Volume 47, Number 2 · February 10, 2000
The Suspended Moment
By Sanford Schwartz
Heade, Martin Johnson 1999- January 16, 2000; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., February 13-May 7, 2000; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, May 28-August 17, 2000.
an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, September 29,, Catalog of the exhibition by Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., with contributions by Janet L. Comey, by Karen E. Quinn, by Jim Wright
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Yale University Press, 197 pp., $50.00
Martin Johnson Heade: A Survey, 1840-1900
by Barbara Novak, by Timothy A. Eaton
Eaton Fine Art, 79 pp., $29.95
The Kingdoms of Edward Hicks 1999-January 2, 2000; the Denver Art Museum, February 12-April 30, 2000; and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, September 24, 2000-February 7, 2001; originally at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, February 7-September 6, 1999.
an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, October 10,, Catalog of the exhibition by Carolyn J. Weekley, with the assistance of Laura Pass Barry
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation/Abrams, 254 pp., $39.95
It makes a kind of poetic sense that an artist whose best pictures show the world in the creepily becalmed moments before a huge storm arrives might have something creepily becalmed about his career as a whole. Specialists in the field of nineteenth-century American painting, if not the general museum-going public, know that Martin Johnson Heade's most renowned works are a handful of paintings of oncoming storms, dating from the late 1850s and 1860s. In these large, magisterial pictures, where the enormous skies are blackening over, the water resembles a black mirror, and all is bathed in a dead, even light, he caught the sheer airlessness of the seconds before a deluge and high winds will strike. At Heade's retrospective, his first in thirty years and only the second large show of his work ever, a related sense of foreboding emanates from his other kinds of pictures: his tropical landscapes and images of hummingbirds and orchids, his still lifes of flowers and views of salt marshes. The light in these pictures is rarely penetratingly bright. Over the marshes, big, thick clouds can sit thuggishly in what feels like humid air, while his still lifes, which whisk us to the dimmest corner of the Victorian parlor, are like details remembered from a bad dream.
Review, 4610 words
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