Word: bierstadt
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...more dramatic, oratorical way, this discovery is also the basic subject of the huge landscape "machines" produced by late 19th century artists who went West, such as Church and Albert Bierstadt, both exceptionally well represented in this show. Each image of waterfall and mountain, volcano and precipice becomes an act of appropriation, the pictorial equivalent to the myth of Manifest Destiny. Practically no French or English painting of the day presents such pre-Cinemascope prodigies with such coercive zeal; with them, the idea of American vision almost becomes a fetish...
...that abstract paintings put into currency in America. They have less to do with locating a set of objects in the illusion of a void than with creating a continuous pelt of shapes that fills the surface from edge to edge, top to bottom. With 19th century landscapists like Bierstadt or Corot, one is softly inducted into the illusion. Welliver points out, 'You can really just enter into it and leave. With mine, there is the resistance of the surface of the painting. The fact of the painting is always...
...Courbet looked very hard and had a method," Welliver remarks to the writer Edwin Denby in the catalogue. "Bierstadt did not look very hard and had a method, and de Kooning makes it up as he goes along ... I look very hard, then make it up as I go along." The idea of "sub lime" American landscape is fairly worn currency by now; there are too many generalized cliches of in stant grandeur attached to it. What saves Welliver's sense of awe at large scale is his sense of fact...
Catlin was no colorist. His drawing did not approach the swirling dynamism of a Remington; his technique could not compass the majestic grandeur that Bierstadt gave to the Rockies. Many of his figures were cursorily laid in, and many of his landscapes were studded with stylized hills that suggest haste rather than observation. But his candid style has an impact on the modern viewer that Remington's hyped-up romanticism no longer does. His so-called ineptness of drawing has been re-evaluated in the wake of the incisive simplicities of a Douanier Rousseau or even a John Kane...
...Reagans a whiff of home while they reside back East; that brought a deluge of contemporary works, most of them bad. They have been stored away in a closet. What the President had in mind was great paintings of an earlier West, scenes by the likes of Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran and Charles Russell. Reagan wants the Western feel with class. Curiously, Reagan balances this new formality with his own habit of doing things himself. The sight of Lyndon Johnson sticking out his hand and a hovering steward thrusting in a fresh drink is still remembered around the White House...