![]() In the spring of 1985 he flew west to become an assistant editor with Reason magazine. He took a seminar with Christopher Lasch and thought on it. He bummed around out west for a while, sleeping in bus stations and writing derivative poetry in Salt Lake City flophouses (nah, he’s not a Mormon, just a BYU fan) before an ill-starred year in graduate school at the UR. Neil Diamond and Karen Carpenter, too, but don’t tell anyone. Two and a half years later he left Moynihan’s staff a bohemian Main Street anarchist who loved the Beats, the New England transcendentalists, early 20th century local colorists (Sarah Orne Jewett his Maine gal), cowpunk music, and the crazy old America. ![]() from the University of Rochester in 1981 and went therefrom to the staff of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the only dairy farmer in the U.S. After an idyllic childhood in his ancestral home of Batavia, New York, birthplace of Anti-Masonry, he was graduated from Batavia High School in 1977. He was an all-star Little League shortstop for the Lions Club Cubs but soon thereafter his talents eroded. Finally, in 2006, I saw it-in Washington, D.C., at the National Gallery of Art, when I was in town to do an overnight national radio show with a host who accused me of being “against penicillin, the Interstate Highway System, and the moon landing.” (Two out of three ain’t bad.) Ah, but there is a twist: “Kindred Spirits” was on display at the National Gallery courtesy of a Wal-Mart heiress who had bought the painting for the soon-to-open Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.īill Kauffman was born on November 15 (also the birthday of Bobby Dandridge) in the otherwise forgettable year of 1959. ![]() So rhymed William Cullen Bryant, the most precocious of American poets, the Berkshires wunderkind who grew grey writing free-trade editorials for the New York Evening Post and gave his name to what later became known as Needle Park, junkie central in midtown Manhattan.īryant is a subject of my favorite 19 th-century painting, “Kindred Spirits,” the Hudson River School masterpiece by Asher Durand in which the poet Bryant and the painter Thomas Cole are standing on a promontory in the Catskills, communing with nature as only dreamy and well-tailored antebellum artists could.įor years, whenever I was in the Vampire City I hoofed it over to the New York Public Library to see “Kindred Spirits,” which was, invariably, on loan. Yet, though thy winds are loud and bleak, Either her fastball was moving or I’m getting old.Īfter half an hour I had a red softball-beaten pulp where my left palm used to be, so we made haste for the hot chocolate and further welcomed the month with me declaiming, to the general inattention of the household, ![]() March came in like a frigid lamb, and even though the temperature never did climb out of the teens the snowless patch in our backyard was large enough for my daughter and I to play catch for the first time in 2009. Tour: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., September 14, 2007–JanuSan Diego Museum of Art, February 2–April 27, 2008.BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NEW YORK. Fleischman, the Gilder Foundation, and the Brooklyn Museum American Art Council. Durand and the American Landscape is made possible by the Henry Luce Foundation.Īdditional generous support is provided by Cheryl and Blair Effron, Barbara G. Mellon Curator of American Art and Chair, Department of American Art, Brooklyn Museum. Ferber, Vice President and Museum Director of the New-York Historical Society and former Andrew W. This exhibition is organized for the Brooklyn Museum by Linda S. Most important, this career retrospective displays together some of the most beautiful and famous American landscape paintings of the nineteenth century. Newly discovered works, new information, and new approaches to the study of art history necessitate another look at Durand’s contribution. Consequently, Durand was the natural choice for the Brooklyn Institute’s very first commission: The First Harvest in the Wilderness (1855)-the cornerstone of the Brooklyn Museum’s American painting collection. ![]() Durand was both an influential artist and the acknowledged dean of the American landscape school from his election as president of the National Academy of Design in 1845 until his death at the age of ninety in 1886. Durand’s career in more than thirty-five years. This exhibition of nearly sixty works is the first monographic exhibition devoted to Asher B. ![]()
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