Reconstruction 7.2 (2007)
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Albert Bierstadt's Images of the American West: An Eco-Critical Reflection on Nature Painting / Sabine Wilke
Abstract: In the Pacific Northwest we encounter images of the American West as place of utmost grandeur, i.e., picturesque images of spectacular Western landscapes that have circulated throughout history in specific ways that I wish to explore. These images of the American West - adopted, among others, by environmental organizations and the tourist industry - were, to some extent at least, shaped artistically by German-American painter Albert Bierstadt who lived and worked in the latter half of the nineteenth century and who was one of the first artists after the first generation of expedition painters who traveled West repeatedly and transformed what he saw into memorable scenes for his contemporaries in America and abroad. These artists established an important tradition of representing Western scenes that Bierstadt was familiar with and acknowledges in his paintings but transforms into very powerful dialectical images. I will argue that Bierstadt worked at the cusp of the trajectory that transformed early images of the American West as a sublime space to a mode of representation that is much more indebted to contemporary European models of landscape painting and that frames these images in picturesque ways.
<1> In the Pacific Northwest of the United States, where I live, we are surrounded by images of the American Western landscape, if not literally every day, then at least metaphorically in so many ways. The majestic peak of Mt. Rainier greets me from my bedroom window on clear mornings; when we go outside or when we go into a store that caters to the outdoors community or when we look at magazines from environmental organizations such as Washington Trails, the Sierra Magazine, National Wildlife, or the journal of the Audubon Society, we encounter images of the American West as place of utmost grandeur, i.e., picturesque images of spectacular Western landscapes that have circulated throughout history in specific ways that I wish to explore. These images of the American West - adopted, among others, by environmental organizations and the tourist industry - were, to some extent at least, shaped artistically by German-American painter Albert Bierstadt who lived and worked in the latter half of the nineteenth century and who was one of the first artists after the first generation of expedition painters (George Catlin, John James Audubon, etc.) who traveled West repeatedly and transformed what he saw into memorable scenes for his contemporaries in America and abroad. As opposed to Catlin, Bierstadt no longer saw the "virgin" landscape that had not yet been traversed by European Americans. He saw the West in its making, so to speak, after the arrival of Europeans but before it had been codified as pristine wilderness and national imagery through the establishment of the first national park. Lewis and Clark first traveled west without an artist on their crew (and we have to rely on their descriptions of what they saw), but painters Samuel Seymour and Titian Ramsay Peale went along on Stephen H. Long's expedition to the Rockies in 1819-1820. George Catlin was the first white artist to paint the tribes of the Upper Missouri in 1832, the Swiss draftsman Karl Bodmer accompanied an expedition in 1833 and brought back detailed drawings of Western landscapes, Alfred Jacob Miler came back with romantic visions from his expedition in 1837, and John James Audubon made his first sketches of Western birds as early as 1834. In 1869, Thomas Morau and Fredrick Delenbaugh accompanied John Wesley Powell on his historic journey down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. These artists established an important tradition of representing Western scenes that Bierstadt was familiar with and acknowledges in his paintings but transforms into very powerful dialectical images, i.e., images, as Walter Benjamin has argued, that temporarily are frozen as slides under the microscope of the artist, lifted from their natural environment, stripped of their immediacy, in order that they might be relevant for the present (see Wolin 1982: 125). I will argue that Bierstadt worked at the cusp of the trajectory that transformed early images of the American West as a sublime space to a mode of representation that is much more indebted to contemporary European models of landscape painting and that frames these images in picturesque ways.
<2> Gordon M. Sayre, citing a tradition established by Burke and Kant, defines sublime spectacles as intensive striking scenes such as Niagara Falls that often double up as national emblems: "By 'sublime spectacles' I refer to wilderness not as an extensive quality of the natural landscape or habitat across a broad area, but to the intensive, striking scenes for which wilderness has long been valued and promoted in America" (2003: 103). But he also found that "early Americans did not see the natural sublime as antithetical to the human goals or as uses of natural resources. Moreover, a scientific or rational conception of these spectacles did not exclude the perpetuation of folklore about their marvels and mysteries" (2003: 104). Sayre also points to the fact that these early images of the sublime - in the absence of expedition paintings or photography - were frequently conveyed in writing before the tradition of American landscape painting was established. What is important to realize is that the Revolutionary conception of the sublime was not yet identical to the later Romantic spectacle and its implication of a natural theology. "For landscape viewers and artists two hundred years ago, steep mountains and raging rapid rivers were sublime, verdant pastures, and quiet streams were beautiful or picturesque" (2003: 107). In contrast to the later Romantic aesthetic of the sublime, "mountains appear to represent Enlightenment values of order and restraint, while rivers stand for the wild powers of nature" (2003: 112). In other words "these eighteenth-century observers did not express a Romantic sense of the sublime spectacle as a sacred place, of Niagara Falls or Virginia's Natural Bridge as manifestations of God's power in the form of natural beauty which it would be sacrilege for man to alter. Although they shared some of Kant's notions of the sublime, they did not see beauty in nature as defined by Kant's famous dictum of 'purposiveness without purpose'. They were inclined instead to see the hand of the Creator as mimicking the works of humans. "A sense of natural theology undergirding a conservation ethic, . . ., had not yet developed in the period 1775-1825" (2003: 115).
<3> There is a growing body of work within eco-criticism that tries to grasp and appropriate this Kantian tradition of the sublime. Rick van Noy has shown that Kant's sublime deals with measureless emotion and that the aesthetics of the sublime communicating awe and reverence is the dominant aesthetic that has informed an American sense of place (2002: 181). Christopher Hitt wrote an entire paper on Burke's and Kant's aesthetic of the sublime and what aspects of it should be retained for an ecological conception of the sublime that offers a new and more responsible perspective on humans' relationship with the natural environment acknowledging nature's otherness (see 605). This is not the place for a thorough and expansive discussion of Kant, but in a nutshell, Kant deals with the concept of the sublime in the second section of his third critique, "Analytik des Erhabenen." Like the beautiful, the sublime pleases in and of itself and is a concept that cannot be found in nature but only in our ideas of nature. Kant is, therefore, a radical constructionist in this respect: "Man sieht hieraus auch, daß die wahre Erhabenheit nur im Gemüte der Urteilenden, nicht in dem Naturobjekte, dessen Beurteilung diese Stimmung desselben veranlaßt, müsse gesucht werden" (1957: 179) ["It is also evident from this that true sublimity must be sought only in the mind of the one who judges, not in the object in nature, the judging of which occasions this disposition in it"; 2000: 139]. It is the feeling of the sublime that Kant analyzes as indicative of reason's superiority over nature. And this feeling is based on an interesting notion of ambivalent desire:
Das Gefühl des Erhabenen ist also ein Gefühl von Unlust, aus der Unangemessenheit der Einbildungskraft in der ästhetischen Größenschätzung, zu der Schätzung durch die Vernunft, und eine dabei zugleich erweckte Lust, aus der Übereinstimmung eben dieses Urteils der Unangemessenheit des größten sinnlichen Vermögens mit Vernunftideen (1957: 180-81).
[The feeling of the sublime is thus a feeling of displeasure from the inadequacy of the imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude for the estimation by means of reason, and a pleasure that is thereby aroused at the same time from the correspondence on this very judgment of the inadequacy of the greatest sensible faculty in comparison with ideas of reason; 2000: 141].
The feeling of the sublime is scary in the sense that our aesthetic judgment is inadequate in the face of nature's power; it is pleasurable, however, in overcoming this obstacle. Looking at steep rocks, threatening thunderclouds, lightning strikes, spitting volcanoes, devastating hurricanes, and the vast ocean, According to Kant, reminds humans of their capacity to withstand these threats, but also may be a vain illusion: "wir nennen diese Gegenstände gern erhaben, weil sie die Seelenstände über ihr gewöhnliches Mittelmaß erhöhen, und ein Vermögen zu Widerstehen von ganz anderer Art in uns entdecken lassen, welches uns Mut macht, uns mit der scheinbaren Allgewalt der Natur messen zu können" (1957:185) ["we gladly call these objects sublime because they elevate the strength of our soul above its usual level, and allow us to discover within ourselves a capacity for resistance of quite another kind, which gives us the courage to measure ourselves against the apparent all-powerfulness of nature"; 2000: 144-45]. It is this acknowledgement of nature's power over an imagined higher reason where an ecological reflection can appropriate Kant's concept of the sublime. We will see that Bierstadt's paintings stage this discussion in very dramatic ways.
<4> Alison Byerly takes the idea of an ecological sublime one step further by claiming that the American wilderness myth was transformed from a sublime landscape into a series of picturesque scenes:
The feeling of awe that is inspired by a 'sublime' scene depends on the spectator's sense of its dominant power and its ability to call forth a visionary grasp of infinity. The American wilderness, however, has been gradually reduced and circumscribed within established boundaries. The conscious aesthetic framing of the landscape that typified the picturesque movement is . . . replicated in the carefully delineated borders of our national parks (1996: 53).
Within the confines of this picturesque aesthetics parks become objects of artistic consumption where the viewer defines and controls the scene yet fosters an illusion that the scene is part of a self-regulating natural system. Byerly claims that the aesthetic of the picturesque is rooted in British aesthetic models of the nineteenth century. I will show that Bierstadt played a very specific role in this process. He worked within the Romantic tradition of the sublime while at the same time transforming it into the picturesque and thus laying the groundwork for a specifically modern wilderness aesthetic. I will work within a critical framework that tries to combine close reading, the tradition I was trained in as a literary critic and that emphatically embraces a constructivist position about cultural artifacts, and an eco-critical focus that acknowledges the existence of phenomena beyond language. Eric Darier has referred to these two philosophical positions as "nature-skeptical"(represented by scholars such as Cronon, Schama, Merchant etc.) and "nature-endorsing" respectively (see the work of Kroeber, Love, Soulé and Lease, even Buell) and he thinks that "this debate reflects the two broad general perspectives and world-views offered by the social sciences and the natural sciences" but that nevertheless "there are examples of cross-over between the two broad categories of disciplines and epistemological premises" (1996: 3). Greg Garrard has likewise identified this dilemma as the most important methodological hurdle to climb for eco-critics: "The challenge for ecocritics is to keep one eye on the ways in which 'nature' is always in some ways culturally constructed, and the other on the fact that nature really exists, both the object and, albeit distantly, the origin of our discourse" (1996: 10). Several critical positions have taken up this challenge and presented us with models that recognize a "natural reality beyond postmodernist constructions" (Love 2003: 69). Willems acknowledges that all artifacts can be read as a system of signs but that it would be hybris to assume that this is the only way of understanding nature and culture (see 1996: 17). I will take these pointers and offer a critical reading of Bierstadt's images of the American West that tries to pay attention to ecological issues, both thematically and structurally.
<5> Bierstadt depicted many Western scenes in his typically large-scale, monumental paintings. I wish to show that the images of the American West that circulate to this day (Ansel Adams, Art Wolfe, etc.) still have some of Bierstadt's framing in terms of execution, composition, lighting, and intended message. I come to this material not as an artist, nor as an art historian or art collector, but as a critic of literature and culture who has worked on literary and pictorial representations of foreign figures and landscapes in German letters, specifically colonial encounters as they relate to the German involvement in Africa and in the Pacific. It is this interest in studying how an object, a landscape, or a figure is depicted that was previously unknown to the Western eye (a member of an island tribe that had never been visited by Europeans, for example, or a plant, or an entire landscape never charted in history) that motivates my work. The European painters on the scientific voyages to the Pacific in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were faced with the request to "record" images of the unknown. There is an entire tradition of representation that developed out of this engagement and I suggest linking Bierstadt's work with that tradition. My thesis is that Bierstadt's images of the American West stand for the characteristic ambivalence the expedition painter faces vis à vis his subject matter which, on the one hand, he tries to share with his viewers at home in terms and aesthetic frames that are familiar to them and, on the other, he paints in aggrandizing terms that lead to a more distancing and admiring attitude toward that which is depicted. The art critic Howard R. Lamar captured that ambivalence by claiming that "part of that curiosity stemmed from the somber, even tragic fact that as representatives of European civilization the artists and their patrons were only too aware that they were agents of change, that inevitably their presence would destroy the exotic primitive world they had found" (1978: 7). To that extent, Bierstadt and his predecessors prefigure the modern eco-tourist who paradoxically desires to visit remote places (and frequently pays enormous sums for that privilege) and, at the same time, is interested in preserving them (for the purpose of which those sums could have been utilized). The problematic nature of ecotourism today is preserved in the definition given by The Ecotourism Society that "Ecotourism is responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and sustains the well being of local people" (see de.wikipedia.org 6/14/06). Bierstadt certainly travels to natural areas but whether or not his travels conserve the environment or sustains the well being of local people is questionable. Bierstadt paints grandiose scenes which, in turn, invite more travelers out West (just like Sydney Parkinson's, William Hodge's, and James Webber's paintings and drawings from Cook's three voyages around the world motivated other expeditions). He knew that he was portraying a landscape and culture that will forever be touched and transformed by Western civilization but denied the fact that his brush was actively involved in that very process of transformation (and eradication) and gave his images a characteristic nostalgic look from the perspective of the landscape being violated. It is this dialectic - which all expedition painters were facing - that culminates in Bierstadt's artistic position vis-à-vis his subject matter and which makes him such an interesting case. Bierstadt stands at a juncture between the tradition of the early expedition painting that still utilized the concept of the sublime and the modern tradition of representing Western landscapes as picturesque scenes.
<6> Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, in 1830. In 1832, his family moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where the father worked as a cooper. It is safe to assume that the family continued to speak German at home in the U.S., because when Bierstadt was ready to get some formal training in painting in 1853 he went back to Germany intent on studying with his mother's cousin, Johann Peter Hasenclever, who taught at the acclaimed Düsseldorf Academy. When Bierstadt arrived in Düsseldorf, however, Hasenclever had just passed away and Bierstadt became friends with fellow American art students Worthington Wittredge and Emmanuel Leutze. Wittredge and Leutze were both young artists who studied in Düsseldorf and were trained in the "Düsseldorf School" of painting which placed a new emphasis on landscape painting from life, a precise, quite literal, and characteristic design, and a synthetic combination of vast members of minutely observed and tightly painted details (see Hendricks 1974: 6). Ralph A. Britsch quotes Wittredge as characterizing the Düsseldorf School as "a hard German style, colorless and with nothing to recommend it except its design" (1980: 9). Thomas W. Leavitt explains that "Düsseldorf was one of the leading centers in the world for artists, and many Americans fell under the crystalline spell of its two leading academicians" (1964: 3). The leading academicians at that time were Andreas Achenbach and Carl Friedrich Lessing whose trademark were the placement of lighting sources hidden behind clouds, tortured trees, dramatic skies, reflective water, and a sweep of valley and plain views. Andreas Achenbach and Carl Friedrich Lessing pioneered this look in their paintings. Bierstadt's Westphalian oil sketches owe much to these detailed compositions of bucolic landscapes in the nineteenth century tradition of the pastoral. He literally put his paint box, stool, and umbrella in his knapsack and went off to paint the Westphalian country side for an entire summer, then came back and reworked his sketches in the studio on large canvases, composing and putting together parts of the sketches he had made. Baigel agrees that "the painting techniques and attitudes toward subject matter that Bierstadt acquired in Düsseldorf were more immediately consequential than the subject matter itself" (1981: 7). For example, "A Rustic Mill" from 1855:
Bierstadt, "A Rustic Mill" 1855.
Courtesy Hunter Gallery, San Francisco
This painting from his first extended stay in Germany and Europe has many of the features discussed in the context of the Düsseldorf School: a reflective body of water, a dramatic sky, wind-torn trees, a mill in the center, a sweeping view of the landscape in the background, and, very characteristically, a figure and a boat, almost as an afterthought to the landscape, maybe as means of perspective to show the size of the trees. Later, Bierstadt is quoted as saying that "you paint a big tree, and it looks like a common tree in a cramped coffin" (Britsch 1980: 44). Bierstadt's European landscapes are never uninhabited; the imprint on nature by culture is always present.
<7> During 1856 and 1857 Bierstadt traveled through Europe, mainly south to Switzerland and Italy and, for the first time, became acquainted with the Alps and the European concept of natural grandeur. The typical Bierstadt composition from those days featured a lake in the center, trees and animals in the foreground, a dramatic sky and Alpine grandeur in the background. The animal figures appear often more as visitors to the scene than as natural inhabitants - but nevertheless the scene is not unpopulated. In 1857, Bierstadt returned to New Bedford from Europe and composed finished paintings from the European sketches in his studio. In 1858 he turned to a genre new to him and completed his first historical painting: "Gosnold at Cuttyhunk, 1606," chronicling the landing of British pioneer Bartholomew Gosnold at Cuttyhunk on Elizabeth Island near New Bedford.
Bierstadt, "Gosnold at Cuttyhunk" 1606.
Courtesy Old Dartmouth Historical Society Whaling Museum, New Bedford, Massachusetts.
Similar to the European scenes, we have water in the foreground framed by trees, Gosnold's ship in the background and deer as characteristic bystanders of the scene adding to its picturesque quality. As opposed to the tradition of historical painting human figures are absent. Instead it is the virgin landscape that is featured prominently at a point in time at which this space will forever be changed by civilization. This is an important point for an eco-critical reassessment of Bierstadt's work: it is not the heroic act of the European explorer Gosnold that is depicted but the moment of penetration from the perspective of nature; we are looking at Gosnold's ship so to speak through the eyes of the trees and the deer and the overall tone of the composition gestures toward caution, not an embrace.
<8> Bierstadt joined colonel Fredrick W. Lander's trip in 1858, exploring and surveying the American West. Lander was a pioneering engineer who selected a route that joined the Oregon Trail at the Fort Hall Indian Reservation in Idaho. On that trip, Bierstadt painted realistic and unadorned oil sketches that would later be transformed into larger oil paintings in his studio. These paintings have traditionally been analyzed not for their documentary value but as interpretations of what the artist experienced and as reflections and comments on the tradition of American landscape painting. Although this is, of course, correct in the sense that they are hardly accurate depictions of actual places - in fact, as we will see, they are heavily constructed composites of a number of different places. An eco-critical reading informed by critical theory can also point to the additional value beyond construction that is preserved in these images leaning in part on a German philosophical tradition of thinking about natural beauty that culminated in Theodor W. Adorno's reflections on aesthetic issues. The value of Bierstadt's paintings of the American West goes beyond the issue of construction, although that is an interesting process in its own right. Bierstadt's monumental paintings would be created largely from memory, with the help of the oil sketches, but he took ample liberty with details, moving scenes around, changing locations, indeed creating artistic statements that produce the effect of natural grandeur and reflect on the moment of crucial and frequently deadly contact between native cultures and animals with white civilization. "Thunderstorm in the Rocky Mountains" from 1859 drives this point of the constructed nature of Bierstadt's images of the American West home very clearly:
Bierstadt, "Thunderstorm in the Rocky Mountains" 1859.
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
This composition contains elements deriving from Bierstadt's Düsseldorf training: the preciseness of detail, the emphasis on the framing, a reflective body of water in the center, the dramatic sky, but Bierstadt also moves his topic beyond the relatively mechanic style of composition that he learned in Germany. We are witnessing the onset of a theatrical drama underscored by threatening skies - an example of a scene that could inspire the Kantian viewer to a feeling of the sublime. Bierstadt is developing a new style, "a shading off from preciseness of detail in the foreground to atmospheric luminosity in the background - and the striving for sublimity and grandeur that were to characterize most of Bierstadt's work for the next thirty-five years" (Britsch 1980: 12). Anderson notes that "Bierstadt understood that the idea of the West preceded the mapping and measuring of the physical land and that the idea was born of European models. . . . With a clear understanding of the mandate, Bierstadt invented the western American landscape by skillfully joining passages of carefully observed and meticulously rendered detail with freely configured compositions that met national needs" (1990: 74). The important idea here is that the mental landscape predates the physical landscape.
<9> Landscapes are always cultural artifacts, in fact, they are cultural before they are natural, as Simon Schama reminds us: "Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock. So goes the argument of the book. But it also should be acknowledged that once a certain idea of landscape, a myth, a vision, establishes itself in an actual place, it has a peculiar way of muddling categories, of making metaphors more real than their referent; of becoming, in fact, part of the scenery" (1995: 61). Bierstadt's compositions reflect his conceptualization of landscape, responding creatively to the myth of the American West. Specifically, they are put together in such a way as to create a certain effect on the viewer and they point to a realm beyond the merely mental plane. Schama explains this mechanism by commenting on Bierstadt's Big Tree paintings that were seen as "the botanical correlate of America's heroic nationalism at a time [1868] when the Rebublic was suffering its most divisive crisis since the Revolution" (1995: 187). The trees that date back to the Christian era become authentic living monuments of pristine America that have an aura of sanctity around them that feeds on both national magnitude and spiritual redemption (see Schama 1995: 193). This is where an eco-critical reading can assist us in expanding a purely human-centered perspective that looks at cultural artifacts merely in terms of their construction to include a larger eco-centric perspective, acknowledging natural beauty beyond language and representation as it was philosophically framed in Adorno's aesthetics.
<10> In 1863 Bierstadt joined the writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow, a frequent visitor to Bierstadt's New York studio, on another expedition to Colorado, California, and Oregon. This is where Bierstadt saw Yosemite for the first time. "The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak" was his first great Western panoramic landscape and Bierstadt added some natural features to the scene for the sake of impressive grandeur. Bierstadt is clearly working on finding a model for the depiction of the American West with the lake in the middle, the jagged mountains, the snow-tipped peaks, and the animals in the foreground as visitors to the virgin scene. But the sublime is also staged. It is a theatrical drama where the West becomes a metaphor for natural grandeur. Eco-critics have repeatedly reminded us about the importance of adding an analysis of place to character, plot, and structure in literary criticism (see, for example, Rosendale 2002: xxii, Glotfelty 1996: xviii). In Wyoming, to give an example for such an analysis of place, Bierstadt witnessed an Indian encampment. Hendricks claims that Bierstadt "idealized a Shoshone encampment, placed it on the shores of a lake which never existed and within site of a waterfall and a series of mountain peaks. Instead of animal visitors to the picturesque wilderness scene we have "Indians," but visitors nonetheless that convey a sense of drama, history, and natural grandeur. In critical response to the common pioneer myth, Bierstadt depicts the American wilderness as inhabited, as a place of human history. Max Oelschlaeger has argued that our idea of wilderness is "related to the evolving character of culture as human nature has articulated itself in particular places and times" (1991: 5). Eco-critics like Thomas H. Birch have criticized the idea of wilderness (as practiced in contemporary politics) as being separated from human history. In fact, Birch has called the contemporary approach to wilderness preservation a kind of "incarceration" where wilderness preservation is "just another song of Western civilization" (1995: 137): "designated areas are prisons in which the imperium incarcerates unassimilable wilderness in order to complete itself" (1995: 142). Greg Garrard agrees that "wilderness, then is ideological in the sense that it erases the social and political history that gives rise to it, extending into reactionary politics as well as Thoreau's occasional misanthropy. At best, the wilderness experience and its deep ecological philosophy risks identification with privileged leisure pursuits that sell authenticity while mystifying the industrialized consumerism that makes them possible" (2004: 71). Karen J. Winkler quotes William Cronon on the fact that designated wilderness areas are not pristine enclaves but cultural inventions and tied to our myths about the frontier as an empty space that was destined to be penetrated by European Americans (1996: A9). Bierstadt's conceptual image of the American West is, at odds with a contemporary tendency in wilderness preservation, shows this area as populated by early people and his paintings point to the history of "early America" which got pushed to the side in the grand plan of Western parks.
<11> The images from Yosemite and Oregon are likewise dramatic constructions: Bierstadt's painting of Mount Hood, for example, features a lake in the background that resembles Crater Lake, but, everyone familiar with Oregon geography knows that Crater Lake is nowhere near Mt. Hood. Where literary writers would use typically biblical or classical references in bringing across their impressions of the American West as Edenic space, Bierstadt finds an artistic language that utilizes his training in the Düsseldorf School to paint dramatic images of the Western landscape as the staged sublime with picturesque overtones. "Bierstadt reconfigures the conventions of nineteenth century landscape painting to produce an American equivalent for the European sublime. In Yosemite Valley, however, he found a landscape so spectacular, so unique in its grandeur, that he was able to offer what had been desired but not realistically expected: a national landscape for which there was no equivalent" (Anderson 1990: 85). These paintings were shown and sold not only to fellow Americans but also to Europeans. They originated in Bierstadt's studio in New York or in his studios in Europe and are creations of his mind. In other words, Bierstadt gave Americans "their" Alps by giving them images of the American West as the space of the sublime. "Americans had for years joined in a collective lament that the American landscape boasted no Alpine peaks" (Anderson 1990: 72). Bierstadt rectified that feeling of inferiority. In 1866 he built a studio on the Hudson River, a house in New York City he calls "Malkasten," and leads a flamboyant lifestyle with frequent soirees. In 1867 he and his wife travel to Europe where they visit London, Paris, and Rome showing Bierstadt's paintings to the courts. "In Europe the artist and his wife visited England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, and Spain. In France the artist was presented at the court of Napoleon III and was awarded the Legion of Honor. In Rome he visited Liszt, and the aging abbé played for his party of only four. In Vienna they heard the three Strauss brothers . . . In London on July 9, 1868, the artist gave a sumptuous banquet in honor of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was in England to accept an honorary degree from Cambridge" (Hendricks 1972: 25-26). In Europe, most paintings originated from memory and creative imagination. "Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains" works particularly well as a composite from his earlier work and represents the quintessential visual embodiment of the picturesque wilderness myth that Bierstadt helps shape with his paintings. It is a constructed and staged image, as we have seen, catering to European and American tastes and conceptions of grandeur. The unspoiled wilderness as theater of the sublime spoke to the viewers of Bierstadt's paintings in their ambivalent attitude toward the project of Western expansion: the pursuit of Western space had to be balanced with the threat of distinction of that space in its current shape. "Because the landscape Bierstadt offered in 'Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains' was an invention, it was impervious to change. The conjured scene was, therefore, the ideal refuge for the Edenic myth. . . . Bierstadt's painting offered sanctuary to an idea America was reluctant to give up despite their headlong rush into an industrial age" (Anderson 1990: 94). I see Bierstadt's attitude toward his subject matter as an early version of the attitude of today's eco-tourist who wants to travel through and experience the wilderness (an invasive action) and yet, at the same time, help protect it. Bierstadt's paintings symbolize this ambivalent position in the perceived need to embellish the scene and show it to the entire world thus making penetration possible and desirable while hoping for its preservation at the same time.
<12> From 1871 to 1873 the Bierstadts traveled to the West Coast again. The expedition visited Yosemite but also Donner Pass in the Sierras and a series of very dramatic scenes resulted from that expedition.
Bierstadt, "Donner Lake from the Summit", 1873.
Courtesy, The New York Historical Society.
Bierstadt clearly plays with the then still vividly remembered story of a group of settlers trapped by an early winter up at Donner Pass in 1846; only part of the group survived by turning to cannibalism. But what is more important than this allusion is the machine in the garden. The railroad had arrived in the West, bringing more people into this formerly pristine wilderness and forever changing the landscape. One could debate if and in what way the railroad has become part of the sublime in this image, whether or not its arrival is celebrated or whether it is seen as a foreign, indeed hostile element. Anderson claims that "Bierstadt attempted to create a composition that would accommodate both the natural and the technological sublime" (1990: 97). Indeed, no trains appear in the picture, just a puff of smoke marks the recent passage of the train, which underscores Anderson's reading of the technological sublime.
<13> By the end of the 1880s art styles around the world had moved on and Bierstadt's monumental style of painting was no longer representative of contemporary American art and taste. Leavitt summarizes that even though "the style and subject matter of his paintings seemed to fulfill precisely the need of Americans newly conscious of the romance of the western frontier" Bierstadt was "trained in an artistic tradition that had gradually become outworn" and "never was able to change his approach to painting in accordance with current aesthetic fashion" (1964: 1). "French Impressionism had reached these shores, and nothing could seem more antiquated and out of place than Bierstadt's tireless enumeration of meticulously painted mountains, trees and skies" (Leavitt 1964: 10). Hendricks agrees that Bierstadt "began his work with a European tradition of training . . . and continued it through the far-away flowering of Impressionism" (1974: 5). Baigel has the following to say in summary of Bierstadt's career:
Bierstadt traveled the high society circuit and collected friends and acquaintances in the White House and in Europe's royal courts. He gave and went to elegant multi-course dinners. He delved, for the most part unsuccessfully, into moneymaking business ventures and even tried his hand at influencing foreign policy. His large paintings, obviously made for a wealthy clientele, have a grandiosity to them not unlike his social pretensions and the large and posturing business aspirations of his patrons. Although he had a studio in the famous Studio Building on New York City's West 10 th Street and was an indefatigable worker, he was an outsider in the American artistic community. Bierstadt was not really one of those committed, with varying degrees of humility, to the making of art; rather, he deliberately sought fame and fortune. Perhaps his lack of subtlety disturbed his contemporaries, and when tastes changed, he became an easy target (1981: 7).
I agree with the assessment of Bierstadt as the flamboyant artist he obviously was, but I don't agree with the assessment that there is no subtlety in his paintings. These grandiose paintings were not only made for a wealthy and influential public, they were also statements of a certain artistic position I tried to underscore in this essay. Baigel claims that Bierstadt was "the painter who best domesticated the West, eliminating its least pleasant aspects and making it an appropriate subject for an elegant sitting-room wall" (1981: 10). I think there is a lot more ambivalence in Bierstadt's depictions of Western mountains. Yes, they found a language to depict the sublime, but some natural features in his paintings were threatening and others were threatened by extinction.
<14> Many of the locations depicted by Bierstadt later became national parks or, at the very least, have attained a protected status of some sort or other. Bierstadt had depicted them as divinely favored, displaying a dialectic of threatening and non-threatening features, unconsciously asking to be possessed and needing to be protected at the same time. If they are indeed allegories of Western expansion, as some critics have claimed, Bierstadt showed his viewers a landscape that would soon change due to Western settlement. Indeed, Americans were eager to fill that landscape and become part of the sublime. But filling the empty space of the frontier also meant destroying it. It is this reflection on the fragile position of ecological balance that Bierstadt displays so well in his art. Bierstadt creates for us what Western landscapes looked like to the European eye at the moment of arrival of Western men and women. This arrival itself is depicted with ambivalence toward the project of expansion. These grand scale images with their multiplicity of detail and their drama represent versions of sublime space as it is transformed into the picturesque.
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