Rebecca Brown in her lovely and engaging blog-post 'The Stranger,' recently wrote on Romantic Propaganda. She was referencing in particular a visit to Frederick Church’s home in Ocala in the Hudson River Valley: “It's about knowing, though not wanting to admit, that the best is already behind us; that we have, by our very presence here in this amazing landscape, fucked it up.”
At first blush her take on the paintings of Church, these lovely visions of light and “unblemished landscape,” are exactly right. This is what 19th century paintings were after. They wanted us to see the Great American West as unspoiled Country “God’s Country." The cities at the time were thick with smoke, filth, and dead animals, and dirty foreigners from the South and East of Europe; they needed cleansing. Cleanliness is next to Godliness and these Italians, and Irish, and Polish were very, very far away from the Protestant Lord. “Go West, young man” said Horace Greeley in 1865 quoting the Terra Haute express from 1851 (a child hood home of mine in elementary school -- we lived just across the Wabash in Marshall, Illinois).
E.L. Doctorov wrote a complete historical fiction of the U.S as his late career masterpiece. He said, “Many people believed that filth and starvation and disease were what the immigrant got for moral degeneracy.” As an Eastern Immigrant himself, Doctorov was well versed in the racism that received his family in the US (possibly a useful reference for those wishing to make peace with the Dept. of Homeland Security “How the Irish Became White” by Noel Ignatiev).
My dad and I (hidden Jews in this nation -- originally Chapman changed from Kaufman on his mother’s side) made a trip to the Milwaukee Art Museum this weekend. There, along with his Filipino bride -- my stepmother Bella, and my little brother Paul Sebastian we discovered an unusual work by my favorite American Romantic painter John Kensett. This one titled Lakes of Killarney. A remarkably ornate and complicated piece.
I adore Kensett. He reaps such great rewards through the simplification of his craft. Morandi is my favorite painter for the same reason and as a young art student in Chicago I tore my hair out trying to achieve such great heights through simplicity. But, I was often admonished by my advisor Dan Gustin, “you are a not a simple person, you are a complicated person. This isn’t you to make such concise work.”
And yet, every time I pore over the surface of a Kensett and I see long shapes with thin surfaces that create space and breath with such soft edges I am left breathless. How can I be this easy?
However, I am aware there is something much more complicated going on here. There is something unsaid with Kensett and the Hudson River Valley School. These folks are striving in their own way to #MakeAmericaGreatAgain. A century ago these fine painters -- the finest painters America ever produced -- made these paintings by sitting down in the late 19th century with soft tonalities and blended edges. Arguably, these were the best craftsmanship we ever made, also the most naïve the most tremendously hyperbolic, not to mention, the most racist work... They deserved to be eclipsed by Modernism.
With regret I look at these works and wonder why 19th century American painting is in the dustbin of history? Woodville and his genre paintings, Kensett and his landscapes, Morse and his portraits.
Have you heard of any of them? These transcendent masters? No. You know Degas, Monet, and Matisse, but not these guys.
I am as nostalgic as you for a time when we weren’t burdened and blinded by digital technology, the internal combustible engine, highway cloverleafs, and complicated, often opposing values on profoundly divisive issues like how much noise and sass is acceptable in public.
Just this value alone will drive the “White Male Patriarchy” to incarcerate a large percentage of one ethnicity of our people.
So Kensett wanted to Make America Great Again too. What I mean by this is that he sought to make it less complicated. Unfortunately, Reality is complicated.
Our postmodern predicament requires a close and fairly wonky understanding of people and policy.
So Fuck You, Kensett. This shit is Real.