Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

Hudson River School), but its supporters argue that it is more fundamentallyan indigenous American way of seeing that can also be identified in still life,portraiture, and genre (scenes of everyday life) paintings. In mid-nineteenthcentury luminist landscapes nature was presented on a smooth, mirror-likesurface that showed barely a trace of the artist’s hand. The aim was artisticanonymity, to remove all visible traces of the artist’s activity so that thespectator could confront the image as directly as possible. This was not anapproach of “mere realism” but arose from a subjectivity that strove powerfullyto transfer the artist’s feeling directly to the object with no intermediary.Luminism pursued an increased intensity of realism, which perhaps couldbe termed a “super-realism” or “impersonal expressionism.”As John I.H. Baur’s pioneering essay on luminism in 1954 alreadymade clear, this stylistic category referred not just to an attitude toward lightbut also toward things. In contrast to the Hudson River School, luminismcreated its own internal world. Here time seemed to stop, and the momentwas locked in place, especially by a strong horizontal picture organizationand by an ordering of planes stepping back in space from and parallel tothe picture surface. There was little sense of the continuous sweep of theHudson River School’s landscape vision; rather, a containment of each partwithin its own spatial unit arrested the moment in what Emerson called a“concentrated eternity.” Expressed again through linear, two-dimensionaltendencies in rendering forms, the traditional American artistic concern withthe integrity and fact of the physical object (its “thingness” or “thereness”)reached its most intense development in luminism. This again reflected areliance on more of a conceptual or “mind’s eye” image than on the actualsensation of the eye. As another indication of a conceptual bias, the detailshown on distant objects was often unnaturally precise.The somewhat mysterious quality of luminist light (from whichits name derives) was largely due to how it was contained within clearlydefined spatial geometries, its very subtle modulations of tone, and theway that most luminist landscapes contrasted a foreground area of ultracleardetail with a luminous, hazy—and sometimes dazzling—background.Here again the transcendentalist musings of Emerson on light have beencited as a significant influence. Consider, for example, Emerson’s commentthat light was “the first of painters,” and how “a jet of pure light” is “thereappearance of the original soul.” Or: “And the stimulus it [intense light]affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath, like space andtime, make all matter gay.” In a luminist landscape or seascape, the hazy,glowing distance is simultaneously a realistic rendering of an atmospheric105