Albert Pinkham Ryder and the "ceaseless melody of the northern line"

Albert Pinkham Ryder, Moonlit Cove, 1890

Albert Pinkham Ryder is one of several great 19th century American artists yet to become familiar to the general public at large.

There are many reasons for Ryder's low profile, not the least of which is that his work has imploded over time; his already scant number of paintings have seriously deteriorated because of his heedlessness to sound oil painting technique. Living like a hermit in a tiny, squalid New York apartment through the late 1800s, Ryder would evolve his paintings over decades, heaping layer upon wet layer on his canvases and liberally using bitumen (a distant cousin of road tar, apparently), which, apparently, puckers, warps, and discolors over time.

Rock star American art historian Barbara Novak devotes a chapter to Ryder in her very readable American Painting of the Nineteenth Century. She identifies Ryder as a visionary "in search of the impossible and the unattainable," who used painting as a visual language to express ideas and internal states of consciousness rather than "empathy with nature" like the Impressionists and many previous American landscapists did so well. As Novak says, Ryder might have said, along with Paul Klee, "Art does not render the visible, but makes visible."

What does it make visible? In Ryder's art, Novak identifies two types of religious experience. On the one hand (in agitated canvases depicting storms, churning waters, Biblical mayhem, gothic episodes from imagination, and operatic and literary works like Macbeth), it becomes a visual metaphor for the self caught up in "a dizzying religious experience" signified by the intense animation of nature (as in van Gogh). In "Lord Ullin's Daughter," the opposing diagonals (of clouds, cliffs, and crashing waves) create a tension that Ryder further ratchets up with sharp edged triangles and counter movements from all directions, though the eye keeps coming back to the storm-tossed figure, a stand-in for the viewer.

Ryder, Lord Ullin's Daughter, 1905

Very much on the other hand (most clearly, in depictions of isolated boats silhouetted in an "abstract void" of Ryder's own invention), his art makes visible "a serene, almost Oriental absorption of the self into cosmos, an annihilation of the self." This Buddhistic dissolution of the self had a strong American precedent in New England Transcendentalism (and think of Melville for the chaos) and in "those painters who erased their own artistic presence in the attempt to realize the life of things," as Novak writes.

Here the forms flow into around each other in gentler, rhythmic patterns, the flatness of the picture plane serving to augment the design's quieter, primarily horizontal movements. Here Ryder subdues anecdotal detail in favor of mood.  

Surely for Ryder, these two forms of self-transcendence, the self's absorption in primal chaos and its dissolution into a oneness with the cosmos, are two sides of the same coin. But here's what's really interesting. These two strains in Ryder and American art and thought, we might call them the Sublime and the Transcendental, reemerged unabated in the 20th century, though rarely in one single artist. The chaos is there in the Abstract Expressionists who channeled untamed forces of nature, such as de Kooning,

Willem de Kooning, Untitled, 1948

Joan Mitchell,

Joan Mitchell, Untitled, c. 1950

and Jackson Pollock (who named both Melville and Ryder as influences),

Jackson Pollock, Silver over Black, White, Yellow, and Red, 1948

Jackson Pollock, Moby Dick, 1943

and on the other hand, painters who quieted the self into Buddhistic non-existence, such as Rothko, 

Mark Rothko, Black in Deep Red, 1948

and subsequent colorists and abstractionists such as Frankenthaler,

Hellen Frankenthaler, Madame Matisse, 1983

Morris Lewis

Morris Lewis, Blue Veil, 1958

and Agnes Martin.

Agnes Martin, Untitled, 2004

I see this as an America artistic and spiritual heritage, albeit one that, judging from what I've seen of late, contemporary and especially conceptual art since Pop and Duchamp mostly rejects.

Ryder would have loved abstract expressionism. "The artist should fear to become the slave of detail," Ryder cautioned. "He should strive to express his thought and not the surface of it. What avails a storm cloud accurate in form and color if the storm is not therein?" Pollock echoed those words when he explained, "I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them."

Albert Pinkham Ryder, Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens, 1888-91

Ryder worked on his painting Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens from 1888 to 1891. It's based on a scene from Wagner's operatic "Ring" cycle, but the back story's not important. Just look at the thing! As Ryder said, "the storm is within." In terms of line, these fluid, twilit forms of light and dark spin everything into motion. From the towering, undulating tree branches to the mythical hero stunned by the appearance of the wily water-spirits, it's a vision of man and nature in archetypal, everlasting turmoil. Okay, its hard to see on a jpeg smaller than a credit card, but who else had painted the fragility and resistance, the archetypal uncertainty of the human condition with such directness? Only the towering greats, El Greco, Goya, Turner, and Michelangelo (especially of the Last Judgment) come to mind. Of Ryder's Siegfried Novak enthuses, "The insistent rhythms... are fixed into the 'good Gestalt' of the perfect design. Siegfried belongs, like El Greco's View of Toledo, to that small group of masterpieces that stamp themselves on our minds with instantaneous - indeed, almost violent - authority." (p. 218)

Novak traces the painterly lineage of the Gothic sensibility in evidence here to what German art historian Worringer, whose ideas supported early 20th century abstraction, called the "ceaseless melody of the northern line," the "whorling, convoluted rhythms that worked their way into Baroque religious art 

Bernini, The Rape of Proserpina, 1622

and ultimately through the expansive forms of Rubens," 

Rubens, Allegory on the Blessings of Peace, 1630

into the romantic color and florid mis-en-scenes of Delacroix, 

Delacroix, Sardanoupolus, 1827

and the sublime, off-kilter light of Turner and beyond. 

J.M.W. Turner, Snowstorm, Steamboat off a Harbor, 1842

"It was this sensibility," novak writes, intensified emotionally, that informed the Expressionism of Munich and the German artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his Gothic visionary aspect, 'Ryder shared this sensibility.'"

Who knows what God knows?

His hand He never shows,

Yet miracles with less are wrought,

Even with a thought.

-A. P. Ryder

Spring Tufts

File under "humble subject matter." One of art's tasks in our time is to reveal beauty in the mundane, to raise the commonplace to the level of the extraordinary. 

I've been struck by the beauty that painters through the ages have wrung from the humble tuft of weedy grass. Once again the lesson is that subject matter may easily be the least important aspect of painting. These paintings portray bits of leaf and stem that people pass hundreds of times without noticing. Art such as this helps to remind us that anything can become the basis for amazing, meaningful art if only it's seen for its expressive potential. 

Here are some anonymous tufts of grass and bracken, a few bare, weedy shoots and branches to remind us that yes, spring really is going to come eventually.

Don't be fooled by the run-of-the-mill plant life in these! These works repay careful consideration and can tell us a lot about design work, compositional choices, the application of the paint, and the evocation of mood, even given the most unremarkable starting-places. Here is proof that the poetic and the sublime need not depend on grandiose or dramatic subject matter.

It ain't what you paint; it's how you see it.

The first three are by contemporary Philly painter Alex Kanevsky. Sorry about the lack of titles- I hope to clothe the naked paintings in them later.

These four are by Leon Bonvin (French, 1834-1866), whom I am tempted to crown "King and Master of the Tuft."

One of the first western artists to elevate the tuft to the level of immortal representation is probably Leonardo, but here's a beautifully realized work by Albrecht Durer to look at instead.

Albrecht Durer, The Large Piece of Turf, 1503

Look how Ivan Shishkin can pull beauty out of the weeds!

Ivan Shishkin

Here'sa typical zen style painting of seemingly random bamboo shoots by Araki Jippo (1872-1944).

Bamboo Shoots, Araki Jippo (1872-1944)

Dennis Miller Bunker gets a shoutout not for painting individual pieces of turf so much as for helping to initiate the painterly attitude toward ordinary scenery still celebrated among plein air painters today.

Dennis Miller Bunker, The Pool, Medfield, 1889

And to bring it back around to the contemporary, I leave you with this one is by Robert Baart and an invitation to participate by drawing my attention to your own favorite paintings of the most commonplace little clumps of natural beauty.

Robert Baart, Water Sedge

White Mountain Art

Just back from a well-received lecture I gave with a colleague of mine from Chester College on White Mountain art and artists. This time we gave the presentation at The Balsams, a grand hotel in Dixville Notch. I tried to give context for the arc of American landscape painting from the 1820s to about 1870 and today with a focus on the twin lights of White Mountain art as these painters saw it: the pastoral vistas and the sublime precipices of the White Mountain range.

The following essay of mine appeared in the catalogue of an exhibition of White Mountain art mounted by The Banks Gallery. It appears in the book “Visions in Granite II,” published in 2008 by Blue Tree in Portsmouth, N.H.

New Hampshire’s White Mountains played a crucial and still under-appreciated role in the coming of age of American art. Arriving in the midst of nineteenth century America’s desire for a worthy symbol of national identity, the artistic “discovery” of the White Mountains was a key moment in the establishment of a nationalist aesthetic under the banner of the liberat

ion of American painting from European models. In the 1820s, before the opening of the American West, the White Mountain region offered unparalleled expansive pastoral views coupled with the most rugged peaks and chasms accessible at the time. During the nineteenth century, their majestic views and picturesque valleys proved irresistible to hundreds of artists, both men and women, who found in them not only a dazzling beauty but a Romantic Eden full of sublime portent and seemingly endless creative possibility.

Lancaster hunter-trapper Timothy Nash discovered the area known as Crawford Notch in 1771 while tracking a moose over Cherry Mountain. He correctly matched the gap he spotted to his south with Native American lore describing a steep-walled pass through the mountains. He made his way there, pushed through it, and kept going all the way to Portsmouth to tell the governor about it. He was promised that if he could get a horse through the Notch from Lancaster, which was doubtful, and then build a road in from the east, a good chunk of the land was his. He and a partner had to lower the horse over a few boulders with ropes, but they succeeded, and the first carriage road to the White Mountains opened in 1775. The Crawford family, the first to permanently settle there, ran a well-known inn and tavern at the base of Mount Washington, the Mount Crawford House, for years.

Early nineteenth-century paintings and engravings of Crawford Notch provided the country’s first glimpses of the magnificence of the White Mountains. Massachusetts landscapists Thomas Doughty and Alvan Fisher traveled to the White Mountains in the 1820s and ‘30s, and a Romantic painting of the Notch by Fisher made a sensation when he exhibited it in Boston in 1834. But Thomas Cole’s celebrated 1839 work, A View of the Mountain Pass Called the Notch of the White Mountains, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., inaugurated a whole new ideal in American art.

A critic writing that year in New York’s art newspaper The Knickerbocker hailed Cole’s painting as a “truly American picture,” in no small part because of the “boldness of the scenery itself.” Grand with towering mountain peaks and lush with streams, lakes, and valleys, the White Mountains more than anywhere else in the nation seemed to offer early-to-mid nineteenth century artists and writers a distinctly American synthesis of picturesque beauty and sublime grandeur superior even to European antecedents. Cole, considered a major pioneer of the so-called Hudson River School style, singled out New Hampshire and its “wild” mountains as uniting all of the quintessentially “American” qualities of the new world’s landscape. In his influential “Essay on American Scenery,” published in the American Monthly Magazine’s January 1836 issue, Cole rhapsodized that:

“in the mountains of New Hampshire there is a union of the picturesque, the sublime and the magnificent; there the bare peaks of granite, broken and desolate, cradle the clouds; while the vallies (sic) and broad bases of the mountains rest under the shadow of noble and varied forests …. although in some regions of the globe nature has wrought on a more stupendous scale, yet she has nowhere so completely married together grandeur and loveliness – there [one] sees the sublime melting into the beautiful, the savage tempered by the magnificent.”

Hallmarks of nineteenth century Romanticism, the “sublime” and the “picturesque” represented two poles of emotional response to nature; the picturesque spoke to nature’s beauty and its Platonic symbolism of the harmony between the human and the divine; the sublime spoke to mortality and the insignificance of human life in the face of the violent, impersonal forces of nature.

In Crawford Notch, Cole, who was a strongly didactic and dramatic narrative painter, depicted a tense, forbidding, dangerous wilderness such as the public had been led to expect from cautioning guidebooks and “reports from the interior.” At the bottom of the steep, broken cliffs of the pass, Cole included the deserted cabin of the famous Willey family. In 1826, a massive landslide in Crawford Notch drove the valley’s first pioneering family, that of Samuel Willey, Jr. his wife, five children, a hired man and a boy, from out of their homestead and to their deaths, perversely sparing the cabin they’d evacuated. Adjacent to it, Cole depicted a larger homestead, perhaps the Crawfords’, as emblematic of the Jeffersonian ideal of small holders contentedly cultivating their share of the land. Above them, blue sky battles a passing storm. Dead trees throw up blanched, contorted branches while foreground shadow darkens the looming stumps of trees downed by axes and nature’s caprice.

Nathanial Hawthorne blended traditional elements of the sublime and the picturesque in his sketch of the Willey incident in “The Ambitious Guest,” in which “the lowly cottage,” its hearth “piled high with the driftwood of mountain streams” and “the splintered ruins of great trees” is engulfed by the “unutterable horror of catastrophe” in “a cataract of ruin.” The “Willey Disaster,” as it came to be known, kindled interest as its story reverberated along the eastern seaboard, confirming early reports of the dangers of this “wild” region. For artists, however, the vacant Willey cabin, standing abandoned to the elements, instantly created a “ruin” emblematic of the darker forces in nature, furnishing artists such as Cole with a pictorial theme worthy of earlier European art’s “Gothick sublimity.”

Over the succeeding decades, Crawford Notch, Mount Washington and Chocorua and the rest of the White Mountains provided more than just compelling subject matter. Then, as now, they provided an ideal site for artists seeking American scenery illuminated by high Romanticism’s twin lights: nature’s primeval sublimity and “picturesque” – and unforgettable – beauty.