Thomas Cole’s ‘The Oxbow, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm,’ 1836
NEW YORK – I’ve always been an admirer of landscapes painted by those 19th century artists known loosely as the Hudson River school: Thomas Cole, his student Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt and so forth. They portray a luminous, nostalgic America that, while it isn’t too far from reality, also manages to resemble the fantastic visions of the European landscape tradition that preceded them – you know the ones, those improbable mountainous vistas dotted here and there with Roman ruins, plenty of cows and sheep and the occasional flirtatious nyad. Apparently the world looked somewhat different during the Renaissance and for a century or two after.
So it was with some surprise and delight this past weekend that I ventured for the first time into the actual Hudson River Valley, making a bit of a pilgrimage up to Thomas Cole’s house, and discovered that he wasn’t making any of it up. OK, he made up some of it, as far as details go – he moved a few trees around here and there and omitted the railroad that was punched through the idyllic landscape between his house and the river.
But Cole captured the light and, more important, the feel of the view from his back porch with journalistic accuracy. His art wasn’t a soft dreamy vision of the American landscape. It’s the actual place, at least as true as photography if perhaps more elegant.
This insight came during a week-long return visit to New York at the invitation of an old friend I bumped into when I was here – for the first time in four decades – just a month ago. I had mentioned I wanted to spend a week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, just looking at the paintings. Next thing I knew, I was on a plane back to the East Coast, destined to become a house guest in a comfortable Westchester suburb with easy commuter access to Manhattan and its artistic delights. I got back home Wednesday night.
First a word on life in the suburbs. With New York’s big artistic institutions just a half-hour train ride away, it’s easy to overlook what is happening out in the provinces. But one night we heard a delightful concert by composer Philip Glass, who sat at a piano at an intimate hall, smaller than the Jaqua Concert Hall at Eugene’s Shedd Institute, and played several of his minimalist compositions (including three pieces from “Metamorphosis”) in a benefit concert for a place called the Tibetan Home of Hope. Glass was comfortable and charming with the audience, if a bit rusty at finding all his own notes on the keyboard, and it was a thrilling experience.
On another day, we went to the local Presbyterian church for an afternoon performance by the local youth symphony and a couple choral groups. Here’s one place where New York has it over Eugene (as though there aren’t many others) – the young performers, who were middle and high school age and, of course, educated in schools where music and art matter, were about as good as professionals I’ve heard in Oregon. They played a program that included Gustav Holst’s St. Paul’s Suite and Joseph Jongen’s Symphonie Concertante, along with a few pop numbers. It’s extraordinary what actual music and art education can do.
My week at the Met – OK, it was four longish days at the museum, but that’s a lot of back-to-back museuming – began with finding my way to the Thomas Coles and the Frederic Churches in the American Wing. (A note on navigation: With my innate lack of any sense of direction, getting around the enormous museum complex was, even after several visits, a challenge. With a map and considerable patience, it can be done, and the advantage of getting lost a lot at the Met is that there are so many fascinating rooms to blunder into. I think I’ve now found most of them.)
Cole is represented here by several large paintings, including the “Oxbow” above. I found myself looking long and hard at it, as well as at a representation of the actual Hudson River Valley as we saw it from his house. In the latter work you could trace the exact contour of the peaks and valleys we had seen, along with the foliage. (I had also seen the same painted view in works at Cole’s house, which now houses a number of his paintings, a museum in its own right.)
Across the street from the Met is a small, interesting institution called the Neue Galerie, co-founded by businessman and art collector Ronald S. Lauder, the son of Estée; it’s dedicated to German and Austrian art of the early 20th century. I wandered over one day to take in a new show there of work by Egon Schiele, the Viennese painter who took his mentor Gustav Klimt’s vision and pushed it to the limit. The show – it runs through January 19, in case you’re interested in going – is beautiful and informative. Schiele was one of those art world comets who flame out early; he died of the flu during the 1918 pandemic at age 28, just three days after his pregnant wife succumbed to the same disease.
I loved the week at the Met. When I would get bored looking at American painting, I would wander over to the European collection and work my way backwards to the middle ages, captivated by the craftsmanship and devotion in all those paintings of Christ and various saints.
A wonderful diversion, which I would have missed entirely had my host not suggested it, is the Met’s rooftop garden, open just until November. It’s currently showing a site-specific installation of steel and semi-reflective glass by Dan Graham, a novel but simple piece that had museumgoers – not just me – wandering around and in it and taking photos non-stop.
But back to that Hudson Valley. My host was, I thought at first, improbably obsessed with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. She had just seen the Ken Burns documentary series on FDR, so our main objective besides the splendid fall leaves in driving up the river that day was to see the Roosevelt mansion, Springwood – now a National Park Service site – along the river at Hyde Park. If this gives you any idea of the neighborhood, the Roosevelts’ nearest neighbor there was a mansion owned by the Vanderbilts.
A bit to my surprise, I was fascinated. Roosevelt was, of course, a towering figure, and to see his life and times so intimately portrayed made me want to rush right out and view the Ken Burns version. We saw the taxidermied bird collection from his youth in the main entry of the mansion, and toured a very good museum account of his life in the presidential library nearby. You can see the original manuscript of FDR’s speech to Congress after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. FDR himself edited the opening sentence, which read “a date which will live in world history” in the original, to the much improved – and now very famous – line, “a date which will live in infamy” (usually misquoted as “a day that will live in infamy”).
We wound up our visit to Hyde Park sitting for a pleasant hour on the porch of Top Cottage, which is a small retreat FDR had built nearby, and which is where he met the king and queen of England as war loomed in Europe in 1937. It was here, later in the war, that FDR and Winston Churchill met privately and agreed to push forward what would be known as the Manhattan Project. (FDR also apparently used the cottage to meet his girlfriends out of the public eye.)
During our hour on the back porch, a very knowledgeable park service ranger sat and discussed, in considerable detail and with great insight, the history and significance of the cottage and the entire Springwood estate, while the four of us in his audience sat back and marveled at the intense history that surrounded us on a perfect fall day.