Robert Rosenblum

I first came to Robert Rosenblum’s Transformations in Late Eighteenth-Century Art (1967) in search of antecedents to John Trumball’s painting, The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill. In an effort to establish themselves as worthy artists, Trumbull and other eighteenth-century American painters emulated their European counterparts. The style that Trumbull and others worked to master was what Rosenblum calls Neoclassic Stoic, “a viewpoint which looked toward antiquity for examples of high-minded human behavior that could serve as moral paragons for contemporary audiences.” As well as classical antiquity, didactic painting had its origins in the rise of the bourgeois class and served its purposes. Warren’s death showed viewers an act of self-sacrifice at a time when self-sacrifice (albeit less extreme than Warren’s) was important to building the new republic.

Rosenblum’s Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition (1975) was crucial to my understanding of early nineteenth-century American landscape painting. He argued that, contrary to the traditional view that modern art emerged out of Paris, there was also an important northern mystical tradition that greatly influenced painters in both Europe and America. In painting of the “Protestant North,” Rosenblum wrote, “we feel that the powers of the deity have somehow left the flesh-and-blood dramas of Christian art and have penetrated, instead, the domain of landscape.” His exploration of this tradition in its early stages creates a kind of typology of Hudson River School painting. The concluding chapter of Modern Painting demonstrates that the Abstract Expressionists were trying to work through the same dilemma as Caspar David Friedrich one hundred and twenty years earlier. Rosenblum’s pioneering work opened up a line of thinking that makes us now take for granted the landscape characteristics and spirituality of Rothko and Newman.

Robert Rosenblum died on December 6, 2006. Today the Guggenheim Museum held a memorial service for him. Herbert Muschamp’s fine article about Rosenblum appears in The New York Times.

Cans: NASCAR Budweiser

Friday Photo (7)

Because I'll be away the remainder of the week, the Friday Photo appears early.
















Untitled, 2007

Goodbye Sunday Poem

I once had the unpleasant experience of becoming involved in an expensive lawsuit that could have had severe consequences. The extent of my involvement was determined by the legal concept (whose name I forget) of half-conscious but willful disregard. In the back of the mind one knows that such and such is wrong; since such and such is in the back of the mind, one does nothing to correct the wrong. On the other hand, since it is in one's mind, one is culpable. Fortunately, I was found to be not culpable.

In a gentle way The English Teacher has brought to my attention that I have been violating the law by posting poems that are copyrighted. I've poked around various sites regarding copyright issues as they relate to poems, and see that it's okay to use a poem of no more than 250 words, but not okay to post the poem on the internet. This is because one doesn't have control over the poem's use after the posting. I've been half-consciously and willfully ignoring these strictures.

One criterion that determines fair use is intentions. Mine were good. I thought that providing another venue for poetry would serve poetry. I believed that alternating the work of a not-so-well-known poet with a well-known poet would provide the lesser known with a wider audience. But, the Sunday Poem was really for me (as is this blog). I read and reread poems that I hadn't looked at for years. Reading poems became part of my week. And I sought out new poets with chapbooks or collections from small presses.

In the back of my mind I was concerned about copyright issues, for I posted the source of a poem, its copyright date, and the small © to indicate the poem was protected. The law might say I profited from the Sunday Poem, and so I did. My profit was attracting viewers interested in John Ashbery, David Edelman, James Merrill. Anne Bradstreet, whose poems I can freely post, would have appreciated these complexities.

Au revoir Sunday Poem. We may meet again if fair use relaxes its restrictions. Until then, I'll read poems in the privacy of my library, keeping them packed, away from public view.

Sunday Poem: Anne Bradstreet

On my dear Grand-child Simon Bradstreet,
  Who dyed on 16 Novemb.    1669, being but
        a moneth, and one day old.

No sooner come, but gone, and fal'n asleep,
Aquaintance short, yet parting caus'd us weep,
Three flours, two fearcely blown, the last i'th'bud,
Cropt by th'Almighties hand; yet is he good,
With dreadful awe before him let's be mute,
Such was his will, but why, let's not dispute,
With humble hearts and mouths put in the dust,
Let's say he's merciful as well as just.
He will return, and make up all our losses,
And smile again, after our bitter crosses.
Go pretty babe, go rest with Sisters twain
Among the blest in endless joyes remain.

Friday Photo (6)

Untitled, 2007

The Loneliness of Todd Hido

At a gallery talk last year Todd Hido paused a moment to comment on his photograph of house whose upstairs and downstairs windows emit an eerie blue light. “That’s the glow from TVs. Two TVs. I love that, when I find it. It doesn’t happen often.”

The average household in the United States owns 2.4 televisions and watches them 6.76 hours a day. It’s surprising that in his wanderings Hido hasn’t come across more houses with people watching televisions in different rooms. His love for the two-television house isn’t. Separation, isolation, and loneliness are characteristic of all Hido’s work.

Hido covered some personal history during his gallery talk. He didn’t, that I recall, mention Robert Adams, an obvious precursor to Hido’s landscapes and urban photographs. In Denver, Adams’ 1977 monograph of tract housing, industrial areas, and other inhabited landscapes, the solitary house is prevalent. Adams was influenced by the great painter of solitary houses, Edward Hopper. Unlike Adams or Hopper, Hido has no interest in the power of light to transform the ordinary into something transcendent. One feels that Hido’s internally illuminated houses lead the way down rather than up. They belong to the world of Poe rather than Thoreau.

Roamings, obviously not as dark as Hido’s nighttime photographs of houses, continues to portray the West as an isolating, muted and often weird landscape. Hido likes to shoot through his car window, a kind of veil between us and the land. The absence of people adds to the feeling of isolation. If we were able to step out of the car, we’d find ourselves in uninhabited territory; there may be houses, but they’ve been abandoned.

In Hido’s latest work, a portrait series, women look directly at the camera with intense ennui, as if the photographer had unsuccessfully attempted an intervention. The photographic portrait of disengagement, perhaps first raised to an art by Rineke Dijkstra, is now so pervasive that one wonders why Hido bothered. Though of a piece with his previous body of work, they add little to it.