Several weeks ago, we took our American Studies students to visit a show of Hudson River School paintings at the Columbia (SC) Art Museum, a show titled “Painting America the Beautiful.” We walked through rooms filled with one stunning painting after another. There were spacious skies and purple mountain majesties. I was ready to burst into song: “Glory, glory Hallelujah!”

I gave my students an assignment to choose a painting from the exhibition and to analyze the painting. One student was captivated by a lovely Heade painting, and she did something profound in writing about it. Here’s a marvelous essay: sharply written and sharply observed.

Cleo Yahn

Mr. Bonner/Ms. Caldwell

American Studies

January 27, 2012

Not Just a Purple Orchid

            Critics should not dispute whether or not Martin Johnson Heade is indeed a Hudson River School artist. Rather, critics should marvel over the sexual foreplay Meade so effortlessly creates in his depictions of lush foliage and tropical hummingbirds in his work Study of an Orchid. Instead of taking the traditional Hudson River School route by capturing the fall of a Roman empire, the portal of light within a Kentucky cave, or the cold winter months in desolate Albany, Meade embodies feminine sexuality within a purple orchid. As Michael Lewis writes, “art is justified by what it does, rather than what it is.” What Heade’s Study of an Orchid does is unusual: it screams from the clear blue rainfall to the tops of palm trees—“Sex! Sex! Sex!”

The typical theme of endless, distant, intricate landscape after landscape in Hudson River School art has a viewer’s eye bored after a few paintings. At that jaded, eye-strained point, Heade’s subject matter pleasantly surprises a viewer’s senses. The cascading waterfall in the lower left corner, the cloaking moss in the upper right corner, and the heavy bud of the centered orchid are all naturally refreshing. The falling effect in all three areas emphasizes the moment when nature gives into sexual desire, relaxes, and releases ecstasy. The two exotic hummingbirds that Heade places beneath the vibrant purple orchid are performing a mating ritual, as suggested by the flared white tail on the female hummingbird to the right side and pronounced red throat of the male hummingbird to the left. Their beaks are almost touching as if the small creatures are about to give each other a kiss: the outset of sex.

Love is in bloom for the two birds in paradise. However, the hummingbird mating ritual is not where a viewer’s eye first gravitates. The eye immediately finds the vibrant purple and pink orchid, the focal point of the painting. Heade’s orchid emphasizes the delicacy of a woman. The pink tint in the flower’s petals makes a viewer’s lips tingle, while the ruffled edges of the flowers petals are reminiscent of a woman’s laced undergarments. There are two flowers already in full bloom, while one bud waits to see the animals’ next move to conceive a fragile blossom: the flower of new life. The bud also acts to give height to a rather divided painting. All the tropical terrain falls at the bottom of the painting, insinuating that the heavenly nature of this piece is not as important. The sun masked behind cumulous clouds only shines enough to bring light onto the mountains in the background.

The main mountain peering through the left side of the painting gives atmospheric perspective to the painting, but it also adds to the feminine allure. Hidden beneath the fog of the moist and hot air of the tropics, the mountains’ shape is similar to that of a woman’s breast. Is it a natural phenomenon or an allusion of Heade’s Latin fever? From his travels to South America, Heade brought back an obsession for orchids and hummingbirds, both easily and frequently seen in his work. However, Heade disguised his strong belief in Charles Darwin’s theories on the creation of man and natural phenomenon with his supple mountaintop. He wants viewers not only to look at the subject, but also the underlying religious connotations of evolution in his works.

Heade was not the conventional Hudson River School artist; he was better. He did not believe that civilization existed or encroached on nature; he did not portray a landscape or make his subject the scene. Heade often made flowers his subject; he painted foreign lands; and he loved the “ominous stillness before nature’s blow falls” (Johnson). Heade believed America was the “land of opportunity.” He used this occasion to travel to distant lands and paint images that captured the miracle of nature, the purity of basic instincts, and the power of life in all its forms. He exercises the American sublime in his pieces by affecting “the mind with a sense of overwhelming grandeur or irresistible power…” Heade appeals to the power of sexual desire: one of man’s most natural, irrepressible urges.

My daughter is reading The Odyssey in her Ancient Studies class, and we have been talking almost daily about Homer’s poem and Telemachus’ longing for his father, no news about Odysseus. Just this evening she told me about being moved by the scene where Odysseus meets his faithful hound after the twenty years of absence, the scene remarkably rendered in Auerbach’s classic work of criticism, Mimesis.

My own American Studies students have just finished reading Huck Finn, and I can’t help but think of Huck as the Achaean prince and Jim as his father in their own odyssey down the Mississippi, a Greek epic poem translated into an American epic work of fiction–of a boy in search of a father and of a slave in search of his family, of (a) home.

Last weekend I read Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, a spare and simple novella depicting any number of American Studies themes: self-reliance, Nature, the allure of the West and wilderness. Johnson presents the dreamy external and internal landscape–inexorable presence of trains, shapeshifting wolves–of  one man’s self-contained life in its full arc as the country embarks on its own 20th Century dreams.

I recently finished reading Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, and the novel left me in that same state. Patchett’s writing and imagery are exact and concrete. The ending of the novel is a dreamed piece of magic. All of the surprises, and they are plentiful, are earned and natural.

I read the latest Julian Barnes novel over the holiday, and I came across a couple of reminders about the presentation of the past. In one scene, a teacher asks a student to describe Henry the Eighth. The student responds, “‘There is one line of thought according to which all you can truly say of any historical event–even the outbreak of the First World War, for example–is that ‘something happened.’” History, then, is the ongoing gossip about the somethings that have happened.

The last two days of our Am Stud DC trip included many visits to museums and significant buildings. On Monday, my group visited the Supreme Court, where Jennifer Eby ’77 arranged a fine lunch and a visit to the Supreme Court library, a rare treat for these visits. I was ready to apply as Scholar-in-Residence. The resources, next door to the Library of Congress, awaiting my eyes! Then to the National Gallery of Art, where I bought no books but ogled two Harry Callahan photos (the iconic Weeds in Snow and an abstract from the series of images of his wife, Eleanor), and the Museum of American History, which always includes my annual viewing of the Flag that flew above Fort McHenry during the British bombardment following the burning of Washington DC, the very same flag that inspired our national anthem (“O, say does that star spangled banner….”). I made up for buying no books at the museums with a couple of purchases in Georgetown following a lovely dinner and evening given by Sarah Brigagliano’s ’12 mother at Ms. McKown’s law firm office. Sarah was able to join us and Mr. Brigagliano greeted us. (Ms. McKown had been called at the last minute to New York.)

Our final day found us at the Capitol, inspired once again by the Constitution’s language enacted in the building in which we toured. In order to form a more perfect Union, we dispersed into smaller groups for the tour. Following this visit, we later gathered on the Capitol’s steps and heard from Congressman John Lewis, one of the speakers at the March on Washington in 1963 and a victim of the police brutality and racism prevalent in the South on Bloody Sunday, a racism that existed (and exists) despite the hopes of Reconstruction, despite the work of Freedom Riders, despite the example of Dr. King and others. John Lewis, only a couple of years older than our American Studies Scholars, addressed the multitudes who shortly thereafter heard Dr. King’s famous “I Have a Dream” Address. To meet this humble and thoughtful man, a man who has lived the history we study, was a moving experience for all of us, and his time with us proved a highlight for many of our students. We were then off to the Portrait Gallery; the highlight for me was viewing seven or so Albert Pinkham Ryder paintings. His spectral boats and eerie moonscapes and skies are riveting, akin in their execution and aesthetic quality to many visionary or outsider artists. These paintings defy the trend of Eakins and Bellows and Sloan and others during this period in art history, presenting a more transcendent view of the world, one closer to Emerson than to Zola. The day ended with an evening tour of the monuments. It’s a transcendent experience to view Jefferson’s Memorial or Lincoln’s at night. The night enhances the Korean Memorial; the work on the wall pops into ghostly relief. The Vietnam Memorial, however, loses its power; the lighting fails to give the names and the black granite their heft.

All of our Am Stud Scholars found at least one experience that resonated with the work we do over the many days of our study together. What amazes me each time, as I read the words of Lincoln and Jefferson or view the Portrait Gallery’s portrait of Whitman with its white cloud  or fog of a beard, is how fully we are a country created out of words–words that move me each visit, words that move others in their desire to attain what we should never take as a given.

Day Two of the Am Stud DC trip began with another early coffee run and leisurely Demo reading. But the day’s two highlights were, first, the illustrated art collection and lunch at Richard Kelly’s (’68), and, second, the evensong service at the National Cathedral, talk about the Cathedral by former Asheville School Writer-in-Residence and Dean of Faculty Vance Wilson, now Head of School at St. Albans, and dinner and lecture about the powers of the legislature as defined by the Constitution by Dr. Samples in the St. Albans Refectory.

The evensong service is always unworldly. Looking up at the cathedral ceiling–the arches, columns , and ribbing–is a sensory experience akin to being swallowed by Jonah’s Leviathan, something skeletal on a scale that has the grandeur of Moby Dick.  Or we’re residing in the hold of Noah’s Ark, souls to populate a world reborn, spirit and flesh. Readings resound as if a divine voice from the heavens. Acoustics are celestial, though this voice drags angelic harmonies into secular off key snorts.

We entered our bus journey for the Am Stud DC trip around 5:00 a.m. I never want to mess with Sam Goodman at that hour again.

Caffeine fueled a pleasant start to the day’s drive. A tour of Charlottesville, VA was a particular architectural delight. The true architectural delight, however, awaited us atop a hill: Monticello, a design inspired, in part, by a certain Greek temple Mr. Jefferson had seen on his travels.

Enter Mr. Jefferson’s self-designed house (who among us expects to see recent Presidents Clinton or Bush doing the same any year soon–maybe in an alternative universe?) and immediately begin your education; maybe Jefferson was America’s first Education President. Overhead, embossed into the ceiling, flies an eagle. A series of natural history “lessons” delight the eye. Maps grace the walls, showing the boundary of the country before Jefferson bought Louisiana from France, doubling the country’s size, and sent Lewis and Clarke on a little adventure. Native American paraphernalia are displayed. A calendar clock, Jefferson’s engineered design, marks the day of the week.

This entrance serves as an appropriate analogy to the many lessons awaiting all of us over the next three days: artistic and historical delights, constitutional limits delineated in a talk, spiritual wonders at the National Cathedral, and so forth. Every year we learn something special and rare. Today we entered a house. Today we entered into history. Today we entered into an adventure.

Several years ago, Humanities colleague Jim Gardner gave me a cd, the Langley Schools Music Project, a collection of Seventies school gym recordings of schoolchildren from western Canada singing these wonderful covers of David Bowie, Paul McCartney, the Beach Boys, and the like. It was all very primitive and pure, punk and powerful: music providing the experience it must have in our earliest days, before the advent of electricity, when the heavens themselves were a deity, profound and deep.

Last semester I had given my Humanities Honors Sixties Seminar students an assignment for extra credit: play Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” a song we had discussed and which my students had analyzed for an in-class essay, at convocation. For what it’s worth, they did me one better: a video, with the link below. There’s a playful and goofy spirit to the project, of course. It’s as if they have channeled Richard Lester’s Help in terms of the visual approach and camera work. The music and voices might have been an outtake from the Langley Schools Music Project, part of a re-release double cd. And there’s the freeze for a split second, just as they sing, “Stop”: a visual pause, a rhyme, that mirrors the warning coded in the lyrics themselves–and a thunk of percussion, a muffled shot, a body fallen. Something’s happening here–a joyful noise and spirit overlaid a song about dark and paranoid times. Maybe there’s an antidote embedded for these own dark times of today.

For What It’s Worth- Bonner’s 60s Seminar …
3 min – Dec 7, 2010
Uploaded by FarOffDestinations
youtube.com

The Keith Richards autobiography is a hoot and a pleasure and filled with treasures. He writes, “When you’re making records, you’re looking to distort things, basically.” And that’s true of all (interesting) art: writing, painting, music, film.