A Late Bloomer

The strange and beguiling American artist Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904) painted diligently for 20 years before he made a painting you’d want to look at twice. But once he did, he didn’t let up. A Victorian sensualist of uncanny inventiveness, Heade turned out a succession of gorgeous pictures you long to see again and again.

It’s a career that spans two-thirds of the 19th century but has only recently begun to be sorted out. The retrospective of 61 paintings and several drawings and sketchbooks that opened Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a tightly selected survey that lays out his major themes with clarity and precision. Organized by leading Heade scholar Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the show reveals a 19th century American artist finally unlike any other. If you didn’t know Heade’s paintings before, see it and you’ll never forget them.

Heade was born into modest circumstances in rural Pennsylvania, where he first learned about painting from the now much-loved folk artist Edward Hicks (he of “Peaceable Kingdom” fame). From 1839 to the late 1850s he made his living as an itinerant portrait painter, constantly on the move--New York, New Jersey, Virginia, Missouri, Illinois, Rhode Island--with a two-year stint in Rome, Paris and London in between.

The retrospective doesn’t include any of this youthful work, which would mostly help to show the huge leap he accomplished around 1859. In addition to portraits, he had painted a few genre scenes, done a number of copies of works by other artists and ventured tentatively into landscape subjects. Then, he painted his first view of the salt marshes along the Massachusetts and Connecticut shore, as well as a dark and ominous view over a watery inlet, “Approaching Thunder Storm,” that changed his course forever. He was 40 years old.

“Approaching Thunder Storm” is the first work in the LACMA show, and it lays out certain of the features of Heade’s art that would make his subsequent production so remarkable.

The broad, horizontal canvas, one and a half times as wide as it is high, shows a man and his dog seated in the foreground and looking out over the water. Another man in a rowboat heads for shore, a white sailboat crisply silhouetted against the ink-black inlet and dark clouds gathering across the top edge of the canvas. Two razor-sharp spits of land come together in the center, like the closing jaws of a pincer, as the little sailboat seems to race to get through before they close.

In this tiny, mundane drama of an impending spring storm, most remarkable is the quality of light. The land fairly glows in golden-green hues, radiant against the blackness of still water reflecting gathering clouds, while light fades from the graying sky. Heade has painted everything like glass, with a slick precision that recalls seeing the world come into sudden focus through a lens.

“Approaching Thunder Storm” is the first example of what I think of as Heade’s constant objective as an artist from then on: He’s the painter of the eternal in-between. Flux, continuous movement and inescapable change are at the steady center of his art, always represented by nature, and the sense of fleeting time is paradoxically heightened by having been meticulously frozen into place.

During the next decade Heade elaborated the eternal in-between in a variety of extraordinary ways. His most compelling invention was the extensive series of salt marsh views--more than 150 examples of which survive, 13 of them gathered in one gallery for the show. The marsh is a particular feature of the variegated American landscape that hadn’t attracted other painters before, including the Hudson River painters who were in search of more romantically exalted sites. But with its watery fields, stacks of cultivated grasses, low horizon line and constantly shifting atmosphere, the salt marsh was ideal for Heade--a landscape literally defined by in-between-ness.

Historians have noted that this 10-year period, so amazingly fecund for an artist of heretofore small achievement, coincides with the most tumultuous episode in the nation’s young life. The wrenching Civil War and its tattered aftermath may well have been a factor; Heade, a fervent supporter of the Union, wrote of his anguish and distress at the event.

In the show’s excellent catalog the curator suggests that the pivot was rather less dramatic, more pragmatic: Heade had moved into a 10th Street studio in New York, where several gifted landscapists of the Hudson River School provided a beneficial artistic collegiality that the itinerant painter had never had before. Among a community of rigorous artists, and with two decades of learning his craft behind him, Heade’s work suddenly matured.

Whatever the case, the decade represents perhaps the most concentrated period of exceptional creative output in his long career. In the midst of it--1863--Heade journeyed to Brazil, one of several trips to South and Central America that he would take. The journey would introduce the third great subject of his art, after the seascapes and salt marshes.

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Heade’s flower paintings aren’t as riveting as his landscapes, but they are fascinating in their delirium for exotic blossoms, often shown with richly colored hummingbirds. His pictures of sumptuous orchids and otherworldly passion flowers shove the blooms up close to the foreground plane, their tangled vines creating elaborate serpentine interlaces that elegantly decorate the surface. The jungle setting for the flowers plunges suddenly into the distance, where it typically dissipates into a moist haze of cloudy light.

No middle ground exists in Heade’s flower paintings. The wildly exotic foreground and the luminously mysterious background press up hard against each other. Through a heightened sense of absence, filled only by evanescent light, Heade calls an almost mystical kind of attention to the world in-between.

It is of course the world occupied by the spectator--who stands there mildly dumbstruck, beholding the remarkable canvas in the frozen moment of the eternal in-between. Heade’s paintings can make you momentarily lose your bearings--a physical response essential to the identification of any great work of art.

The final gallery of the exhibition is divided in two. On one side are numerous frilly still-lifes showing flowers in delicate vases, sometimes set in Victorian interiors. On the other are bold pictures of white, waxy magnolias, stems clipped and laid out on velvet-covered surfaces, like floral equivalents of Oriental odalisques by Ingres.

Heade’s reputation as a flower painter, a category long consigned to decorative hobby craft for women, is one reason that his astonishing work fell into obscurity shortly after his death. (Living in Florida for the final 20 years of his life probably didn’t help.) The stark differences between his poetic landscapes and those of the celebrated Hudson River painters is another reason he fell from favor. So is the difference between his glassy Realist technique and the bravura brushwork of the most popular form of 19th century landscape painting, Impressionism.

But now that Modernism isn’t what it used to be, and Georgia O’Keeffe has ascended into the pantheon, we can look at Heade’s paintings for what they are. What they are is amazing. This is an exhibition not to miss.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-6000, through Aug. 13. Closed Wednesday.