Every era gets its own Thomas Cole, the British-born, nineteenth-century artist who ushered in a new age of American landscape painting. In the 1930s and 1940s, he was a precursor to artists like Grant Wood. Come the 1960s and 1970s, MoMA linked his brushwork to abstract expressionism. In the late 1980s, he was part of a Reaganesque “Morning in America” campaign, a Chrysler-sponsored survey of American landscape paintings at the Met. Now, also at the Met, “Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings” positions Cole as a challenge to Trumpian greed, as well as to the American landscape as imagined by Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke and EPA chief Scott Pruitt. But while Cole was undoubtedly concerned with the land he painted, he was not exactly the convenient social critic the Met portrays.
Credited as the force behind the Hudson River School (though the term was not used in his lifetime), Cole created a visual language for a young country. He popularized working from nature, traveling into the mountains and using his sketches there to paint landscapes that were breathtaking and inspiring. He also painted moralizing allegories set in fictional realms, the most famous of which show the development and destruction of empire in stages. Stylistically different, the landscapes often look idyllic, while the pastel, gauzy allegories are sentimental. For years, critics and academics simply saw the latter as an embarrassment. But the current exhibition at the Met links the two to support its portrait of Cole as a proto-conservationist—rightly recognizing the dark message about human nature at the heart of Cole’s work, but applying a contemporary reading of Cole that can be simplistic and anachronistic.
In a line that might be as explicitly political as the Met show gets, art historian Tim Barringer concludes his catalogue essay with a question that he attributes to Cole’s work: “Must the accumulation of wealth always entail overweening greed, leading to imperial exploitation and violence… causing environmental and social ruin?” The implication is that this is still a central question today. But the Met seems to grasp for relevance as many institutions have over the years, creating a Thomas Cole for every moment. The curators ignore the contradictions and issues in his work in favor of pure valorization. In “Atlantic Crossings,” Cole also becomes an “economic migrant” in the introductory video Sting narrates.
To illustrate Cole’s disgust with industrialization, the museum hangs side by side two paintings of the same scene along Catskill Creek near Cole’s home. View on the Catskill, Early Autumn (1836–1837) is bucolic. A young mother runs to her baby with flowers, and according to the Met’s analysis the hunter in the corner is apparently Cole. The thumb-sized figures look cartoonish; painting human figures was never his strength. In the River in the Catskills (1843), the landscape is denuded. A man with an ax stands where the mother and baby had been. A train runs through the view in the distance, portending a coming threat. The rail line had just been built, and Cole wrote angry letters about it to his friends and collectors.
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