Art

“In Search of the Promised Land: Paintings by Frederic Edwin Church” is at the Portland Museum of Art through March 18, 2001.

the second-generation Hudson River School painter already well on his way to being 19th-century America’s most revered landscape artist. He had a passion for such extraordinary environmental phenomena and their potential for creating dramatic effects on canvas. He made a painting of the event, “The Meteor of 1860” (pictured); by all accounts he was the only artist to have done so. It’s relatively small in comparison with some of his more heroic landscapes. But it has a vastness extending beyond its gilded frame, and a significance exceeding the mere record of a meteor shower.

The meteor’s twin white-hot heads burn an orange streak across a violet-blue twilight, paralleling the near shoreline. As many painters would tell you, blue and orange tend to deaden and dull one another when they are juxtaposed, and as a rule it’s incredibly difficult to use them as a painting’s dominant colors. But being the exception to this rule is the measure of Church’s virtuosity. Like each of his paintings, the color of “Meteor” color is so tuned into its architecture that it seems suffused by a single glow — as if instead of being meticulously painted, it just happened. The water’s ripples and the jagged rocks lining the waterfront reflect the meteor’s celestial light. The only trace of human presence is a tiny pinprick of a campfire on the far shore, whose deep red makes the painting’s ethereal glow that much more intense. Everything seems right at the edge of catching fire. All of this becomes more than just a pretty picture when we remember that Church was painting it in 1860-61, the eve of the Civil War. With this in mind the image becomes an omen, the two-headed meteor a metaphor for Lincoln’s house that was about to divide and burn a path to its own ashes.

“Meteor” certainly had a resonance for Church himself. Though he lent it to a few exhibitions, Church never had its image published. He and his wife Isabel were so attached to it that they hung it in their bedroom. That Church went to bed and awoke in its presence might explain the fact that the palette used in “Meteor” can be found in several paintings in the show. Indeed this painting’s spatial relationships are at work in most all of his others. “The Evening Star” (1859) is another example of his love for the dialogue between the piercingly singular and the sweepingly expansive. In place of the meteor, here Church sets up a tension between a sharp, solitary star and the soft spread of the sky. This relation between point and void returns years later in “The Iceberg” (1875): afternoon light turns an ice peak into an incandescent flame that sings against the Arctic sky. And it returns finally in “Mount Katahdin from Millinocket Camp” (1895), his last major painting, which he presented to his wife on her 59th birthday. A man, thought to represent Church, sits alone in a canoe, watching the autumn light shed rainbows on Mount Katahdin’s foothills.

But it is in “Our Flag”(1864) that Church’s painterly devices and intellectual message find their most explicit fusion. This painting reminds us that each of his works, even seemingly innocent paintings of sublime landscapes, is inherently political. Here Church doesn’t so much translate his ideas into color as cast them in it, crafting light as if it were clay. His familiar stony violet-blue sky commingles with that burning orange of his that simultaneously conjures heaven and hell. They come together in an eerie opalescent glow that illuminates a lone American flag atop a rock outcropping, having outlasted the soldier who planted it there.

It’s easy to overlook the fact that “Our Flag” has considerably fewer stars than our flag today. It forces remembrance of a time before the sanctioned taking of lives and land that brought us the rest of the United States and its territories had been completed, when the mixture of cruelty and hope that created an empire from sea to shining sea was still relatively immature. We’ll often find paintings like Church’s explained in terms of the sublime: our realization of our unimportance when faced with nature’s powerful grandeur. Maybe. But the language of the sublime has also often served as the heroic face for colonization, and the rhetoric of the insignificance of man has been used to justify an indifference to the lives of people who actually lived in the New World that venture capitalists, politicians, and painters alike have coveted for various reasons. Church’s work grappled with this expansionist history as it was unfolding. His canvases provide palpable evidence of this struggle, and this — much more than their technical mastery or their romantic imagery — is what makes them live into the 21st century.

Natural selections

Frederic Edwin Church at the Portland Museum of Art