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The tradition of painting in the Hudson River Valley is unparalleled in American art. Since the early 1800s artists have traveled up the Hudson River, inspired by its pristine beauty, in search of the "divine spirit" inherent in the land. Between 1826 and 1870 Thomas Cole and the Hudson River school of painters embodied this paradigm, gaining deep religious feelings from the landscape. Following the new path set forth by Cole and reflecting Manhattan's rise to national economic leadership with the creation of the Erie Canal, the Hudson River School painters visually defined a young America's idealism for much of the nineteenth century. As the Hudson River School of painting was eclipsed by Impressionism, Modernism,. and Abstraction, so the landscape was transformed by the progress of the industrial revolution. Thomas Cole was haunted by the horrors of the industrial revolution which he observed in his native England. Although his early death prevented him from witnessing the industrial development of his beloved home, he had a powerful foreboding vision of its arrival in America. John Ruskin's death in 1900 was a portent for the coming century, which sought to define itself in intellectual-industrial, rather than spiritual, terms. And yet Ruskin's admonition to find truth of inspiration in nature remains a constant thread in a century of modernist flux. When asked why he didn't paint from nature, Jackson Pollack declared, "I am nature" - surely confirmation that such epiphanic inspiration transcends style. This continuum remains unbroken today. Many artists still derive their inspiration directly from the landscape, altered by man as it might be. To those painters who still seek the manifestation of this "divine spirit" the changes that have occurred to the land have not diminished the source of their inspiration. rather they inform the artists' intimate relationships with the environment, and inevitably give rise to work that could not be perceived as anything but contemporary. The painters in this exhibition have varied backgrounds, although all are or have been engaged professionally in Manhattan. What they share is an American tradition of figurative landscape painting inspired by the terrain of the Hudson River Valley as it appears on the eve of the twenty-first century. This group of work exemplifies this timeless response to the sublime found exclusively in the beauty of the cycles of our natural world: a uniquely American vision, initiated by the Hudson River School, that continues to endure.
Curators,
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