Political economy, race, and natural images in the United States, 1825–1878.
evan robert neely
Routledge, 2024
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has harshly described Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow (1836) as “a masterpiece of American landscape painting,” in which the artist “juxtaposes pristine wilderness and rural villages.” It highlights the possibilities of the national landscape and provides a vision for America’s future.” The American nation. The Hudson River School, comprised primarily of male Anglo-American painters, including Cole, became widely known for their landscape paintings in service of Manifest Destiny and their general attitude toward the wild and nature. , their paintings are now valued as embodying nature. A depiction of the imagined settlers of the American West and their land, signifying an interwoven relationship between capitalist expansion, racial identity, and nationalism.
The Oxbow is one of several paintings discussed in detail in Evan Robert Neeley’s thorough book Political Economy, Race, and Natural Images in the United States, 1825-1878. It is. Neely notes not only how cartography influenced the visual structure of landscape painting and its spatial orientation, but also how the practice of sketching outdoors meant that “proprietary ideology was inseparable from colonial conquest.” claims to have expressed. Throughout, he explores how nature was culturally constructed, land ownership, economic development, settler colonialism, and the rise of literary forms such as poetry and their popular popularity during this critical period in America. It shrewdly focuses on what has been mutually determined by dissemination. The growth of the publishing industry and literacy in the Northeast. Essential for landscape art historians and painters alike, this book provides a timely reappraisal of widely canonized painters, including Thomas Cole, Usher Durand, and Frederick Church. But the breakthrough insight comes in a later chapter, when Neely skillfully assesses the racial geography of African American painter Robert S. Duncanson’s landscapes of black labor, This can be achieved by finding passages in Henry David Thoreau’s writings that criticize picturesque capitalist economics and imperialist views. Nature.
In his foreword, Neely presents “three stories” spanning the decades from the 1960s to the 1980s, each evoking a larger historical context outside the tradition of nineteenth-century American landscapes. They also serve as a prelude to his adoption of 20th and 21st century theoretical models, such as Michel Foucault’s dispositif interpreted through the apparatus of Giorgio Agamben. Historically, these stories also serve as a bridge between our present and the discussed Jacksonian, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras.
First, the 1962 Storm King Mountain incident highlighted legal and environmental resistance to development based on ecological rather than aesthetic concerns. Second, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson’s 1971 film The Swamp critiques conventional landscape beauty by exploring a degraded environment and rejecting romantic notions of nature. . Third, Gordon Parks’ 1984 adaptation of The Twelfth Year a Slave shifts the focus from the natural landscape to the psychological trauma of slavery, establishing a redemptive relationship between nature and human suffering. I’m refusing. These examples provide a counterpoint to prevailing attitudes toward American landscape painting, illustrate how environmental destruction and human suffering challenge the Hudson River School’s romantic view of nature, and It advocates a critical reappraisal of landscape aesthetics.
Foucault’s general problem remains his reductive notion of power and the difficulty of understanding Agamben’s apparatus in critical relation, but Neely ultimately takes pragmatism as his overarching theoretical lens. Being employed gives a sense of security. Furthermore, he dedicates a coda to Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics, linking it to Emerson’s transcendentalism, and emphasizing that nature always imprints physical traces. Anticipating the signatures of American Abstract Expressionism, Neely applied Peirce’s ideas to the modern American landscape paintings of George Innes and Alexander Wyant, where brushstrokes became indicators of personal expression.
Ever since “Landscape with a Rainbow” (1859) was exhibited at the U.S. Capitol in time for President Biden’s inauguration in 2021, interest in Robert Duncanson has increased and prompted a re-examination. For Neely, Duncanson’s painting View of Cincinnati, Ohio from Covington, Kentucky (c. 1851) embedded political condemnation in an idyllic landscape, functioning as a complex reflection on race, labor, and geography. There is. Moving away from his later romantic landscapes, Duncanson paints a realistic depiction of Cincinnati from a vantage point in the slave state of Kentucky. While dealing with the mainstream visual culture of popular sculpture, Duncanson subtly criticizes its colonialist roots. Providing a counter-narrative to white settlers, he intentionally changes the race of the figures in the foreground to emphasize the legacy of black labor and slavery. The geographical orientation of this scene, northward from the slave states, indicates a metaphorical escape from slavery and is consistent with abolitionist narratives of the Underground Railroad and flight to freedom.
Neely’s Political Economy, Race, and Natural Images in the United States, 1825-1878 is an important and compelling reappraisal of 19th-century American landscape painting, and reads like the first in a series. Masu. Given his interest in both land art and mid-century modernist painting, as well as his unique theoretical lens, the trilogy of texts coalesces around these periods of art history in which landscape and painting are interwoven. There is a possibility that Neely’s engagement with semiotics, particularly through perspective, provides a rationale for linking nineteenth-century landscape painting to both twentieth-century abstraction and contemporary issues of environmentalism and racial geography. . Careful incorporation of late 20th century critiques such as Holt, Smithson, and Parks connects historical artistic practices with contemporary concerns about environmental degradation and the politics of representation, and demonstrates the ongoing relevance of these debates. is emphasized.
