The Natural and the Human
A new show atvose Galleries asks what makes us human
Ralph Albert Blakelock (18471919) traveled among the Native American tribes of the West at a time when their lifestyle and rituals were still relatively untainted by the westward expansion of America. Blakelock admired their mystical and natural connection to nature.as his career progressed, Blakelock turned inward and relied more on memory to paint scenes of nature. His influence on the development of American modern art, if forgotten today, was extraordinary in his lifetime. Marsden Hartley said his paintings were a “plausible basis for a genuine American art.” In the early years of the 20th century his paintings sold better than those of the French impressionists. But during the height of his notoriety he was confined to a mental institution with schizophrenia— separated from Nature and his own.
His painting Landscape with Shepherd is featured in the exhibition Human/ Nature atvose Galleries in Boston, opening November 17.
The gallery notes,“in this exhibition we’ve chosen to focus on artists’ experiences of the natural world versus the human world and ascertain the lines where these two worlds converge. Each painting exists along a spectrum between the two poles and in deciding where these paintings fall, we’ve relied primarily on the power dynamic within the painting.to what extent are the human inhabitants of each painting in command of their surroundings? On one end are wild, uninhabited landscapes. As we move toward the human side of the spectrum, there is
little or no reference to nature.” Blakelock’s scene is one of man and nature in equilibrium but an equilibrium where man always has the upper hand—a divine right granted in the Garden of Eden.
The exhibition catalogue quotes Edward G. Bulwer-lytton (1803-1873), the English writer and politician, who wrote,“art does not imitate nature, but it founds itself on the study of nature— takes from nature the selections which best accord with its own intention, and then bestows on them that which nature does not possess, viz. the mind and the soul of man.”
His anthropocentric view of man is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Blakelock’s experience of Native American tribes.
A bucolic landscape is invaded by The Great Curve of the Boston & Worcester RR at Newton, a painting by Samuel Adams Hudson (18131894). Primeval nature is present in the decaying tree stump in the left foreground and domesticated nature in the cows in their pasture and the men fishing in the river.
Howard Logan Hildebrandt (18721958) was primarily a portrait painter. His Working on the Road shows the proud workmen extending the biblical “dominion” across the landscape which appears almost incidentally in the background as in a Renaissance portrait.
Ellen Emmet Rand (1875-1941) was one of the country’s most successful portrait painters of the elite in the early 20th century.the pensive sitter in Woman Before the Mirror averts her face from the viewer but gazes back through her reflection.the figure is selfreflective rather than part of a larger context, cosseted in her corset.
In his novel The Tree English novelist John Fowles wrote “The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.”