From: Bruce Sterling [bruces@well.com]
Sent: Sunday, April 30, 2000 9:23 PM
To: Viridian List
Subject: Viridian Note 00152: Martin Johnson Heade
Key concepts: environmental art, Hudson River School,
nineteenth-century American painting, Greenhouse storms,
unheimlich landscapes, Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904)
Attention Conservation Notice: It's art criticism.
It's about some long-dead painter.
Entries in the Greenhouse Disaster Symbol contest:
http://www.xnet.com/~wbrink/ggw.html
http://www.wmblake.com/searedearth/
http://www.wmblake.com/toxicsun/
http://www.io.com/~stack/gds.html
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/bdw/earthglyph.htm
http://www.stewarts.org/viridian/solar_weather_violence.html
http://www.provide.net/~herrell/viridian/greenhouse.html
This contest expires May 31, 2000.
Links:
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/heade_1.htm
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/heade_martin_johnson.html
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Martin Johnson Heade, Viridian Artist
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WHY MARTIN JOHNSON HEADE IS NOT VIRIDIAN
- He's been dead since 1904.
- If he belonged to any art movement at all, he was
probably an "American Luminist" or one of the "Hudson
River School."
- Even though Heade was amiably bumming around and
barely earning a living in his own lifetime, he's been
violently rediscovered by the contemporary art scene, and
is almost as hot right now as Norman Rockwell.
WHY MARTIN JOHNSON HEADE IS VIRIDIAN
1. He didn't seem to have any settled address until he was 64, and he seems
to have been to Europe at least three times and traipsed all over the Caribbean
and South America.
2. He married at 64, settled down in St Augustine, Florida, and did a lot of his best work in his declining
years.
3. While other Hudson River painters were doing corny mountains, gorges and waterfalls, Martin Johnson Heade painted over 100 pictures of drowned swamps.
Rhode Island salt marshes were particular favorites. A lot of Heade's landscapes are half-submerged in rising water. His seascapes are, if anything,
even more ominous and otherworldly than the swamps are.
4. Thanks to his travels in Brazil and elsewhere, when Heade wasn't doing swamps, he was portraying endangered orchids and hummingbirds from today's very
politically correct rainforests.
5. Even though he painted as much "nature" as Audubon, Heade never seems to have shot anything in order to
paint it. Mostly he did big, sexy, tropical flowers, with a very nice Viridian line in drippy tropical decay.
6. Since his first teacher was the self-taught Edward Hicks, Martin Heade never got academic
painting quite "right." As a result, his painfully meticulous birds and flowers look a hell of a lot
like genetically-altered mutants. Heade's skies have tints unknown in conventional canvases, while many
of his most peaceful, contemplative landscapes have bushes and crops that were clearly designed
by Monsanto.
7. Martin Johnson Heade's most effective and remarkable canvases, in his own day and today, are giant, uncanny storms. I particularly recommend
"Approaching Thunder Storm" of 1859. An imperturbable Yankee and his dog sit next to a stained New England bay as black as ink, bathed in an eerie, pellucid,
deeply unnatural light, while all Greenhouse hell breaks loose on the horizon.
This work of art is an unheimlich gift from the 19th
century that prophesies an "approaching thunderstorm" that
still hasn't quite hit us. When it does hit, this guy
is gonna be the only nature painter of his time whose
brush can tell the truth.
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2000/heade/112-001_fs.htm
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"AN OMINOUS HUSH... ALMOST SURREAL
IN ITS PORTENTOUS ATMOSPHERE"
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