Volume 53, Number 13 · August 10, 2006
The Artist as Prospector
By John Updike
Frederic Church, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran: Tourism and the American Landscape
Catalog of the exhibition by Gail S. Davidson, Floramae McCarron-Cates,Barbara Bloemink, Sarah Burns, and Karal Ann Marling
an exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, May 19–October 22, 2006.
Bulfinch/Time Warner, 180 pp., $50.00
This engaging, farraginous show at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, on Fifth Avenue, invites the viewer to think of the nineteenth-century landscape artist, usually envisioned as the independent producer of a luxury artifact, as, instead, a tool of commerce and real estate development. Frederic Church, who has recently played a starring role in 2002's traveling (London, Philadelphia, Minneapolis) megashow 'American Sublime' and this year's exhibition 'Treasures from Olana: Landscapes by Fred-eric Edwin Church,' at the National Academy Museum in New York,[*] extends his twenty-first-century revival by dominating the two other named artists in an assemblage subtitled 'Tourism and the American Landscape.' Though Winslow Homer is represented by a number of amusing wood engravings and beautiful watercolors, and Thomas Moran adds his otherworldly West to the collective depiction of the relatively unspoiled American wilderness, it is Church whose heirs lodged over two thousand works in the collection of the Cooper Union Museum (as compared with more than three hundred by Homer and less than a hundred by Moran), and it is Church who, in his preternaturally deft and rapid oil sketches, most decisively places before us the thing itself, the New World's nature.
Review, 2435 words
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