- CAPITALISM IN PLACE
- GALLERIES
- Imagining Italy
- Revisiting Rome
- Staging Emilia-Romagna
- Consuming Milan
- Unhoused Atlanta
- Globalized Atlanta
- Racialized Atlanta
- Greenwashed Atlanta
- Georgia Timescapes
- Mississippi Timescapes
- New Mexico Timescapes
- Florida Beachscapes
- California Waterscapes
- Yankee Landscapes
- ¿Auténtica Oaxaca?
- Authentique Quebec?
- ¿Auténtica Cuba?
- New York Streetscapes
- Southern Roadscapes
- Branding Jacksonville
- Crafting the Quarter
- CONTACT
Yankee Landscapes
Empowering Natural Scenery
Each of the essays up to now has focused on a specific place, except for "Italian Getaway" which took you on a detour through whatever place my mind was in when I started thinking about this website. This essay presents a different take on the process of capitalist placemaking, neither place-specific nor me-specific. While we will make stops at a number of actually existing places, from Catskill and Kingsport to Hyde Park and Poughkeepsie, before reaching our final destination of New York City, my principal interest here is not in these places per se but in what they can tell us about an important template of capitalist placemaking whose roots reach back to the Hudson River School of Painting (1825-1876). This contradictory ensemble of landscaping practices and discourses spread across the country after the Civil War, achieving its most long-lasting success in the creation of the urban public park system, a veritable monument to the unsteady marriage of democratic populism and corporate capitalism.
Tracing the impact of the Hudson River School on urban design sheds light on how capitalist class power and the dynamics of capital accumulation have shaped, and continue to shape, our understanding of private place, public space and the hazy boundary separating them. This is a matter worth investigating, for if highly speculative spatial-temporal fixes continue to sweep over urban built environments in the years ahead, which is a safe bet, battles over the privatization and securitization of city parks are guaranteed to intensify.
Those of you who read "Unhoused Atlanta" will know that I once had a dog in the fight over urban space. When the Atlanta city government teamed up with downtown business interests to shut the Peachtree-Pine shelter, the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, on whose board of directors I served, fought unsuccessfully to keep it open. I have been brooding over the meaning of this defeat ever since. I know it will sound like a stretch, but in my historicizing imagination there is a connection waiting to be uncovered between 19th-century landscape painting, urban public parks and the ongoing campaign to displace homeless populations from central business districts across the country. I intend to investigate this connection as a way to gain some critical historical perspective on what the Task Force was up against in its battle against the Atlanta regime. My hope is that this essay will give you some deeper sense of what urban activists are up against in the era of neoliberal urbanization.
In the spring of 2022, Allyson and I decided to travel to the heartland of American landscape painting. This trip, like so many others we have taken over the decades, involved a lot of intense negotiation because while we both wanted to see many of the same things—landscape paintings, first and foremost—it would be far from accurate to say that our interests coincided in every detail. Allyson had her heart set on visiting FDR's Hyde Park estate, her favorite president, as successive waves of high-school juniors who took her US history course could attest. Presidential homes and libraries rank near the bottom of my bucket list, I admit, but my heart fluttered wildly in anticipation of our week-long stay in Manhattan, where I planned to spend as much time as possible taking pictures in Central Park, the holy Lourdes of street photographers. Allyson felt no more enthusiasm for my park than I did for hers. Let's just say that many years ago my wife made it clear that she has better things to do with her time than watch me take pictures of total strangers.
The finalized itinerary had us flying into Hartford, Connecticut, where we would visit the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and its collection of top-drawer Hudson River School paintings. We also planned a side trip to the historic homes of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain, two of our favorite nineteenth-century novelists who continue to illuminate white racial attitudes of their day and ours. Next stop was Hyde Park, which would be our base of operations for exploring the Catskills. This region was not only ground zero of landscape painting but also where Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church, the greatest landscape painters of their time, made their homes which today operate as historic museums, art collections, environmental centers and busy tourist attractions. The trip would end in New York City, which boasted major landscape collections at the Met and the New York Historical Society, as well as the most extraordinary collection of urban public parks anywhere in the US. We would thereby come full circle in tracking the American landscape tradition, for these public spaces, epitomized by Central Park, are arguably the most lasting legacy of the Hudson River School of painting. had, a dog in this fight over urban space. When the city government and its business allies joined forces to shut down the Peachtree-Pine shelter, the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless fought a long and ultimately unsuccessful. It might seem like a stretch, but in my mind there was a link between landscape painting, urban public space, and contemporary campaigns to displace homeless populations from central business districts.
Exploring this link was one reason why, in the spring of 2022, as the Covid lockdown began to lift, Allyson and I decided to travel to the heartland of the Hudson River School of painting. This trip, like so many others we have taken, involved a lot of intense negotiation because while we both wanted to see many of the same things—landscape paintings, first and foremost—it would be far from accurate to say that our interests coincided in every detail. Allyson had her heart set on visiting the Hyde Park estate of FDR, her favorite president, as could attest thousands of juniors who took Mrs. Steffen's US history course at Atlanta area high schools between 1992 and 2018. Presidential homes and libraries are down at the bottom of my bucket list, I will admit, but my heart fluttered wildly in anticipation of our week-long stay in Manhattan, where I planned to spend as much time as possible taking pictures in Central Park, the holy Lourdes of street photographers. Allyson felt no more enthusiasm for my park than I did for hers. Let's just say that many years ago my wife made it clear that she has better things to do with her time than watch me take pictures of total strangers.
The finalized itinerary had us flying into Hartford, Connecticut, where we would visit the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and its collection of top-drawer Hudson River School paintings. We also planned a side trip to the historic homes of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain, two of our favorite nineteenth-century novelists who continue to illuminate white racial attitudes of their day and ours. Next stop was Hyde Park, which would be our base of operations for exploring the Catskills. This region was not only ground zero of landscape painting but also where Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church, the greatest landscape painters of their time, made their homes which today operate as historic museums, art collections, environmental centers and busy tourist attractions. The trip would end in New York City, which boasted major landscape collections at the Met and the New York Historical Society, as well as the most extraordinary collection of urban public parks anywhere in the US. We would thereby come full circle in tracking the American landscape tradition, for these public spaces, epitomized by Central Park, are arguably the most lasting legacy of the Hudson River School of painting.
What is landscape? Let’s begin by specifying what it is not. The natural world untouched by human hand, or what is sometimes referred to as "first nature," is not landscape. Only when human beings begin to interact with the natural world and to shape it with their labor, both physical and mental, can we say that the enabling conditions for the production of landscape have arrived. The next time you gaze upon a landscape, any landscape, consider its multiple meanings and purposes. Ask yourself whether the thing before you is "second nature," built environment, aesthetic object, visual text, expression of social power. Or all of the above.
In societies organized around class, the resources available for the creation of landscape are allocated by dominant groups who control the social surplus. Wherever and whenever the capitalist mode of production takes hold, the creation and representation of landscape are governed by the logic of accumulation and the interests of those who own the means of production. Of particular importance is the role that landscape plays in engendering ideologies conducive to the perpetuation of capitalist class power.
In the United States, landscape first took representational form in the work of the Hudson River School of painting (1825-76). Borrowing heavily from European artistic conventions, American landscapists achieved local fame for their patriotic images in which nature and nation were fused in a virtuous unity. A few dissenting painters lamented what they saw as the conquest, commodification and desecration of nature in the race to cash in on the continent's resources. But the overwhelming majority of painters brushed aside such misgivings and joined in the celebration of capitalist development, territorial expansion and scientific progress. For landscape painters the bounty of North American nature was God's gift to His chosen people, guaranteeing that the social inequities and spiritual impoverishment besetting the Old World would never gain a foothold in the New World. These ideas formed the mythic core of American exceptionalism and the central preoccupation of the Hudson River School of painters.
It’s easy to understand why capitalists of the antebellum era were prepared to pay top dollar for skillfully-executed landscapes. Picturesque images trumpeting manifest destiny appealed to the Northeast’s established “aristocracy” and its up-and-coming bourgeois “nouveau riche,” both of whom saw in westward expansion unprecedented opportunities for profitmaking. These visual advertisements for “nature’s nation” served a crucial ideological function by casting an aura of legitimacy over the existing social order and its rapidly coalescing ruling class in the Northeast.
Anything that might throw a shadow over the grand narrative of benevolent nation-building under the guidance of Yankee capitalists was cropped out of the Hudson River School’s pictures. You’re unlikely to find in them any evidence of the bloody dispossession of indigenous peoples, the coerced labor of enslaved plantation workers, the super-exploitation of immigrant laborers, the structural racism of settler colonialism, the rapacious business practices of corporate capital or the imperial hubris of American exceptionalism. In the pictorial imagination of the Hudson River School, the violence accompanying capitalist expansion across the continent was washed away in the sepia tones of pastoral scenery and the other-worldly light of sublime mountains.