In the 20th Century there have been a number of approaches to painting industrial America. It took some time for artists to work their way up to the task, and some of the first attempts were corporate. In fact, the notion of corporate sponsorship remains in much of industrial art throughout the century.

One place to start is in 1855 with "The Lackawanna Valley" by George Inness. The painting, now in the National Gallery, was commissioned by the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad and depicts the company's first roundhouse at Scranton, and integrates technology and wilderness within an observed landscape. As his career progressed, Inness would not continue to depict a landscape blended with industry.

The word "industry" in the 21st Century (and late 20th), might just as easily be referred to as technology. A pioneer at bringing technology to his art and work is the photographer William H. Rau. Like Inness, Rau was commissioned, this time by the Pennsylvania Railroad. As revolutionizing as the technology of the steam train was on transportation, photography was as much on the art world. The picturesque images taken by Rau introduced Americans and Europeans to the scenic countrysides not easily accessible before the train. Curiously many of Rau's photographs do not show trains. The images show a peaceful co-existence between nature and human civilization. They are not unlike a landscape by William Wall, or a painting by Russell Smith. The difference is in the Wall painting, there's a sense of timelessness, as if the state of things would remain that way forever. That's a popular notion in sentimental paintings, but not one embraced by Rau. Many of his images provide a clear sense that there is a steady march of progress. An obvious example is in an image of a half-built Philadelphia City Hall.

Corporate commissioning of industrial art may have reached its climax in a series of calendar prints done by the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1930s-1950s. During the war effort, the images even incorporated politics, and as government and industry merged in the market, so did they in the commissioned art. One of my favorite by Dean Cornwell shows Uncle Sam rolling up his sleeve as smoke billows and trains thunder below. There's a certain fascist element to it, one that has repeatedly surfaced into the 21st century in war time. Through the mid-century, smoke had been alligned with progress. The sentiments of the Hudson River painters are completely absent from this image, and never again would industry and the pollution it created be so glamorized.

Some of the best images of industrial America can be found in the work of Aaron Henry Gorson, who painted Pittsburgh's steel mills. Gorson seems unmotivated by the politics that often invade art, the sense of progress, environmental damage or workers rights. When you look at his work, you don't see a march of progress, rather an attempt to see industry for what it was physically. Gorson finds the beauty in industry and captures it. The smoke, the colors, the reflections in the water-Gorson seems to look at it all as if it were a tree or sunset. Gorson's work was commissioned, however, by Andrew Carnegie, Mrs. W. S. King, the wife of a glass manufacturer; the Mellon family; and Charles Schwab. Like many of his benefactors, Gorson later moved to New York and began painting scenes of the city and views of the Hudson River, but continued to create works showing the steel mills of Pittsburgh.

Most associated with industrial art today is Charles Sheeler. I found it amusing that a web site about "Objectivist Art" listed Sheeler as an Objectivist artist. Objectivism is the philosophy of writer Ayn Rand. I felt like emailing the creators of the site this quote I located by Sheeler.

"I find myself unable to believe in Progress--Change, yes. Greater refinements in the methods of destroying Life are the antithesis of Progress. Where is the increase in spirituality to be found?"

I'm in my infancy in regards to my knowledge about Sheeler, but it would seem he is more likely being critical of the depersonalization of industry, or just depicting the way in which we can see the world around us.

Sheeler was also commissioned, by Ford Motor Company to photograph and make paintings of their factories and by Fortune magazine to "reflect life through forms…" that "trace the firm pattern of the human mind." Sheelers paintings were based on photographs, and so even the more personal painting had its origins in the mechanical photograph. I don't know for sure if Sheeler, known as a precisionist and modernist, was criticizing the loss of humanity in the modern world. To me there's elements of both admiration from the shape and form of architecture and machinery, and some sense of loss. However, when he painted the barns in Doylestown, the technique is no different. We may, on the other hand, be thinking too much about it.

"To a man who knows nothing, Mountains are Mountains, Waters are Waters, and Trees are Trees," Sheeler wrote. "But when he has studied and knows a little, Mountains are no longer Mountains, Waters are no longer Waters, and Trees are no longer Trees. But when he has thoroughly understood, Mountains are again Mountains, Waters are again Waters, and Trees are Trees."

The trip to Montclair Art Museum was quite smooth. There is no commuter train running on the weekends, but Decamp bus runs every hour from Port Authority, Manhattan to Montclair, NJ. It only took about 40 minutes by bus to get to the museum, which is situated almost at the top of a hill, with a view of Manhattan. Down the hill, we found a Turkish restaurant (quite upscale), a WholeFood store and a few antique stores further down which unfortunately did not seem to open on Sunday.

Montclair Art Museum is not as big as Newark Museum, but it dedicates a full room to George Inness who spent his last decade in the town. Like all other townships near NYC, Montclair has lost its rural beauty that Inness favored in his paintings; but it is surprising that there is such a wonderful museum filled with some best American art.

Besides the Inness room, I was quite impressed by two paintings. Early Morning in Cold Spring, a painting by Asher Brown Durand shows a perfect balance between naturalism and romanticism. The fact that I just visited Cold Spring, NY a few weeks ago made the painting more personal to me. There is always a sense of freshness in Durand's painting: The nature, depicted truthful but poetic, exists in harmony with minds of intellectual. In this painting, Durand was inspired by a William Cullen Byant's poem:

And o'er the clear still water swells
The music of the Sabbath bells

The other painting is a little gem by Edward M. Bannister, an African-American painter from Rhode Island who founded Rhode Island School of Design. Passing Storm is a vivid demonstration that by the late 19th century Barbizon has been transformed into a unique style that can almost be coined as American-born tonalism. Like Inness, Bannister said "artists become an interpreter of the infinite, subtle qualities of the spiritual ideals of nature... revealing glimpses of absolute harmony." There are not as much details as are almost everywhere in Cropsey's painting next to it, but I was immediately drawn to the overall effect: the untamed nature revealing its austere beauty: It is easy to understand that now I appreciate the brownish soil under still-looming sky more when working in a place that almost every inches of earth is covered by concrete and every feet of sky is blocked by skySCRAPErs.

Philip Pearlstein's exhibition "Objectification" takes almost half of the first floor exhibition space. The figure paintings demonstrate a sense of objectivity with cut-off faces, obtruded features. He treated the human body with the same degree of coolness as other objects from his collections that were painted with the bodies. They are marvelous in the techniques but to see Pearlstein after Inness (that's how the exhibition rooms are arranged) is like to read a math dissertation after reading essays by Heinrich Heine. From the short video, Eric commented the way Pearlstein works on his paintings is almost the opposite to how Inness created his own imagination on the canvas.

Before we left, Eric asked how often the museum rotates the paintings by Inness since at least half of the collection are not on display. Unfortunately, we were told the rotation has not been done quite often. Maybe in the curator's point of view, the nine paintings in that room give the audience a complete image of Inness' style in different periods and of course his association with the town when at his peak power. We will probably go back in the near future on a Saturday when those antique stores may open. And after all, "Christmas Evening" by George Inness is Eric's favorite painting!

“We are all the subjects of impressions, and some of us seek to convey the impressions to others. In the art of communicating impressions lies the power of generalizing without losing the logical connection of parts to the whole which satisfies the mind.”
George Inness

The first time I really noticed a painting by George Inness was in the Butler Art Gallery in Youngstown, Ohio. The Butler has a very good collection of American Art, and I was busy looking at some Hudson River landscapes when I turned and looked straight at it. I wasn't quite sure what drew me to it at first, it was kind of blurry, sort of like a dream I guess, or maybe more like a memory. The landscapes in the other room tried to capture the grand details of nature, sometimes untouched by humans. Here, in the foggy outline of a tree, there was clearly human communication.

An early Inness work, Lackawanna Valley (National Gallery), shows a clear departure from the Hudson River painters. It shows some trees that have fallen to human activity, a steam train and a boy sitting hillside looking yonder. It might be more in line with Currier and Ives, or akin to Norman Rockwell. I'm not sure if it communicated any sort of harmony with nature. nature is something that exists on the same level as the boy, the tree stump and the train.

On the surface this painting doesn't have much in common with his later works, yet the idea that many parts make a one. The natural world, and the human world, and perhaps even the industrial world, are inseparable.

Inness lived and painted in Montclair, New Jersey from 1885 to 1894. Today the Montclair Art Museum has 24 of of his works, about half of which are not on display. Of those on display, five are exceptional. One is of the same era as the one in the National Gallery, another Inness considered his finest work.

When you enter the Inness Gallery at the Museum, the words "Knowledge must bow to spirit" is written above the doorway. If you turn around it's also above the doorway from which you entered. Inness believed "the true end of art is not to imitate a fixed material condition, but to represent a living motion." Life in art is a "subtle essence of a moving spirit. This is what satisfies the craving of the intellect, not the excesses of our senses."

I couldn't help but compare his work to Jasper Cropsey, who I learned today was an architect before painting full-time. Crospey's work is engaging on one level, but the strict attention to detail somehow doesn't travel far from the realm of a pictorial representation. An Inness painting not only speaks, but pulls you in and makes you one with it.

The Hudson River School started with Thomas Cole, and some say ended with George Inness. It's an interesting observation that while both Cole and Inness incorporate figures, most Hudson River works showed nature absent of human presence. It's also curious that many of Cole's figures were allegorical, and in works by Inness, the figures are not only hard to separate from the landscape, it's hard to tell if their presence is physical or spiritual. One painting today showed the figure of a woman. It seemed that figure was no more than a light imprint on the landscape. Like the way a human spends 75 or so years on the earth, then leaves, but much of their being remains, in the impact they had on the world, and in the minds of others.

The painting that, according to a label at the museum, Inness considered his best work is Early Autumn, Montclair. It is striking. The vibrant intense colors make it seem full of life. Yet a dark cloud hovers above. Nothing in the painting seems young. The tree is old, the barn withered and the red color of the tree in the center indicates winter is coming. Yet it's more stunning than it has been all year. It came to my mind that the mental and creative climax of life comes near the end. It would seem that way for George Inness.

The painting I most wanted to see was Christmas Eve. The night before I described the painting as "being cold and warm at the same time." It could be the figure in the painting is undergoing some sort of religious transformation, but from my own memory one of the best aspects of Christmas is the absolute quiet late at night. It may be cold, but there's peace, or at least the possibility of it in our hearts.

Part 1 is here.

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Even though the market prices of American paintings have gone record high in the past decades, the American Barbizon school nowadays is less known in public and claims little spotlights in the major auction houses. Between the grand panoramic rendering of Hudson River School and exciting, bright-toned eye-candy of American Impressionism, the Barbizon school was short-lived and apparently less appealing to the general public. But these painters quietly testified the statement for the first time of American art history that landscape paintings are and should be subjective and personal. With the advent of early photography, it was not accidental that these painters gave up details in the canvases and opted for the more intangible -- that can only be shown indicatively and suggestively.

The way Albert Bierstadt or Edwin Church orchestrated the elements with exceptional details and minutiae to extricate dramatic settings challenge the eyes more than the minds. We see apocalyptic clouds, we see also the leaves of the foreground vegetations. All are given in a scientific exactness, all given are the God's garden in God's perspective.; however, what is missing is the room for the minds to roam around. There is a peculiar contrast between the immense scales of the canvases and the aloofness of human feelings. Here are we, the onlookers at the mercy of the splendid techniques of the painters., whose intricate compositions are of great intellectual, but again we do not and need not have the role of participation.

Then came the late Inness, whose canvases have nothing solid and everything seems to be floating and out of focus. The lack of focus points forces the eyes to view the canvases in the whole, which were usually painted in a unified hue. Henry Ward Ranger started the painting with a special brownish varnish to which he attributed the magic glow inhis autumnal landscapes. Other painters like Dwight Tryon or John Francis Murphy used limited pallet with subdued colors. Quite often, the picture is medium dark, almost bordering murkiness. In viewing these pictures, the consciousness of audience has naturally changed from grasping what is offered in Hudson River school paintings to examine what can be explored in Barbizon paintings; in other words, our minds search instead of catch.

Such an ironic comparison can also be applied to infer the difference between Barbizon school and its succeeder - Impressionism. I have been fond of Impressionism and find that the best impressionistic paintings do not suppress the proactive thinking, the take-charge initiative from the audience by their pure visual pleasure. Too often, I have seen some modern Impressionism paintings with brilliant broken colors, or complimentary excitement; but there is nothing evocative beyond that point. And quite often the eyes get exhausted after experiencing a kaleidoscopic showcase of color range.

If the reduced color pallet and muted darkened tones in Barbizon paintings intrigue us into the depth of the canvas and the whole effect of the suggestive moods, then the typical subjects that are chosen by these group of painters bring us an infinite degrees of intimacy. Instead of the bird view of the grandeur that is supposed to be only enjoyed by the God, a closely acquainted or familiar scenes are frequently painted by Ranger, Tryon, and Murphy, etc. There are deep woods where we have trotted; or the brook that quenches both the cattles and travelers. The marshland of Murphy's paintings reminds the New Yorkers the nature of Long Island; while the old Church under the brush of Henry Golden Dearth stands for our unpretentious daily life. But contrary to the Impressionists, who preferred strong lightand shadow, Barbizon school would find its ideal in dusks or evenings when even the mundane objects bear a touch of tenderness or nostalgia. It is true that the foreground is most likely to be all muddily indistinguishable; yet the remains of the light is at once mysterious and momentary but also recalls something eternal and recurrent in one's subconsciousness. The profound sentimentality springs out when the unvarying surroundings take a softer form that combines the ordinary and the accustomed with the unanticipated. We've seen the trees growing taller as the sun sinks off the horizon, but only under the brush of the Barbizon painters do we really behold and enjoy the beauty of such sunset. In front of such paintings, we are encouraged to perceive out of the vagueness and to seek deeply into our profound memory because of the tendered moods, the suggestive brush strokes and the routine scenery which we think we know from the heart and which surprises us when filtered through painters' eyes.

In someway, Inness and his followers painted with a continuum of pianissimo. It is said: When volumes of the sounds are toned down, we hear our own internal echos, in a definite resonant.

Keep reading part 3 here. 

This past weekend saw two paintings by George Inness at auction, one with a Pittsburgh connection. The first was offered by Fontain's Auctions in Massachusetts and sold for $10,000, exceeding the estimate of $5,000-$6,000. The price would seem very reasonable. We wrote to ask for a condition report and found that there was much inpainting in the sky. The auction house said they couldn't see any reason why the sky would have been impainted, however. The second seemed to be an early Inness and bears more likeness to a Hudson River School painting than the later style he was well known for. It shows a stream and birch trees. The interesting thing to those in Western, Pennsylvania is the label on the back "J.J. Gillespie, 35 Wood Street." At some point the painting had been in Pittsburgh's first art gallery. If you're in the market for an Inness or painting with a Pittsburgh connection, you may be in luck... Midwest Auctions had some sort of difficulty and the this Inness will be relisted.

As I was walking through a painting gallery over the weekend, a friend asked me if I had a favorite artist. It's not a question that brings an easy answer. It would be almost as hard for me to tell you my favorite color, though I may come up with one. I don't generally see the world in this way. I think there are so many elements in the world, so many paintings, so much music, so many colors that they come and go each making some impact on us and then fading away or becoming a more significant bulding block in who we are and the way we see things. Sometimes the way we see things at first leaves one impression and then with further contemplation, something completely different. The perception can change with time. The immediate perception itself doesn't change, however. What changes is our perception of the immediate perception. Our perception morphs from that immediate perception into something else, a perception that includes that immediate impression and everything we've thought about it since and what together it means to us at any given moment.

So I have described the immediate perception, and at any moment the current perception. A third element to our impression of a painting is our memory of that perception, which can vary from an immediate perception as much as any memory can vary from the actual event. What we think about the immediate perception differs from a memory in that we are not necessarily thinking about a memory.

I wasn't thinking about this all at once when I, after a few moments of pause, gave my answer of George Inness. Yet in pondering my answer, I think this is what I like most about Inness-- that sense of an immediate impression, perception or perhaps the most accurate word would be feeling. To me, many of the works by Inness provide this sense of how we feel about something the first time we see it. Not the thing itself, but that feeling of what it is that we get even before we look at it completely. As soon as we look at it completetely we destroy it. Its almost as if we have to be walking one way, turn our head quickly, breathe in and then shut our eyes. We let the world with a breathe in and then hold it in our breasts to be forever not what it is, but what it is to us. That's George Inness.


The other type of Inness painting I think is the ones that seem to depict memory, and sometimes a memory of that first feeling we had when we set our sites on a place in time. The specifics don't matter the way they seem to in a Dali, in fact if they are there in our memories, they aren't what they were physically anyway. It's our minds that can see the world somewhat, but not entirely independent of what exists. It's our memories that keep it in existence long after that fleeting moment in time has passed.

These feelings, first impressions and the memories of them would have been lost to eternity had they not been painted by Inness. More, they seem to let us inside Inness himself and enter our phsyche almost as if it was an impression on our mind or a memory therein.

Inness himself may have recognized the changing nature of impressions and images in our minds. As an image enters our mind covering over or somehow changing another memory or idea, so Inness enjoyed most painting not on a blank canvas, but on other work. He is also said to have never considered a painting finished and always reserved the right to rework it even after it had sold, almost as if the paintings were a recording of his changing idea of an impression on canvas.

So my answer for now is George Inness.

Images: Close up from work at Toledo Museum of Art (top) Close up from work at Buteler Museum of American Art (bottom)

A Philadelphia auction is offering several original photographs by William Rau. Its not hard to find examples of Rau's work on stereoview cards or in books. Rau may be best known however as a photographer for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Rau captured the industrial encroachment of the natural landscape as well as the Scalp Level painters captured the absence of it.

Rau was hired in 1890 by the Pennsylvania Railroad and in 1899 by the Lehigh Valley Railroad, for which he produced a series of views from Perth Amboy, New Jersey, to Buffalo and Niagara Falls. He also recorded the Johnstown flood and the 1904 Baltimore fire. It reminds me of the commissioned work by George Innes in the National Gallery. Rau was no run of the mill company photographer, however. The artistic value of his work rivals many landscapes painted by well-known Pennsylvania painters.

Some of Rau's extrordinary landscape photography can be seen at LACMA in LA, the Cleveland Museum of Art, MOMA and a large collection is on view at the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art in Loretto (a short and scenic drive from Pittsburgh).