Blurred around the edges

The PMA runs the gamut with “American Impressionism”

By Jenna Russell

“PONTE SANTA TRINITA,” oil, 1897, Childe Hassam.

Looking at Impressionist paintings is kind of like being drunk. Now consider a minute before you protest: The blurred edges, the slight disconnection, the unassailable sense of well-being. This is not to recommend “American Impressionism: Treasures from the Smithsonian,” at the Portland Museum of Art, as a substitute for a night out at the bars. If you’re out for alternate reality, however, you could do worse than drinking in these 52 paintings for $6. It’s Mary Cassat to James Whistler, for about the price of a frozen margarita.

American Impressionism was imported from Europe at the turn of the last century, another of their brainstorms we adopted as our own. It’s hard to imagine now, but before it was universally adored, a sure source of museum revenue, the genre was a revolution. Impressionism marked a radical shift in visual art, emphasizing human perception over objective reality. The beauty of nature was paramount: gardens, snowstorms, ocean cliffs and women, who stood around arranging flowers or their hair — rarely anything useful. Nature was often dissolved into fragments, brushtip-sized points of light and color that produced a rock or cloud by force of accumulation. This mission, reproduction of sensation by deconstruction and reassimilation, freed Impressionism from the question that plagues strictly realist painting. (Is duplication essentially creative?) In this, the artist is a forceful filter; the world he or she builds can be bland or magnetic, depending on what’s left out or in.

Sensual overdrive defines Impressionism. The sky is electric with rustling leaves in Willard Metcalf’s “A Family of Birches” (1907), the sound translated into a visual shimmer of sunny and shadowy greens. Will Low channels his attention like a laser in “Self-Portrait at Montigny” (1876), the only male portrait in the exhibition. His moist, modeled cheeks, flushed with sun, rounded as fruit, document humidity escaped in a green latticed bower. The images of Thomas Dewing are soaked in atmosphere: “In the Garden” (1892-94) takes place in an emerald cloud; three ghostly women float in a field of misted greens as a full moon emerges. Dewing’s “Lady in White” (1910) is a gold and lavender study of a woman at rest atop an inflated, pod-shaped skirt. Her expression is closed, revealing nothing, like the blank face of the mirror next to her.

What Dewing’s works lack in tension they make up for in mood; decorative in their symmetry, they nonetheless manage a strangeness that sets things off balance. That’s the hook. Similar intrigue is missing from much of Childe Hassam’s work, which revels in an abundance of light and color, sometimes at the expense of naturalness and focus. Hassam is well represented in the show, and the minty waters of his “Ponte Santa Trinita” (1897) are pale and softly suggestive, but the pitch grows heavy-handed when he moves indoors. The woman in “Tanagra (the Builders, New York)” (1918) holds an awkward Statue-of-Liberty pose, a small green figurine lifted up in one hand. It’s a forced, overstuffed composition, the woman and statue competing with artificial-looking flowers and a hectic screen patterned with flying birds. The greens and yellows are gorgeous, but they can’t transcend the clutter.

More annoying is 1919’s “Marechal Niel Roses,” where the blond model rests her chin on perfectly interlaced fingers and gazes lovingly, vacantly, into a vase of yellow roses. It’s a bit much, as if Hassam himself is inebriated by Impressionism, and, like a drunk, mistakes false sentiment for the real thing, the banal for the beautiful. His rigid nude “Pomona” is crushed by comparison with Frederick Frieseke’s “Nude Seated at Her Dressing Table,” hung nearby in all her lushly-rendered voluptuousness.

“SELF PORTRAIT AT MONIGNY,” oil on canvas, 1876, Will Low.

Several paintings in the show feel especially fresh and immediate — crisp toast to Hassam’s soggy bread. “Canal in Venice, San Trovaso Quarter” (1885) is an arresting, velvety study of a passage between planes of Italian architecture. Robert Blum’s slick, saturated colors are suffused with afternoon light of sleepy intensity. Tinted aqua by the sunset, the sea is an unbroken, unknowable whole in Abbott Thayer’s “Cornish Headlands” (1898). Nature is clean and polished here at the intersection of grass, rock and placid water; the forceful simplicity anticipates the seascapes of Rockwell Kent.

“American Impressionism” sounds like a single, reasonably unified genre, but each artist made the breakthrough his own. Mining is not a typical Impressionist subject, an oversight that grants “Gold Mining, Cripple Creek” a unique energy. The mountain that takes up four-fifths of Ernest Lawson’s 1929 canvas is a dizzying amalgam of tiny, ridged brushstrokes. Paint layered like drips of multi-colored wax forms an organic yet glassy monument, anchored by a cluster of candy-colored buildings. A daunting, modern picture, it has a sharpness at odds with the melted-ice-cream style of some of Lawson’s peers.

Another unexpected subject is “The Flight into Egypt” (1892), George Hitchcock’s subtle retelling of the Bible story in a Europeanized landscape. The injection of specific plot and characters isn’t jarring, and the sandy field of blue flowers seems lit by mystical purpose. Some other paintings in the show could stand more narrative muscle under their content and pretty poses.

The sculpture show upstairs at the museum, bronzes by European masters, is the perfect antidote to the plush torpor of the Impressionists. It’s all hard edges and dark, solid mass, dramatically spotlit in dark-blue galleries. The visual equivalents of hot tea and aspirin, the raw angst of Rodin and primitive elegance of Henry Moore make an excellent hangover cure.

Jenna Russell can be reached at russelljenna@hotmail.com.