THE ARTS/ART	MARCH 16, 1998 NO. 11
	New Worlds Confronted with untamed nature on vastly different continents, the European landscape tradition underwent a thrilling transformation By MICHAEL FITZGERALD wo differently colored walls and two traditions snake around the National Gallery of Australia's new exhibition wing. A sea of Confederate gray carries 19th century American landscape; the Australian collection blends into a backdrop of eucalyptus green. Moving through the space is like watching two rivers flowing side by side. Each has the same elemental power: Frederic Edwin Church's West Rock, New Haven, 1849, shares the viewer's attention with W.C. Piguenit's The Flood in the Darling 1890, 1895. They are bound by air and light as much as rock and water. Notes the NGA's Andrew Sayers, co-curator of the exhibition "New Worlds from Old: 19th Century Australian & American Landscapes": "You get this wonderful feeling of sky." Bringing these two worlds together was a colossal task. Organized by the National Gallery and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., "New Worlds from Old" combines 123 works from more than 40 collections around the world, including two John Glovers from the Louvre which have not been seen in Australia since 1840. "We became a little competitive," says Wadsworth Atheneum's Elizabeth Kornhauser, the show's U.S. curator. "The Australians kept saying to me, 'Your paintings are so big, they're so big, we have to have some good paintings too.' So that actually helped secure the greatest landscapes from both sides." The two colors are shades of the same vista, which the exhibition harmonizes with five central themes: Meeting the Land, Claiming the Land, In Awe of the Land, A Landscape of Contemplation and The Figure Defines the Landscape. Australian and American artists worked in relative isolation last century; only occasionally did their work meet in group shows in London. Yet as the viewer progresses through the exhibition, the artists seem to call out to each other; Nicholas Chevalier's Mount Arapiles and the Mitre Rock, 1863, genuflects to nature with the same reverential awe as Church's Natural Bridge, Virginia, 1852; the lone Native American of Thomas Cole's The Clove, Catskills, c. 1826, echoes the Aboriginal sentinel of Augustus Earle's Wentworth Falls, c. 1830. Here the blue and green lines begin to converge and blur. Observes NGA director Brian Kennedy: "Australia fits absolutely on top of America. If you discount Hawaii and Alaska, it's the same size." There are differences, for sure. Where Australia's convict past seemed to throw a godless pall of melancholy over its early landscape, American works were fired with Protestant zeal. Says Kornhauser: "You see groups moving across our landscapes with this spiritual light guiding these people as they move west. So that idea of manifest destiny, being God's chosen people, is a great difference from Australia's roots as a penal colony." Yet a second look at the Australian vistas of John Glover and Eugene von Guerard reveals a shared spiritual quality. Glover's My Harvest Home, 1835, is the English painter's hallelujah to his adopted Tasmania. Kennedy sees a religious reckoning in Austrian-born Von Guerard's Mount William from Mount Dryden, Victoria, 1857, with its "soaring heights, the uplift to heaven and the rootedness in the ground; the realization that the ground is where you're going to end up, your bones will be there, but where does your spirit go? Is there a spirit in this landscape?" What unites the two countries' landscape painters is their rawness of vision. Despite geographical divergence, the tools these artists used to first conquer then embrace the wilderness were the same. English critic John Ruskin's call for "truth to nature" was heeded as earnestly in William Trost Richards' botanical fantasia In the Woods, 1860, as in Von Guerard's teeming Ferntree Gully in the Dandenong Ranges, 1857, while the influence of Barbizon and Impressionist painting in Europe would ripple across canvases on both sides of the Pacific. "What connects the Australian to the American experience," writes former Wadsworth director Patrick McCaughey in the exhibition catalog, "is a kind of inner imaginative awakening." Where figures first cowered at the edges of the frame, by the close of the century they had moved to inhabit the center of the canvas. In Tom Roberts' Slumbering Sea, Mentone, 1887, figures caress the landscape, almost melting into it, while the fishermen of Thomas Eakins' Mending the Nets, 1881, peg out a human fence across the horizon. Only Winslow Homer's Maine Coast, 1896, and Roberts' A Break Away!, 1891, disrupt the exhibition's carefully wrought sense of order. "For the most part, humans loom large. They are in control, they are creating their own environments," says Kornhauser. It's a theme that resonates strongly for Kennedy. Since moving to the NGA from Dublin's National Gallery of Ireland last September, he has had to contend with a new world--and the wilderness of an unwieldy 109,000-object national collection. "New Worlds from Old" arrives at the right time. The $A9 million wing the show launched last week frees up the gallery proper, while the exhibition--initiated by Kennedy's predecessor Betty Churcher--forcefully asserts Australian art's place in the world, which Kennedy sees as central to the gallery's new mission. By the time "New Worlds from Old" opens at Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art on Australia Day next January, 19th century Australian landscape will loom larger than ever before. Says Kennedy: "I want the world to wake up and realize--and us to wake up by sending it there--the fact that when you put a Von Guerard and a Glover beside a Church, a Cole, a Bierstadt, they stand up remarkably well." Indeed, a highlight of the show is Glover's Ben Lomond Setting Sun. From near the Bottom of Mr Boney's Farm, 1840. In this work from the Louvre, a group of Aborigines make camp by a creek in darkness as the last of the sun sluices the mountain behind. It is a memento mori, landscape as memory, for Aborigines had all but vanished from Tasmania by the time Glover arrived there in 1831. A few years earlier, fellow Englishman Thomas Cole, too, had reimagined his adopted land, claiming it as his own. In Scene from "The Last of the Mohicans," Cora kneeling at the Feet of Tamenund, 1827, a tribe of American Indians gather on Mount Chocorua as if in sacrifice to the wilderness they would soon lose. In their lifetimes, Cole and Glover never met; now they do. And the resonances, like so many in "New Worlds from Old," are rich and remarkable.
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