Sanctified Landscape: Writers, Artists, and the Hudson River Valley, 1820–1909 / Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition / Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language (original) (raw)
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In the preface to this insightful and deeply researched study, Maggie Cao maintains that by the 1870s the Hudson River School and the vision of landscape associated with it were slowly crumbling under the weight of revised conceptions of nature, property, and wilderness-revisions still very much with us today. Landscape increasingly lost its ability to sustain its earlier cultural functions as the spatial, economic, and environmental conditions of American land became increasingly incompatible with existing modes of representation (4). Cao observes that this "particularly revealing" moment in the history of American landscape painting can be quantified in terms of declining sales of the work of Hudson River School artists, diminishing and often-negative press coverage, and faltering careers. However, as she notes, that moment is not so readily characterized. How, Cao asks, "can we qualify aesthetic decline when it has been so little theorized in the humanities?" (5). She responds by concentrating her analysis on "aesthetic peripheries." Arguing that "a study of decline cannot be justly told by medians and averages, which will likely reveal themselves as uninteresting, even passé, in the face of the new" (6), she elides social-historical explanations for the decline of the Hudson River School. Instead, she focuses on what she terms "limit events or instances of deep thinking and engagement. .. visual and material experiments [that] inhabit landscape's breaking points, where the genre's inadequacy is identified and its potential for making sense of the modern world is tested" (6). [1] Cao is thus concerned with artistic failure, not artistic invention or success. Indeed, the works she studies rely, in her words, on "failure as method" (6). "The end of landscape. .. is filled with artists resorting to futility and sabotage as pictorial strategies, deploying absurdist humor and exuberant excess to address the fears and anxieties underlying the end of a 'terrestrial' era" (6-7). That "era," as Cao reminds us, extends from the late 1830s to the 1870s-the heyday of the Hudson River School. Its "end," as she asserts later in the book, served as the prelude to modernist efforts to reconceptualize landscape.
SCHUYLER, David, Sanctified Landscape: Writers, Artists, and the Hudson River Valley, 1820-1909, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2012 Transatlantica [Online], 2 | 2014, Online since 30 December 2014, http://transatlantica.revues.org/7230