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III.
Letter from James Perry Wilson
Letter from James Perry Wilson
“I might raise an erotic storm, powerful enough to tear
up trees by the roots.”
up trees by the roots.”
Soren Kierkegaard,
Either/Or
I.
James Perry Wilson appears in passing in internal museum reports, in various agendas and administrative timelines, as seldom more than a scheduling concern. His paintings were LATE.
His biographical file at the American Museum of Natural History carries a note of concern from “friends worried information about him will become scattered”; when Salvador Dali came to watch him paint he did not speak. A “Museum Personalities” item published in Spring 1948 is the rare document, just one page long, dedicated to presenting him to the public. “This museum personality has the most photographed back in the museum,” the article claims. “He is usually to be found (in a costume admirably suited to the warm, dark corridors) facing the wall to ply the each calculated brush stroke of his trade.”
The what.
His the and returned with and a ten-gallon hat he wore around the museum. Painting--pink sunset, the what, and the elk in the buffalograss. Two years later, the curator mailed the donor a picture with a note attached: “No photograph can do it adequate justice,” the note reads, “The atmospheric quality of the late afternoon setting has subtle qualities which cannot be put down on paper.”
Curator Harold Hall’s lament was just one of many attempts to describe the strange, numinous aspect which inheres in Wilson’s paintings. One seems to see straight through them, through the glass and paint, the laborious technique and human hours, and out the other side into pure wilderness—that great source—as though it were real; as though it existed and one were there in person, breathing it in. It is a quality which no photograph can do justice, Hall wrote. One colleague called it the “breath of life,” another called it Catholicism--both, that the murals opened a “spiritual,” rather than empirical, “window onto nature.” Through this window, something entered the work, a spirit which looked back out from perfect illusion shining forth.
The nature of this “shining forth,” as Hegel would put it, was light. Wilson’s paintings seemed to “glow,” to burn inside, viewers claimed, as though the paint were kindling insights more luminous than its matte sums. The dioramas opened up onto the entire world, trembling with touch this glimmer. Someone once turned the lights out to ensure the paintings were not casting their own, glowing in a row like streetlamps down the corridor.
That simple paint had produced such an enigmatic quality begged the question how his art made somemthing what. Some sought explanation in his technique, obscure and what: despite Hall’s curatorial disclaimer, almost his entire process, beginning to end, had passed through a camera lens and been put to paper; had been gridded, measured, predicted, weighed, tested, sketched, modeled, and planned in order to adhere as close as possible to empirical truth. Others thought the gentle, inner glow an expressive dimension irreducible to technique, a subjective element that survived his empirical, rational process. These sought resolution in the artist, in some private or personal expression expressed thgrough what. “Their delicate truth can only be a reflection of the sensitivity of the artist,” one colleague speculated, though little about him was known and even less permitted to enter the work.
“I remember walking along with him, in the year of his eighty-second birthday,” one colleague recalled of Wilson, “while he explained why the colors on the leaves of the different species of trees were of different shades of green and how the sun and clouds affected those greens, turning them to pale blues, pale oranges, pale yellows, and off-whites; seemingly any color but green. He wasn't just teaching me,” she claims, “he was observing for himself too.” Wilson bore this commitment to observation in each and every brush stroke.
I. Technique...
II. ...And Expression
On August 27, 1943, James Perry Wilson met Thanos Johnson, a young soldier in the 10th Mountain Division stationed in western Colorado. Johnson was twenty-one years old when he entered the North American Mammal Hall on furlough and recognized the “breathe of life” in Wilson’s elk-camp mural: it depicted the rugged Flat Top Mountains which he liked to hike near his post at Camp Hale. Wilson had solicited carpenters to build walls around his murals so that he might paint in solitude, but in the late-summer heat Wilson had let the door open, and Johnson, inquiring, stepped in. The two men had tea that same day and began a correspondence which would span the next twenty years. “Did you ever think on what a small chance lay some of the pleasantest things in life?” James Perry Wilson wrote to Thanos Johnson in 1944. “If I had not happened to leave the door to the Mule Deer enclosure open on a certain day that summer, —if I hadn’t happened to notice an interested-looking soldier standing outside, and hadn’t invited him in, I might never had the pleasure of knowing you. I’m certainly glad that I did.”
“Perry,” as Johnson called him, received Johnson’s letters in the afternoon mail and carried the most recent in his pocket until another arrived; Johnson kept Wilson’s letters in special binders that Wilson provided him and wrote on matching special paper Wilson would replenish. This archive, some letters papers, provides the sole insight into Wilson’s work and person, his techniques, what, his what. Johnson’s responses have been lost to us, misplaced in an attic or thrown out in time, and what remains is a one-sided dialogue: a portrait of the “sensitivity of the artist” recognizing itself in another.
some four hundred and twenty-four pages across
III.
In the letters to Johnson, Perry what.
In more ways than one, such a rigid and technical approach made an uneasy admission into the established aesthetic paradigm. According to his colleagues, Wilson was too “submissive” to nature, too rational in his translations, to produce a true creative act. His paintings demonstrated no power of judgement, they claimed: he mirrored rather than made, copied rather than created—and, even worse, he was slow at it. In an unpublished memoir passage, American Museum painter Frances Lee Jacques dismissed Wilson’s paintings as “giant Kodachromes”—as simple photographs, in other words—and his time-consuming methods as yielding “diminishing returns” compared to his own. “Wilson,” he wrote, “went into factors of perspective just not necessary in ordinary work, in an art world where perspective is a dirty word.”
Although he was committed to the utmost realism, there was indeed an immaterial and inarticulable dimension to Wilson’s practice, one he attempted to relay foremost when the two painted together side-by-side. In interviews Johnson describes painting under Wilson’s guidance in almost spiritual terms: “He was sitting down right next to me while I was painting,” he says, and “made me aware of what I should be concerned about; how the aspens here are and so on. It was not quite philosophy but…He wanted to get you to a feeling beyond the photograph.” There was a silent stress placed on seeing past semblance and into something that had not yet appeared: “I don’t think it was conscious, but he went beyond the painting…It wasn’t what I was seeing—it was beyond what I was seeing. It’s very difficult to explain.”
Although Wilson’s letters gesture toward this “beyond” in technical terms—layers, importance, tonality—it was, as Johnson intimates, deeper and more intuitive, an endangered nonempirical element buried deep inside his rational process. “He taught me to think beyond what was there,” Johnson claimed—to imitate something that did not—was not allowed to—exist.
BEYOND.
III. An Apocalypse Now.
According to Theodor Adorno an “evil star,” Unstern, has hung over the concept of natural beauty since Schelling and Hegel’s aesthetics, a star which represents not natural beauty’s dialectical transcendence, as Hegel propounds, but its near-total repression.
The art-historical realization of natural beauty as an autonomous subject matter in “landscape painting” had to be wrested from its canonical subservience to figuration. Although other cultures had long ago developed dedicated landscape traditions, such as the Chinese shanshui, it was not until the 18thC. that the west accepted nature as independent content. In 1843, Ruskin imagined how surprised a man-out-of-time would be to enter a modern art gallery and witness this change: “He would, as his ideas began to arrange themselves, be first struck by the number of paintings representing blue mountains, clear lakes, and ruined castles or cathedrals, and he would say to himself: ‘There is something strange in the mind of these modern people! Nobody ever cared about blue mountains before, or tried to paint the broken stones of old walls.”’ It was through, however, but what.
Once upon a time there was a time in Europe when mountain ranges and blue, icy rivers were not considered natural spectacles, “charming and glorifying every landscape,” as John Muir wrote, but impositions to be climbed or waded or worse. In 1698, Celia Fiennes called “desart and barren” the same Lake District which Wordsworth would just 10 years later acclaim “the loveliest spot that man hath ever found.” An aesthetic register had to in culture “open,” and, as Muir highlights in the very first sentence of The Mountains of California, this cultural opening seemed to depend on, to begin with, something called “the landscape.”
In the early 18th century, in a well-known example, the English cleric William Gilpin began writing essays which taught aspiring aesthetes to impute beauty into the natural world using values learned directly from the study of painting. “This great object,” he wrote, “we pursue through the scenery of nature; and examine it by the rules of painting.” These rules had been modeled on romanticists such as Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa, whose landscapes hung in galleries across Europe and in whose imitation Gilpin codified his doctrine of natural beauty. He named that doctrine the “Picturesque,” a natural beauty that was “picture-like,” and defined it, tautologically, as “…that kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture.”
A “picturesque eye,” as he calls it, must thus be trained to recognize natural beauty through the pictures it resembles. To this end, Gilpin began writing and illustrating popular guidebooks teaching readers not just where to look—the River Wye, the Cumberland lakes—but how, and what,to see. His instructions made a new pattern legible in the chaos of the natural world, and “picturesque travelers” trawled the countryside in its pursuit, appraising and parsing the land. As with any good aesthete, this meant a disposal to judgement: in order to be pleasing, it was decided the scene must have roughness and smoothness in equal measure, variety, harmony, and an interplay between light and dark. A flight of birds may be pleasing, Gilpin advised, but a heavy beech tree can offend the eye. Swedish mountains are too rough, American lakes too large. Cows are most ideal in April and May, when they become tufted and shed, but whoever stumbles upon them grazing in large groups, he suggests in his “doctrine of grouping larger cattle,” should ensure the groupings number three at most.
And place the extra cows where, one might ask? Alas, Gilpin admits, “you must allow a little imagination, or your scene will never please”; when nature disappoints its aesthetic potential (as he attests it does in the countryside near Leicester, leaving him to contemplate cows), an improvement can be arranged in the imagination. Unlike the land, that is, the “landscape” is an artifice: it is an artwork rather than instrument, a picture rather than the “stuff of labor and the reproduction of life.” The grass pasture is replaced by the compositional field; the excess cows erased, painted over, corrected. As though it were a plow, Gilpin’s “picturesque eye” tills the land to remove impurities, turning over the large, grazing cows like boulders, to yield a ground more fertile to Picturesque experience. Oh “what glorious scenes might here be made, if these stubborn materials could yield to the judicious hand of art,” he laments. Perhaps “an intervening hill may be turned aside; and a distance introduced”; an “ill-shaped mountain may be pared, and formed into a better line.” To read a landscape is to make it, Gilpin implies: one “composes a landscape as the artist composed his celebrated Venus, by selecting accordant beauties from different originals.”
When Picturesque travelers arrived at the sites presented in Gilpin’s illustrated tours, then, they discovered scenes discrepant to their expectations. His descriptions and illustrations had wandered so far in their idealization that hardly a likeness remained. “Whoever examines those ‘abortive nothings,’ which Mr. Gilpin calls Landscapes,” a contemporary criticized, “will hardly be able to trace one view, how well soever he may be acquainted with it…” Under Gilpin’s marshalling, he argued, the landscape was no longer identical to the land; it had become a pattern, a what, like “those landscapes and figures which boys fancy they see in the sky at sun-set, or in fire on a frosty evening.”
In this sense a landscape is always “made”; there can be no landscape “out there” in nature, sitting on its own in silence, the wind rustling in the grass or rippling the water, until human reason is applied to the land. It is not a location at all, in fact, but the relationship between nature and culture brought into momentary cessation, “a moment of becoming at a standstill.” As such natural beauty is what Adorno calls a second affinity, a “symbolic reconciliation” extended toward the natural world by the very culture that destroys it. When John Wesley Powell first journeyed the Colorado river in 1851, for example, he attributed the canyons a beauty not of their own making but of ours, their high walls and carved rock cathedrals “imitating architectural forms, and suggesting rude but weird statuary.” Only in its integration with culture, in other words, does “nature” become the “natural history” Wilson celebrates. As Longinus wrote, natural beauty hits the mark only when art is hidden within her.
Picturesque experience did not create for its pursuants a sympathy with nature, in other words, but a nature sympathetic to themselves.
In his a morality play between reason and its opposite, between subject and object, culture and nature, domination and love.