The Unedited Manuscript of God

By ROBERT HUGHES

NATURE AND CULTURE by Barbara Novak; Oxford; 323 pages; $35 ft

"In the beginning all the world was America." John Locke's 300-year-old phrase still keeps its haunting simplicity. For generations, America meant the part of the earth that was not corrupt, not worn by labor, tainted by inequality or poisoned by greed. This myth of paradise-on-the-frontier pervaded 18th century ideas about America and, by the mid-19th, had become one of the chief regulating ideas of America's discourse about itself: "That unfallen, western world," as Melville wrote in Moby Dick, "which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god." It deeply affected painting as well as literature, and those influences are the subject of Art Historian Barbara Novak's remarkable book. "Meditation on nature in the nineteenth century," she points out, "was a recognized avenue to the center of being ... 'Looking' became an act of devotion." Thus American landscape and its contents, the effects of light, weather, distance and time, were seen as the unedited manuscript of God. He had written his designs in great detail, and left his hierophants--scientist and painter --to decipher and interpret them. "The noblest ministry of nature," claimed Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the tone of transcendentalist piety whose echo is still heard among American environmentalists, "is to stand as the apparition of God." Not since the Middle Ages, when every animal or plant could be taken to symbolize some aspect of God's plan, had a landscape been as widely moralized as America's wilderness. Novak persuasively argues that the powers of artists as diverse as Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, Martin Johnson Heade, Thomas Cole or John F. Kensett did not simply arise from their formal talents as painters. They were reinforced by a social agreement about the meanings of art and landscape in the last age of faith, when there still appeared to be a seamless, didactic relationship between nature and man. The medium of this relationship was religious experience. Here, art preached while remaining whole as art; and the result was a fervid intensity, within the image of American space, that could never quite be recaptured--despite the efforts of "transcendentalist" American abstract painters like Mark Rothko to revive it a century later.

It is a big, not to say epic subject, and Novak approaches it with an admirable blend of ambition, elan and hard research. Ten years in the writing, laced with a wide but unpedantic range of quotation and allusion, Nature and Culture sets the paintings in full light against a panoramic ground of ideas. Her earlier book, American Painting in the 19th Century, established Novak as one of the chief historians of 19th century American painting, and it is partly due to her efforts that the period was resurrected,at all: 20 years ago, few scholars thought of it as anything but a bombastic or provincial version of European Romantic sublimities; the idea that anyone would pay $2.5 million for Church's The Icebergs (as a Texan did last year) would have seemed a lunatic fancy. Novak is not one of that vanishing line of critics who tend to treat the history of art simply as the history of pictorial form. Instead, she disentangles and shows the content behind the forms: the iconography that links painting to the culture of its time. Central to her text is the conviction that the finest American landscapes of the half-century between 1825 and 1875 ought to be taken as seriously in every way as the writings of Poe, Melville or Thoreau, that their authors brought the same optimistic energy to inspecting the world as Victorian botanists, geologists and zoologists.

How was the vision realized? In two basic ways. The first was theatrical, replete with grand effects and young-nation braggadocio. This was the high declamatory style whose masters were Bierstadt and Church. Novak rightly compares Church to the great naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, "merging exploration, exoticism, baroque energy, and pragmatic observation infused with flashes of transcendence." Toiling across the Andean Cordilleras and North American crags, Church brought back the data to create whole Last Judgments enacted by sky, light, vapor and rocks. In this way, she argues, Church was the "paradigm of the artist who becomes the public voice of a culture, summarizing its beliefs, embodying its ideas, and confirming its assumptions."

In fact, no artist in Europe--not even Turner--had become a public voice by painting landscapes. That role was kept for figure painters. Only in America, where nature was culture, could landscape painting become so direct a form of social discourse. The figure of the explorer or frontiersman merged with the image of the painter, Natty Bumppo with his watercolor kit, boldly opening himself (and so, vicariously, his audience) to unimagined and grandiose experiences. In due course this atmosphere of effort and risk would give a permanent tinge to later American fantasies about the "heroic" avantgarde, and place special stress on the artist as psychic explorer of inner nature.

The second approach was quieter: meditation instead of opera. American luminism--typified by the flat, light-filled, glassily tight seascapes of Fitz Hugh Lane or Martin Johnson Heade--was reverence in paint. Instead of the baroque rollings of Church's skies, luminism presented a small, highly focused world whose spirituality depended on motionlessness, a parallel to Emerson's transcendentalist belief that "a light shines through us upon things and makes us aware that we are nothing." No American art has a more hushed, angelic quality than the best of luminism. Novak discusses European antecedents and parallels in detail, but one is left convinced that luminism, despite its connections to European art history, was one of the first major inventions of American visual culture.

This sense of the sacredness of nature could not last. The mid-19th century brought a crisis in the moral aspect of science, in America as elsewhere; the idea of a providentially created universe, overseen by a benevolent and purposeful God, began to crumble under the tremendous delayed impact of Darwin. The vision of a still, explicit world, irradiated by divine light, became hard to maintain; light itself turned secular. The grand opera house of American nature was deprived of its impresario. By 1890, deeply felt pieties were coarsening into nationalism, while, on the physical plane, the image of the undefiled wilderness was eroded every day by westward expansion. For a time, as Novak shows, art could maintain the fiction that nothing had really changed, and artists continued to produce their sublimities "without much recognition either of nature's negative aspects or of the destructive potential of the 'culture' symbolized by the action of the axe, the locomotive, and the figure of man himself." The promise of a union between man and nature under the eye of God, as absolute as it was innocent, had vanished, to survive only as obsessive nostalgia and myth. It would be hard to imagine a more richly argued, sympathetic account of that myth and its extrusion into art than Barbara Novak's. Hers is not just an art book, it bears on some of the deepest fantasies of American culture as a whole.

Excerpt

Once ... landscape had become a repository of national pride, the cultivation of the landscape experience (even by challenging it through risk and danger) was one of the key preoccupations of the age. Critics admonished their readers to experience nature fully, since only the man practiced in reading nature's text could appreciate paintings dealing with that experience. The nature experience was considered a crucial amenity for the moral man, and, as we have seen, was readily accepted by society as a religious alternative. Elevated by such moral projections, it was easy for landscape to assume the mantle of history painting. But there is a certain irony in the democratization of the elitist Grand Style as it was transformed into landscape art. The most ennobling of experiences very readily became the most widely disseminated form of -- popular entertainment.

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