Jun 29, 2008 8:51 am US/Eastern
CBS 2 At The Met: American Landscapes
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
The museum's Robert Lehman Wing is sharing space.
Large-scale landscape paintings have a temporary home on the main floor while the American Paintings and Sculpture Galleries undergo renovations.
The nine works will return to the American Wing when it re-opens in the Winter of 2010.
Associate Curator Kevin Avery told CBS 2's Dana Tyler that when it came to deciding what to display, he chose examples from the Civil War era. Avery said, "Landscape painting became very popular in the mid-19th Century until about the Centennial Period, 1876. As you look around, you will see a number of agricultural scenes for instance, you'll even see a scene that's combined agriculture and industry, sort of celebrating the prosperity that followed, or the sense of prosperity that was hoped for with the end of the Civil War."
Front and center, visitors can't miss Thomas Cole's "View From Mount Holyoke, Northhampton, Massachusetts After a Thunderstorm, The Oxbow" from 1836.
Back in the day it was a favorite tourist spot, according to Avery. "You can see Cole rendering it as a kind of wilderness, on one side of the picture, and a pastoral, farmland, landscape on the other side of the picture. As if he is making a statement about not merely about the variety of American scenery, but also about the history of American at that time itself, moving from a wilderness into a more agricultural status, toward the mid-19th Century."
This show isn't quite all-American. Artist Frederic Edwin Church went south of the border to capture "Heart of the Andes" in 1859.
People paid admission to see this painting in 1864, the proceeds helped wounded union soldiers. "What he (Church) was trying to convey with this amount of detail was the full lushness of tropical life in this part of the world, he made two expeditions down there. In effect, to paint this kind of landscape, any painter of landscape, is to paint the planet, and that was Church's ambition in many ways."
And America's. Ambitious private collectors, many captains of industry, were creating art galleries in their own homes.
"The Valley of Wyoming," ...that's in Pennsylvania, by Jasper Francis Cropsey, was commissioned by Milton Courtright, the first president the New York Elevated Railroad Company.
Still in it's original frame, it was painted at the end of the Civil War ..in 1865.
Avery explained, "This is not merely a pastoral landscape as represented by the cows, and the children, and the farmland that you see in the foreground by the Susquehanna River there, going into the middle distance, but it's also the industry that's starting up in Wilkesbury, Pennsylvania. Bear in mind, that Pennsylvania was kind of like the crux of the Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg was fought there, usually considered the turning point of the War. So the emphasis on the peace and the prosperity in a picture like this, even to the point where the artist is sort of configuring the clouds, almost like it's some kind of pantheon, or dome with the light coming through a hole in the roof, it's very much that sense of Providence shining down on the valley."
"American Landscapes" is on display in the Lehman Wing, until the American Wing re-opens in two years.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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