Knights of the Brush: The Hudson River School and the Moral Landscape

Abstract

Knights or the Brush: The Hudson River School and the Moral Landscape by James F. Cooper Hudson Hills Press, 1999 Readers of this journal will recall the article entitled An Artistic Renaissance? in the summer 1999 issue that told of the American Arts Quarterly's championing of a potential aesthetic renewal in the United States. The goal of the Newington-Cropsey Foundation, publisher of the Quarterly, has been to promote sublimity and beauty in the arts, supplanting what it sees as a studied ugliness in postmodernist art. One of the early-American schools of art that is often featured within the Quarterly is the Hudson River School of Romantic painters that towered over American painting between 1830 and 1860. Although the Quarterly contains articles by a number of authors about many different artists and their work, the intellectual core of the Quarterly's efforts comes from two men: James F. Cooper, the editor, and Frederick Turner, who works with the magazine and serves on the editorial advisory board. Now the Quarterly is in effect supplemented by a book of high-- quality artistic reproductions and aesthetic, historical commentary. James F. Cooper is Knights of the Brush's primary author, providing the text that accompanies the illustrations and that explains the characteristics of the Hudson River School and its place in American history. Frederick Turner adds a second to Cooper's views with a brief Foreword. Fifty-six colorplate reproductions of the leading paintings by such artists as Thomas Cole, Jasper F. Cropsey, Frederic Edwin Church, Asher Brown Durand, and others, combine with the text to make this book rank high among the many beautiful and informative art books available. The early nineteenth century American wilderness, suffused with light that is made even more striking by its contrast with deep shadow, provides the paintings' subject. The scenes often contain Protestant Christian imagery, reflecting the artists' central purpose of presenting nature as a manifestation of God's presence. The values informing their work? - virtue, chivalry, spirituality, beauty, order - to which we might add Plato's philosophic Realism, as is evident when reference is made to "timeless archetypal forms." Accordingly, Cooper and Turner see the Hudson River School as a champion of artistic standards that have been repudiated by the postmodernist school, which for several years has held sway within academic and institutional art. They tell us how art today has been politicized and condemns the past as Eurocentric, heterosexual, racist, hierarchical, and an instrument of class and racial oppression. The radical relativism of Foucault and Derrida denies the value of standards, representational art, and archetypes. To present this contrast and to point, then, to a possible renewal of Western artistic commitment to beauty, Knights of the Brush contains three sections: "Paradise Found," about the Hudson River School itself; "Paradise Lost," about the slide into secularism and cultural alienation; and "Paradise Regained," about the signs of incipient renewal. There is more that could be told here about the paintings and artists themselves, but the reader is best left to experience those things personally, since the paintings speak more eloquently than words can describe. In some important ways, this reviewer would suggest, however, a different analysis of recent art history than the text provides: It is a mistake, induced by focusing exclusively on art as it is recognized by an "art establishment," to believe that contemporary American art repudiates the beauty-focused art of the past. …