Exhibition Review

	Cinque, Chief of the Amistad Captives (1840) by John Sartain. This engraving of Cinque, leader of the Amistad mutiny, includes his signature _EMDASH_ a product of his education during captivity. Courtesy Connecticut Historical Society.

For most of the twentieth century, scholarly discussions of nineteenth-century American landscape paintings have treated them as passive purveyors of culturally commonplace beliefs. With sublime regularity, art historians marshaled evidence and concluded that a painting by Thomas Cole or John Kensett or Albert Bierstadt or George Inness or one of their major or minor contemporaries expressed God's commitment to the nation's manifest destiny or the divinity of nature. This style of interpretation was rarely challenged until the 1980s, when Angela Miller, David Miller, Alan Wallach, Bryan Wolf, and others began to treat landscape paintings as ideologically complex objects, capable of subverting, as well as reinforcing, dominant, residual, and emergent cultural meanings. The new landscape history has been especially successful in showing how the popularization of landscape art was made possible by, and contributed to, the commercialization of leisure, the democraticization of gentility, and the consolidation of regional identities. In many midcentury landscapes a yellow sun throwing golden light over a distant mountain does express God's approbation. But some golden sunsets carry other meanings. Indeed, sometimes a golden sunset is just a golden sunset.

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The traditional approach to nineteenth-century American landscape art lent itself to the organization of beautiful exhibitions focusing on images by individual artists or bringing together images by many artists who could be treated as working within a single, unified tradition. In recent years, Edward Nygren, William Truettner, and several other curators have organized innovative exhibitions that have both used and advanced the new scholarship. The most important of these include "Views and Visions: American Landscape before 1830" (Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1986); "The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier" (National Museum of American Art, 1991); and "Thomas Cole: Landscape into History" (National Museum of American Art, 1994). But despite those examples, most recent exhibitions of landscape art have continued to focus on aesthetics while either ignoring other kinds of cultural work performed by art objects or relegating those concerns to related publications and—perhaps—a few discrete wall labels.

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