Driving Home, page 35
In 1855, when the artist George Catlin was pushing sixty, he stopped in the Northwest, breaking a voyage that took him from Cape Horn to the Bering Sea. At the mouth of Clayoquot Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, then as wild a site as any in the region, he painted a prophetic elegy on the fate of wilderness in an industrial, land-hungry age. A Whale Ashore—Klahoquat is as ambitious a painting as Catlin ever attempted: half moody seascape half grim morality tale. Set against a troubled sunset over the Pacific, the stranded whale is not the only creature in the picture that is seeing its last day. The Indians swarming around the carcass, in canoes and on foot, are observed from such a distance that one can tell little about them except that they are members of the same species. They might just as well be a colony of prairie dogs. The swirling pattern made by the crowd on the beach has the organic coherence of a shoal of minnows or a flock of gulls. In the middle distance a trim schooner rides at anchor. A boat has just put off from it. On the far horizon, to the right of the schooner, is a flattened contrail from a steamship going south. Numerous as the Indians may appear, it’s the smoke in the distance that signals the inevitable outcome of this story. Historically speaking, we are just seconds away from the arrival of the logging crew, the pulp mill, the cannery, and all the rest of the machinery that will change forever the lives of the unsuspecting people on the beach.
Since 1830 Catlin had been chasing Indians westward across the plains, trying to capture them on canvas before they were swamped by the tide of white conquest and settlement. By 1855, great tracts of the land that he had known as wilderness had been claimed for civilization by fenced rectangular grids. That Catlin could see the Indians as doomed even here, in the last outpost of the truly wild, reveals the depth of the visionary pessimism he had acquired on his travels. And he was right, of course. Ten years before he stood above the beach at Clayoquot, the Hudson’s Bay Company had made Victoria its western headquarters; three years before, the Seattle city fathers had staked claim to their settlement on Elliott Bay. Catlin’s nearing steamship was as unstoppable as the setting sun.
The Indians in A Whale Ashore are squarely seen as part of the Pacific Northwest’s nature, not its culture. It’s no accident that one of the best collections of Native American art from the Northwest coast is housed not in the National Gallery but in the American Museum of Natural History, where the Salish, Haida, and Kwakiutl tribes take their place alongside stuffed elk and bison. In the basic grammar of nineteenth-century landscape painting, no stretch of Northwest water is complete without its canoeful of Indians—a native aquatic species whose presence gives the stamp of regional authenticity to a canvas. As the same water filled in real life with square-rigged lumber ships and steam tugs, its painted counterpart became an exclusionary zone in which white vessels were banned and only cedar canoes allowed.
In 1863, on his second swing through the West in search of material for his enormous pictures of the American sublime, Albert Bierstadt planned to visit Puget Sound. However, his companion, the journalist Fitz Hugh Ludlow, fell ill in Oregon, and the two men sailed instead from Portland to San Francisco, en route to New York. The unvisited territory evidently loomed large in Bierstadt’s imagination, and in 1870 he produced a curious painting titled Puget Sound, on the Pacific Coast, in which he depicted a landscape of artistic myth and rumor, a Pacific Northwest de l’esprit.
By Bierstadt’s usual seven-by-twelve-foot standards, this canvas is quite modest, but every last inch is packed to the bursting point with the stock ingredients of the sublime, all lusciously painted in the artist’s best theatrical style. Here are rocks, precipices, withered trees, the darkness of a howling storm, a shaft of golden sunshine of the kind that might herald the Second Coming, a thunderous cascade descending a mountain face, a turbulent and angry sea, and Indians hauling their canoes to safety out of the exploding surf. The picture turns Puget Sound into a brand name for the dreadfully picturesque.
More effectively than the Oregon paintings that Bierstadt drew from the life, Puget Sound, on the Pacific Coast formulates the terms on which the Pacific Northwest made its appeal to the aesthetic tourist. The region was soon dotted with established vantage points offering painterly views of the major landmarks: Mount Hood seen from the northwest bank of Lost Lake, Mount Adams seen from the Oregon side of the Columbia River, Mount Rainier seen from across Commencement Bay, on Puget Sound. It was a quickly established convention that Northwest water—river, lake, or branch of the sea—was sufficiently still to hold a faithful reflection of a mountain for hours at a time. This despite Bierstadt’s suggestion that Puget Sound waves break on the shore like those of the Mediterranean in a full gale.
Sanford Gifford, a Luminist painter and a close friend of Bierstadt’s, was another early visitor. In 1874 he pitched his easel on what I take to be the beach on the southeastern tip of Vashon Island and painted Mount Rainier mirrored in the lakelike water of Commencement Bay. The snow-capped summit, rose-tinted in the light of a late-summer afternoon, rises above a layer of hazy cloud like an apparition, or (in Gifford’s own terms) a manifestation of the divine. The water is made radiant by the diffused brilliance of the mountain’s reflection. On the scored-glass surface of the bay float two Salish canoes. On the far shore the most prominent trees are as green and, more surprisingly, deciduous as any in Gifford’s English and Hudson River landscapes. It’s a picture of an undisturbed American Arcadia, in which Indians—with their pathless woods, their peaceful water, and their inspiring alp—are seen to be living apparently beyond the reach of time.
It’s Gifford’s determined erasures that catch the eye. Gone (from the patch of land immediately above the canoe in the foreground) is the young town of Tacoma, with its new lumber mill, new docks, and fleet of moored cargo ships. Gifford’s lovely Arcadia, so seemingly present, belongs to an imagined past, and the painting is suffused with nostalgia for a period that never really was, when bushy elms grew out over the water and Indians were the nymphs and shepherds of European pastoral tradition.
Fifteen years after Gifford painted Mount Rainier, Bierstadt at last reached Puget Sound, having completed a painting tour of southeastern Alaska. Camped out on what appears to be the same spot that Gifford had used for his view of the mountain, Bierstadt set to work. By 1889 Tacoma had grown to a smoke-and-steam-wreathed city of thirty thousand people. Bierstadt obliterated it from his vision. To accentuate the enchanted solitude of the scene, he painted just one Indian canoe in place of Gifford’s two.
It should not be thought that Bierstadt took no interest in the great industrial developments of his time. He was acutely sensitive to them. His major patrons were financial, timber, mineral, and railroad magnates for whom Bierstadt’s pictures (like those of Thomas Moran) were grandiose souvenirs of the West as it had been before their own work crews landscaped it to the industrialists’ design. When Bierstadt finished his Rainier painting, in his New York studio, he sent a hopeful letter to James J. Hill. Mount Tacoma (the alternative name for Rainier) was, he wrote, “one of the grandest of mountains,” and it was happily situated “on the line of your road.” The railroad baron didn’t bite.
In a spirited counteroffensive to the idea of Manifest Destiny, the Romantic painters made it their great mission to depopulate the Northwest of all but its aboriginal inhabitants. It was left largely to amateurs—and, interestingly, to painters of Indian scenes such as Catlin and John Mix Stanley—to tell the other side of the story. No one had a keener sense of the fantastic pace of white settlement and industry than the artists who spent their lives searching for authentic Indians in the ever-decreasing wild.
Though John Mix Stanley specialized in Indian portraits, he was an accomplished, if conventional, landscape painter. His Oregon City on the Willamette River (c. 1850) is a conspicuously fair-minded treatment of the theme. The sublime survives in the immediate foreground, where a bluff overlooks the Willamette Valley, but it has mostly been exiled to the back of the canvas, where sandstone cliffs and thick forest frame a splendid river-wide waterfall. Sandwiched between wilderness in the distance and wilderness nearby lies an infant city of neat rectangular plots and newly painted houses, dominated by an English-style church and a three-storey sawmill. Covered wagons are rolling down Main Street. The low light is falling from the east; it’s early morning, and this is just the beginning of what is going to happen to Oregon in the near future.
Cut to the figures on the bluff—still in shadow, for the morning hasn’t reached them: two Indians, a man and a woman, with what looks like a bedroll between them. The man is leaning on a staff, so he’s a pilgrim, or a vagrant. Both figures look directly at the viewer. They might be homeless people on a modern street, begging passers-by for change. With hindsight, we know where the couple are headed. In 1857 Stanley painted an allegory titled Last of Their Race, in which ten Indians, wearing the costumes of different tribes, are perched on a pile of rocks at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, their last toehold on the West that was once their domain.
Yet Stanley rendered the fatal city so affectionately that the painting seems to shimmer with ambiguity, like a hologram changing shape as it is tilted under a light. Now you’re with the Indians, now you’re with the whites. At first glance the picture looks like an advertisement for the civic pleasures that await travelers at the end of the Oregon Trail; it promises space to build and to breathe amid tranquil natural surroundings—a school for one’s children, a waterfall to delight one’s eye. At second glance that cheerful promise seems callow and heartless—but not so callow, or so heartless, that it cancels out one’s first impression. As in the hologram, both images are equally there, but never quite at the same time.
In the 1880s an amateur, Emily Inez Denny, a member of one of Seattle’s founding families, took the robust, monocular view of settlement in a painting of Smith’s Cove, on Elliott Bay. The artist is standing in the middle of a stump field, where land is being cleared for future development. (The space just behind her will turn, eventually, into a chain-link-fenced compound for imported Japanese cars.) Beyond the field lie the already substantial accomplishments of Denny’s ingenious, hardworking family and friends: a handsome homestead with barns, outbuildings, and an orchard; ships under steam and sail in the harbor; a locomotive hauling a line of cars on the railroad, which is carried on trestles over the shallows at the north end of the bay; two horse-and-buggy outfits heading down a lane into town. The sky is dominated by a roiling billow of steam issuing from the impossibly tall smokestack of a mill somewhere over on Vashon Island, or beyond. Emily Denny’s picture, with its proud detailing of modes of transportation, makes that most poignant of provincial boasts: we may seem to live miles from anywhere, but we are really very well connected. In that respect her painting is bang up-to-date a hundred and twenty years later.
Denny’s work belongs to a tradition of vernacular landscape which includes picture-postcard photographs of the Pacific Northwest. Photographers and painters used many of the same views and vantage points, but these coincident locations serve only to expose the huge rift between their visions of the land. Turn-of-the-century postcards abhor solitude. They represent nature as a resource, for industry and for recreation. One wonders what Bierstadt, for instance, would have made of the diagonal line of twenty-five people “nature coasting” down a snowy slope of Mount Rainier and waving to the camera as they slide by. Every river has its fisherman, every lakeshore has its picnic table. A postcard from Oregon shows Mount Hood mirrored in Lost Lake, a favorite view of painters—but here a man in a bush hat sits in the foreground cradling a gun, as if he were about to unzip the reflection with a bullet. Mountain scenes afford a pretty backdrop for early Oldsmobiles and Fords, shown parked on dirt tracks in the heart of the sublime.
As the postcards promote the luxury hotels, the parks, the zoos, and the electric lighting of the new cities, so they take a boosterish line on the sources of the cities’ wealth. Loggers are represented as gnarled western heroes, grinning widely from halfway up the trunk of some monarch of the forest they are about to dethrone. Massive balks of cut timber, a hundred feet long and seven feet square, are captioned “Washington Tooth Picks.” A class of twenty-five grade-school children is pictured sitting atop the flat stump of a single logged cedar. Bridges, ships, farms, mills, and railroads figure on the postcards as triumphs of civilization over the wilderness—a wilderness that by 1905 or thereabouts could already be thought of as a lavish extension of a civic park, to be valued in terms of its facilities for tourism and sport.
A postcard from a later date qualifies as one of the few iconic Northwest landscapes. It shows the vast glaciated extrusion of Mount Rainier, grandly outclassed by a B-17 Flying Fortress that appears to be cruising directly over the summit. Here is the awe-inspiring, Seattle-manufactured, technological sublime, putting nature in its place. The dormant volcano and the Boeing bomber are up to the same deadly waiting game. This was the card to send, with love, to Moscow.
The most powerful and dramatic landscapist of the Northwest was the timber industry, which has turned the forested mountainsides into a new kind of wilderness, of skid roads, stumps, and slash. I saw my first clearcut eleven years ago, when I was out here on a visit. It was unexpectedly stirring to see the sheer totalitarian scale of damage that the chainsaw can inflict, and the sight ranks in memory somewhere alongside my first view of the Manhattan skyline or of the Pyramid of Cheops, as one of the great eccentric wonders of mankind. I understand perfectly why Paul Bunyan was a leading mythological god in the American pantheon, before his activities came to be regarded as commensurate with spilling oil and dumping untreated sewage.
No sooner had the Pacific Northwest been established as the last outpost of the sublime than it was recast as a battlefield in the war between man and nature. The loose group of Seattle-based painters whom Life magazine would in 1953 label “The Northwest School”—Morris Graves, Mark Tobey, Guy Anderson, and Kenneth Callahan—lived within view of the clearcuts. If their best-known work leans toward the calm restraint and stylization of Japanese and Zen Buddhist art, that might be—in part, at least—a response to the violence and upheaval that figure so prominently in their early paintings. Against Graves’s later, light-infused and delicate studies of birds, animals, and potted plants should be set his Logged Mountains, painted from 1935 to 1943.
The upstanding dead and withered trunks left by the loggers are identical twins to the lightning-blasted trees found in the spooky landscapes of Salvator Rosa, such as Landscape with Mercury and the Dishonest Woodman and Landscape with Tobias and the Angel (both in the National Gallery). But they are the least of it. The land itself has turned into slurry; it’s pouring in a viscous, yellowish-green waterfall right through the bottom of the painting. The grand cascade, central to Romantic pictures of the Northwest in the nineteenth century, has here been perverted into a Niagara of waste. The draining land leaves behind bare chunks of rock, like rotten molars, under a stormy and sinister sky. The dominant colors—russet, ochre, greens that verge on black—are the true colors of Washington as seen by an unillusioned resident rather than by tourists like Gifford and Bierstadt.
Graves was only describing what actually happens when a mountain is indiscriminately logged and its drainage system wrecked: it turns into a mudslide. His landscape—as dreadful as anything conceived by the Romantics—is based on close observation. Similarly, House in a Landscape (believed to date from the 1930s), his exquisitely precise depiction of a collapsing homestead, its timbers warped and splayed as the house melts back into the earth, is at once a bold statement about the decay of human hopes in an unkind land and a cool exercise in pure draftsmanship. In both paintings one feels Graves’s fierce intimacy with his region and its areas of darkness. This is a northwesterner’s bleak version of the Northwest—and it is little wonder that Graves later escaped into the light and airy simplicity of his post-1960s work. It’s not for nothing that rainy Seattle leads the country in the per capita sale of sunglasses.
The response of Graves’s friend and colleague Kenneth Callahan to the clearcuts was a sequence of big, almost Bierstadt-sized canvases that tip their caps ironically to the Romantic sublime: same mountains, same rivers, same forest—except that the forest has been stripped from the picture, and the landscape rendered in a monochromatic muddy brown and littered with the machinery of the timber industry, so that it recalls a strange, alpine version of the battlefields of the Marne and the Somme. One might expect to see the tin hats of dead soldiers hung on the crosslike projections of Callahan’s surviving stumps.
In the 1940s, before he entered his squiggly, Zen-inspired, drip-painted white-writing phase, Mark Tobey was paying close attention to the art of the Northwest coast Indians, as in his Drums, Indians and the Word of God (1944). Since John Webber first sketched at Nootka, Indians had often been in the foreground of Northwest landscapes, as the obligatory genii loci of the region, but their art had made only incidental appearances, in the form of carved and painted canoes, house posts, totem poles, and embroidered hats. The rediscovery of primitive art was part of the core curriculum of twentieth-century modernism, with Braque and Picasso rivaling each other in their extensive collections of Amerindian and Pacific Island trophies. Borrowing from the stylized and abstract vision of the world as represented in tribal art became a modernist mannerism, and on the Northwest coast the white artist had immediate access to an extraordinary body of native work. The art of the Kwakiutl, Haida, Tsimshian, and Tlingit Indians was as vital, strange, and complex as any in the world. On bentwood boxes, muslin wall hangings, housefronts, masks, and domestic equipment the Indians left their own, often highly enigmatic, landscapes of the Pacific Northwest—a great treasury of techniques and images to which twentieth-century white artists began freely to help themselves.
