Knights of the Brush
The Hudson River School and the Moral Landscape
by James F. Cooper
Hudson Hills, 109 pp., $ 35
You can see it in Sanford Robinson Gifford’s 1862 Kauterskill Clove: serenity tinged with a hint of the sublime, tinged with a touch of the morally uplifting, tinged with a trace of the historically enriching, tinged — well, mostly just tinged. Everything that’s praiseworthy, and everything that’s not, in the nineteenth-century paintings of what’s come to be known as the Hudson River School derives from this essential tinginess.
The romantic period of American landscape art began about a quarter of the way through the 1800s and lasted until about 1875, and its flowering is the topic of James F. Cooper’s recent volume, Knights of the Brush: The Hudson River School and the Moral Landscape. Gifford’s Kauterskill Clove shows a skillful use of light, a talent for minute detail, and a clever arrangement of subject. But, beyond all that, Gifford’s painting offers a dual image of what Cooper believes American art can and should be. In the midst of a decorative landscape, the artist combines traditional values of spirituality, aesthetics, and history to produce a painting that Cooper claims can be appreciated by both serious critics and the general public — a painting, in other words, that could resolve the antagonism of insiders and outsiders that bedevils the world of modern art.
Gifford was one of many painters in the Hudson River School who explored the intersection of the moral and the natural landscapes of America. He joined Thomas Cole (often considered the father of the Hudson River School), Frederic Church, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Albert Bierdstadt, Asher Brown Durand, and many others. From the daunting mountains of Cole’s The Garden of Eden (1828) and the violent waterfalls of Church’s Niagara (1857) to the soft light of Durand’s Kindred Spirits (1849), the highly detailed landscapes of the Hudson River School promoted a sense of national pride by glorifying the natural beauty of young America. Indeed, despite the lack of history in the newly established nation, Cole and his colleagues recognized in the rich wilderness of America a moral lesson that could draw out the best of the older European traditions.
It is, of course, this recognition of America that has been most thoroughly destroyed in the years since those painters worked. In Knights of the Brush, Cooper explores the Hudson River School’s presentation of history, Christianity, light, and beauty — all to show how each of these has dissolved in the art of the late twentieth century. And he presents a proposition that on its face seems exactly backwards but that comes to seem at least possible as he develops his case: The erosion of values in art leads to the breakdown of morals and culture.
Cooper’s aim is to explain how art can be used to renew Western ideals and to restore American culture, primarily by reintroducing beauty, virtue, and spirituality. Just as in the nineteenth century the Hudson River School attempted to preserve values with art, so in recent years a group of artists and writers — among them Cooper, Frederick Hart, and Tom Wolfe — have claimed the title of “centrists” and fought to reclaim art from its postmodern claws. A few months before his death last August, Hart told an interviewer, “We’ve entered a generation that’s forgotten how to do it right.” And Cooper, like Hart, believes that the promotion of artists who remember how to do it right has the possibility of restoring moral value to art — and thereby to culture.
In a certain sense, that makes Cooper an optimist about the future of America. During the nineteenth century, there were concerns perhaps similar to our own about the fading of order, spirituality, and beauty. In the eyes of the artists in the Hudson River School, the values that ensure a rich and prosperous Republic are the ones that prevailed during antiquity. Classical life was the model of virtue, for it illustrated with its myths and history the ideas of liberty and justice on which America was founded. Thus the painters of the Hudson River School extracted images from antiquity and often transplanted them into American settings, as Jasper Francis Cropsey did in The Spirit of Peace (1851) or more significantly in his Temple of Neptune, Paestum (1859) — a painting of a crumbling temple in a barren landscape. Indeed, such symbols of antiquity not only allowed Cropsey and his contemporaries to indulge the typically Romantic love of ruins, but served as a cautionary moral lesson — reflecting the likely results of decaying civic virtue. Cropsey’s painting, devoid of any life other than a small bird in the foreground, warns the country of the danger of losing virtue and embracing decadence. An early environmentalist, Cole also sought to remind the nation of the intersection of the moral value of American liberty and the beauty of American wilderness.
This leader of the Hudson River School brought his themes together best in his three-part series, The Course of Empire (1836). In the first, The Consummation of Empire, Cole shows the beauty of Roman buildings, figures, and landscapes, all suggesting a society of grandeur, order, and justice. Yet, the third painting in the trilogy, Destruction, shows harmony and order dissolving into discord and chaos. These dramatic opposites frame the central painting, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, in which Cole offers an Edenic image to suggest that there exists a higher power that will prevail in the end.
The artistic techniques used by the artists in the Hudson River School derived from European landscape painting, especially French and Dutch. The portrayal of the sublime and the development of the picturesque originated in Europe as early as the seventeenth century, with Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorrain. In comparison with its European counterpart, the art of the Hudson River School lacks technical depths, but the constant lesson-teaching — the relentless foregrounding, as it were, of the moral and historical tinge — was strictly an American phenomenon.
The European vision of art, however, won as the twentieth century progressed. Increasingly, we came to see the artist as a rebel against fundamental beliefs, and the result, Cooper argues, is the corrosion of art. Losing its mission to convey moral absolutes, art became distanced from the American people. Of course, art cannot, in fact, entirely cease to attempt to convey absolutes, but art in the twentieth century came to see those absolutes as either pure politics or “pure art” — both somehow divorced from beauty and moral virtue.
Cooper, the editor of a small but innovative art journal, the American Arts Quarterly, has put together a fascinating and important study with Knights of the Brush. What is not entirely clear in his work, however, is the presumption that art offers the cultural salvation he desires. The flaw is not so much in what Cooper says as what he fails to say. He argues that Americans can undergo a “cultural renewal” by inducing a sort of Great Awakening in the arts, but how exactly can good popular art precede good culture?
This is a question in part about the depth to which the corrupt definition of the artist as rebel has penetrated the general culture. And it is in part a question of the success of race, class, and gender analysis in making traditional values seem not just out of date but actually evil. Even more, however, it is a question about what the role of art ought to be. Cooper and his conservative supporters would like to see art help mold a more virtuous society — and they may be right. Yet, before we can entirely agree, we need considerable explanation of why art’s purpose should be to reform moral conscience or to force a people to question their existing cultural constructs.
Indeed, if the anti-moral art of the twentieth century has had the effect that Cooper ascribes to it in fully corrupting the culture, a new moral art cannot succeed in promoting the virtues now lost. The Hudson River School arose when artists perceived appreciation for America and the deeper values in life fading from mainstream culture — fading, but not yet gone. There is a reason, as Cooper observes in his introduction, that the art of the Hudson River School made a comeback during the gloom of the Great Depression as well as during World War II, periods when citizens needed reminders of America’s dignity and greatness.
In Cooper’s view, the end of the twentieth century is another depression — this time of a moral and cultural sort. But to what lingering moral sense will our new moral artists appeal in the midst of this new depression?
The work of the Hudson River School may not be the model for a new art that Cooper thinks it is, for the artists of that school had to face only the decay, and not the destruction, of the moral sense. We may need a better culture to have a better art. Unless, against all odds, Cooper proves right about the power of art to restore culture, any modern attempt at moral art is likely to be tinged, as the Hudson River School was tinged, primarily with sadness.
Sabrina Savodnik is a staff assistant at the American Enterprise Institute.
