Word: bierstadt
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...rhetoric, Church's work didn't fully express the hot idea of westward expansion within North America--the belief in Manifest Destiny. To convey the image of the Western landscape as glorious and triumphal, the Cinerama devices first used by Church were taken up by other painters, notably Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) and Thomas Moran...
...this rather trite dichotomy does give scope for the film's most redeeming quality: the cinematography. Director of photography Jonathan Cornick captures straight-laced Puritanism in idyllic shots awash with scullers, clapboard and steeples straight from an Eakins canvas. Dramatic cliffs and dense forests redolent of Bierstadt represent America's noble savagery. Happily, such arresting backdrops tend to distract the audience from the action...
Among the painters of this myth were George Catlin, friend of the explorer William Clark and indefatigable painter of native tribes; George Caleb Bingham, that vigorous orderer of American genre scenes; the landscapists Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran; and a host of lesser figures, who also played their part in the creation of a heroic imagery of national conquest. And here the difficulty rises, for Americans still wish to believe in the "historical" truth of their icons, which is what such pictures have become...
...when you have seen the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny in the paintings of, say, Albert Bierstadt -- the tiny wagons advancing into those golden floods of light from the westering sun, the absence of opposing Indians, the implicit approval of Jehovah himself -- you still have to decide how good they are as art. This is why the dubious orthodoxy of art-historical deconstruction is so popular. It aborts the problem by collapsing everything into ideology and fatuously claiming that the idea of "quality" is either meaningless or oppressive. It appeals to sanctimony and makes the stuff easy to teach. It lets...