The Primal Vision: Expeditions

• Main Author: Novak, Barbara
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University PressNew York, NY 2007
• Subjects: Arctic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195305876.003.0007; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/52463467/isbn-9780195305876-book-part-7.pdf

Abstract The landscape artist’s prominent role in the exploration of the American continent was as diverse as that great adventure itself. In style, it ran the gamut from the simple topographical description of the earlier western expeditions to the baroque glorification of the great surveys of the seventies. The locale ranged from desert heat through the climatic extremes of the South American tropics to the icy expanses of the Arctic. The artist was explorer, scientist, educator, frontiersman, and minister. He ran arduous risks and suffered extreme hardships which certified his “heroic” status. This heroism became a kind of tour de force in the vicinity of art. In Europe, the tour de force generally received its scale from the artist’s Ambition, set resplendently within a major tradition. In America, it consisted in simply “getting there.” The artist became the hero of his own journey—which replaced the heroic themes of mythology—by vanquishing physical obstacles en route to a destination. For the ambition of the artistic enterprise was substituted the ambition of the artist’s Quest—itself a major nineteenth-century theme. In this displacement of the heroic from the work of art to the persona of the artist lay, perhaps, part of the attraction of unexplored territory for the American artist at mid-century.