A Sense of Place

Go out to walk with a painter and you shall see for the first time groups, colors, clouds and keepings. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Few Americans get the opportunity to have their eyes opened by such a hike. The painter's vision can nonetheless be shared, reasons a New York artist named Alan Gussow. Backed by a leading environmental group, Friends of the Earth, he has just produced a handsome coffee-table book entitled A Sense of Place: The Artist and the American Land (Saturday Review Press; $27.50). It juxtaposes 67 American landscapes, painted from the 16th century to the present, with a description of what moved each artist to select the scene. The result is astonishingly successful; no careful reader should see art--or nature--in the same way again.

Gussow defines an artist's chosen landscape as "a piece of the whole environment that has been claimed by feelings." It has always been thus, even when the U.S. was a complete wilderness and artists were merely its sensitive surveyors. In 1585, for example, John White was sent to the New World to "bring back descriptions of beasts, birds, fishes, trees, townes, etc." His watercolor of Indians fishing in Virginia gives not only the basic facts but the artist's response as well--enchantment.

As the East grew populous, George Harvey felt that man-made structures like lighthouses enhanced their natural surroundings by emphatically signaling progress. But the prevailing mood changed to awe as Americans pushed westward, and it reached a climax in Albert Bierstadt's enormous canvas of the Rocky Mountains. Almost Wagnerian in scope--soaring peaks, resounding cataracts, blazing shafts of sunlight--it shows nature completely overwhelming insignificant man. On a lesser note, such painters as Jasper Francis Cropsey saw nature as a metaphor for God and respectfully depicted people as tiny objects in glorious settings.

By now, that relationship has been largely reversed or obscured. Even so, a number of contemporary artists still take an intimate view of the land. Paul Resika discovers "the light of sentiment" in the long summer twilight of Cape Cod. Jane Wilson is fascinated by the "weight of the sky" in Iowa. Other painters look ever more closely around them. Alan Gussow discerns a universe in Atlantic tidal pools; in a bunch of wild flowers, Ann Poor sees Maine's rocky land, autumn, perfection.

What is the environment of the future? Sidney Goodman gives one alternative in a minatory view of Manhattan's towers; technological civilization, the painting seems to say, has finally overwhelmed nature. But such an outcome is by no means inevitable. Any place that has been charted by a man's awareness and reverence stands a good chance of being saved. The book thus offers a gentle means of seeing nature whole and a plea to respect it wholly.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.