American Sublime

I visited the Tate Britain American sublime exhibition on February 24th 2002. Having been to the Andy Warhol exhibition at the Tate modern I was interested in the astounding contrast in representation of America. Warhol made the banal and everyday look challenging and new, these artists drew their inspiration from the newly discovered lands and what they felt was Gods creation, There was a lot of influence from European artists like Turner and Constable and in fact one of the artists Thomas Cole, owed a great deal to English and European artists. He acknowledged this influence. He spoke about "the sublime melting into the beautiful, the savage tempered by the magnificent". There was an enormous amount of religious and Christian references in the paintings. I felt this was due to the vastness of the landscape and mans encounter was always double edged- a terrible beauty, dangerous and unpredictable. There was also a trilogy of paintings based on the Roman empire and they conveyed a romantic vision of how it may have been. The splendour and fall of the empire and how they felt this sat with America of their time. I found these pictures quite amusing because they also looked similar to the way Hollywood movies would portray Rome a century later. Interesting.

The use of colour was exquisite and some of the natural scenery portrayed was beautiful- sunsets, gloomy rainy days. Thomas Moran's picture of monumental ice berg floating to the north of America and a stranded ship in the foreground. Very interesting. Some of the scenes portrayed could also have been England except for their vastness, small cottages set in front of vast open spaces. Niagara falls was also portrayed in stunning magnificence, truly awesome. This was in the same room as Frederik Edwin Church's Twilight in the wilderness (1860); this I felt captured the contrasts in landscape representation, a bird of prey, sunset, wildness and religious reference in the foreground.

Once again I felt that although these artists are less well known than their European contemporaries, their work was as inspiring. Their portrayal of America was an attempt to deal with man's place in the scheme of things, some paintings had tiny figures sitting or standing in front of vast open spaces. Man appeared tiny compared to the scenery and I am sure this was something they wanted to explore further. God and the creation of the world was also eluded to, one portrayal of good versus evil, light versus dark was straight from Old Testament story. I also noticed the influence on Lord of the rings - Gog and Magog. The references were sometimes subtle and sometimes not so subtle, which is maybe the American way. How do you capture wild scenes and landscapes and yet show the place of humans in this, how does one retain the danger in nature and how man is always trying to tame it?