Expanding Horizons

At the Vancouver Art Gallery until January 17, 2010

He’s got only a single painting in this show, but Otto Reinhold Jacobi could almost be its poster boy—if only for the circumstances surrounding his birth and death. You see, Jacobi was born in Königsberg, Eastern Prussia, in 1812, and died in Ardoch, North Dakota, in 1901. Those dates, and those locales, neatly summarize what Expanding Horizons: Painting and Photography of American and Canadian Landscape 1860–1918 does best, which is to survey the wonderful collision of cultures that took place when Old World techniques met the mad landscapes of the new West.

If that were all it did, though, this would be a much smaller show—and a stronger one, possibly. Under the auspices of Hilliard T. Goldfarb, who curated the show for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Expanding Horizons hares off wildly in many different directions at once, some of them more fully explored than others. Among the topics under review are the evolution of abstract art; the interplay between early photography and the painter’s eye; the impact of Japanese aesthetics on North American art; the rise of the industrial metropolis and how it necessarily forced artists to strip away an earlier generation’s Arcadian sentimentality; the myth of the noble savage and the reality of the genocide perpetrated against North America’s aboriginal populations; the gulf between the heroic aspirations of American landscape painters and the modest scale employed by their Canadian counterparts… I could go on, but you get the idea. A whole college’s worth of art-historians-in-training could find dissertation topics here.

Don’t get the wrong impression, though. What Expanding Horizons lacks in focus it makes up for in, well, expansiveness. While this show could easily be broken up into six or seven or eight smaller exhibitions, all of them fascinating and complete, it offers a unique opportunity to view one art form, painting, in transition, and another, photography, in the act of being born.

There’s a bigger picture on display here, too, although the individual works that compose it are so dazzling in themselves that it’s sometimes hard to make it out. More distance, and further viewings, would help articulate this thesis, but Expanding Horizons is perhaps primarily about how art helps create our world-view. Looking at Albert Bierstadt’s monumental Yosemite Valley or Thomas Worthington Whittredge’s Woods of Ashokan, it’s hard not to think of these works as embodying the notion of the American experiment as something grand and noble and endorsed by the hand of God himself—a notion that would soon have terrible consequences in the form of the Vietnam and Iraq wars and in the despoiling of the North American wilderness.

Conversely, let’s count the number of small, human-powered boats shown in Canadian paintings like Emily Carr’s Indian War Canoe or Tom Thomson’s The Pointers (Pageant of the North). Is there, perhaps, a gentler and more intimate connection with nature at work here? At the very least, it’s nice to think so—however clichéd that view might be.

In either case, the underlying message is that art defines our reality as often as it reflects it—something the politicians currently bent on wrecking this province’s artistic economy would do well to contemplate.

But let’s return to the physical facts of the exhibition itself. Its cultural, political, and art-historical implications aside, Expanding Horizons is a sensory delight, with something arresting on almost every wall. These highlights range from works that have a viscerally physical impact—Marsden Hartley’s Storm Clouds, Maine comes to mind—to images of almost transcendental delicacy, such as Edward Steichen’s painterly photograph The Flatiron (Evening). Some of the works on view here anticipate surrealism—what is Martin Johnson Heade’s Newbury Hayfield at Sunset but an early and superior Magritte?—while others show that the expressionist mindset transferred nicely to the new world. (Willard Leroy Metcalf’s Midsummer Shadows and Clarence Gagnon’s opalescent The Wayside Cross, Autumn stand out.)

Yes, some of the images will strike contemporary viewers as portentous or awkward; I’m thinking of that one lonely eagle soaring in Thomas Moran’s Mountain of the Holy Cross, or the crude and childish rainbow that adorns William Morris Hunt’s American Falls, Niagara. But the latter is the only outright bad painting in this show, which is otherwise crammed with excellence—and even a few revelations, like David Milne’s The Boulder. It’s a work that does not reproduce well; in the exhibition catalogue, it looks flat and lumpy and lifeless, although in the VAG it shimmers. It also perfectly illustrates the point at which geomorphic shapes spill over into abstraction—or, to put it another way, the moment when an old way of seeing faded away and a new one began.