Word: bierstadt
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...since the Middle Ages, when every animal or plant could be taken to symbolize some aspect of God's plan, had a landscape been as widely moralized as America's wilderness. Novak persuasively argues that the powers of artists as diverse as Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, Martin Johnson Heade, Thomas Cole or John F. Kensett did not simply arise from their formal talents as painters. They were reinforced by a social agreement about the meanings of art and landscape in the last age of faith, when there still appeared to be a seamless, didactic relationship between nature...
...tradition to which Still's work is related is heroic landscape, the art of the epic vista, as seen in 19th century America by painters like Bierstadt and Moran. No doubt, in some general way, his years spent under larger skies than Manhattan's, in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest, contributed to the sense of vast atmospheric scale in his art. But to read it directly as landscape violates its meaning. The cliffs and ravines of color, the jagged rifts of blue or vermilion breaking through a matrix of dense enveloping black, are no metaphors of the Grand...
...vision ecstatically distributed between the near and the far, has permeated American nature writing from Henry David Thoreau to Carlos Castaneda. It is as central to Adams' photography as it is to O'Keeffe's painting, or further back to the landscapes of Yosemite and Yellowstone painted by Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran and their followers in the 19th century. An entire tradition of seeing is inherent in the word wilderness; it is essentially romantic. As Szarkowski has observed, "Adams' pictures are perhaps anachronisms. They are perhaps the last confident and deeply felt pictures of their tradition . . . It does not seem...
...rate had not noticed, the work of his 19th century predecessors, Western landscape photographers like Carleton E. Watkins and Timothy H. O'Sullivan. He was still influenced by the so-called pictorialists, photographers given to arty blurs and poses. He also disliked the canonical painters of the American sublime, Bierstadt and Moran. "Indians and bears walking out to the edge of cliffs!" he snorts. "They'd paint the Half Dome as though it were chewing gum. No essence, no spirit?just scene painting." Adams' problem was to find a modernist vision in photography, one that corresponded to the postimpressionist avantgarde...
...century landscapes furnish most of the drama of the show. Their medium is light, perceived in elaborately religious terms as the direct speech of God. Very little in 19th century European painting, except for J.M.W. Turner and John Martin, prepares us for the burst of patriarchal radiance that Ms Bierstadt's Sunset in the Yosemite Valley, 1868. The sun is hidden by a crag as though it were the unspeakable name of Yahweh. When Frederic Church painted Cotopaxi, 1862, he deliberately invoked the creation of the world-a panorama of sifting red light, boiling vapors, lakes emptying over...