George Inness

Los Angeles County Museum [Published date: 1985]. Soft cover, 213 pp. [Excerpt from foreword]. It is with great pleasure that we join in presenting George Inness. This exhibition of sixty-three oil paintings by George Inness (1825-94) displays the full range of his mature artistic output from the 1850?s to the last year of his life. The exhibition, which will visit five major metropolitan areas, will be the most widely seen exhibition of Inness paintings ever presented.

There's no better way to say it than Cikovsky's first sentence: "George Inness is one of the most neglected major American artists of the nineteenth century." As he surveys Inness' life and dramatically beautiful paintings, Cikovsky identifies various reasons for Inness' decline in critical fortune, from being considered the best landscape artist in America to being almost forgotten. Inness was largely self-taught and had little patience for the detail and labor of drawing and engraving. He loved, instead, the richness of paint and color, which he called the soul of painting, and believed that one painted, "not to imitate a fixed material condition, but to represent a living motion." Epileptic and prone to depression, Inness was inherently attuned to the beauty of shadows and stormy skies, as well as the mysterious, moody sweep of lush, stream-traced landscapes and autumn's golden light and sense of suspension and transition. Inness' atmospheric paintings are difficult to reproduce, but Abrams has done its usual fine job, enabling us to lose ourselves in Inness' extraordinarily lyrical world. Donna Seaman