The Artchive: Hudson River School
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Description: Long review of the Hudson River School with links to the Artchive's galleries of paintings by the more noted artists.
The Artchive needs EVERYONE to help! Books on the Hudson River School Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition catalog. "It is a truth rarely in need of mention that works of art have an identity as material objects - that they are made of paint and bronze and cloth and wood. In recent times, to be sure, substance has asserted itself as subject, so that works of visual art often refer internally to the material conditions of their realization, and are about what they are made of. It would be false to ascribe so contemporary an aesthetic to the paintings of the Hudson River School, as it was somewhat derisively labeled, but it is also impossible not to be struck by their status as furniture - as objects of interior decoration that summon up the other components of domestic embellishment with which they converse in the plush language of comfort. With their oleaginous and varnished surfaces, as glowing as buffed mahogany, their heavily carved and gilded frames, their academic authority, their opulence verging at times on corpulence, these paintings surround themselves with tacit parlors and salons. They belong in the company of stuffed and tufted ottomans and Turkish carpets, of ormolu hardware and brass lamps, of fringed burgundy velvet and luminous damask, and rosewood pianofortes or elaborately fretted harmoniums on which accomplished daughters or young wives fingered hymns or songs of sweet melancholy concerning lost or distant loves. The scenes these paintings represent occupy those rooms of reassuringly thick prosperity like thought balloons, indoor embodiments of outdoor realities that correspond, in every spiritual particular, to the spaces in which they are suspended. The outdoors shows God's grace shed upon the American landscape as the indoors reflects that same grace bestowed in the medium of material success. As scenes and things at once, the Hudson River paintings communicate a double affirmation of divine blessing. They constitute the American wing of the Protestant ethic given cultural express
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| Date | Creation Date: 05-jun-1998 Expiration Date: 04-jun-2018 |