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In This Case: Catlin
August 8, 2006
In This Case is a series of weekly posts on art in the Luce Foundation Center, a visible art storage facility at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that displays more than 3,300 pieces in fifty-seven cases.
George Catlin, Prairie Meadows Burning, 1832, oil on canvas, 11 x 14 1/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr., 1985.66.374
George Catlin (about whom Eye Level has written before) composed naturalist paintings on the trail that necessarily required a quick touch. In his portraits of Great Plains Native Americans, he is lavish in detail, but frequently details from the settings are more quickly sketched. However, when Catlin confronted the sublime in nature, his brush grew more expressive. The sublime sometimes took the form of vast prairie fires, which Catlin portrayed using a roiling brushstroke that approached the abstract.
Prairie Meadows Burning is my favorite among his paintings. Catlin's composition couples two dramatic gestures that mirror one another—one of smoke into the sky and the other of fleeing horsemen. The smoke billows from the vertical center of the left edge toward the upper right; the horses and their riders spill from the center toward the lower right of the canvas. Catlin pairs the natural phenomena with human drama. He also includes a few internal rhymes in the painting, like the alternating flecks of white and red that distinguish horse, rider, and gear.
You'll find this Catlin painting here in the Luce Center.
Posted by Kriston on August 8, 2006 in American Art Here, In This Case: Luce Foundation Center
Comments
Very nice review. Interestingly, this same painting by Catlin is also one of my favorites by this important artist.
I'm sure that my following comments will be loaded with political implications, but I can't help but think about this painting in light of having actually witnessed (and photographed) a major swamp fire in Louisiana from several years ago, as well as having just recently seen the controversial digitally enhanced Reuters news photographs by Adnan Hajj of smoke reportedly billowing from burning buildings that were destroyed by an Israeli air raid on a suburb of Beirut in Lebanon. Of course, when these questionable photographs were proven to be digitally enhanced, Reuters pulled them (as well as all others by Hajj, as I understand it) from their online photo package.
What gave the Hajj photographs away were the "unnatural" repeating patterns of smoke. One of the things you notice as an artist if you've ever witnessed a large scale fire (and especially in an open area) is that the smoke patterns are completely random and chaotic. There is no discernable pattern to the flow of smoke from a major fire in a wide-open space. This is something that clearly impressed me when I was photographing that swamp fire in Louisiana near New Orleans.
I say all of this because, just like in the Hajj photographs, there is a very unnatural quality in the smoke patterns painted by Catlin in this painting. In a way, it almost has that Adobe Photoshop "feel".
But let me clearly emphasize that as a work of art that the false dramatic of his depiction of the smoke from this fire on a prairie works. Indeed, Catlin absolutely captures the frightening, yet strangely compelling, presence of smoke billowing up from and across a flat landscape. Seeing such a sight probably motivates a normal person to flee for their life. But as an artist, being in the presence of this overwhelming display of natural forces (in the case of the Louisiana swamp fire I photographed the cause of the fire was attributed to a lightening strike) commands your undivided attention.
I have no doubt that if Catlin were alive today and was a photographer that his image of this prairie fire might well be digitally enhanced in order to convey the “truth” of what such a fire really “looks” like, and more importantly, “feels” like.
Maybe the natural artistic inclination of painters to enhance and embellish their impressions of “reality” is one of the reasons why painters aren’t hired by news agencies to “record” the images of war.
Posted by: James W. Bailey | Aug 9, 2006
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