ART REVIEW : HIGH MARKS AGAIN FOR A TIMKEN GALLERY SHOW

The Timken Gallery in Balboa Park continues to set a standard for scholarship and public education that other Balboa Park visual arts museums might strive to emulate.

Last year it initiated a series of annual exhibitions to focus on a work in its collection presented within a historical context. The inaugural exhibition in the appropriately titled “Focus” series featured “The Wake of the Ferry” by John Sloan, an early 20th-Century American realist painter and graphic artist who was a subject of special interest to then-curator Grant Holcomb.

The subject of Focus II is Albert Bierstadt’s “Cho-looke, The Yosemite Fall” (1864). Guest curator Nancy K. Anderson, a Bierstadt expert at the National Gallery of Art who organized the exhibition for the Timken, selected 20 works--oil paintings, illustrations, photographs and a drawing--as a context for “Cho-looke.” The wall and label texts are a helpful introduction to the show. The catalogue with its many illustrations and Anderson’s essay with extensive quotations from numerous sources is a valuable and attractive addition to any library. In the finest humanist tradition, it gives pleasure as it instructs.

German-American painter Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), whose name is familiar to many informed Americans and whose works through frequent reproduction are familiar to many more, studied in Germany in the mid-19th Century when a romantic school of landscape painting expressed a kind of visionary pantheism. The ostensible dichotomies of the universe--matter and spirit, chaos and order, good and bad--were man’s misperceptions or partial and limited views. God was an artist who sculpted mountains and painted sunsets. Man was a tiny part of the universe but nevertheless crucial in it as an observer of its processes.

Early California Unitarian preacher Thomas Starr King, whose role as a propagandist for Yosemite is discussed by Anderson, believed that landscape painters functioned as “artist-priests” who inspired viewers “to return to God’s original with heightened perception and increased awe.” In a simple formula, communion with nature was communion with God.

Bierstadt’s “Cho-looke, The Yosemite Fall” is, to begin with, very beautiful. Although representational, in an old-fashioned way at that, it has an expansive feeling. Like the best Abstract Expressionist paintings, it does not simply stop at the edges of the canvas. You can feel, if not see, that it extends forever and that it includes you. Campers in the mid-foreground give you a sense of scale. The scene is awesome, without, however, being intimidating. God’s nature includes man. The palpability of the earth, of animal and vegetable matter and their forms, dissolve into vapor and light in the far distance at the top of the falls. Realism dissolves into impressionism.

The exhibition includes five other paintings of Yosemite by Bierstadt, one of which, “Night at Valley View,” a study in near-monochromaticism with two contrasting kinds of light--the orange/red of a campfire and the white of the moon in the sky and reflected on water--has the feel of a contemporary abstraction.

Also included in the exhibition is the first known drawing of Yosemite Falls (1855), a work by ‘49er Thomas Almond Ayres, used, with modifications, for a lithographic reproduction in “Hutchings’ California Magazine,” a copy of which is on view.

Bierstadt’s achievement is made appreciable through comparison with the works of other artists in the show. George Henry Burgess reduces the grandeur of the scene, making it stiff and lifeless. James David Smillie domesticates it.

William Hahn’s “Yosemite Valley From Glacier Point” (1874), an engaging scene of a touring party, shows that the problem of litter began a long time ago.

This exemplary small exhibition continues through June 15.