Against His Grain: Albert Bierstadt's "Clouds Over the Prairie"
A MONA Moment |
 |
You might call him the Rococo master of 19th Century American landscape art. Not known for understatement or subtlety, Albert Bierstadt was the artist of "Manifest Destiny." Financed by railroad and mining magnates, he manufactured a vision of the west for the American publicdesigned to glorify the western frontier and its promise . He painted huge, crowd pleasing canvases, landscape panoramas served up with craggy mountain peaks shrouded in dramatic mists, the sun exploding on the horizon into cloudscapes churning with pinks, violets and gold. He was, at mid-century, one of America's most popular and profitable artists.
Bierstadt was born in Germany but raised in New England. He received his formal art training in Dusseldorf, Germany, one of the great centers for art training in Europe. His meticulous, polished, super realist style crossed with the intense romanticism sweeping across the European artistic community resulted in highly charged dramas of light and color played out on the American landscape.
He arrived at this formula after he returned to America. In 1858 he joined a western surveying expedition which took him through the Nebraska territory to the Colorado Rockies. Along the way, he produced many studies which ultimately he took back to his studio in New York city and worked into the composite views which built his landscapes. One of these studies is in the collection of the Museum of Nebraska Art. This oil painting on paper, Clouds Over the Prairie, is so interesting because it belies our image of Bierstadt as the highly charged impresario of manufactured grandeur.
There is delicacy of observation here. It is most noticeable in his treatment of the clouds, and a thin bank of low-lying fog in the middleground. Here, like so much of his work, we have drama, but the clash of nature's elements is muted. This is a modest little drama, but a telling one. Not Tolstoi, but Chekov.
There is an upper strata of clouds dividing the sky in the center of the painting. It is foaming, white, cumuli, brightly illuminated by the sun breaking through the looming, dark storm clouds directly to the left. In a clever and virtuosic use of his brush, we see the sun's intense white rays as hair thin paint trails. Brilliant white highlights of impasto whip up toward us like the peaks of a meringue. The light breaks through to the ground, just enough to leave a yellow beam scuffing the top of the prairie grass where it meets the sandhills in the distance.
The foreground is dominated by the greens and browns of scrub grasses, daubs of paint impressionistically applied. Take a few steps back and see the quiet drama in the sky being played out. Stage left, the edge of the dark cloud we see butts up against the white clouds in the center--each occupying equal space in the painting. Below them, a subtle effect plays out, a fugitive cloud of brownish mist bends down to the prairie in a downdraft. What pleases here is the intensely observed, objective, understanding of these atmospheric effects, effects those of us who live in or near the sandhills have seen and enjoyed many times. There is a start of recognition. We have seen this before. Bierstadt has distilled it for us, clarified and intensified it, a common scene, alive with understated but unmistakable drama and beauty.
