The Pebble and the Mountain
Past Time: Geology in European and American Art at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College
Past Time: Geology in European and American Art at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College
We take rocks in paintings for granite—i mean granted. But just as rocks are the foundation of the planet we live on, they are also the foundations, seen and unseen, of every landscape, even of every seascape.after all, what holds the sea in and up? Rock. Extend this to portraits.what do we all stand on? Something ultimately connected to the crust of the Earth. Stretch the metaphor just a little and you embrace the bronze of our statuary, marble and clay, and the minerals paint pigment is made from.then go back, back to the very beginning: rock is the canvas of the caves. And yet, I am hard pressed to think of exhibitions that bring the bedrock of art— rock—to the fore. Past Time: Geology in European and American Art, the new—and perhaps geologically overdue—exhibition opening at the
Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, rights this wrong and redresses this odd art historical absence.
Curated by Patricia Phagan, curator of prints and drawings at the Lehman Loeb, with a scientific assist from Jill S. Schneiderman, professor of Earth Science atvassar, Past Time chronicles a convergence of three passions at the end of the 18th century:“the popular tourist trade, the fashion for the picturesque, and the rise of natural science and geology.” This convergence, in turn, shaped the practice of landscape painting and the philosophy of painting from nature—see John Ruskin—that had a profound effect on European and American artists.
But another keen interest at the time was theology. Science was beginning to question the age of the Earth as the Bible set it forth; Bishop Ussher’s meticulously researched timeline of human history since creation—which, according to him, had begun at 6 p.m., on October 22, 4004 B.c.—was
running headlong into the stories that rocks were beginning to tell.artists, especially those who strove to be artistnaturalists, found themselves in the thick of a transformation in Western thought as well as art.
For artists, the world—at least, the world that was worth representing in art—could be divided into the beautiful, the picturesque and the sublime, where the beautiful was harmonic and pastoral, the sublime was craggy, vertiginous and frightening, and the picturesque attempted to combine the two. Painters sought remote peaks, stone arches and causeways, caves, volcanoes and cataracts tumbling over cliffs. In other words—rock. There is precedent for this artistic interest in geology. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, had closely observed the stratification of rocks, noting the deposition of fossils on the tops of mountains and refuting—giving no thought to the heresy in his refutation—the biblical story of the flood. In his recent biography on the
master,walter Isaacson cites davinci’s notebooks:“if the Deluge had carried the shells three and four hundred miles from the sea, it would have carried them there mixed up with different species, amassed together. But we see, at such distances, the oysters, and the shells, and the squids and all the other shells which stay congregated together.” Davinci’s keen eye for rockforms is evident throughout his work, no more so than in the dramatic landscape that frames the Mona Lisa.
But though there is precedent, you have to look at Ruskin, the influential art historian and critic, who had studied geology and was an artist in his own right. Ruskin advocated that artists should not only study nature, but be true to nature in their works.
His 1843 book, Modern Painters, was carried, so it is said, in the hip pocket of every painter and student of painting in Europe and America.what he wrote there tells us all we need to know, not only about the 19th-century artist’s interest in mountains, but also why artists like Cole and Church would go so far as to collect rocks on their travels. Some of these, it should be noted, are part of the exhibition and should not be overlooked. It isn’t merely that they wanted souvenirs or even that these specimens would help them get the rocks right in compositions. Read Ruskin, and you’ll see why they filled their pockets and bags with stones and fossils:“for a stone, when it is examined, will be found a mountain in miniature.the fineness of Nature’s work is so great, that, into a single block, a foot or two in diameter, she can compress as many changes of form and structure, on a small scale, as she needs for a mountain on a large one; and, taking moss for forests, and grains of crystal for crags, the surface of a stone, in by far the plurality of instances, is more interesting than the surface of an ordinary hill; more fantastic in form, and incomparably richer in color.”
We’re in new and different territory here—asked to look at the macro in the micro and the micro in the macro.this is Blake’s world in a blade of grass and Emerson’s oak forest in an acorn, where a romantic outlook meets a scientific eye. You can see the artists, looking up, looking around, squinting, having just read this passage from Ruskin, or recalling it, or having read it so many times that they’ve digested it, so many
times that it’s become a layer in the bedrock of their own way of seeing the world and making it into art. Frederic Church’s oil sketches—petra, Study of Rocks, 1868, done at the great Nabatean city in present day Jordan (site of the last scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), and Cliffs and Rocky Cove, Mount Desert Island (today’s Acadia National Park)—are close examinations of geological forms, colors and contours, Ruskin’s dicta in action.
It’s the equivalent of anatomy in figure work and animal art: to paint from Nature, you have to know Nature. To paint landscapes, you have to know the land.
Finished paintings often conceal the evidence of the painstaking sketches that lead to them. One of these, Asher Brown Durand’s Where the Streamlet
Sings in Rural Joy, painted circa 1848-49, is fascinating because the way Durand paints the flow of water flowing, with thin lines of white hugging their rounded contour of the rocks, tells a tale of the eons it has taken to smooth these stones.the exposed, mosscovered stones at right, and the tiny trickles that fall between them confirm the tale; these same tiny trickles are waterfalls in miniature, waiting for us to identify them with, for instance, Sanford Robinson Gifford’s drawing of Kaaterskill Falls, sublime and slender in its 260-foot drop from the top.
What water and wind do to rock, how the sea and rivers and buffeting gales are Nature’s sculptors (even as the sun, moon and clouds are Nature’s painters) making immense, cyclopean wonders: cliffs, canyons and arches, are crucial subjects in 19th-century landscape. In these works, rock becomes the medium for the elements as well as a subject for art.
In the exhibition, william Trost Richards’ 1882 watercolor, Legendary England: tintagel, we see the waves and wind in action, sculpting the rocks bit by minute bit.what appear to be the ruins of a castle wall at the top blend in with Nature. Nature is taking them back, wresting them from human time, folding them back into time on her scale.when you realize that Tintagel is the site of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King—the poet’s take on the Arthurian legends—you feel that all of our power is nothing next to Nature’s. Albert Bierstadt’s Geyser, yellowstone Park, is otherworldly.the water-filled crater might be on the moon, and the sulfurous explosion hints at an infernal instability beneath the solid ground we believe we walk on. It would not be long before plate tectonics grew from a dream of a germ of an idea into a serious subject of study.awe inspires science; the science of the Earth leads us back to a kind of spiritual reverence. The more we know, the more wonder we feel—and the more we want to know more. I highly recommend Werner Herzog’s 2016 documentary, Into the Inferno, after you see Past Time. The combination of volcanology with a look at history of spirituality surrounding volcanoes will cap your experience and understanding of what the artists in Past Time felt and sought and strove to convey.
In her essential book, The Art of
Field Sketching, Clare Walker Leslie, perhaps today’s foremost exponent of sketching from Nature and a modern Ruskin in temperament, says that she gets more requests to teach classes in field sketching from college geology departments than from any other. Perhaps this is because the changes in rocks are so slow that they seem like stillness to us, and this stillness, in its turn—sometimes, for some of us— reaches us as a quiet, insistent murmur that asks us, politely, to reach for pencil and sketchpad, and try to set it down.