Of Nature

Thomas Cole and Brice Marden in the Hudson Valley.

- Peter Schjeldahl

Two sublime small shows that will last the summer in towns along the Hudson River remind me of something that art is good for: consolation. I speak of “Thomas Cole’s Refrain: The Paintings of Catskill Creek,” at the Thomas Cole Historic Site, in Catskill, and “Brice Marden’s Cold Mountain Studies,” which will open to the public on June 9th at ‘T’ Space, in the wooded outskirts of Rhinebeck. Roughly a century and a half apart in history, the artists touched me with a sense of timelessness that, today, couldn’t be timelier. They happen to represent the first great American landscape painter, in Cole, and arguably the last great American abstract painter—the last, certainly, to have achieved an influential late style—in Marden.

Cole was an English immigrant and a largely self-taught painter who initiated what came to be called the Hudson River School. Marden, eighty years old, has been an art-world luminary since the mid-nineteen-sixties, when he emerged from the Yale School of Art with a style at once rigorous and seductive, adapting painting to the anti-pictorial aesthetics of Minimalism in monochrome canvases, tenderly surfaced with mixtures of oils and wax in hauntingly subtle colors. After subsequent years of uncertain focus, he developed, in the eighties, a mode of spontaneous drawing and brushing of linear networks—random-looking at first glance, profoundly disciplined upon sustained attention—that was influenced by Asian calligraphy, triumphing with a series of drawings and paintings collectively titled “Cold Mountain” (1988-91).

All differences aside, I absorbed from works by both artists a poetic affimation of reconciliation with nature, including the human kind, and a recoil from the wastage of nature’s gifts. The shows hint at long spiritual rhythms that are not lost, though they may be occluded, in the staccato frenzies of our day.