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.