Sanford Gifford Lecture Program
September 19, 2004
East Building Auditorium
Held in conjunction with the exhibition Hudson River School Visions:
The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford
Why Gifford Now?
Franklin Kelly, senior curator of American and British paintings, National Gallery of Art
Sanford Gifford has the distinction of being the first artist ever honored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a monographic exhibition. It was held in the fall of 1880, not long after the artist's death (August 29), and continued through March 1881. Some 160 works were included, ranging from large-scale finished masterpieces to small, informal sketches. Ninety years would pass before Gifford's art was once again the focus of a monographic exhibition--the 1970-1971 show that traveled from the University of Texas, Austin, to the Albany (New York) Institute of History and Art, and the New York commercial gallery Hirschl and Adler. In the thirty-odd years between that exhibition and Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford, interest in the artist has grown, but nowhere near the level accorded to some of his own contemporaries and friends in the Hudson River School. Painters such as Frederic Church, John F. Kensett, Jasper Cropsey, and Albert Bierstadt have been the subject of large-scale retrospectives at major museums and the substantial, well-illustrated catalogues that accompany such exhibitions.
The answer to the question "Why Gifford Now?" may, on the one hand, seem obvious--his time had come. But the curators of the current exhibition had somewhat more complex and multifaceted motives. By outlining some of these reasons, Kelly will consider some of the show's aims and goals, and evaluate what may have been learned from it.
From Narrative to Image: Gifford's "Air-Painting" and Changing Taste in Landscape
Angela L. Miller, director of graduate studies, Washington University, St. Louis
Gifford's relationship to landscape traditions--both American and European-- will be considered in light of his particular fascination with "air-painting." Gifford's movement away from the moral and national narratives of earlier American landscape anticipates the more subjective orientation of landscape painting in the late nineteenth century. His interest in light-filled intervals of space through which natural features are seen registered a shift in landscape taste, one that was related to a broader cultural moment. He preferred unity of impression and suggestibility over precise detail and public meanings. Already by the late 1850s, Gifford's emerging approach to landscape pointed away from the older cultural iconographies of the Hudson River School and toward more intimate modes of perception. These qualities were part of a cultural redefinition of the sublime, from masculine authority to feminine "influence." Gifford's innovations ultimately reveal the greater role of perception--and the growing significance of the image over narrative--in the experience of landscape art.
Beyond the Hudson River
Heidi Applegate, doctoral candidate, department of art history and archaeology, Columbia University
Gifford traveled more widely--both abroad and within the United States--than nearly any other American landscape painter of his generation. His trips to Europe, the Near East, and the American West resulted in several key pictures that defined his early success and ensured his continued popularity in the New York art world. Applegate will examine some of Gifford's favorite subjects beyond the Hudson River and discuss his lifelong interest in depicting effects of sunlight and atmosphere in new places.
Gifford and the Catskills: A Tour of Art and Landscape
Kevin J. Avery, curator of American art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Sanford R. Gifford was at once among the most traveled and the most localized of his contemporaries. In the Old World, he toured as far east as Egypt. But of the second generation of landscape painters called the Hudson River School, he was also the most closely identified with New York State's eastern Catskill Mountain region, which supplied the early subject matter of Thomas Cole, the so-called "father" of the school. Gifford's association with Catskill scenery is not surprising: he was raised in Hudson, New York, just across the river from the village of Catskill, in the shadow of the mountains where Cole had resided through Gifford's coming of age. Throughout his life Gifford frequently visited his family in Hudson, and his stays often included tours in the mountains with other artists, friends, and family members. Gifford's affection for the Catskills, like Cole's, reflected contemporary tourism, established there with the 1824 opening of the Catskill Mountain House, a hotel 2,300 feet above the Hudson River Valley. Affluent visitors to the site developed a taste for artists' renderings of the hotel's surroundings--a taste that Cole and, even more especially, Gifford accommodated.
Selected paintings of Catskill Mountain scenery by Gifford and several of his Hudson River School mentors and colleagues are discussed in relation to the actual sites represented in recent photographs. Through these comparisons, Avery evaluates not only Gifford's distinctive response to the locale but also the ways in which his interpretive attitude embodied the changing conception of picturesque travel in the Civil War era.