“Thomas Cole: Landscape into History”
at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn,
New York. January 13–April 2, 1995
This exhibition of about sixty works by the English-born American
artist Thomas Cole (1801–1848) is the first major overview of his
work since the late 1940s. But if Cole’s work has not been much in
the public eye of late, it has been on the public’s—at
least the art public’s—mind. For the last fifteen years or so,
Cole has enjoyed a quiet vogue among those concerned to champion
what it has pleased them to call “the American Sublime,” a
fresh-scrubbed, homegrown version of Romanticism whose sources
include the aesthetic writings of Joseph Addison and Edmund Burke
and the landscapes of Claude Lorraine and such Dutch masters as
Hobbema and Ruysdael. Cole, who came to the United States when he was
seventeen, counted Frederic Edwin Church among his pupils and is
generally regarded as the major inspiration for the so-called Hudson
River School. The popularity of that mid-nineteenth-century
phenomenon has helped boost Cole’s stock, and it is surprising that
he has not hitherto attracted serious attention among curators
seeking to please the museum-going public.
The present exhibition, organized jointly by the National Museum of
American Art and the New-York Historical Society (which was to have
been the New York venue), will surely go a long way toward satisfying
the craving for Cole. The works chosen for the exhibition vary
widely—indeed, wildly—in quality. At his best, Cole displayed a
certain breathless vigor and real feeling for grand prospects;
combined with a studied genius for composition—Cole’s arrangement
of objects and zones within his paintings almost always surpasses his
draftsmanship— this attachment to uplift enabled him to produce
some remarkable pictures. If his most stirring and dramatic
landscapes—e.g., Romantic Landscape with Ruined Tower (1832–36),
Mount Etna from Taormina, Sicily (1844), Landscape, Composition,
St. John in the Wilderness (1827)—often flirt with melodrama, his
more restrained efforts—The Architect’s Dream (1840), The
Gardens of the Van Rensselaer Manor House (1840)—possess a nearly
classic dignity that tempers Cole’s penchant for bombast.
Writing about Cole in the late 1940s, Clement Greenberg observed that
the more casual one’s acquaintance with his work, the more highly one
was likely to rate him. At first blush, the exuberance of Cole’s
painting inclined Greenberg to place him with Eakins, Homer, and
Ryder at the top of the American pantheon. Greater familiarity bred
greater reservations. Greenberg conjectured that Cole “did not
adequately understand his own gift,” and there is much in the
present exhibition to support that judgment. When Cole was content to
paint a landscape, he could produce some lovely work. Individual
patches of foliage are quite fetching. Unfortunately, he was
addicted to the Ideal, to grandiosity in all its stage-lit,
hyperventilated forms, and the more he succumbed to this passion the
more his paintings are likely to seem, as Greenberg put it, “too
heavy, mechanical, and uniform to permit the canvas to breathe.”
The burden of the ideal is especially heavy in Cole’s ambitious
allegorical sequences, The Course of Empire (1834–36) and The
Voyage of Life (1842). He may have been in hot pursuit of an
impossible goal: to blend allegory, which requires great attention to
the particular, with the sublime, which requires the surrender of
particularity to the absolute. “A clear idea,” Burke wrote in his
book on the beautiful and the sublime, “is another name for a little
idea.” Maybe so. But large ideas in art are a dangerous
thing—dangerous, anyway, to the aesthetic substance of art. It is
easy to admire the noble sentiments that went into Cole’s grandest
works. The problem is suppressing a giggle when contemplating the
woodenness of
his figures: their every gesture is a pose and their
conversation, could one transcribe it, would be full of Thees,
Thous, and a baroque scheme of capitalization.
Cole probably should have stuck to the vegetable and mineral
kingdoms; animals of all descriptions were beyond him. There are some
really lamentable sheep in this exhibition, not to mention a boneless
Prometheus
bound to his rock and a senile Daniel Boone. Cole’s
Indians tend to remind one of Fenimore Cooper’s Indians, as seen by
Mark Twain: the difference between a Cooper Indian and the Indian in
front of a cigar store, Twain observed, is not large.
“Thomas Cole” was previously on view
at the National Museum of American Art
in Washington, D.C. (March 18–August 7, 1994), and the
Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut (September 11–
December 4,
1994). A catalogue, edited by William H. Truettner and Alan Wallach,
and with essays by divers hands, has been published by the National
Museum of American Art and Yale University Press (186 pages, $50;
$29.95 paper).