George Inness and the Visionary Landscape

Rating:
Summary: Good but not Great.
Review: Hungry for everything I could get my hands on regarding the great Hudson River artist George Inness, I spotted this book in Borders bookstore and immediately bought it. It will be one that I visit from time to time, but not for the text. It does have several reproductions of works I had not seen previously, and they are printed excellently (albeit radically reduced in size) on very thick stock.

This is where the quality stops. One has to wonder why the size is so diminutive, especially for a color repro book. In several places, it takes a magnifying glass to view the works at their best. Why publishers skimp on size (and in many places, using black and white over color reproduction) is beyond me, and I would imagine that art lovers everywhere would agree.

Rather than give a history of the artist in full, Bell concentrates on the spiritual or religious history of the artist and does so with great detail - but includes possibly too much unecessary history of other luminaries of that era. Copious notes are in the addendum for those who love to pour over these types of things as well as list of works presented in the book (although I'm not sure why this is done in these types of books, especially when the same information is present by each piece. It's an outdated form that keeps existing long after it's usefullness.)

One rather bothersome point is how the work is not in chronological order. This is done to concentrate on several suppositions of Bells for which there is a notable lack of evidence.

One example of this is Bell's dissection of Inness' Lake Nemi work, where it is supposed that the painting is made up of triangles. I would argue that nearly any landscape could be sliced in such a manner, and there are no notes from the artist or any of his contemporaries to support this rather loose idea. Bell waxes prosaic and over-flowery on the picture descriptions throughout as well, making supposition her over-stated trademark.

If you are interested in the Swedenborgian school of thought, this is the book for you and while it may have been a great influence on Inness, Bell aims her focus on it to the point of dreariness.

I found the book rather dry to read but the imagery faithfully reproduced, although it would have been worth my money to see more and larger imagery with less text - unless the text was more about his life and techniques instead of his philosophy, regardless of the book's subtitle.

However, since there is so little of his work published and/or written about, I'll take what I can get and I am thankful this book was produced, however weak the result may be. At the very least, the paintings are there to speak for themselves, regardless of Bell's perfume-veiled mendacity.