The text below originally appeared in The Olana Crayon, Vol XXXV 221, Fall/Winter 2005, pp. 10-11.

Looking Ahead: Olana as Modern Art

by David Kermani

Olana is the culmination of one of the great careers in American art and is increasingly acknowledged as a major achievement in its own right. Its total meaning and significance, however, have yet to be fully grasped. I believe that Frederic Church, in the twenty-some years during which he conceptualized and fabricated the “art environment” called Olana, was investigating issues that are now recognized as central to the development of our modern culture. His explorations resulted in a new art form that could change the way we experience art.

Many would describe Olana as an exotic-looking house, filled with interesting objects, on a handsomely landscaped property with fantastic views. But the powerful experience of Olana doesn’t stem just from the impression made by any one of its components; it is the result of dynamic interrelationships among the many facets that comprise the total environment envisioned by Church — the house and its contents; the constructed landscape of Church’s property, which provides a link between the architectural space and the great vistas; those vistas themselves; and also the light, the atmosphere, the dress of the landscape in various seasons, and so on. All these provide the vocabulary, the materials from which the complete work issues. The artist used architecture, the decorative and fine arts, and the natural world itself as component parts of his art environment, employing techniques found in collage and related art forms (assemblage, construction) to challenge conventional notions of depicting the real world.

The spectator, who becomes an active participant in this creative process, experiences these interacting elements over a period of time. The artist does not control many aspects of the artwork as it is being experienced: the weather, the season, the light, the vantage point or viewer’s focus. The picture plane and figure/ground relationships are in constant flux, partly because of Church’s daring use of Islamic architectural and decorative motifs, which transform the spatial experience (These qualities are hinted at in David Lee’s evocative photograph.) As the spectator moves through this environment, the scale of the work shifts, as does the relationship of individual details to the whole. Chance plays a large role in all of this. In a sense, nature itself becomes the painting, seen within a frame created by the artist.

Church's new art form is distinctly American, a democratic leveling of traditional artistic hierarchies, an experience that is constantly in a state of becoming, of renewing itself. It posits a new role in the creative process for the viewer, who experiences the work personally and directly, unmediated and not interpreted, but merely facilitated by the artist. Looked at in this way, Olana can be seen as a work of artistic genius in a revolutionary modern idiom, perhaps the first existential artwork.

These are a few of many ideas which should be examined in order to understand Olana’s significance as a total work of art. When we place Olana within a cultural context that includes the early twentieth century, we recognize Church’s active engagement with iconoclastic ideas of his time—and ours. And that could change the way art history is written. For example, Church’s use in Olana of concepts and techniques analogous to those of collage and related processes predates by several decades the acknowledged “invention” of those seminal art forms by Picasso, Braque and Schwitters in the early twentieth century. And Matisse’s description of his abandonment of painting in favor of other forms of expression that led to his cutouts and his designs for the chapel at Vence—among the triumphs of modern art—could have been written by Church himself around the time Matisse was born:

“[P]ainting seems to be finished for me now. … I’m for decoration. There I give everything I can—I put into it all the acquisitions of my life. In pictures, I can only go back over the same ground … but in design and decoration I have mastery, I’m sure of it.”

Picasso, Braque, Schwitters and Matisse doubtless knew nothing of Olana, but the radical ideas and artistic breakthroughs attributed to them and others had in fact been developed much earlier by Church in the creation of his American masterpiece.

The quotation is from Hilary Spurling, "Material World: Matisse, His Art and His Textiles," in the exhibition catalogue Matisse, His Art and His Textiles: The Fabric of Dreams (London and New York, 2005). The author is indebted to artist, educator and Church admirer Archie Rand, whose insightful comments in mid-2004 revealed how Olana’s concepts and processes are closely linked to those of modern and contemporary literary, musical and visual art forms. Those relationships were then elaborated more fully with Dara Wier during preparation of her graduate seminar on aesthetics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (Fall 2004), and with Jennifer Raab (mid-2005), whose in-progress doctoral dissertation at Yale is about Frederic Church. Angus Fletcher’s astonishingly original A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination (Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press, 2004) has been essential to the development of these ideas.

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