Eldredge: Nature Symbolized - American Painting Ryder to Hartley

 

One of 19 essays in the catalog of "Abstract Art :  Abstract Painting 1890-1985" ..for the  1986 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

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Arthur Dove, Abstraction #2, 1910 

Wow.

Eldredge starts off with four of what could be the very first non-objective paintings in the history of American art - and as it turns out, only one can be found online today - and it does not disappoint. 

The above seems sui  generis. The closest I can think of is Van Gogh - but that’s not very close. His subject is light on a flat painted surface — not sunflowers or bedrooms.

American abstract painting started off with a bang. Arthur Dove had his own strong, luminous voice, and apparently he was painting only to please himself

When Arthur Dove brushed his first series of abstractions in 1910, he assumed a pioneering position among nonobjective artists. At the same time, he continued a distinguished American tradition of imagery reliant upon landscape or natural inspiration. Dove's accomplishment embodies the paradoxical marriage of innovation and tradition in the genesis of abstract art in America, a union that fired the creativity of inventive painters in the early years of this century, yet whose roots were firmly planted in nineteenth-century imagination. Janus-like, these pioneers greeted the new era with a novel artistic language while reflecting the philosophical precepts of their forebears. Until recently critics and historians paid attention almost exclusively to formal innovations in commenting on these artists' works; belatedly their ties to idealist thought and imagery, particularly transcendentalism, have been stressed in critical discussions. In fact, the significance of the work derives from the painters' abilities to wed their concerns for artistic form and subjective content. 

One might expect the first abstract painters in America would have been looking backward at the same time they were looking forward. - but I just don’t see Dove looking anywhere but at his canvas and applying paint until he got the excitement he wanted.

 Until recently critics and historians paid attention almost exclusively to formal innovations in commenting on these artists' works; belatedly their ties to idealist thought and imagery, particularly transcendentalism, have been stressed in critical discussions. In fact, the significance of the work derives from the painters' abilities to wed their concerns for artistic form and subjective content.

We will have to read further to see if Eldredge thinks that any subjective content is notably spiritual - or compelling in any other way.
 

Albert Pinkham Ryder,  Moonlit Cove, 1880-90,  14 x 17

In Moonlight Cove, 1880-90 Ryder arranged masses of dark color in an illusion of three-dimensional space that at the same time adheres closely to the flat plane of the canvas. While the spatial recession in Dove's Abstraction No. 4 is more ambiguous, its layers of heavily brushed earthen and vegetal forms within a shallow space suggest strong affinities with Ryder’s  painting.

Regretfully, only Dove’s Abstraction No. 2 can be found online - and comparing it with the piece above is like comparing day to night (or sun to moon).  And Ryder is imagining a place for you to visit — while the only place Dove  would have you visit is the canvas itself.

Albert Pinkham Ryder is customarily cited as the exemplar of this introspective mood in American painting of the turn of the century. His reputation as a figure apart, a reclusive visionary outside the mainstream, has lately been modified by studies that place the artist in community and in context. ' Nevertheless, Ryder's imaginative compositions, often based upon literary or musical inspirations, have none of the slavish fidelity to details nor optical plays with daylight and color found in the work of many of his contemporaries. While they mimicked the observable world, Ryder sought other ends. As his friend Elliott Daingerfield recalled, "Fact did not interest him - truth and beauty did. " In a rare discussion of his work Ryder admonished: "The artist should fear to become the slave of detail. He should strive to express his thought and not the surface of it. . . . The artist has only to remain true to his dream and . . . must see naught but the vision beyond. "To describe the quest for that vision Ryder chose an unconventional simile: "Have you ever seen an inch worm crawl up a leaf or twig, and there clinging to the very end, revolve in the air, feeling for something to reach something? That's like me. I am trying to find something out there beyond the place on which I have a footing. "It was probably Ryder's risk taking as much as the large forms and vital rhythms of his compositions that led Jackson Pollock to admire him as "the only American master who interests me. "

John Frederick Kensett,  Lake  George, 1870, 14 x 24"

"Truth and beauty" instead of fact and detail?  The same might be said of this piece done twenty years earlier.

Howard Pyle, Once it Chased Dr. Wilkerson into the very town itself", 1909 

Perhaps I would feel differently about the actual paintings - but these online images suggest that this contemporary piece has all the virtues of the Ryder piece - and then some.

Ryder, Death on a Pale Horse, 1900

This figurative piece would better compare with Howard Pyle - though, in person, it probably has painterly effects that magazine illustrators, like Pyle, we’re not aiming for. 

 I saw nature springing into life upon my canvas. It was better than nature, for it was vibrating with the thrill of a new creation. —— Albert Pinkham Ryder

That does, however, sound like something Arthur Dove might have said

Ryder's transcendence of "sharp outlines and colored surfaces" as he sought expression of thought, of the "vision beyond," is akin to Emersonian practice. And his coltish romp through sunset fields after he saw nature spring into life suggests that, like Emerson, he had gained one of the "best moments of life." Likewise Dove's 1910 paintings are abstractions of organic process, visions of cause and spirit rather than outline and surface. They are an extension of Ryder's aesthetics and Emerson's faith, siting creative inspiration in the spiritual experience of the natural world. Both painters would likely have concurred with Emerson's estimation that "the greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. "

The Emerson quote is cute and clever - but doesn’t he exemplify an intellectual rather than spiritual approach?  If Dove wrote about spirituality in his art, wouldn’t Eldredge have shared it?  Dove seems to be the round peg getting thoroughly pounded into the square hole.  I will ignore the other literary luminaries whom Eldredge references.

Cezanne, Apples, Pear, and Quince, 1885-7

Dove’s piece appears much closer to Cezanne than Ryder,

Brightness, frontality, short brush strokes, patches of color.

Who has ever suggested that Cezanne was "symbolizing nature"?

Marsden Hartley, Abstraction #1, 1913, 39 x 31

A few months later he catalogued other influences, which comprehended "a universal essence - I came to it by way of James' pragmatism - slight touches of Bergson - and directly through the fragments of mysticism that I have found out of Böhme - Eckhart, Tauler - Suso - and the Bhagavad Gita. " Having absorbed these varied influences and guided by his unconscious, Hartley created during his first year in Paris (1912-13) a series of lyrical abstractions in which a loosened Cubist structure is scattered with calligraphic lines and occasional mystic symbols. The investment of self in these works individualized them; as Hartley wrote to Stieglitz, quoting the Symbolist Redon: "I have made an art after myself." Hartley had hoped to create a spiritual art that would suggest the universal and transcend specific meaning. He was disappointed when an occultist visitor read them literally and observed, "You have no idea what you are doing - these pictures are full of Kabbalistic signs and symbols. "   For Hartley the goal was not an occult cryptogram, but a suggestion of the spiritual perceived through the self. He took pains to distinguish his approach, which was rooted in American experience, from the mystic symbols used by his European. contemporaries and congratulated himself that previously no one has presented just this aspect in modern tendency - Kandinsky is theosophic - Marc is extremely psychic in his rendering of the soul life of animals. . .. I could never be French. I could never become German - I shall always remain the American - the essence which is in me is American mysticism just as Arthur B. Davies declared it when he saw those first landscapes [of about 1909, which]. .. were so expressive of my nature - and its the same element I am returning to now with tremendous increase of power through experience.

Yes — Hartley’s paintings, like the above, are indeed "the suggestion of the spiritual perceived through the self".  Eldredge has put it quite succinctly. The self, however, might be considered more like an obstacle  than a lens in the pursuit of spirituality.

The priest and Levite walk past the injured man,

Good Samaritan windows, Chartres, 1205-1215

The jagged black lines in the Marsden painting recall the lead strips in medieval glass windows, and overall, he seems to be using a similar visual vocabulary. Might we then compare private/non-objective  versus public/figurative spirituality ? 

I find the Gothic  image much more compelling.  It’s so deliciously ironic  - with the floating, and useless, servants of God who flank the suffering, and sinking, injured man.

But the age of great cathedrals was long, long gone by the time of Hartley — and now  artists could only speak for themselves - and  Hartley does so quite well.

Marsden Hartley, Painting #48, 47 x 47", 1913

This one is even more intense and visionary.

Marsden Hartley, Pre-War Pageant, 1913,   49 x 31

The painter claimed that "there is no hidden symbolism whatsoever in them," yet many of his Berlin paintings (for example, Painting No. 48, Berlin and Pre-War Pageant , both 1913), seem loaded with symbolic meaning, especially those that present complex emblematic portraits of Lieutenant Karl von Freyburg, his friend who was killed in action in October 1914.» The symbolic content of Hartley's Berlin paintings is conveyed through such Signs as the mystical figure eight, with its Occult implications of physical or spiritual regeneration, or the Iron Cross, with its references to Christian and Prussian sacrifice: through such symbolic forms as the Christian mandorla and Kandinsky's spiritual triangle: and through bright, allusive color, including martyr's red, the "painful shrillness" of Ellow's "disturbing influence," and celestial blues, which Kandinsky had identified as "the Typical heavenly color. with} a call to the infinite, a desire for purity and transcendence."

With strong color and wavy line,  this piece might work well as a tapestry.

Konrad Cramer, 1919

Konrad Cramer, Abstraction, 1914

One of the artists moved by the exhibition was Konrad Cramer, a frequent visitor (although never an exhibitor) at the "291" gallery, who enjoyed the distinction of having known the work of the German avant-garde prior to emigrating to New York in 1911. Cramer's debt to Kandinsky was evident in the abstractions he began shortly after his arrival in this country, including his Improvisations series painted in 1912- Hartley's influence was to add momentum to Cramer's own search for an abstract visual language. 

 

 Can art be spiritual to others if it is not appealing ?  There is no mystery here that I want to pursue.

 

 

Regretfully, no color reproduction can be found for this piece.

A Cramer abstraction of about 1914   (Shown above) composed around an emphatic orange peak, seems to derive from Hartley's The Warriors, 1913. The embracing foreground figures and the conjoined emblems of male and female within the central orange peak suggest that, unlike Hartley's fascination with the masculine military, Cramer is celebrating the spiritual and physical Union of man and woman, an abstract joi de vive.

Matisse, The Dance (1), 1909

Picasso

Cramer's figurative work makes me long for that

of his famous contemporaries.

 

Marsden Hartley, Yliaster, 1932 , 25 x 28

In Yliaster (Paracelsus), Hartley recalled another legendary occultist, Philippus Paracelsus, the sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist whose cabalistic philosophy of evolution predated Darwin's theory by three centuries. According to Paracelsus, it is Yliaster, the protomateria, or base matter, that is the source of all elements: "When Evolution took place the Yliaster divided itself. . . melted and dissolved, developing from within itself the Ideos or Chaos . .. or Primordial Matter." With the action of the "individualizing power," from Yliaster "all production took place in consequence of separation, yielding the four basic elements. These are the phenomena that Hartley visualized. The uncharacteristically intense colors and distorted spaces in his representation of cosmic meltdown seem perfectly appropriate to the extraordinary event, Creation itself. The radiant sphere of Yliaster, already dividing into arcs, beams into the stylized cone of Popocatépeti, a sexual metaphor in landscape guise. The forms of earth, glowing as if molten, thrust upward into the excited air; 

 

  This painting shows the volcanic peak of Popocatepetl rising from a red plain against the disk of the sun. Fire and earth contend with the intense blues in the sky and lake, completing the four elements of earth, air, fire and water that Paracelsus described.-- Smithsonian Museum

What could be more ambitious than to  depict the creation of the universe?

But the piece appears underwhelming.

 

 

Hartley, Transference of Richard Rolle, 1932,  28 x 26

 

 

  Rolle's monogram hovers above a desolate landscape, emblazoned within a spiritual triangle against a similarly formed cloud, whose whiteness denotes a transcendent world.

 

This painting is more interesting with the poem that Hartley wrote to accompany it. Then we get a sense of Hartley’s spiritual journey.  But if a knowlege of spirituality is our purpose, we might ask why study Hartley when there are so many other more credible spiritual teachers

 in the foreground an ovoid pool of water repeats the caldera's form, its central jet responding to the downward dissolve of Yliaster and recalling Paracelsus's claim that "all the activity of matter in every form is only an effluvium of the same fount." Hartley, returning to occult concerns after years of relatively naturalistic landscape practice, must have been particularly moved by Paracelsus's conclusion that the earth, indeed all nature's elements, are "of an invisible, spiritual nature and have souls." Although adhering to no conventional denomination, Hartley was before nature a man of faith. He recalled his excitement upon first encountering Emerson's essays: "I felt as if I had read a page of the Bible. In Mexico, in the philosophy of Paracelsus and other mystics, he found another book of creation, and, while the paintings these writers immediately inspired may have been less cosmic than cabalistic, the impetus they provided for the merger of natural and metaphysical con-cerns, of objective and subjective, revitalized Hartley's creativity throughout his final decade.  

It is the subject matter, not the visual effect

that is spiritual in this painting.

The following are examples of the reverse, however:

Arthur Dove, Nature Symbolized #3, 1911-12, pastel on wood,  18 x 21

Arthur Dove, Nature Symbolized #2, pastel on paper in Masonite,  18 x 21

Arthur Dove,  Thunderstorm, charcoal on paper, 21 x 17, 1917 - 20

Arthur Dove, Thunder Shower, 20 x 32, 1940, oil and wax on canvas

Arthur Dove, Foghorns, 1929, oil on canvas, 18 x 26

Arthur Dove, untitled, 1940-43, wax and paint on paper, 3 x 4"

 

These miniatures really appeal to me

and they seem like they could have been made yesterday

as well as 80 years ago.

Arthur Dove, 3" x 4", 1940-46, mixed media

Arthur Dove, 3" x 4", 1940-46, mixed media

However, they do seem more like playful  experiments in design

than some kind of spiritual exercise or program.

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We move now onto Augustus Tack (1870-1949)

and we may note that he was seven to ten years older than Hartley and Dove.

That might explain why he’s more imbued with fin-du-siecle elegance.

Other painters, such as Augustus Vincent Tack, William Schwartz, and Will Henry Stevens, pursued similar strains in the development of their abstract vocabularies. Tack achieved note as a painter of portraits and religious subjects but also privately practiced abstraction, as evident in Storm, 1920-23 . Tack's was no mere summer thundershower any more than was Dove's. 

Augustus Tack;  The Storm, 1920-23,  36 x 48

 

 

 

 

Georgia O’Keefe, A Storm, pastel, 1922, 18 x 24"

 

Here's a sexier;  more exciting contemporary version of the same theme

 

 

Augustus Tack, As the Ships Go Sailing By, 1917, 31 x 24

Augustus Tack, Elizabeth Hudson, before 1915, 36 x 29

Augustus Tack, Order, 1916, 43 x 35

This abstract piece feels like a religious icon

Augustus Tack, Solitude, 1910-12, 18 x 6

I think he’s seen some Japanese prints.

Augustus Tack, Time and Timelessness, 1935, 39 x 85 

This was his commission for the curtain on the stage of a university theater.

"My mind naturally turned to the meaning of a university. How could the vital principle or soul of a university be expressed abstractly? A university - the center from which springs the expansion and development of human minds reaching out far into fields of astronomical proportions as well as into infinitesimally small ranges of microscopic discovery, and to find some symbol of creation in eternity - or of Time and Timelessness, and of the magnificent achievement of human intelligence, made in the image and likeness of God, was the purpose and the problem."

It appears pleasant enough

and appropriate for an institution that seeks Truth rather than proclaims it.

But if I were in the audience for a show,

I might fall asleep before the curtain was raised.

His great patron, however,  felt differently:

According to Duncan Phillips, Tack created an "awe-inspiring symmetry out of thundering chaos ... a symbol of a new world in the making, of turbulence stilled after the tempest by a universal God. " 

Phillips served simultaneously as the primary patron of both Tack and Dove, while also making a significant commitment to the work of O'Keeffe, which connotes much about the collector and his taste. It also suggests that, in their quest for expression of the ineffable, the artists whom Phillips favored, while individual in style, were united in spirit and intent and the pursuit of a mystical abstraction. Raised as a devout Catholic, Tack as an artist recalled his youthful beliefs in his representational. but still distinctive, scriptural subjects. Yet the spirit that infuses his decoratively patterned abstractions derives from no single or conventional faith.

William S. Schwartz, Symphonic Forms #16, 1932, 36 x 40"

I

William S. Schwartz,  Symphonic Firms from the Sea, 1963, 36 x 40"

William S. Schwartz,  Symphonic Forms on a Western Theme, 1930, 40 x 30

 The vogue for the translation of sound, particularly music, into painted images continued to capture many artists beyond the late 1910s. William Schwartz of Chicago, Russian-born painter and concert singer, was in many respects representative, although he differed from his colleagues in the acclaim he had enjoyed as an operatic tenor prior to receiving notice as a painter in the early 1920s. He achieved regional repute for his landscapes with figures, often poetically titled allegories à la Davies. As early as 1924 he began to produce a series of abstractions based upon musical motifs, collectively known as Symphonic Forms. As with Tack's compositions, however, these were privately done, and Schwartz withheld them from prairie salons for more than a decade. In later discussing the Symphonic Forms, Schwartz explained that he sought harmony of color, form, and line, just as he had in music. "In looking at nature, therefore, I search for materials which may be interpreted and manipulated until they become unified wholes and reveal the . . . harmony. . . representative of my own personality - my thoughts and my feelings. In the musical analogies and the search for an abstract expression of personality, the artist generally echoed Kandinsky's precepts. In looking to the external world for his materials, however, Schwartz closely followed the path of American spiritual abstraction.

 

A local gallery has several Schwartz Symphonic Forms (as well as his social realism) on display, and they have yet to move me.  They feel like the rooms of gemstones at the Field Museum.

Will Henry Stevens, Abstraction #2, 1938, pastel and paper on board 

 In New Orleans from the 1920s onward, Will Henry Stevens, like Schwartz, developed an abstract style that reflects the surviving vitality of the natural ethos. Stevens developed his youthful love of nature through readings of favorite American authors, especially Emerson and Thoreau, Whitman and Mark Twain, and in solitary rambles through his native Indiana countryside. Stevens always recalled Ryder's congratulatory words to him at his first solo exhibition in 1901 and his admonition, "Remember, you are a poet. Don't do what so many painters are doing today - painting out before nature all the time. Just walk out in the pleasant time of evening." Ryder's praise was shortly followed by another signal event in the young artist's career, his discovery of Sung dynasty paintings. Stevens responded intuitively and forcefully to the unfamiliar Chinese masters: "I could not look at Sung without realizing that it had the same kind of philosophy that I had discovered in Walt Whitman." Pursuing his new interest in oriental art and philosophy, Stevens was eventually led to P. D. Ouspensky's Tertium Organum and the writings of Confucius and Lao-tzu, among others. His self-education, as well as his landscape painting, continued during his seasonal orbit between New York and the Midwest or, after 1921, Newcombe College in Louisiana, where he began his long art-teaching career. Stevens found particular inspiration in the words of Lao-tzu: "Man at his best, like water ... / Loves living close to the earth, / Living clear down in his heart."  "Rivers have meant very much to me," Stevens once acknowledged. "Inland rivers. I remember being charmed by Huckleberry Finn. If only one could get that spirit into painting!" In New Orleans he had the greatest subject of them all close at hand, the Mississippi, and  not far away the exceptional bayou country. In "these bayou people [who] have never tried to subdue nature but have harmonized their lives with natural order, " Stevens found vindication of oriental wisdom. 

 

 

Here’s a little gallery of Stevens’ work.  He sold his nature views and abstractions in separate galleries.

 

Even this piece titled "Lurking Menace" 

feels calm and  dreamy-

like peering through a microscope at a tiny world.

This one looks like the iPad sketches of David Hockney.

This work is so much gentler than the brash New York school that would rise in the following decades.

It’s been set  apart and above the passions and tragedies of daily life.

 

Prepared by his transcendentalist readings, surrounded by Louisiana's abundant and evocative verdure, and inspired by the oriental philosophers, Stevens began to move beyond the representation of his surroundings to new pictorial concerns. "The best thing a human can do in life, " he advised, "is to get rid of his separateness or selfness and hand himself over to the nature of things - to this mysterious thing called the Universal Order, that an artist must sense. To put yourself in the way of that Thing so that you become a vehicle of it - that will be your only merit - to put yourself in the way." As Stevens sought to get closer to nature, to the universal order, his imagery changed from description to abstraction. His discovery of Kandinsky and Klee in the 1930s lent impetus to this new direction in his art, finally leading to lyrical abstractions in an experimental variety of media . 

Among American artists, Stevens's case, like Schwartz's, is instructive. Their example suggests the difficulty of creating a novel abstract language and the diverse paths by which that objective was achieved. But even more important, it demonstrates that abstraction in the expression of nature's forces and materials was not the exclusive province of the Stieglitz circle but, by the 1930s, had become a more broadly based phenomenon, representing the native flavor of abstract art in America.

More specifically- the kind of nature those Americans invoked was the quiet peaceful kind.  Thunderstorms are as violent as it gets.  Your clothes dry off and you’re back to normal.

It was dog eat dog in the world of men - nature was a place for peaceful escape and refreshment - and so was art.

I'm not sad that times have somewhat changed.