Word: ryders
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...artists who make other artists famous. A striking case in point, in America, was Albert Pinkham Ryder. This somewhat reclusive visionary was born in 1847; grew up in the whaling town of New Bedford, Mass.; studied in New York City; spent most of his working life there and died in 1917. As far as is known, he painted fewer than 200 works. Yet a succession of American artists has looked up to him as a sage, a holy man: the native prophet who linked tradition to modernism...
...young independents who organized the epochal Armory Show in 1913 -- Arthur B. Davies, George Bellows, Walt Kuhn and others -- made sure that Ryder was the only American to share its central galleries with the new European masters: Matisse, Gauguin, Cezanne, Van Gogh. "There's only Ryder in American painting," remarked Kuhn. "No artist ever used more of the vital energies of the imagination than Ryder," wrote Marsden Hartley in 1936, "and no one was ever truer to his experience . . . One finds his elements so perfectly true that even the moon herself must recognize them if she had time to look...
...difference between fiction and myth is that people do not feel impelled to act on fictions, whereas myths are a guide to life. In this sense, one could say that Ryder, in the process of becoming the very prototype of the saintly visionary, patron of outsiders, pure of spirit and attuned to the great rhythms of nature, became America's first mythic artists' artist...
...visit the Ryder retrospective, the first in a generation, which has been assembled with meticulous scholarship by Elizabeth Broun at the Brooklyn Museum (through Jan. 8), is to become sharply aware of the limits of the Ryder myth. He is like Poe -- so overwrought, yet so influential. One sees, not for the first or only time, the paradox of American art in its larval days: how its course could be deeply affected, and the enthusiasm of its artists unstintingly engaged, by works whose actual aesthetic merits often seem slight...
...show contains perhaps a dozen paintings before which one can feel the enthusiasm Ryder's name has always generated. Most of these are his famous "marines" -- dark, concentrated images of boats, the fishing smacks of his New England youth, pitted against wind and wave under the centered, tide- dragging eye of the moon. But then there is the rest of his work, and especially the earlier religious and allegorical material, much of which is bathetic and some quite ludicrous in its earnest gropings toward elevated pictorial speech...