Hudson River school

[Rip Winkle]

http://www.nobts.edu/faculty22/slemke/hrsedentech.htm

The Serpent in the New Eden:
Technology and the Hudson River School

 By Steve W. Lemke
Delivered at the 1997 Rocky Mountain Regional meeting
of the American Academy of Aesthetics                 
      at St. John College

The Hudson River school was, I believe, the first
American school of art to raise significant
questions about the legitimacy and value of
technology. Several of the Hudson River School artists
express in their works a growing concern about the
dangers of technology, particularly in the later
works of its founder Thomas Cole, and in some of the
works of George Inness. While this shift is
obviously not uniform or universal, and nor is it
strictly chronological, some Hudson River School
works appear to glorify technological progress, but
some other works suggest a growing worry that
the advantages of technology were not worth the price
which must be paid. To appreciate these
concerns of the Hudson River school artists, however,
one must first understand their romantic vision
of nature.


The Romantic Vision of Nature 

        The artists of the Hudson River school were
strongly influenced by the romantic heroic
naturalism of John Ruskin and Alexander von Humbolt,
and the associationism of Archibald Alison.
Their aesthetic was also shaped by the definitions of
the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque
advocated by Edmund Burke and William Gilpin. The
Hudson River school approached art with a
rather Platonic aesthetic in which the beautiful is
not that which is actual, but that which is ideal.
Plato
advocated the view that art should imitate the ideal,
hence the artist has a moral role to communicate
truth and appropriate moral values. (3) The Hudson
River school's commitment to the Platonic
aesthetic is evidenced in its idealization of nature,
in its application of classic Claudian form, and in
its
allegorical representation of romantic ideals,
Manifest Destiny, and Christian symbols. 


It is largely the Hudson River school approach to the
sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque
mark its uniqueness. The Hudson River school artists,
particularly in the early period, utilized a
Burkean concept of the sublime (4) which emphasized
the apocalyptic and catastrophic in
nature--volcanoes, waterfalls, earthquakes, and
storms. Fear and awe were appropriate responses
to these catastrophic or dramatic events. This rather
Gothic perspective on the sublime was
exemplified in the Hudson River school's use of
threatening nimbus and cumulus clouds in an
approaching storm or a brilliant sunset. The Hudson
River school paintings evoked a sense of
overwhelming awe, accented by the monumental scale of
these works--as much as ten feet across.
This concept of the sublime could be called
"Christianized" in that it implied human
insignificance in
the face of an omnipotent, holy God. 


The romanticism of the Hudson River school painters
did not, however, lead them into
obscurantist, anti-intellectual, or anti-naturalist
sentiments. In fact, they were probably more closely
acquainted with the most recent developments in
contemporary science than most artists are to the
science of their day. They were very interested in the
latest developments in botany, biology, and
meteorology. Church, for example, not only had the
contemporary books on such topicsin his library,
but also journeyed from the Arctic to South America to
see such phenomena firsthand. But the
Hudson River school artists found an account of
science which did not discourage them from their
romanticist aesthetic.

The nationalistic message of Manifest Destiny was
often proclaimed in Hudson River school
works. Imagery of America as the New Eden, pioneers as
the New Adam, and key American
leaders in a Moses/exodus motif drew close parallels
to biblical motifs such as God's creation and the
divine election of Israel. Leo Marx has distinguished
two views of gardens in landscape painting--the
primitive wilderness (in America) and the cultivated
pastoral scene (in Europe). (19) Manifest Destiny
cast the American wilderness as an Edenic American
Genesis, a paradise regained. It is also seen in
the Hudson River school's adaptation of earlier
historical painting genre to landscape painting in
glorifying early American pioneers. (20) 

        This glorification of the westward march of
settlers to tame the American wilderness made many
Hudson River school artists appear to be advocates of
technology.

The Hudson River school artists in many ways were
pro-technology. They were friends of and
beneficiaries of wealthy industrialist and railroad
tycoon patrons. They glorified the western
expansion, and indeed portrayed it as a divine
mission. They portrayed the American settlers as
noble pioneers in a New Eden.   But the romanticism at
the core of the Hudson River school
perspective prevented them from embracing technology
completely. Romanticism looks back, not
forward. It honors the noble savage, not the
technocrat. The Hudson River artists were concerned
about the preservation of the untamed beauty of the
virgin wilderness. It was the ruggedness of the
wilderness, not the pastoral scenes of European
landscape painting, which they so loved. They began
to see the sawmills, the roads, the trains, and the
wholesale deforestation of the Midwest as a threat
to the New Eden, and as symbols of destruction. The
paradise of the New Eden was endangered,
and could become paradise lost. Their aesthetic thus
had little room for the invasion of idealized
natural beauty by technological innovation. Their
vision was not the creation of a new utopia through
science and technology, but for a return to the purity
of the original creation. Technology was not the
agent of redemption, but the serpent in Eden.


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