The Poetic Vision: American Tonalism
"After
Impressionism, painting went in many different directions. All kinds of
"isms" sprang up - Symbolism, Fauvism, Cubism, Abstract
Expressionism, and Futurism, just to name a few. Realism went back to the
Tonalist method of painting, and later the personalized method of Wyeth, which
is a Tonalist approach." Prof. Sammy Britt (1993)
Description of the Tonalist Painting
Style and Technique
Tonalism is
rooted in the French Barbizon movement, which emphasized atmosphere and shadow.
The Tonalist style employs a distinctive technique by the use of color's middle
values as opposed to stronger contrast and high chroma. Resulting in a
understated and compelling overall effect. The tonalist subject matter is never
entirely apparent; their is no effort to communicate a message or narrate a
story. Instead of relating a story, each sensitively chosen color,
composition, and line is arranged to create an intriguing visual poem.
The
interiors of tonalist paintings are generally elegant and sparsely decorated,
tonally uniform, simplified and indistinct; the figures are usually presented
alone in silent contemplation. Landscapes are typically luscious and
luminous with evocative atmospheric effects featuring misty backgrounds
illuminated by moonlight. Tonalists painters were drawn to both the natural and
spiritual realms. They sought to awaken the viewers consciousness by shrouding
the subject in a misty indistinct veil of emotionalism. The palette is minimal,
characterized by warm hues of brown, soft greens, gauzy yellows and muted
grays. Preferred themes were evocative moonlight nights and poetic, vaporous
landscapes. Tonalist painters seemed to favored unconscious states and
psychological experiences over reality.
Key terms and phrase associated with
the tonalist movement
obscured
details, single-figure themes, the natural and spiritual domain, waking,
unconscious states, sleep, dreams, death, aura, religious significance,
emotionalism, emotionalists, pictorial space, compositional space, diffused
light, incandescent glow, organic forms, artistic inspiration, illusionistic
representation, luminous, transcendentalist, glowing, metaphysical, emotional
expression, poetic, evocative
David Adams Cleveland on Tonalism
Tonalism - a distinctive style of low-toned
atmospheric landscape painting, developed a sizable following among American artists in the 1880s. This
new generation of tonalist artists, most born after 1845, and many foreign
trained in Paris and Munich, broke with the prevailing school of Hudson River
artists and their large detailed panoramic views of the American scenes. Many
streams of influences fed into the growing taste for a more intimate, poetic, and expressive
style of landscape art, relying on soft-edged broadly painted tonalities to
communicate emotion.
If European
methodologies were important, so too were the visionary canvases of native
talents like Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917) and Ralph Blakelock (1947-1919), who developed
idiosyncratic styles and romantic subject matter (soon to be widely imitated)
without recourse to foreign training. Initially influenced by French Barbizon
painting by way of American exponents George Inness (1825-1894), William Morris Hunt (1824-1879), and John La Farge (1835-1910), American Tonalist painters
tended to use a neutral palette of predominantly cool colors: green, blue,
mauve, violet, and a delicate range of intervening grays, carefully modulated
to produce a dominant tone. Preferred subjects were scenes of dawn or dusk,
rising mist and moonlight in which the enveloping atmosphere is both palpable
and evocative of poetic and meditative states.
Artists
like John Twachtman (1853-1902) and Henry Ward Ranger (1858-1916) employed techniques
derived from European landscape art, especially artists of the Hague School the
most prominent being Josef Israels and Anton Mauve), with their emphasis on domesticated landscapes bathed in
silvery light. From French sources, especially Jules
Bastien-LePage, American expatriates such as Birge Harrison (1854-1929),
his brother the marine painter Alexander Harrison (1853-1930), and J. Alden
Weir (1852-1919) developed a love for natural atmospheric effects combined with strong
draftsmanship, and the use of high horizons to bring dramatic focus to
foreground features.
From English
sources in the Aesthetic
movement, especially James
Whistler (1834-1903), an entire generation of
American painters, learned formal compositional techniques and decorative
strategies based upon a generalized hue (achieved by using a neutral
ground on the canvas), and a fundamental belief that painting should express
sentiment—yet not be sentimental, didactic, or emphasize narrative.
The technique of glazing,
the layering of thin layers of pigment suspended in oil or varnish, came to
play an important part in the Tonalist repertoire of effects. Light penetrating
these thin washes of color to an undercoat of more solid color was reflected
back to the surface, producing a jewel-like quality of scintillating,
bewitching hues.
The smoky quality or sfumato, also achieved by
such methods, was considered part of the Tonalist tradition of craftsmanship
going back to sources in the Venetian Renaissance.
Thus a
certain vibrancy of contour and blurring of forms came to characterize many
Tonalist landscapes. Vibration
of color, achieved by using warm undertones and cool overtones, was widely used and
taught by tonalists such as Birge Harrison to a generation of
painters at his Art Students League classes in Woodstock, New York, where he
was an instructor beginning in 1897. In his widely influential book on
landscape painting, Harrison stressed the heritage of English artists John
Constable and John Crome, especially their use of refraction, or the play of adjoining color
masses—the “lost-edge” technique, which resulted in a general diffusion of tone
and a luxurious, atmospheric quality.
Natural forms are dramatized, their edges blurred,
patterns and decorative elements emphasized, enhancing the surface quality of
the canvas.
A finely composed Tonalist painting reads
compellingly and immediately when viewed at a distance: all parts contribute to
the whole.
Harrison advised his students to strive for
the “big vision—the
power to see and to render the whole of a given scene, rather than to paint a
still-life picture of its component parts; the power to give the essential and to suppress the
unessential, the power to paint the atmosphere that surrounds the objects
rather than the objects themselves; the power, in one word, to give the mood of
a motive rather than the scientific statement of the trees and rocks and fields
and mountains that make up the elements.”
In terms of
Tonalist subject matter and vision, the landscapes of the pathbreaking
indigenous artists Ralph Blakelock (1847-1919) and Albert
Pinkham Ryder (1847-1919) were crucial in the development of a distinctly romantic, if not a
spiritual or quasi-religious element. Mystery, dream, memory, and imagination are often espoused in their
haunting, broadly painted canvases of dusk and moonlight.
In this
regard, the works of the transcendentalist writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and
especially Henry David Thoreau were very influential, authors familiar to many
tonalist painters. George Inness (1825-1894) brought a
distinctly religious enthusiasm to his late tonal works, inspired in part by
the religious mysticism of the Swedish scientist-visionary, Emanuel Swedenborg
(1688-1772), and Ralph Blakelock frequented spiritualist circles
where Swedenborg was esteemed.
George
Inness was consumed by his exploration of the subjective mystery of
nature in the everyday. He wrote eloquently of the importance to his art of the
“civilized landscape,” rural
scenes of human habitation that speak to memory and offer a glimpse into realms
of the spirit.
Inness
believed the artist’s central task was to elicit an emotion from the viewer. His late visionary
landscapes encapsulate the underlying Tonalist strategy to produce an art
expressive of mood, of insights into the human spirit by way of landscape—a
painted transcription of the individual artist’s response to nature.
These subtle and charming expressions were achieved, not by a detailed realistic rendering of a
specific place—as Tonalist artists criticized both their Hudson River
forbearers and Impressionist colleagues for doing—but by a synthesizing process in the
studio in which the painter often worked from memory to manipulate light effects and simplify and harmonize
compositional elements until obtaining an evocative whole. The goal was an
overall decorative unity that was both pleasing to the eye and touched the
soul.
Because Tonalist landscapes tended to be
generalized places, as opposed to recognizable locations,
they often lacked local associations and anecdotal subject matter, thus
allowing greater scope for the imagination. As a result, these paintings resonate with aesthetic and spiritual overtones—redolent of
a better time and place that appealed to patrons and critics weary of the
growing clamor of urban life and the social and economic upheaval of rapid
industrialization.
By the
1890s, Tonalism and Impressionism were recognized by critics and collectors, if
not as competing styles, certainly as different aesthetics. Tonalism was fundamentally a
landscape art: subdued, profound, and spiritual.
Impressionism also concentrated on landscape,
but included more cosmopolitan and narrative subject matter—including the
figure—and employed high-keyed colors and broken brushwork to capture
scintillating sunlit effects.
The aesthetics of the two styles were not
mutually exclusive and artists from both camps freely borrowed from one
another. Thomas
Dewing (1851-1938) is often included among the
Impressionists because of his figurative subject matter, but is firmly in the
Tonalist school, more a follower of Degas than Monet.
In 1901, the
eclectic critic Sadikichi Hartmann, writing about the Tonalist artist Dwight Tryon (1849-1925) succinctly touched
on the heart of the matter in terms of the artistic aspirations of the
Tonalists.
"With works of art it should be very much as with
human beings, they should possess a soul, an individuality, a certain something
which cannot be materially grasped, but which produces in the sympathetic
spectator feelings, similar to those the artist felt in his creative moments.”
By 1914, the
Tonalist landscape was such an established fixture on the American art scene
that the artists employing this style were referred to as a group or school,
led by the landscape painter and teacher Henry Ward Ranger (1858-1916). In an
introduction to a book of Ranger’s lectures on art and Tonalism, Art-Talks
with Ranger (1914), arts writer Ralcy Husted Bell wrote glowingly
of Ranger and the movement he espoused.
"All those who are familiar with the finest
examples of the Tonal School must be impressed with their sensuous swing and
play of colour, which are wedded to such delightful designs and pleasing
patterns that they neither seem like designs nor yet suggest patterns. So
agreeably are all the parts connected, that they are seen only together: fused
in a nice relation to the whole…These noble specimens disclose a mastery
of the relations which assemble and unify all the components of a picture into
a single broad harmony…Better than the votaries of any other
school known to me, the Tonalist catches the laughter of shimmering light, and
transmutes it into pictorial joy; he speaks admirably the old mother-tongue of
cloud, tree, pool, and stone; he interprets the spring; he is summer’s scribe,
page to the majesty of autumn, and priest to the whole round year.
With a simple palette, and as if by magic, he expresses breadth, teasing
transparency, mysterious distances, the illusion of luminosity—in a word, the
drama of air, light, and colour. Taken all in all, his
pictures challenge, please, and convince. As a last refinement, he permeates
them with his own individuality, and thus may he be called a creator."
Tonalism as
a movement and school of landscape painting lasted well into the 1920s and was
a critical influence on artists of the Stieglitz Circle like John
Marin (1870-1953) and Marsden Hartley (1872-1943), and later inspired
modernists Milton Avery (1885-1965) and even Jackson Pollock
(1912-1956) who drew on the romantic abstraction of Albert Pinkham Ryder. Today, contemporary artists such as
Wolf Kahn (1927- ), Russell Chatham (1939- ), and April Gornic (1953-
) look back to the heritage of American Tonalism for inspiration in their work.
Written by
David Adams Cleveland and excerpted from his exhibition catalogue essay in
Intimate Landscapes, Charles Warren Eaton and the Tonalist Movement in American
Art 1880 –1920, De Menil Gallery at Groton School, September 26 to December 14,
2004.
References
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