A Sense of Place: The Artist and the American Land

Rating:
Summary: The End of Landscape
Review: A SENSE OF PLACE links the human with the natural: people make, and are made by, parts of our earth. Landscape artist and conservationist Alan Gussow has organized 63 well-chosen colorplates reminding us that paintings record the known landscape, the unknown frontier and what might be forgotten once nature and people meet. The book is a beautiful way to get to know the names in landscape art and see how the United States has changed over time: late 16th-century John White's "Indians fishing" in the Virginia colony organized by Sir Walter Raleigh; early 19th-century Thomas Cole's "Landscape with dead trees" and George Catlin's "Prairie meadows burning - Upper Missouri"; mid-19th century stained glass window specialist John LaFarge's "Bishop Berkeley's rock"; late 19th-century David Howard Hitchcock's glowing "Halemaumau" volcano; early 20th-century Marsden Hartley's rambunctious "Smelt Brook Falls" and Charles Sheeler's precise "Rocks at Steicher's"; mid-20th-century Edward Hopper's "Cobb's house" on comfortable Cape Cod and Georgia O'Keeffe's elegant "Sky above clouds II"; and late 20th-century Sidney Goodman's chilling "Landscape with 4 towers" and Anne Poor's delicate "Gertrude's bouquet." Readers get more specifics from William Gaunt's TURNER, Patricia Junker's JOHN STEUART CURRY, and Bernard B. Perlman's PAINTERS OF THE ASHCAN SCHOOL. It also is interesting to do comparison reading into Paul Machotka's CEZANNE and Richard Thomson's CAMILLE PISSARRO.