One of the arguments adduced in support of abstractionism as an enduring aesthetic is that the camera abolished the need for the artist to have representational talents. The camera - so the argument went - made the visual recording skills of the artist obsolete. With that requirement removed from his list of necessary skills - the argument continued - the artist could now indulge himself and his imagination. He would interrogate his brain for inspiration; and since he was liberated - the argument droned
Go to the "American Beauty" exhibition at the National Gallery, go as soon as you possibly can, go early in the day so that you may spend as much time there as you are allowed, to see what utter rubbish doctrinaire abstractionists spout when they say such things. For, whereas the photographer can capture otherwise eluctable truths in portraiture, or journalistic truths with action photographs, he cannot command obedience from the landscape. He cannot make it conform with his artistic ambition. He cannot arrange it so that form and colour and composition achieve a single artistic coherence.
Frederick Edwin Church
The most famous paintings of "American Beauty" are by Frederick Edwin Church. They are truly magnificent spectacles, huge banquets of detail and brilliant colour; compositionally colossal, yet astonishingly precise in effect. Go and look at "Cotopaxi", the celebration of the Ecuadorian volcano; examine it close up, as close as you can without the alarm bells exploding, and observe the smoke pouring out of the mountain.
Do you see what I mean? Those marvellous oily billows, black and heavy and coiling back downward on themselves: no mere photograph could have captured those darkly liquid movements of sullen vapour oozing oilily across the landscape, and darkening the upper rim of a plummeting golden sun. The orange glow is reflected on a lake in the middle ground, and in the left foreground, a waterfall, turbulently icy, cascades over rock. And just in front of the waterfall, outlined against it, there is the delicate filigree of a tree.
This is a sumptuous canvas, vigorous, exuberant, unashamed, and utterly American in its scale. It might be Ecuador in its setting, but his imagination was shaped in the US and its towering landscapes, with those perfectly stunning sunsets which burn across the horizon, containing colours which have no names, and which no photographic chemical has yet been devised to convey in print.
Microscopic integrity
Only the artist can do this; an artist who has refined his skill to microscopic integrity, who has mastered the alchemy of the palate, and who within his brain can devise a canvas as vast as this one.
"Cotapaxi" alone would merit the admission fee of €10; it would merit another €10 next day to ensure that the painting had been as amazing as you thought it was. Be assured: it is. But it is merely the most spectacular of Church's works there; for contrast it, then, with "Syria by the Sea", an essay in the colours of North Africa and a celebration of its ruins - khaki and sandstone, beige and grey, faun and taupe and soft, parched greens, so brilliantly presented against the white heat of a scorching sun that they almost appear to be different shades of the same colour.
A contemporary critic complained that Church had placed ruins where no ruins lay: precisely, oh foolish critic. Church's companion in Ecuador, Louis Remy, took a comparable artistic liberty when he painted "Morning in the Andes" from memory, and from notes, in London. For that morning and that Andes do not exist, outside his brain and his palate. Tell me, please, the name of the photographer who could do that.
But of course, paintings are essentially about getting shape down in two dimensions, and finding a third in the execution. Albert Bierstadt's "The Wolf River, Kansas" is an utter marvel in its varying depth of perspective, as well as being a melancholy social document (as he intended it to be): its subject is an Indian encampment being visited by trappers, who are of course merely forerunners of their nemesis.
Of Thomas Wilmer Dewing I know nothing other than what the catalogue - excellent value at €20, by the way, as guide and memento - tells me. It is sufficient that he painted "Summer", the central panel of a triptych. It is of two women against a woodland: a beautifully delicate work conveyed in sumptuous shades of green. If I'd had a Stanley knife with me, it wouldn't be there now.
Nagging question
But that, then, is so true of so many of these American beauties. Nearly without exception, they are quite captivating and often exhilarating, and they leave the nagging question: why is almost no one painting like this any more? It is not that there is no appetite for this kind of work; otherwise there would be no such exhibition travelling around Europe.
The truth is that people do want to see beautiful things. They want to see artistic genius. They are thrilled by composition and colour and dazzling originality. They exult in skill and are enthralled by the artistic power of great painters. They want to see what human beings are creatively capable of. They want to feel their pulses race in excitement. They want their day enriched by the artistic impulse. All of which, I promise you, this marvellous "American Beauty" will do for you at the National Gallery.