The Last Ruskinians Catalogue 1985 Brooklyn Academy of Art
Fine art: THE AMERICAN PRE-RAPHAELITES
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April five, 1985
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Section C , Folio
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''Paint the leaves as they grow! If you tin paint one leaf, you tin can paint the world,'' wrote the English critic John Ruskin in his epic ''Modernistic Painters.'' And in the mid-19th century, a small grouping of American artists took the communication to center, rendering Nature shut upwardly with such allegiance as to make today'south Photograph-Realism look - well, out of focus. They came to be known as the American Pre-Raphaelites, and their work - celebrating Ruskin'southward anoint-every- blade-of-grass esthetic - left something of a marking on American mural and still-life painting. Now ''The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites,'' the outset show to study this brusk-lived movement in depth, has been mounted by the Brooklyn Museum, where information technology volition 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 piece of work small, concentrating on watercolor still lifes and landscapes rather than the complex narrative themes - mostly done in oil - of the English language Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood that preceded them. The Americans sacrificed interpretation and imagination to obsessive reportage: i of the best-known of them, William Trost Richards, spent the entire summer of 1858 limning ''a blackberry bush-league 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 yet unlocated - from nigh-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 creative person and ardent Ruskin acolyte. In ''Modern Painters,'' Ruskin's insistence on long and earnest study of nature every bit the basis for art had inspired the English Pre-Raphaelite Alliance, which aimed at reviving the ''purity'' of Italian art before Raphael. Even so the cornball, literary compositions of the English artists were fussily detailed and mannered, with bright coloring and high finish. The Americans picked up on the color, cease and detail, just they eschewed the figural for still life and mural, 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 testify in Brooklyn, organized by Linda S. Ferber, curator of American painting and sculpture in that location, and William H. Gerdts, executive officer of the Ph.D. plan 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 command 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 yellowish blossoms on the ground, with three abased blue eggs, a meditation - one supposes - on the fragility of life. Too here is Ruskin'due south famous watercolor, ''Fragment of the Alps,'' a closeup view of boulders more rocklike than stone itself (he felt that rock was the artist's slap-up challenge).
Works past the core group of American Pre-Raphaelites institute the 2d 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 grow, along with some stunning landscapes and i or two English Pre-Raphaelite-way 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, ''Wintertime 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 volition have a picnic here.
By 1870, the motion was over, but its coloristic principles and focus on particular had an issue 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 bulletin, were nevertheless influenced by it. Enhancing the show are works by Bierstadt, Church building, Asher Dark-brown Durand, Thomas Moran, Martin Johnson Heade and Worthington Whittredge, among others. The Pre- Raphaelites may not exist the most exciting sub-chapter in American art history, but - cheers to this show and its scholarly catalogue - they are at last enshrined in information technology.
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 together mosaic to his surfaces virtually 1978, and for the last few years, he'due south 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 person and a female person nude, is in the electric current Whitney Biennial show). The figures, too, have been archaic, of biblical- mythological extraction, seen in cardinal attitudes.
His electric current work is a mix of ancient and, well, gimmicky-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 confronting a lush, stylized Bible-state of colored stones and glass. In one called ''The Air current 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 brilliant bluish; 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 likewise a serial of life- sized, black-and-white drawings of the dancer. The backgrounds are very elegantly realized but the woman'south effigy, drawn from life with almost photographic realism, hasn't been translated into mosaic with the same stylization. She looks also carefully drawn and realistic. And mosaic is non a medium that lends itself to realism. The overall concept is a bold 1, only it doesn't quite come up off. I adopt Smyth in the round. (Through Apr 20.)
Mary A. Armstrong (Victoria Munroe Gallery, 56 West 57th Street): A yr in Italy studying early on Renaissance predellas provided the impetus for these radiant, delicately painted panels by Mary A. Armstrong. Their pocket-sized, iconlike format is a rectangle set in a wide frame; the rectangle carries the heart of the painting, but imagery covers all. In ''Lone Tree,'' for example, a luminous rectangle of heaven and water partially confines a stoutly branching birch of subtly nuanced white bark. But the branches explode into another landscape in which announced 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, forth with trees and ''sanctuaries'' made of ancient house facades. In the latest, more than abstract work, of which ''Pierrot's Middle'' is an instance, the tree shape bursts open to reveal a seed or heart form that seems to charge the atmosphere with celestial light. Armstrong'south is a visionary talent, and like the one-time 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 newspaper, paint flakes and $.25 of cloth - ''experienced papers,'' equally he puts it - scavenged from torn wall posters, ravaged billboards, so along. And to keep the integrity of their edges, the fragments are not glued but hinged together by tiny $.25 of Japanese paper, a painstaking method that requires special micro tools. Just it's the uncanny way in which Kremen - a professor of psychology at Knuckles 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 exist fabricated, for instance, to ''No-Name,'' 1982, a shaggy-feathery matter of shreds and patches whose birdlike brownish tone, inflected by areas of blackness and pale gray-tan, seems essential to its ungainly grace. The torn, layered field of ''Prime number Number,'' 1978, with its balanced range of blues and tans, holds in perfect tension the look of homo'due south versus nature's artifact. What they stand up for is mortal ruin redeemed by spirit. (Through May 13.)
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/05/arts/art-the-american-pre-raphaelites.html
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