POE TURMOIL RACE CRACKED
Was he the Vincent van Gogh of American art, as some have suggested, his ecstatic brushstrokes shaking our inherited traditions to their foundations and opening up a new visual world? Or was he an overrated crank, a throwback to an earlier age, a cult figure long in need of debunking? Are his ravaged canvases-more damaged than others of a similar vintage and a challenge for any exhibition of his work-the record of bold experimentation, or are they symptoms of carelessness and ineptitude? An extreme example is Ryder’s spooky The Temple of the Mind, inspired by a poem in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which has come to resemble, over time, the cracked and moldering walls of Roderick Usher’s doomed mansion itself.Įncountering such paintings, one might feel like Ishmael in the third chapter of Moby-Dick, published four years after Ryder was born. There is scant recent scholarship on him college students familiar with Thomas Eakins or Winslow Homer may have only the vaguest notion of Ryder’s work, if indeed they’ve heard of him at all. In 1944 Jackson Pollock wrote, with flat finality, “The only American master who interests me is Ryder.” The sentiment has been echoed over the years by other artists, including Alex Katz, who called Ryder “perhaps the best American painter ever.”Īnd yet Ryder’s current status seems uncertain. Ryder’s work has continued to attract passionate adherents, especially among fellow artists. The Lebanese-American painter and poet Kahlil Gibran was so impressed with Ryder’s work at the Armory Show that he sought out the reclusive artist and drew a sensitive portrait, finding his head “very much like that of Rodin,” with whom Gibran had studied. His darkly hallucinatory paintings occupied the central gallery at the epochal Armory Show in 1913, which introduced modern European artists like Gauguin and Cézanne to a wary American audience while also honoring native forebears. Ryder was admired by a small coterie of artists and discerning collectors during his lifetime. Like every great artist, he belonged to that rare class of which there is only one example.” “One might call Ryder the Blake or the Melville or the Emily Dickinson of American painting,” Mumford mused, “and thus define, after a fashion, one or another phase of his art but the fact is that Ryder was Ryder. In The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse), inspired by a waiter who killed himself after making a bad wager, a skeletal figure armed with a scythe rides a pale horse, while a menacing snake monitors his progress. Born in 1847, Ryder was a virtuoso of turbulent moonlit skies, ships lost at sea, and nightmare images-drawn from Poe, another nightbird, among other sources-that stick like burrs in the memory. Chief among these nocturnal artists, for Mumford, was the painter Albert Pinkham Ryder, who was given to long, solitary nighttime walks in Lower Manhattan.
“American history is haunted by nightbirds in the nineteenth century,” Lewis Mumford wrote in The Brown Decades, his landmark 1931 study of Gilded Age culture. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.Īlbert Pinkham Ryder: Jonah, circa 1885–1895