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Luminism is an American landscape painting style of the 1850s to 1870s, characterized by effects of light in a landscape, through the use of aerial perspective and the concealment of visible brushstrokes. Luminist landscapes emphasize tranquility, and often depict calm, reflective water and a soft, hazy sky. Artists who were most central to the development of the luminist style include Fitz Henry Lane, Martin Johnson Heade, Sanford Gifford, and John F. Kensett. [1] Painters with a less clear affiliation include Frederic Edwin Church, Jasper Cropsey, Albert Bierstadt, Worthington Whittredge, Raymond Dabb Yelland, Alfred Thompson Bricher, James Augustus Suydam, and David Johnson. [2] Some precursor artists are George Harvey and Robert Salmon. [3] Joseph Rusling Meeker also worked in the style. [4]
The term luminism was introduced by mid-20th-century art historians to describe a 19th-century American painting style that developed as an offshoot of the Hudson River School. The historian John I. H. Baur established an outline of the style in the late 1940s, and he first used the term "luminism" in a 1954 article. [5] The National Gallery of Art's landmark 1980 exhibition American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1825-1875 centered many artists now primarily associated with the Hudson River School, such as Frederic Edwin Church. [6]
As defined by art historian Barbara Novak, luminist artworks tend to stress the horizontal, and demonstrate the artist's close control of structure, tone, and light. The light is generally cool, hard, and non-diffuse; "soft, atmospheric, painterly light is not luminist light". Brushstrokes are concealed in such a way that the painter's personality is minimized. Luminist paintings tend not to be large so as to maintain a sense of timeless intimacy. The picture surface or plane is emphasized in a manner sometimes seen in primitivism. These qualities are present in different amounts depending on the artist, and within a work. Novak states that luminism, of all American art, is most closely associated with transcendentalism. The definitional difficulties have contributed to over-use of the term. [7]
Luminism shares an emphasis on the effects of light with Impressionism. However, the two styles are markedly different. Luminism is characterized by attention to detail and the hiding of brushstrokes, while impressionism is characterized by lack of detail and an emphasis on brushstrokes. Luminism preceded impressionism, and the artists who painted in a luminist style were in no way influenced by Impressionism.
Luminism has also been considered to represent a contemplative perception of nature. According to Earl E. Powell, this would be particularly visible in paintings by John Frederick Kensett, who shifted the visual concern for landscape to an interest in quietism, making pictures of mood that depict a poetic experience of nature. Furthermore, his painting Shrewsbury River would "reduce nature to cryptographic essentials of composition...while rarified veils of light, color, and atmosphere reflected in water offer an experience of silence", a description akin to the sublime. [8] [9] [10] Similarly, Martin Johnson Heade's painting Thunder Storm on Narragansett Bay would represent the greatness of nature and a feeling of the sublime arising from an intimate engagement with nature. [11]
The artists who painted in this style did not refer to their own work as "luminism", nor did they articulate any common aesthetic philosophy outside of the guiding principles of the Hudson River School. Many art historians find the term "luminism" problematic. J. Gray Sweeney argues that "the origins of luminism as an art-historical term were deeply entwined with the interests of elite collectors, prominent art dealers, influential curators, art historians, and constructions of national identity during the Cold War." [12] Building on Sweeney's work, Alan Wallach has called for a wholesale rethinking of "luminism" as a historical phenomenon. [13]
Ingredients of luminism – such as majestic skies, calm waters, rarefied light, and other representations of magnificence – have been also appreciated in contemporary American painting. [14] Such a trend is visible in artists like James Doolin, April Gornik. and Steven DaLuz. [15] [16] [17] The term neoluminism has been suggested in reference to contemporary American luminism. [18] [19]
A distilled influence of luminism can be seen in the works of several American experimental filmmakers including James Benning and Sharon Lockhart, particularly in Benning's Ten Skies (2004) and Lockhart's Double Tide (2009). [20]
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities, ordinary subject matter, unusual visual angles, and inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s.
Visual art of the United States or American art is visual art made in the United States or by U.S. artists. Before colonization, there were many flourishing traditions of Native American art, and where the Spanish colonized Spanish Colonial architecture and the accompanying styles in other media were quickly in place. Early colonial art on the East Coast initially relied on artists from Europe, with John White the earliest example. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, artists primarily painted portraits, and some landscapes in a style based mainly on English painting. Furniture-makers imitating English styles and similar craftsmen were also established in the major cities, but in the English colonies, locally made pottery remained resolutely utilitarian until the 19th century, with fancy products imported.
An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific art philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a specific period of time, or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defined within a number of years. Art movements were especially important in modern art, when each consecutive movement was considered a new avant-garde movement. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new style which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy.
Frederic Edwin Church was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters, best known for painting large landscapes, often depicting mountains, waterfalls, and sunsets. Church's paintings put an emphasis on realistic detail, dramatic light, and panoramic views. He debuted some of his major works in single-painting exhibitions to a paying and often enthralled audience in New York City. In his prime, he was one of the most famous painters in the United States.
The Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by Romanticism. Early on, the paintings typically depicted the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, including the Catskill, Adirondack, and White Mountains.
John Frederick Kensett was an American landscape painter and engraver born in Cheshire, Connecticut. He was a member of the second generation of the Hudson River School of artists. Kensett's signature works are landscape paintings of New England and New York State, whose clear light and serene surfaces celebrate transcendental qualities of nature, and are associated with Luminism. Kensett's early work owed much to the influence of Thomas Cole, but was from the outset distinguished by a preference for cooler colors and an interest in less dramatic topography, favoring restraint in both palette and composition. The work of Kensett's maturity features tranquil scenery depicted with a spare geometry, culminating in series of paintings in which coastal promontories are balanced against glass-smooth water. He was a founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Landscape painting, also known as landscape art, is the depiction of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, especially where the main subject is a wide view—with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works, landscape backgrounds for figures can still form an important part of the work. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather is often an element of the composition. Detailed landscapes as a distinct subject are not found in all artistic traditions, and develop when there is already a sophisticated tradition of representing other subjects.
Fitz Henry Lane was an American painter and printmaker of a style that would later be called Luminism, for its use of pervasive light.
Martin Johnson Heade was an American painter known for his salt marsh landscapes, seascapes, and depictions of tropical birds, as well as lotus blossoms and other still lifes. His painting style and subject matter, while derived from the romanticism of the time, are regarded by art historians as a significant departure from those of his peers.
David Johnson was an American painter, a member of the second generation of Hudson River School painters.
Alfred Thompson Bricher was an American painter associated with White Mountain art and the Hudson River School.
The Webb Gallery is an exhibit building located at the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont. Webb Gallery is the Museum's primary showcase for American art and serves as a gallery for special exhibitions.
Edmund Darch Lewis was an American landscape painter known for his prolific style and marine oils and watercolors. Lewis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in a well-to-do family. He started training at age 15 with German-born Paul Weber (1823–1916) of the Hudson River School. At age 19 he exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and was elected an Associate of the Academy at age 24.
John Currie Wilmerding Jr. was an American professor of art, collector, curator and author of books on American art.
Morning at Grand Manan is an 1878 oil painting by Alfred Thompson Bricher. It is part of the permanent collection at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and is currently on view in the Paine Early American Painting Gallery.
Steven DaLuz is a contemporary American Neoluminist artist known for using chemically induced patinas on metal leaf and mixed media to produce figurative works and imagined landscapes often reflecting upon the sublime as a pictorial theme.
Twilight in the Wilderness is an 1860 oil painting by American painter Frederic Edwin Church. The woodlands of the northeastern United States are shown against a setting sun that intensely colors the dramatic altocumulus clouds. Church scholar John K. Howat describes the painting as "one of his finest ever" and as "the single most impressive example of Church's depictions of unsullied North American woodlands and their most famous representation in nineteenth-century painting".
Raymond Dabb Yelland was an American landscape painter and art instructor. Born Raymond Dabb in London, he came to the United States in 1850 as a young child, and was raised in Union, New Jersey, and later lived in neighboring Elizabeth, New Jersey. He served in the Union Army during the Civil War.
Light in painting fulfills several objectives, both plastic and aesthetic: on the one hand, it is a fundamental factor in the technical representation of the work, since its presence determines the vision of the projected image, as it affects certain values such as color, texture and volume; on the other hand, light has a great aesthetic value, since its combination with shadow and with certain lighting and color effects can determine the composition of the work and the image that the artist wants to project. Also, light can have a symbolic component, especially in religion, where this element has often been associated with divinity.
Orchid and Hummingbirds near a Mountain Lake is a painting by Martin Johnson Heade, which he completed sometime between 1875 and 1890. Some scholars see the sensual depiction of the orchid and the nearly touching beaks of the birds as conveying romantic or even sexual overtones. Others see Heade's interest in orchids and hummingbirds as an exploration of dominance and survival in nature, perhaps inspired by Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory. The work is now in the collection of the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College, having been donated as part of the Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch collection.