Hudson River School Extrapolations

The painters of the Hudson River School set out across the American continents ostencibly to collect the magnificant landscapes which awaited them. Though earnest in their intentions, their eventual creations, although beautiful to be sure, stood more in the name of a distorted manifest destiny than pure representation. In this way, it becomes impossible to extricate their painting-making from America's nation-making.

Theirs is a contribution to what it means to be California in so far as the paintings stand for the conundrum that produced American westward expansion. Financed at times by the railroad, the images teeter at times against racism and patriotic propaganda, variously engulfing such far subjects as naive Europeanizations of the native populations and exaggerations of the American landscape.

What categories of content began as displaced peoples or rather banal geological sites emerged from the Hudson River canon as symbols of the virgin nature ahead or foreboding, if not awkwardly Swiss (often modeled directly on the alps, rather than their purported subject matter) mountain tops, all deeply embodied in an aesthetic exercise of cultural production. The overall body of work stands as an innate reminder of the constant, unavoidable politicization of art and culture, reaching backwards into the Western mindset that pillaged a continent to project forward an image of virtual limitless possibility for a young nation.

Are these pieces redeemed by their beaty, acquitted against their charges of nationalistic dogmatism? Or are they something more complex, a nuanced emergence of an aesthetic category fueled in equal parts by the collusion of individuals' careers and government prerogatives? In any case, their deep tonalities conceal microcosms for the extrapolation of what it meant then, and continues to mean now, to be American - standing a foot's width apart on both the benevolently intrepid and reprehensibly arrogant sides of history.