Moonlight in the Brooklyn Museum, or, How to See a Landscape
American landscape painter Ralph Blakelock rose to fame in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries on the popularity of his moonlight paintings. He would shatter a record for an American artist when one of his paintings sold at auction for $20,000 in 1916. The art-buying public was finally ready to invest in American art and its homeland subject matter which would in turn shift the focus of the art world from Paris to New York.
Unfortunately, Blakelock would not enjoy the financial windfall suddenly generated by his work - he was locked away in an asylum while his family toiled in extreme poverty. Dealers who had exploited his desperate situation soon found themselves with years-old landscape paintings worth thousands. To add salt to the wound, Blakelock and his family were also about to be the subject of one of the most extraordinary scams in art history.
More on that fascinating (and sad) story, another time. It needs multiple posts to do it justice. For now I want to focus on the art, particularly one piece of it and how inspired writer Paul Auster a century later.
Blakelock was an early master of Tonalism, an art movement that emphasized an overall tone of colored atmosphere or mist. In additional to his landscapes and moonlights, Blakelock painted scenes inspired by his earlier trips to the frontier with various Native American tribes. While most of his contemporaries went to Paris to study with the European Masters, Blakelock went West and immersed himself in America's natural landscape, and its indigenous people. His paintings neither exploited nor romanticized his subjects. Likewise, he resisted ever painting the Native tribes in the state of degradation in which they would be forcibly made to exist. While newspaper men loved those images, Blakelock had too much respect to depict a broken and defeated civilization.
Like his moonlights, Blakelock's 'Indian' encampments conjure a mixture of serenity and sadness. They represent a culture fading into memory as the sun sets on a day and age. They are inherently American. In the Gilded Age, art patrons longed for this 'forgotten' or 'lost' America, even if they themselves had never experienced it themselves. Reconnecting with our own rapidly vanishing past was en vogue. America's landscapes were more than the Hudson River Valley of the preceding decades. Blakelock conveyed all the mystery and magic that the Frontier had to offer - just as the Frontier itself pushed to the western coast and signaled its own end.
Around 1885, Blakelock would paint the "Moonlight" that now hangs in the Brooklyn Museum. It is the perfect marriage of landscape, Indian encampment, moonlight, and his signature brown and green tones.
In the September 1987 issue of ARTnews, writer Paul Auster would recount his experience with viewing Blakelock's painting in the Brooklyn Museum:
"Learning all of this about Blakelock's peculiar life, I thought back to the painting and its shadowy Indian figures dwarfed by the bigness of the scene. In spite of their smallness, they betrayed no fears or anxieties. They sat comfortably in their surroundings, at peace with themselves and the world, and the more I thought about it, the more this serenity seemed to dominate the picture. Blakelock's green sky seem to emphasize harmony, to make a point of showing the connection between heaven and earth. If men can live comfortably in their surroundings... if they can learn to feel themselves a part of the things around them, then perhaps life on earth becomes imbued with a feeling of holiness"
Auster continues:
"It struck me that Blakelock was painting an American idyll, the world the Indians had inhabited before the white men came to destroy it. The picture was painted in 1885, almost precisely in the middle of the period between Custer's Last Stan and the massacre at Wounded Knee - in other words, at the vey end, when it was too late to hope that any of these things could survive. Perhaps, I thought to myself, this picture was meant to to stand for everything we had lost. It was not a landscape, it was a memorial for a vanished world."
But Auster's contemplation of Blakelock would not end there. The painting became part of the plot of his 1989 novel Moon Palace.
In the novel, one of the characters sends his young assistant to the Brooklyn Museum, giving explicit instruction on how to view landscape art. It's a valuable lesson for anyone to learn:
"Imagine yourself looking at something under various lights that make the world visible to us: sunlight, moonlight, electric light, candlelight, neon light. Make it a very simple and ordinary something. A stone, for example, or a small block of wood. Think carefully about how the appearance of that object changes when placed under different lights. Think nothing more than that."
Upon entering the Museum, the following instruction is given:
"Find your way to the floor where they keep the permanent collection of American paintings and enter the gallery. Do your best not to look at anything too closely. In the second or third room, you'll find Blakelock's painting 'Moonlight' on one of the walls, and at this point you'll stop.
Look at the painting. Look at it from various distances - from ten feet away, from two feet away, from one inch away. Study it for its overall composition, study it for its details. Don't take any notes. See if you can memorize all the elements of the picture, learning the precise location of the human figures, the natural objects, the colors on each and every spot of the canvas.
Close your eyes and test yourself. Open them again. See if you can't being to enter the landscape before you."
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