-loving Cole produces a psalm of nature as eloquent as Beethoven’s “Pastoral” symphony. In retrospect, we can acknowledge that Cole had every reason to fear that his beloved American landscape was threatened.
The show’s thoughtfully selected paintings, drawings, oil sketches and related works by Cole, by the Europeans who influenced him, and by the American painters who perpetuated his legacy clarify the dynamic balance between his indebtedness to foreign tradition and innovation, and also his own original vision: Cole’s fantasy “Titan’s Goblet” (1833) anticipates the surrealism of Salvador Dalí and René Magritte a century in the future.
Ultimately, it is hard to imagine any visitor departing this moving exhibition without a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of Cole’s extraordinary activity not just as an American, but as an actor upon the world’s stage.
—Mr. Scherer writes about music and the fine arts for the Journal.
Party Dress all buttoned and bowed...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/137337412@N02/24531471746/Magic Theatre memories by Ricky Dixon
https://www.flickr.com/photos/tanyadawnhughes/25292950508/Another one leather dress in my collection
https://www.flickr.com/photos/50965933@N02/25293665118/LOVE this dress !!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/146138013@N06/38272266886/Happy Halloween to all the creatures of the night.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/debbie_lewissmith/37998219006/Power of Love (Huey Lewis)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/55377997@N05/38585957802/The legendary Holly White
https://www.flickr.com/photos/trannilicious2011/39141484791/Crystal Transformation
https://www.flickr.com/photos/boyswillbegirls/36653500056/really bad
https://www.flickr.com/photos/katvarina/24036163237/Party Dress 2
https://www.flickr.com/photos/anne_zoe/37818082322/
Betty's Pub 20.1
Topic: There’s no denying we are now in the Winter Flickr (Read 13699 times)
