The Art and Era of the Spanish Generation of ’98 by Enrique Lafuente Ferrari, and: Els Quatre Gats: Art in Barcelona around 1900 by Marilyn McCully (review)

Books 241 a painting of light, not with light itself. The remainder of the actual process of painting recalls to us the agent of process, the painter. It denotes not only the artist’s activity, but the artist’s presence. That presence introduces usto a selfwho, as it were,stands between the image seen and the spectator. The more that artist’s self, embedded in the “signature” of stroke, occupies our attention, the less we are dealing with the selfless image of luminism.’ No intermediaries, in other words, were meant to stand between the viewerand the silence.‘Without movement between strokes or between units of form,’ Novak continues, ‘we hear nothing. Luminist silence implies presence through the sense of thereness rather than through activity. Inaudibility is a correlative of immobilized time and objects. ...Yet luministsilence,in the repose of inaction represents not a void but a palpable space, in which everything happens while nothing does.’ There is, about Novak‘s remarks, a familiar allusion to American transcendentalist philosophy, particularly that expounded by Ralph Waldo Emerson, that also characterizes much of the writing about the content of luminist paintings. In his essay ‘Nature’ (1836). Emerson wrote of viewing a landscape composed mostly of farms, land ownedby one person or another, ‘But none of them ownsthe landscape. There isa property in the horizon which no man has but he whoseeye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.’ Emerson’s poet would view the land in a manner quite apart from that of the ordinary individual. ‘To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not seethe sun. At least they have a very superficialseeing.The sun illuminatesonlythe life of man, but shinesinto the eyeand the heart of the child. The loverof nature is he whose inward and outward sensesare still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. ...Nature says, he is my creature and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight, for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight.’ If the luminists tended to concentrate more on the breathless hour of noon than on the grimmer aspects of midnight, that is possibly due to the era during which their works emerged,the agethey address. AsJohn Wilmerding, Chief Curator of American Art at the National Gallery and prime mover of the exhibition, notes in The Luminist Movement: Some Reflections (along with Novak‘s, the other key article in the catalogue), ‘The earlier years of luminism coincide with and illuminate the culminating years of Jacksonian optimism. The middle period of course, parallels the national crisis of the Civil War, and it is unsurprising that emergingout of theseyearsare the luminist subjectsof violence and explosion. During the last phase one is conscious of an almost schizophrenic polarity in the luministvision, asit istorn between drama and calm, clarity of ideals and melancholy mediations on loss, one period of history and art behind and another uneasily unfolding.’ It is Wilmerding’sconclusion, moreover, that luminism is not merely an idle style of mid-nineteenth century painting that lies uneasily between the Hudson River school and Homer and Eakins, but that it should be assessed as an achievement that parallels the American literary renaissance of the same period. Whether the paintings of Lane, Heade, Kensett, Gifford, or even Church should be considered on a par with contemporaneous work by Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau and Whitman is yet open to question, but it is now more difficult to argue with the contention Wilmerding proposes in his introductory essay, that ‘By proposing luminism as the conclusive development of early American landscape painting (in contrast to the more traditional and often uneven Hudson River school surveys), one can view it as the central movement in American art through the middle of the nineteenth century.’ In the end, one is irresistibly drawn toward the works themselves, toward those uniquely graceful, quiet and reflective meditations upon the vastness and immutability of the landscape that Emerson had...