Reflections on an Exhibition in Nagoya: Contemporary American Artists and Environmental Concerns

Abstract

This essay was occasioned by the invitation to lecture in Nagoya about a show of contemporary landscape painting from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Following upon two recent environmental disasters, the author felt compelled to view this work in terms of American artists' role in promoting environmental awareness, going back in time to the great nineteenth-century tradition of American landscape painting and its legacy. Activism by visual artists in promoting environmental awareness continued during the late 1960s when a political cartoonist, Ron Cobb, designed the symbol used for the ecology flag in time for the founding of Earth Day on April 22, 1970. The author examines contemporary artists' landscapes and analyzes whether and how they encourage viewers to consider the perils threatening nature today. After tracing the gradually dawning awareness that man's activities harm nature, the differences between the conservationists and the environmentalists are considered. It was pride in the nation's natural beauty that inspired American artists to make landscape painting a leading genre by the 1820s. To them, the country's unspoiled wilderness began to seem like a metaphor for the nation's immense resources and future power. Painters of the Hudson River School and the influence of the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau helped determine our current notion of canonical landscapes. The influence of nineteenth-century painters such as Thomas Cole or Thomas Moran on contemporary artists such as Stephen Hannock, May Stevens, or David Hockney is explored. The power of nature, its abundant metaphors, and the transience of natural forms and resources continue to resonate with contemporary artists who paint the landscape. But by mid-twentieth-century, something else had begun to affect how American painters responded to the landscape. A notorious discussion of nature in mid-twentieth-century American art took place when Lee Krasner introduced Jackson Pollock to Hans Hofmann, who, seeing no evidence of still life set-ups or models in Pollock's studio, asked him, ”Do you work from nature?” To which Pollock responded: ”I am nature.” This was in the formative years of the abstract expressionist style. The significance of nature and environmental concern in the work of abstract artists from Adolph Gottlieb to Helen Frankenthaler is examined. Some artist-activists such as Alan Sonfist eventually turned to work directly with nature, while others, such as May Stevens, continued to paint. Other painters of landscape seem oblivious to threats to the environment, concerned only with art for art's sake. Yet, some contemporary American landscape painting may reflect more than meets the eye is in its veiled references and allusions to Asian art, particularly Chinese art with its longer tradition of landscape styles and images to draw upon. Chinese artists long ago saw painting as a way of merging, or becoming one with nature. References to nature in terms of Chinese painting affect some contemporary American painters, such as Roy Lichtenstein or Michael Mazur.