Roaring20JournalFNL_SGL:6.9 Golf Journal - the Heckscher ...

Roaring20JournalFNL_SGL:6.9 Golf Journal 10/15/08 12:31 PM Page 54
54 The Heckscher Museum of Art
EXHIBITIONS
Mythic Landscapes of America
November 15 through January 4
Landscape painting in America has often been about ideas of national identity
and the uniqueness of the country. The Heckscher Museum of Art is fortunate to
have an exceptionally strong collection of landscape paintings from the 19th- and
early 20th-centuries. As a group, they tend to emphasize the natural majesty of
the country with a delicate balance of the Real and the Ideal. Nature is most often
directly presented with little evidence of human activity. When human presence is
recorded, the balance is weighted toward the power of Nature. Settlement and
pastoral innocence achieve equilibrium in paintings. The themes of silence and
solitude appear repeatedly. In the Western works, we might see signs of redeeming
heroes, noble savages or laconic cowboys, but there is no indication of
conflict or strife.
In the more modern images, there is still an attempt toward calmness or spirituality,
although just as often there is a disruption of the myth. The commercial or
industrial comes to dominate the landscape. Mass culture reconfigures the experience.
American innocence has been lost, and we can no longer accept the
straightforward myth of a unique Arcadia. Yet, there is still a wistful remembrance,
if not a longing for that beauty.
Thomas Moran, Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, 1911, oil on canvas,
20 x 30 in. The Heckscher Museum of Art; August Heckscher Collection.
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