George Inness and the Visionary Landscape - Softcover

Bell, Adrienne Baxter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807615773 ISBN 13: 9780807615775

Publisher: George Braziller Inc., 2007

Synopsis

The American landscape painter George Inness (1825-1894) was one of the most thoughtful and inventive artists of his generation.

George Inness and the Visionary Landscape presents both a concise overview of Inness's life and work and a focused examination of his philosophical and religious preoccupations. It shows how Inness, inspired by the ideas of the scientist-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688- 1772), devised a new artistic vocabulary to convey his understanding of the personal visionary experience. Moreover, it reveals commonalities between Inness's prescient work and efforts by the psychologist- philosopher William James (1842-1910) to validate mystical states of mind. It explains for the first time how Inness treated landscape painting as a form of philosophical inquiry that could communicate his holistic belief in the unity of nature and spirit. Full-color and black-and-white reproductions throughout

About this title

About the Author:

Adrienne Baxter Bell, Ph.D., is the author of George Inness: Painting Philosophy and the editor of George Inness: Writings and Reflections on Art and Philosophy (Braziller, 2006). She served as Guest Curator for the exhibition George Inness and the Visionary Landscape (2003-04) and is an Associate Professor of Art History at Marymount Manhattan College, New York.

From Booklist:

Inspired landscape painter George Inness (1825-94) was born in New York State's beautiful Hudson Valley and could easily have been part of the world-renowned Hudson River School. Instead, as Bell argues so persuasively in this rare, invaluable, and luminously illustrated monograph, Inness was far more concerned with metaphysics than with representational depictions of nature. Sojourns in Europe brought him into sympathy with the "emotionalism and painterly practices of the Barbizon School," Bell writes, but the most crucial influence on his later work was his immersion in the writings of Swedenborg, which inspired him to paint landscapes emblematic of the Swedenborgian vision of "spiritual influx," that is, the infusion of divinity into nature. Psychologist and philosopher William James also shaped Inness' meditative aesthetics with his vision of consciousness as a "stream of thought" and his observation of how mystical experiences "soften nature's outlines and open out the strangest possibilities and perspectives." The latter provides a perfect description for Inness' transcendent landscapes--gorgeous and radiant scenes that embody life's interconnectivity, mystery, timeless beauty, and untarnished hope. Donna Seaman
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About this edition

• Publisher: George Braziller Inc.
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0807615773
• ISBN 13: 9780807615775
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 174