Nature in America: Taming the Landscape

From the late eighteenth century to the middle decades of the twentieth, artists in America looked out at nature and transformed what they saw, sometimes romanticizing it, or making it appear more intimate, and in the first half of the twentieth century, breaking it up into constituent parts. This exhibition, drawn primarily from the permanent collection of the Art Center, explored these phenomena in forty-four works on view. Paintings, drawings, photographs, and prints—many rarely or never shown—comprised this landscape survey of American art ranging from early views of the Hudson River to mid-twentieth-century representation, before abstract expressionism changed the artistic dynamic.

The exhibition explored these shifts, looking at the nineteenth-century engagement with the sublime by the Hudson River School, the intimate approach to landscape after the Civil War, and the fragmented manner taken by American modernists in the first half of the twentieth century. The exhibition included works by painters Thomas Cole, Aaron Draper Shattuck, George Inness, Arthur Dove, and John Marin, and photographers Frank Jay Haynes, Edward Steichen, and Ansel Adams, among many others.

The exhibition was sponsored by the Evelyn Metzger Exhibition Fund. There are works that appeared in this exhibition that were loans to the Loeb and therefore do not appear on this website.