Detail

At first glance the picture by Alfred Leslie may seem rather out of place in this exhibition: a huge, old-fashioned landscape, it certainly appears to have little enough in common with the thoroughly urban avant-gardes of the 1970s. We would rather expect to find a work like this hanging on the wall of some old mansion. Leslie did not paint the picture from photographs but from drawings made by himself. Over several months the artist, highly receptive to the changing seasons and the according changes of light, produced drawing after drawing in the open air, always using the same vantage point. Only the tree in the painting’s foreground is a later addition. In order to paint the tree as lifelike as possible, Leslie kept a branch of it in his studio. Leslie’s work is the exact repetition of a work done by another painter more than a hundred years earlier. In 1836, Thomas Cole painted a landscape from the very same point of view. This painting, which today is owned by the Metropolitan Museum, New York, is widely regarded as one the masterpieces produced by the so-called Hudson River School. This specifically American brand of landscape painting depicts America through idyllic pastorals in which man and nature live in harmony. The continent’s vast tracts of land are romantically idealized and presented as inviting discovery, exploration and settlement. While both artists studied the landscape from the exact same spot on Mount Holyoke, Massachusetts, Leslie see things in a more detached and clearer way than Cole. Though his re-creation borrows from the tradition of landscape painting, he also shows the inroads made by civilization in the shape of urban sprawl and streets that cut into the elegant curve described by the river.