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"Albert Bierstadt: Art & Enterprise." Brooklyn Museum, 200 Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238, in association with the National Gallery of Art, 4th Street and Constitution Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20565.
Traveling exhibition, Feb. 8-May G, 1991, at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; June 8-Sept. 1, 1991, at the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; and Nov. 3 1991-Feb. 17, 1992, at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. 14,584 sq. ft. at the Brooklyn Museum. Linda S. Ferber and Nancy K. Anderson, co-curators.
Albert Bierstadt: Art & Enterprise (New York: The Brooklyn Museum and Hudson Hills Press, 1991. 327 pp. Cloth, $75.00. Paper, $29.35.)
Albert Bierstadt was the artist who presented the Rocky Mountains to the American public at a time when artists were hoping for an American equivalent, in grandeur and sublimity, of the Swiss Alps and when public curiosity about the sprawling and apparently enormously wealthy continent that had already produced gold in California and silver in Nevada was at its zenith. His most likely rival, Frederick Church, Thomas Cole's only student and the heir apparent to the leadership of the American school of landscape painting, the Hudson River School, had followed Alexander von Humboldt's trail to South America, leaving the American Rockies to the twenty-nine-year-old Bierstadt, fresh from his study in Dusseldoff and avid to sketch the western scenery and study "the manners and customs of the Indians."
Following his 1859 trip to the West, Bierstadt unveiled a series of "great paintings" of the Rockies that were almost as popular with the press as they were with the public. He returned to the West in 1863 and again in 1871, remaining in California for more than two years on the later trip. Bierstadt made the Rocky Mountains synonymous with grandeur in the mind of the public. The 1991-1932 traveling exhibition of seventy-four paintings and prints, whose subjects are the Rockies, the Sierra Nevadas, and Yosemite, will not change that impression. Masterpieces such as The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak (1863), Mount Hood, Oregon (1865), Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie (1866), The Domes of Yosemite (1867), and Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California (1868), giant paintings all and intended to be exhibited alone, won him a great following. He showed...