Two painters I’ve come across again in the last year or so are the Hudson River School painter, Frederic Edwin Church and the German painter, Lovis Corinth. For each of them, this renewed attention came about because of single paintings they’d done that illustrated a bravura and expressiveness with paint that pre-dated more modern modes of paint handling. These paintings, each a landscape, are not unique in calling on the material qualities of oil paint to do double duty by toggling beautifully between physical presence and abstract sign. But they exist as eye-popping carnivals of delight in the properties of paint they had each taken in with a reflexive understanding of what this stuff, paint, was capable of representing.
Frederic Edwin Church Study of Zoomorphic Rock, Petra, February, 1868.
12” x 9 15/16”.
In both pieces, the painters offer the representational space through what might be compared to a filmmaker’s “establishing shot”, giving us the basic markers of deep space by line, intensity, and nods to perspective: above, Church capturing the topography of the Middle East, and below, Corinth in the region surrounding Münich. These paintings are deeply understood and economically executed. Pale and diffuse light through scaled marks and the admixture of white to the paint pushes back the distance. Moving into the foreground, pigments intensify, and the physicality of the paint itself, beginning to take on a materiality that we share, becomes pronounced.
Church’s painting, one of many small studies he executed, is understood as just that, a study. He was a primary figure associated with the Hudson River School credited with, among other things, works that illustrated America’s “manifest destiny” in rich, expansive highly finished works. I’m no historian, so I’ll leave aside the well-questioned political project of the expansionist movement into the western lands of what has become the United States. This example isn’t from North America, but from Petra, in Jordan, produced on one of the many excursions Church made around the world. Many of these sketches are in the collection of the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, where I happily came across a series of icebergs he sketched off the coast of Newfoundland in 1859. These small, yet surprisingly monumental pieces are icy companions to the monolithic rock formations on display in the Petra sketch.
As has been noted by many others, the paint handling prefigures more contemporary approaches to painting in its physicality and bravura. Though there are examples found in earlier masters such as Hals or Titian, this sketch brings the material into the viewers lap, nearly too heavy for the representative job its been tasked with. Chaim Soutine, Frank Auerbach, Phillip Guston, or Joan Mitchell seem easily to fit into an approach similar to Church’s here, and it’s the more remarkable for it. It’s done plein-air, while the camels and the guides rest, and its immediacy was required given these circumstances. The constraints seem here a challenge ably met by the experience and facility that Church brought to it. It’s immediacy, painted wet-in-wet, is maintained without collapsing into mud. The brushwork follows the contours of the stone, the shadows are precise, and the bristles of the brush left evident serve as an index for themselves, a record of time and movement, and simultaneously for the layering in the rocks that were the subject, striations of millennial time and color, the latter of which “paint” the level of oxygen available during each distinct eon.
It’s impossible to know how much pleasure completing this sketch gave Church. But it would be hard to believe he didn’t see something powerful in it as a finished work. It’s intelligibility as such for us is retrospective, thanks to the primacy of immediacy and materiality now valued in so much contemporary work. Its embrace is a result of a contemporary actuality harvested from a virtual landscape of possibilities created by works like Church’s Petra sketch.
Study of a Zoomorphic Rock, Petra, detail.
Both painters were steeped in traditional techniques for the recording of what they could see, and the picturing of what they imagined, in the visual language developed over centuries. Corinth’s work from the last decade of the 19th Century covered portraiture, landscapes, and biblical scenes in a powerful and painterly realist style. His command of the paint grew with time and touches, to the point where a mark might be instantly recognized as having what I’ll call “image power.” This recognition is breathtaking when taking a closer look at a detail of the Isar painting below. In fact, Corinth published a painter’s handbook towards the end of his life that succinctly noted this very process: “The extract of the phenomenon [is to be] designed with the greatest simplicity possible. Through a couple of brushstrokes, the changes in terrain can be exhaustively evoked, through characteristic spots, on the right scale, clumps of trees, houses and incidental figures.” (As quoted by Stefan Koja in his piece on Corinth in German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Yale Univ. Press, 2010)
Lovis Corinth, At Unterschäftlarn on the Isar, 1896. Oil on canvas, 23 5/8” x 32 1/4”.
At Unterschläftlarn on the Isar, Detail.
This detail is a rich illustration of the type of transcriptive power Corinth had achieved. Taken in isolation, the type of marks seen here are meaningless. But with the depth of experience Corinth had gathered in the qualities of paint and in their syntactical use across the breadth of a canvas, he was able to recognize the affect that could be invoked by the material he’d come to know so well. The wind is experienced, the fragility of heavy blossoms on thin stems is felt. And he is successful because the physical affect of the “phenomenon” he mentions finds its expression connected directly to physical gesture. It isn’t distilled first through abstract graphics but rather through a seismograph of the body.
Lovis Corinth’s working life could have ended when he suffered a stroke on December 11, 1911. But he had given himself the tools to let go of what would become impossible, physically, following this event. “Landscape as such…is chiefly emotional painting, coming close to music…”. The detail above, if nothing else, is a deeply emotional transcription of emotional music. The landscapes he produced following the stroke, most notably the series done overlooking the Walchensee at the end of his life, are remarkable - vibrant, dense, immediate and dramatic. The body of the paint and the body of the painter dovetail. There is no space to be found between them.