runner -> RE: Finding Vivian Maier (Mar. 3 2015 20:50:34)
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Stephen, I hope your girlfriend's art historian sister did not think that her distinguished ancestor was a Luminist. His portraits are indeed luminous, but they are not Luminist. The Luminist canon has been pretty well defined and elucidated by art historians beginning with John Baur, and continuing with Barbara Novak and John Wilmerding. They list, among other traits, that Luminist works are overwhelmingly horizontal landscapes that evoke, through a near-absence of stroke, both timelessness and silence. The paintings themselves are almost never large in the manner of Church, Bierstadt, Moran, but rather convey a feeling of motionless immensity. Novak says that Luminism is the painter's expression of American Transcendentalism. And fundamentally it's the light...... As I indicated before, the four painters Kensett, Heade, Lane, Gifford are the archetypical Luminists, with artists like George Caleb Bingham, Bierstadt, Jasper Cropsey, William Hazeltine and many others associated with the Hudson River School often working in a Luminist mode--in fact, Luminism is a subset, though a special one, within the Hudson River School. A fine book on Luminism, with lots of plates, is American Light: the Luminist Movement, 1850-1875, edited by John Wilmerding. There are also full books, richly illustrated, on Kensett, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Gifford. By pure good fortune, I once had the chance, while kayaking on the Tappan Zee section of the Hudson River, to stop to eat my lunch on the shore of Croton Bay on a lovely October day. As I sat there eating my sandwich and looking out over the water toward Hook Mountain on the western shore, I became aware of a feeling of déjà vu--the scene was hauntingly familiar, as well as hauntingly beautiful. When I got back home, I raced for one of my art books and found the painting: Hook Mountain, near Nyack, on the Hudson, by Sanford Gifford. I had been sitting exactly where Gifford had stood while painting the exact same scene. It was all the same--the autumn color, the sun, the light, the grandeur, the silence. Another magical moment.
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