George Inness and the Visionary Landscape - Softcover

Bell, Adrienne Baxter; Inness, George; National Academy Of Design (U. S.); San Diego Museum Of Art

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1887149139 ISBN 13: 9781887149136

Publisher: San Diego Museum of Art, 2005

Synopsis

The landscape painter George Inness (1825-1894) was one of the foremost American artists of his generation. Born in Newburgh, New York, Inness studied the works of the old masters and, as a young man, painted in the reigning style of the Hudson River School. Within a few years, however, he found himself more attuned to the gestural, expressive approach of the Barbizon School. He greatly admired the free handling of paint and the expression of soulfulness in the works of Theodore Rousseau.

Equally important were Inness's philosophical and spiritual concerns. Along with contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Walt Whitman, Inness studied the writings of the Swedish scientist-turned-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). During a trip to Italy in the early 1870s, Inness began to structure his landscapes around geometric forms, a development that may have reflected the Swedenborgian idea that the natural world corresponds to the spiritual world and that geometric forms possess spiritual identities. Through these and other compositional devices, Inness created paintings to inspire an almost "religious experience" in his viewers.

George Inness and the Visionary Landscape includes forty color reproductions of Inness's most important paintings and presents both a chronological overview of Inness's life and a more focused treatment of the artist's main philosophical and religious preoccupations. It suggests resonances between Inness's visionary landscapes and the concurrent efforts, on the part of the psychologist/philosopher William James (1842-1910), to validate the existence of mystical states of mind. It shows Inness to have anticipated many of the most important tenets of modernism, an achievement that continues to inspire contemporary audiences. 40 illustrations in color, 12 in black and white.

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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Edition details

• Publisher: San Diego Museum of Art
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1887149139
• ISBN 13: 9781887149136
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 174