Industrial Sublime (Paperback) | Released: 01 Nov 2013

It was not until the first decade of the twentieth century, as artists like Robert Henri and John Sloan turned their attention to the urban scene, that American art shifted its focus from bucolic landscapes to the cities, the towns, the crowds, especially the raucous urban scene of Manhattan--by then the nation's most important metropolis.

This movement away from painting the land to painting the life on the street is often seen as a clean break with the depiction of the landscape, and with landscape painting generally as a mainstay of American art in the face of European Modernism. However, artists continued to paint the Hudson River, as well as its tributaries, the Harlem and East rivers, and the great harbor of New York City into which they flowed. What was different was their approach. Having jettisoned the romantic ideals of their forebears, artists like Henri and Sloan, and later, Georgia O'Keeffe, George Ault, Edward Hopper, and Preston Dickinson, celebrated the changing way of life along the city's waterfront. As the century progressed, they did so with sharper focus and with ideals borrowed from the Machine Age. Instead of majestic mountain ranges, their subjects were the arching bridges, swinging cranes, and streamlined ocean liners resting in the harbor. These artists took the elements of the Sublime, combined them with Modernism's interest in structure and form, and applied them to the manmade industrial one--thereby creating a new visual vocabulary for the twentieth century: the Industrial Sublime.

Industrial Sublime takes as its focus this shift in both style and sensibility during the years 1900-1940, and explores the development of a new mode of landscape painting and pictorial ideals suited to America's role as a global industrial power.

Co-published with the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers. The exhibition Industrial Sublime: Modernism and the Transformation of New York's Rivers, 1900-1940 runs from October 12, 2013, through January 17, 2014. Visit www.hrm.org for more information.
About the Author:
Kirsten Jensen is the co-curator of Industrial Sublime: Modernism and the Transformation of New York's Rivers, 1900-1940, and joined the staff of the Hudson River Museum as a curator beginning in January of 2013. Her upcoming projects include an exhibition on Westchester designer Vera Neumann's influence on twentieth-century style and fashion. Kirsten has most recently served as the Director of the John F. Folinsbee Catalogue Rasisonne, working to bring attention to this important American Impressionist painter. Kirsten holds a Ph.D in the History of Art from the City University of New York, and has curated exhibitions for the Woodmere Art Museum; Cedar Grove, the Thomas Cole National Historic Site; and the Greenwich Historical Society. Most recently Kirsten has been a Leon Levy Fellow at the Frick Collection, where she has conducted research on the pioneering 19th century American curator Sara Tyson Hallowell and her influence on collecting in the Gilded Age.

Bartholomew F. Bland is the co-curator of Industrial Sublime: Modernism and the Transformation of New York's Rivers, 1900-1940 and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Hudson River Museum, where he has organized a number of exhibitions related to the art and history of the Hudson Valley Region including, Westchester: The American Suburb and Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture. He also curated A Field Guide to Sprawl for Arts Westchester, which examined of the impact of the suburban lifestyle on the physical environment, an exhibition that traveled to Yale University. Among his survey exhibitions for the Museum related to the Hudson River School are Paintbox Leaves: Autumnal Inspiration from Cole to Wyeth and Greener Pastures: Images of Arcadia at the Hudson River Museum.

Katherine Manthorne is Professor of Modern Art of the Americas at the CUNY Graduate Center. She earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University and previously headed the Research Center at the Smithsonian's American Art Museum, where she also served as executive editor of American Art. Prior to that she was professor and chairperson of art history at the University of Illinois at Champaign- Urbana. Recipient of various awards and fellowships, she was a Senior Fulbright Research Fellow and the first professor of American art at the University of Venice, Italy. She has collaborated on museum exhibitions and publications including The Landscapes of Louis Remy Mignot: A Southern Painter Abroad; El Baron de Courcy: Ilustraciones de un viaje, 1831-1833; Creation and Renewal: Views of Cotopaxi by Frederic Edwin Church; and currently Sand and Fog: The Luminist Paintings and Collection of James Suydam.