Essay by Hilton Als

Some time ago, I would read and reread Barbara Novak. Novak is, of course, the great Americanist, author of a number of seminal books on nineteenth-century art with a special focus on American landscape painting. In works such as 1980’s Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 1825–1875, Novak introduced me to transcendental masters such as Thomas Cole, and Frederic Edwin Church, and Fitz H. Lane—artists who hadn’t had much critical exposure before Novak gave them a frame.

Prior to that, American landscape painting was largely marginalized; indeed, even as late as 2000, few European collections contained works by nineteenth-century American artists, let alone the transcendentalists; there was always Caspar David Friedrich, but next to no Albert Bierstadt. Presumably The Earth and its surrounding energy and force was different in the former colonies. Standing in front of great works with Novak’s book in hand (or in my head), I studied the Hudson River School and read transcendentalist writers such as Emerson and Thoreau and Bronson Alcott, too—creators who all shared a common belief: that God was nature, and nature, God.

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Image: Cy Gavin, Untitled (Beaver Dam), 2021 (detail)