Brom Kim, 1998
Looking Down Yosemite Valley
Albert Bierstadt, 1865
Currently in the Birmingham, AL Museum of Art
"Critics buzzed at the vast Western spectacle, some with unrestrained admiration, others with contempt: its vast radiance bespoke heavenly splendor, or it was popular kitsch, big and loud like a bad opera".
(From a Birmingham Museum of Art placard next to Albert Bierstadt’s Looking Down Yosemite Valley.)
When Albert Bierstadt’s romantic visions of the American West first appeared before an Eastern public yet unfamiliar with the beauty and scale of the West the public was dazzled. In a short time however, Bierstadt’s renown, like the wildness of the West, would be destroyed by the westward march of progress. When Bierstadt died in 1902 he was so thoroughly forgotten that a contemporary painter said, "I did not know he was alive until I saw that he had died." (Kernan, *) While Bierstadt’s skill as a painter has often been derided, he was notable in that like his literary counterpart John Muir, Bierstadt encapsulates, for a fleeting moment, a uniquely American notion of the Romantic sublime.
Bierstadt began his career in the Northeastern U.S. in the mid-1800’s, but soon left to study art in Dusseldorf with his mother’s cousin, Johann Hasenclever. (Baigell, 8) Hasenclever died before Bierstadt arrived, but Bierstadt after being initially rejected, eventually gained entry into the Academy at Dusseldorf, where he remained for a few years persistently trying to improve the technique he had at first taught himself. It seems likely that while in Europe, Bierstadt would have inevitably been exposed to the likes of Friedrich, Turner, Constable, and in his own area, perhaps, the ‘Hudson River School’ painter Cole. Unlikely as it may seem, it may have been in Dusseldorf where Bierstadt’s interest in the American West was sparked. Contemporaries Charles Wimar, Henry Lewis, and George Bingham had been painting Western scenes there for a while before Bierstadt arrived.
While in Europe, Bierstadt painted his first alpine landscapes, and not long after returning to the U.S. set out to do the same in America. "It was the summer of 1859 when Bierstadt finally came face-to-face with the Rockies, as a member of Frederick Lander's survey party. He and an artist friend roamed the Continental Divide, the Black Hills and the Wasatch Range for several weeks, writing home excited tales of their travels [...] thus earning himself the title "the artist-explorer."
On his journeys, Bierstadt made numerous pencil and oil sketches to work from in his New York studio. That he worked from sketch and memory may explain Bierstadt’s rather free use of exaggeration in scale. The Rockies are a beautiful range of mountains, but their physical relief is nothing like the Alps. This seemed not to bother Bierstadt a bit. For Bierstadt, "The imagined West was at least as great as the Alps, the American version of Europe's Alpine Sublime […] this sensation upon experiencing "the Sublime"-that is, any scene in nature that commanded awe and a frisson of fear-was much prized at the time. European romantics raved so much about it that Americans wanted some of it too.
Eventually, Bierstadt’s travels brought him to the Sierras, the California mountain range dubbed the ‘range of light’ by Muir. Of the particular Yosemite valley depicted in the painting, Muir writes "After long ages of growth in the darkness beneath the glaciers, through sunshine and storms, it seemed now to be ready and waiting for the elected artist, like yellow wheat for the reaper; and I could not help wishing that I might carry colors and brushes with me on my travels, and learn to paint. In the mean time I had to be content with photographs on my mind and sketches in my notebooks."(53)
And: "A massive cloud of pure pearl luster, apparently as fixed and calm as the meadows and groves in the shadow beneath it, was arched across the Valley from wall to wall, one end resting on the grand abutment of El Capitan, the other on Cathedral Rock." (95) Bierstadt and Muir exemplify the Romantic notion of the spiritual quality of nature. According to Gardner, "Early in the century, most landscape painting to some degree expressed this Romantic, pantheistic view (first extolled by Rousseau) of nature as a "being" that included the totality of existence in organic unity and harmony […] Romanticism in the arts, it could be said, made a kind of personal religion of nature, a religion based in profound esthetic emotion- of mystery and beauty." (948) I believe it is this quality of reverence and awe that I appreciate in Looking Down Yosemite Valley.
While the public was quite taken with Looking Down Yosemite Valley, as is often the case, the critics were not so impressed. Qualitatively, the piece displays the common features of Dusseldorf landscape paintings: "abrupt tonal contrasts of light and dark, lighting sources hidden behind clouds, tortured looking trees, agitated and dramatically rendered skies, and craggy landscape features often conveying an anxious mood." (Baigell, 9)
Additionally, according to Baigell, "Bierstadt picked up Gude’s habit of using a belt of dark colored trees in the foreground so separate fore from rear." (9) This is also a feature of Friedrich’s Cloister Graveyard and Cole’s The Oxbow. Also, the attention to atmospheric effect "reveals Turner's influence" (Baigell, 53). Problematic however, are Bierstadt’s monotonous use of the same color schemes throughout vast swath’s of the huge painting, and it’s impersonality. "The details are all there, but a single informing spirit does not inhabit the canvas. Instead of becoming inspirational, the work remains topographical and theatrical." (Baigell, 53)
Critical acclaim however, never seemed to be Bierstadt’s goal. According to Baigell, he "was not really one of those committed, with varying degrees of humility, to the making of art; rather he deliberately sought fame and fortune." What the public wanted, Bierstadt delivered. which explains why he was one of the most commercially successful painters of the 19th Century. With the changing nation, Bierstadt’s fortunes would soon change however. Landscape painting had been changing, and public acclaim if fleeting and fickle. "Perhaps his lack of subtlety disturbed his contemporaries and when tastes changed, he became an easy target." (Baigell, 8) According to Kernan, "the 1876 Centennial marked a watershed of American taste."
America was changing fast. With the driving of the ‘Golden Spike’ in 1869, thousands of Americans were able to see the fabled West, and the view from the train at least, was not nearly as stunning as Bierstadt had portrayed it. "Americans by the shipload had been to France, had seen the works of Corot and the Barbizon School. Instead of the literalism and bald, bright studio light of mid-century art, they looked for a more intimate vision, a landscape of the mind perhaps, anyway something poetic and subjective." "Others found Bierstadt's landscapes too theatrical, "commonplace" and entirely dead to all sense of what is properly termed color." Both the Wild West, and Bierstadt’s fantastic vision of it were rapidly becoming things of the past.
References:
Baigell, M. (1981). Albert Bierstadt. New York: Watson-Guptill.
Kernan, M. (1991). Showing the West in paintings as big as all outdoors. (Albert
Bierstadt), Smithsonian, 21(11), 86-97. *unnumbered internet document. Muir, J. (1838, 1980). Mountaineering essays. Salt Lake City, UT: Peregrine Smith Literary Naturalists.
Tansey, R.G., & Kleiner, F.S. (1996). Gardner’s art through the ages (10th ed.). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.