Writings | Landscapes after Ruskin

Early in 1991 I visited the exhibition Artist's Choice: Chuck Close. Head-On/The Modern Portrait at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Close had been invited by Kirk Varnedoe, then MoMA’s Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, to peruse the museum’s vast collections and curate a show. He complied with gusto, choosing well over a hundred items in varied media. The paintings were mounted frame to frame, salon style. On adjacent walls, prints, drawings, and photographs were displayed on narrow shelves, often overlapping. Works by well-known masters were hung next to pieces by artists I was not familiar with. Sculptural busts in different scales were installed so that their eyes aligned. The common denominator was portraiture. Close is, of course, a highly acclaimed contemporary portraitist, much revered for his steadfast pursuit of the genre while consistently evolving his approach to it.

I thoroughly enjoyed Close’s unconventional take. When I saw Head-On, I was working as an independent contemporary art curator and was intrigued by how the show challenged assumptions about museum exhibitions. Now at the helm of the Grey Art Gallery, New York University’s fine arts museum, I was thrilled when Maryse Brand, the Director of the Hall Art Foundation, approached me in August 2016 about hosting Landscapes after Ruskin: Redefining the Sublime, a show that had been mounted in Reading, Vermont. The Hall Art Foundation had invited renowned photographer Joel Sternfeld to curate an exhibition drawn from both its holdings and those of Andrew and Christine Hall. Sternfeld took the task very seriously, reviewing all of the works in the combined collections, which number over five thousand.

From mid-May through November 2016, nearly seventy pieces by more than fifty artists were on public view in the Foundation’s renovated nineteenth-century dairy farm, which comprises a stone farmhouse with cow, horse, and tractor barns. To the Halls’ surprise, Sternfeld did not confine his selections to photography. Instead, he gravitated to a wide range of images focusing on nature or the environment across many media—not only photography, but also painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and video. All, he felt, reveal a contemporary fascination with and concern for the natural world. He titled the exhibition Landscapes after Ruskin: Redefining the Sublime.

That Sternfeld delights in artworks referencing nature was not, perhaps, totally unexpected. Both the Halls and the artist share a love of Vermont; Sternfeld had once owned a home there and the Halls still do. Most importantly, Sternfeld refers to himself as a “landscapist.”² Indeed, he is passionate about the genre. Sternfeld is also enthralled with nineteenth-century philosophy, art, and literature—hence the references to Ruskin and the sublime in this show’s title. Sternfeld has, as long as he can remember, felt an affinity with Transcendentalism, a movement that emerged out of English and German Romanticism and reached its height in the United States during the 1820s and ’30s. Since very early childhood, he confides, he has been captivated by atmospheric effects and fascinated by the ever-evolving cycle of the seasons and the intensity of individual experience of nature. By age eleven, he had read Henry David Thoreau.

In 1840 J. M. W. Turner, the painter seemingly born to make atmospheric landscapes and seascapes of the blowsy weather of the British Isles, was entering what would be the final decade of his life. After forty years of exhibiting his work at the Royal Academy of Arts, his vision began to soar — to take on a whole new freedom and wildness.

A new cloud of controversy about his work and his life arose around him like one of the swirling passages in his paintings.

“He paints now as if his brains and imagination were mixed up on his palette with soapsuds and lather,” wrote the critic William Beckford. Accused of painting with, “cream or chocolate or yolk of egg or current jelly… His whole array of kitchen stuff,” Turner was in need of some aesthetic justification.

Enter John Ruskin, a wealthy young aesthete who had recently studied at Oxford. In time he would become one of the great and controversial voices of the 19th Century, not only as a critic of art but also as a radical social theorist — an advocate for working men and for utopian communities. However, for the moment he was living under the thumb of his ambitious wine merchant father and his controlling mother (who had taken rooms at Oxford to better supervise him). Ruskin was forty years younger than Turner when they met at a garden party.