Paintings of polar landscapes at Peabody Essex Museum are cool
From Paul Gauguin's sensuous Tahiti to Winslow Homer's austere New England coast, visionary painters invested exotic locales and landscapes with human emotions that still touch viewers on many levels.
Journeying to harsher lands, painters like William Bradford and Rockwell Kent infused the polar regions with the barren magnificence of places indifferent to human aspiration.
They are among the standouts in a dramatic, groundbreaking exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum that brings together for the first time striking works by 15 pioneering explorer-artists who depicted the romance and mystery of the Arctic and Antarctica throughout the great age of polar exploration.
Organized by PEM curator Sam Scott, “To the Ends of the Earth” is visually stunning, informative and accessible to a wide range of viewers.
Best of all, it allows visitors to experience vast, forbidden lands through the fresh eyes of artists who painted scenes unlike anything known to most of the world at that time.
“Never before have so many outstanding Western paintings of the Arctic and Antarctic been brought together in one place,” said Scott, associate curator of maritime art and history.
Focusing on a century of polar art from 1830 to 1930, he has organized the exhibit around painters - except for Kent, Bradford and American Frederic Edwin Church - little known to the general public. As a strategy, it succeeds brilliantly by requiring viewers to see anew these regions through the fresh eyes of under-appreciated artists, like Lawren S. Harris, David Abbey Paige and William H. Smyth, as they encountered it.
Subtitled “Painting the Polar Landscape,” this show runs through March 1.
It features more than 50 paintings, maps, notebooks, one film and one photograph that reveal how explorers and artists from the United States, England, Canada and Scandinavia depicted the collision between humans and nature in ways both traditional and novel.
It is organized into three parts, each occupying a gallery and representing an aesthetic and human theme. They are: “Theater of Heroism,” “Conscientious Witness” and “Terrible Majesty.”
Visitors will see acknowledged masterpieces like Bradford's monumental “Sealers Crushed by Icebergs,” a 10-foot-wide oil painting from 1866 depicting a mountainous glacier crumpling a ship as sailors flee to barren ice floes. Hanging in the middle of the first gallery, Church's glorious nocturnal panorama, “Aurora Borealis,” from 1865 turns the fragile human world upside down. Lit by a single lamp, a tiny vessel sits ice-locked beside an glacial mountain and beneath an immense curtain of shimmering colors.
Taking a minimalist approach, American Paige painted en plein air subtly tinted pastels of little humans bent by driving winds. Working into the mid-20th century, Canadian Harris employed modernist techniques to paint scenes of primal beauty.
Yet Kent (1882-1971) emerges as the American artist who most immersed himself physically and emotionally in the stark beauty of Newfoundland and Greenland for five years including time in Alaska with his 8-year-old son. More formally trained than most in the show, Kent painted the Arctic with an impressionist's fascination with the dance of light on ice and sea. Yet in paintings like “First Snow, Greenland” and “Resurrection Bay,” he incorporated abstract techniques to convey the elemental power of a place he considered “all that is beautiful in art and man, the virgin universe.”
As straightforward as a snowball to the nose, this exhibit sends visitors on a parallel expedition through fierce seas, inhospitable expanses of snow and ice, and finally into the maw of solitude.
There is little that is more lovely or lonely than George Curtis' 1867 oil painting “Polar Sea” depicting the broken mast of a lost vessel drifting by a jagged iceberg.
And if a New Englander in early November can't relate to that frigid and forlorn scenario, go check out Monet's water lilies.
Yet this show also explores how artists of different backgrounds adapted techniques to portray human drama where little, except imminent destruction, was obvious.
Icelander Johannes Kjarval infused his 1931 “Summer Night at Thingvelir” with a warm expressionist palette. In a peaceful oil depicting summer on Baffin Island, Canadian A.Y. Jackson is one of the only artists to make indigenous people his subjects.
Leading an opening day tour, Scott said the paintings in the show reveal artists' differing representations of an environment that confounded familiar responses.
Most of the 19th century paintings were done about the time Romantic poets in England and Europe sought to experience the sublime in untamed nature and exotic landscapes.
“Some saw the heroic in man's attempt to conquer the unknown. Others, moved by the landscape's sheer power and perceived invulnerability, evoked a spiritual response,” said Scott.
He observed that for explorers and artists of Romantic temperament, the polar regions were the last uncharted terra incognita to test “human aspirations against the environment.''
Several artists, Scott pointed out, painted emblematic scenes of ships floundering at sea, crushed by ice mountains or dwarfed by glaciers as if "to put fragile humanity in its place."
The exhibit celebrates explorers, artists and seamen who risked everything to reach the “Ends of the Earth” for their own reasons.
Yet Scott observed that only a century later the once-indomitable polar regions are now degraded and threatened by human technology.
Entering the first gallery, visitors encounter a quotation from Kent beamed from above onto the floor: “Being here in this spot, now, is worth traveling a thousand miles for. Maybe we have lived only to be here now.”
The exhibit may be a wondrous requiem for an unspoiled region that may someday exist only in our imaginations.
The Peabody Essex Museum is located in East India Square, Salem. The museum is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. It is closed Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day.
A lavishly illustrated catalog, “To the Ends of the Earth,” with essays by Scott, Russell Potter and photographer John P. Caponigro is available at the museum.
General museum admission is $15 for adults, $13 for seniors and $11 for students; children 16 and under and Salem residents are free.
Same-day tickets to the 200-year-old Yin Yu Tang House, brought intact from rural China to the museum, cost $4 in addition to museum admission. Advanced tickets for visiting at a specific time may be purchased with a small surcharge by calling Ticket Web at 866-468-7619.
For more information and to take a virtual tour of the Yin Yu Tang house, visit the museum's Web site at www.pem.org or call 866-745-1876.