Taking It Easy: Crescent Cityscapes at Ogden
I arrived at the Ogden pumped to see some art, engaging hard-won art-viewing athleticism. Habituated to notice and analyze skill, voice, relevance, and how successfully shows are installed, I entered Crescent Cityscapes: Images of New Orleans from the Permanent Collection and was surprised to feel something like relief. This summer show is not an art-viewing Ironman; it’s more like a walk in the park.
Confession: I like small, arguably boring landscape paintings, the innocuous kind that decorated the walls of my house growing up. My earliest appreciation of pictures is grounded in the pleasure of seeing a place—not my house and not my neighborhood—open within the four edges of a frame. This exhibition is exactly what it says it is: pictures (and a couple of sculptural works) of New Orleans. It hardly requires a well-trained or critical eye to make sense of subject, style, and intention. It serves me to remember that it’s OK sometimes to just relax and enjoy the show.
Crescent Cityscapes is laid out roughly chronologically. The first gallery focuses on city and riverscapes. The majority of these canvases are executed in an Impressionist vocabulary, which had gained widespread acceptance in Western art as the 1800s became the 1900s. Ice storm on the Mississippi River, a Monet-esque oil on canvas by William Woodward, looked out of place, weatherwise, among three paintings of the river’s edge. Some light googling told me there was an ice storm that affected New Orleans in 1899, but this canvas was painted in 1897 probably further north on the river. While this painting may not fall squarely within the thesis of the show, for me it recalled the snowstorm this past winter that froze pipes, waylaid plans, and delighted New Orleanians with a real, Northern-style winter wonderland.
The painting next to it, also by Woodward, is titled Mississippi River Dredging. Both canvases could represent Normandy judging by the light, the palette, and the painterly vocabulary borrowed from the old world, but didn’t remind me of New Orleans. After studying at Rhode Island School of Design, William Woodward came to New Orleans in 1884 to teach art and architecture, then traveled to Europe on his honeymoon where he encountered French Impressionism, and its influence on the artist and his paintings of his adopted home in the South is evident.
Like Bierstadt’s paintings of the American West, these early depictions of New Orleans are not always “accurate” and were influenced by the life of the artist. Bierstadt couldn’t escape his Germany-rooted Romantic training and many who painted early New Orleans saw the city through elsewhere eyes.
At first, it’s kind of a bummer to try and place the scene painted in George Wharton Edwards’ From a Balcony in New Orleans – Old French Quarter (1890); I don’t think it exists. The vantage point seems at least two stories taller than available proximities of the era and Saint Louis Cathedral looks a bit off—wrong shape and color. I overheard a visitor describing to his companion where the painter was positioned—hovering three stories above Decatur Street. Unlike Woodward, Edwards did not get to know New Orleans. But map facts aside, there is a certain bizarre loveliness in the painting, and I look at it the way I would have as a child, ignorant of specificities of place. There’s a dash of orange on the balcony, a color that’s repeated in the distance of the painting like little inexplicable fires. It doesn’t make any sense but it’s fun to look at. I am not going to fact-check this tourist’s folly but enjoy it.
The next gallery is full of etchings and drawings. These small—and in some cases tiny—works are charming, not challenging illustrations of architecture. A small etching by Louis Oscar Griffith, Circular Staircase (1920), articulates the intricacy of ironwork, reminding me of this remarkable physical attribute still on view in the city, though those of us who live here may forget to appreciate it.
In the contemporary section, Hannah Chalew’s Between (2010) is a large drawing in ballpoint pen and ink on cut paper with threads and pins cut out and floated about an inch from the wall. This piece breaks from the rectangle and captures the experience of looking down long New Orleans streets lined with oak trees, chain link, and businesses beyond the French Quarter. Between offers a life-like—but not photorealistic—take. Unfortunately, there is a floor piece preventing the viewer from approaching the piece from across the gallery, which would maximize the effect of the peeled-open perspective of the drawing.
The older works in this show are remarkably unremarkable when held up against major collections of similar small cityscape paintings in fancier museums in fancier cities by fancier painters of their time. But this is part of the pleasure of this show. The newer works are less cohesive as a group, feeling patched together, which is the risk run by a typical genre show.
Strolling through this exhibition was a pleasure that was not cerebral or art-critical, but pedestrian in the best way. The museum is situated downtown and presumably attracts visitors from here and elsewhere, both art aficionados and tourists seeking a bit of culture and air-conditioning. To appreciate the show, I put aside my rigorous “serious” art-viewing tendencies and succumbed to its spirit.
Crescent Cityscapes: Images of New Orleans from the Permanent Collection runs through July 13. For more info, check out ogdenmuseum.org.
Top photo by Emily Farranto: Hannah Chalew, Between (2010)
