The Return of Painting in Germany, 1960s The Post-War Condition After the last bombs were dropped, the last soldier had surrendered, and all surrenders were ratified, an uneasy peace descended upon Europe. By 1946, the rebuilding was underway as people, determined to...
Smoke, Mirrors, and Power One of the problems any artist has when approaching any landscape with art in mind is that he or she is stalked by three hundred years of aesthetic convention. Since the mid-eighteenth century, the Enlightenment thinkers did what philosophers...
The Industrial Sublime and Power Places One of the earliest paintings of the industrial sublime could be Coalbrookdale by Night, painted in 1801 by Philip James de Loutherbourg, a German artist who migrated to London and become a theatrical designer. His penchant for...
Arcadia Electrified John Pfahl at Niagara Falls In 1881, the artist George Inness, famous for the Lackawanna Valley painting of a train uncoiling from a roundhouse and making its way into the frontiers of Pennsylvania, visited a more natural site, or so he assumed....
Arcadia as a Metanarrative The Precursors of John Pfahl Ever since the historical Arcadia had been lost, swallowed up by the Roman Empire of Augustus, its memory has been mourned and a new Arcadia has been sought. Handed down from Virgil and from the known histories...
The Invasion of Arcadia In writing of the state of landscape photography, post-Ansel Adams, the catalog of the 1990 Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition of “The New American Pastoral. Landscape Photography in the Age of Questioning” stated,...
