Tag Archives: Wadsworth Atheneum

Nature-inspired Gothic clothing

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Thomas Cole, The Past, 1838 and the golden glow of Romanticism

You gotta love it!  The Wadsworth Atheneum has put together another of its seemingly modest, but creatively eye-opening exhibits.  This time, from Gothic to Goth: Romantic Era Fashion & Its Legacy.  Don’t go expecting much Alexander McQueen.  Goth is a footnote, and I was delighted this exhibit focused on American Gothic.

Even those two terms seem like an anathema.  American and Gothic?  Yes, with a slight tweaking of more American phrases we typically use–the Hudson River School, antebellum fashion styles–we can start connecting that Victorian-dark Gothic Revival furniture with our golden landscapes and elegant gentility.

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Look at this gorgeous detail from Lilly Martin Spencer’s Reading the Legend, 1852.  You know how much I love Spencer’s wit and social commentary.  This painting couldn’t be more conventional, with the Romantic tryst in nature and picturesque ruin.  But look at the details of that dress–the transparency of the lace over the bodice, the golden floral shawl, and the ruby-red satin of her gown.  Luscious.

Two revelations came from the exhibit for me.  That the Hudson River School painters like Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, who painted the connection between the Romantic notion of untamed wilderness and God, also influenced fashion.  Yes, according to the exhibit curators.

Even more than in the Spencer painting, consider this dress.

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2016-03-20 15.34.01It sparkles with metallic thread in the embroidery and the golden material accentuates the Greek Revival fronds, so fashionable in all the decorative arts.  Though a brighter palette, the same theme is used in this beaded bag that reads Hartford Conn 1833 and was inscribed with Almira H. White’s name.  No German import for her!

You can see the American forest flora and fauna in these objects.  Just what Cole, Church, and particularly Asher B. Durand painted.

 

 

This Durand nature study is not in the show, but makes the point.  Note the botanical specificity, the golden glow.

The russet tones of the dress below, and then pull in the neo-Gothic chair…

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…and you get my second revelation.  The  pointed dress pleats and shawl front are reversals of the classic Gothic aspiring point.  Wow!  I had never put that together before.

So I reached out to Erin Monroe, American Art Curator at the Wadsworth, and she replied via email, “the pointed pleats on the dress and the slimming down or elongated silhouette of the dresses—moving away from the GIANT leg o’ mutton sleeves in the earlier dresses—are the visual reaction to or emulation of the Gothic elements of the architectural.”

How cool is that?  Thanks, Erin!

You can really see it here:

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The gold

The points

The nature motif

 

 

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Now look at the nearby painting by Cole, Scene from ‘The Last of the Mohicans,’ Cora Kneeling at the Feet of Temenund, 1827.  It’s all there.  Plus the lead character in the book was a ‘Natural Man’, so a fitting subject for our landscape guru.

Cole’s painting predates the dress and shawl above by some 10 years, and you might connect the influence of his golden glow, pointed spires, the botanical specificity (of so much more important than the miniscule figures).  Thomas Cole changed landscape painting everywhere, and now I know him as a fashion inspiration!

Maybe the love of pointed mountain peaks with their evocation of mystery and spirituality, helped inspire the whole Gothic Revival thing.  (This is how an art-geek thinks.)

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More examples of the earth-tones, flora and fauna patterning, and severe points.  Look at those pleats to the right.  Makes me gasp for air.

Perhaps the quirkiest decorative art to be inspired by Cole and gang was not really an art, but more a decorated functional object.  A stove.  Yep.

Look at how this parlor stove from about 1844 has been cast with the same decorative motif.  Rounded foliage right out of a landscape painting.  The exact patterns used in dresses…and stoves!

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Don’t you love when you see something so familiar in a totally new way.  Brava, Curators!

 

 

 

Visual Culture of Slavery

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Today’s New York Times includes an editorial calling for a Slavery Monument.  Seems overdue to me.  Is there any space left on the National Mall?  In this moment of deep racial and cross-religious tensions and anxiety, I like the way visual culture invites us to reflect and reframe without panic and distraught emotion.

The Wadsworth Atheneum, its glorious renovation completed, now has an concise and engaging exhibition Sound and Sense: Poetic Musings in American Art.  Every object can be inhaled slowly and thoroughly.

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I was taken with the first Clementine Hunter painting I had seen in years.  Hunter, born just after the Civil War to a sharecropper family, began working the fields at age 12 on a Louisiana plantation called Melrose.  As an older woman, she moved indoors to work as a cook, and that’s when she found discarded art supplies left behind by a plantation visitor.  An artist was born.  “Cotton Picking” from around 1940 tells a direct, unexaggerated story of the poor, black life Hunter knew so well.

2015-12-05 13.23.59Here’s a close up of how she created the cotton balls–a thumb smudge of paint, repeated over and over.  Or maybe she dolloped a blob from the paint tube.  The texture energizes the surface, contrasting the rest of the flatly-depicted scene.

Hunter’s paintings caught the eye of local ‘white ladies’ who paid Hunter a pittance for the works, then turned around and sold them to ‘folk art’ collectors for a healthy upcharge.  Of course, Hunter never received any of these profits.  Because collectors bought the paintings, some have landed in museums like the Wadsworth.

I first met Hunter’s works while visiting Melrose, which markets her, her story, and her paintings as a major tourist draw.  In 1955, when she was 68, Hunter painted her African House Murals on plywood.  The murals were then hung in the African House at the plantation.  She still very much lives through these visceral works.  Go see them if you can.

At the Wadsworth, I also was captivated by William Howard’s desk.  He built the desk during the Mississippi Reconstruction, about 1870, from inexpensive yellow pine and salvaged crate wood.  He hand-carved the desk front, honoring the tools associated with his own history as a slave.

You can probably make out the pistol at center and the pointing hand, as if showing how the work got done–under duress.  You can also see the tableware he created, first for plantation owners, then for freed African Americans.

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As with Hunter, Howard must have been self-taught, leaving us with this top-heavy work desk that’s completely distinctive.  The desk, just like Hunter’s painting, tells a story of slavery and freedom, through a quirky creativity and vision.

What a good reminder for us today, to think beyond the fear and foolishness, to rise above the pain of our histories and present, and to actively work to create a world of new possibilities.