I leave the Thyssen Museum one morning this January of the endless pandemic as if I were returning not from a painting exhibition, but from an entire continent, with an exalted spirit, with a greater amplitude of breathing in my lungs, as if I had really breathed the air of those open horizons, as if it had shared the urgent life and celebration of the real world in all its vulgarity and all its beauty that seems a decisive feature of the arts made in America, from painting to music, from the cinema to the novel and poetry. I leave the museum as if I were returning from a trip, and that makes me realize to what extent this time of anguish and confinement that began almost two years ago has affected us and we no longer imagine that it can end.
The American art that Baron Thyssen began to collect with such perspicacity at a time when nobody paid him the slightest attention is now displayed in the museum with an intoxicating variety, with an expository ease in which they mix, in the same room , periods, artists and very different styles. But underneath this richness so diverse there is a consistency that branches perhaps into two main currents, sometimes separate and others mixing with each other, that of the natural world and that of the tumultuous human adventure, that of clear horizons, forests , the power of the sea, and that of life in cities, that of the spectacle of the everyday, the common, the plebeian, the distressing, the energetic. What distinguishes American art is an ability to encompass the vastness and complexity of the world with an indiscriminate generosity, such as that which expands the verses of Walt Whitman or the superhuman fiction of Moby-Dick, or the major symphonies of Charles Ives, in which all the sonorous junk and the racket of the music bands and the solemnity of the hymns of the Lutheran liturgy fit.
The originality of American poetry emanates from the diction of common speech exalted by the mighty thrust of the verses of the Bible. The painting inherits the romantic sense of European landscaping, widening it to account for a nature of a scale that erases or trivializes human presence. The great shock newcomer from Europe has not changed much since the early nineteenth century, or even much earlier, since Henry Hudson traced for the first time in 1609 the ocean width of the mouth of a river that was undoubtedly larger and more mysterious because for he had no name. At that time, most of Europe was already deforested. The American forests were so immense, their trees so tall, that sailors smelled their aroma of vegetation and fertile land from the sea. An entire school of painting, initiated by Thomas Cole and perfected by Frederic Church and his disciples of the Hudson school, dares to measure itself against the dimensions and fertility of those landscapes that reach a point of chromatic delirium with the change of the leaves and the golden mists of autumn days. I have seen those colors with my own eyes, that river that is stained with the reds and yellows and ochres of the fallen leaves that it trails, those hills of forests that are lost in a bluish distance of mountains. Seeing them again in the painting, I give in to longing. I cycled away from the city along a path along the riverbank and after only half an hour I found myself on a rocky shoreline that, on foggy days when the nearby horizons were blurred, allowed me a feeling of Patagonian solitude . Freighters gliding upriver blew sirens like ghost ships.
The landscape, the same in my memory as in these paintings that I now see in Madrid, was largely a fiction. The painting suppresses as much as it shows. The original river that Frederic Church painted around the seventies of the 19th century was already polluted by industrial discharges from the factories on its banks. The reddish haze of sunsets was blackened by smoke from coal chimneys. Forests were being cut down. The landscapes that amazed European travelers were not those of Genesis, but of the Apocalypse. The forests that seemed virgin had reached that thickness not because no one had ever inhabited them, but because their inhabitants had disappeared. The romantic solitude of the landscapes of American painting is the posthumous scene of a great extermination. In a painting by George Catlin from 1871, the formidable San Antonio Falls on the Mississippi River are seen from an elevated point of view to better give the impression of the spaciousness of the space: below, diminutive, are two figures, a man and a woman Indians, followed by a dog. By the time the painting was painted, even that minimal human presence was already a memory of another time. Epidemics, harassment, war, the policy of expulsion and extermination are inscribed as invisible scars on the beauty of a landscape that seems untouched.
The reverse of that abysmal poetics of absence and emptiness is the pressing presence, the fervent affirmation of the human, the singular and irreducible and the overwhelmingly collective, the anonymity and multiplication of the city and commercial images and the courage of the lonely artist, vulnerable and undefeated: it is the mystical loneliness of Mark Rothko and the fury of Jackson Pollock, the rigorous asceticism of abstract painting and the fascination of pop art with the images of advertising and mass culture, the ironic complacency and the tear, Willem de Kooning’s expressionistic creatures and Roy Lichtenstein’s jovial comic strip girls.
But we should also talk about the street signs of Stuart Davies, of the mysterious waste chests of Joseph Cornell, of the winter watercolors of Andrew Wyeth, of the portraits of Raphael Soyer, of the delicate pamphleteering mastery of Ben Shahn, of that woman alone in a hotel room owned by Edward Hopper who is not sure if he has just arrived or is about to leave… I was going to leave now and retraced my steps. I didn’t want to leave the exhibition so that my eyes wouldn’t be narrowed again.
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