BARBARA ROSE
63
virginal landscape, undefiled by man 's presence and the destructiveness of
his acts, glorified instead by the supernatural powers of nature displaying
awesome light and color spectacles and forms grander than anything man or
his art had ever created . Unlike idyllic Claudian scenes from which their
Arcadian formula was derived, these landscapes did not give relatively epic
scale
to
nature by peopling hills and valleys with
staf/age
figures; they were
as unpopulated as the primeval American wilderness they depicted.
Recently a number of these paintings of the natural wonders of the
new world, which Americans had a great investment in believing would
supplant the man-made marvels of antiquity, was assembled in the
Museum of Modern Art exhibition titled "The Natural Paradise. " Accom-
lJ
panied by a catalogue with texts by Professors Robert Rosenblum, John
Wilmerding, and Barbara Novak, the exhibition marked a considerable
departure from the formalist, anti-American bias for which MOMA has
been known since it was founded in 1929 to promote the cause of modern
art, which, in the opinion of its founders, was mainly made in Paris.
Another important new direction for the museum: "The Natural Paradise"
is the first Museum of Modern Art exhibition based on an essentially
iconographical theme spanning more than one hundred years .
As it seemed to represent an effort at institutional self-criticism, one
expected "The Natural Paradise" to have been greeted with generous
acclaim; instead, it was roundly condemned by critics of such divergent
persuasions as Hilton Kramer, Harold Rosenberg, and Thomas B. Hess .
No doubt, there is a lot to say against a catalogue of multiple authorship
that lacks any unifYing point of view, as well as against inconsistent
selection of works that hardly seemed a major effort on the part of the
museum to master its vast resources in obtaining the best paintings, or even
those most successfully illustrating the thesis of the show. One could not
imagine the Museum of Modern Art treating an exhibition of French art of
any kind with so little responsibility. But it is understandable that the idea
of housing those very premodern and antimodernist styles that MOMA was
originally established to challenge could hardly inspire the museum to
consider "The Natural Paradise" a very serious occasion. Even taking into
consideration the lack of total commitment to an exhibition that defied the
very principles on which a Museum of Modern Art was established, the
exhibition was unnecessarily tacky, an uncritical jumble of acknowledged
masterpieces, third-rate salon paintings, and popular academic art.
The presence of so much minor and retardataire art can be written off
to
some extent by arguing that the exhibition had essentially an icono–
graphic focus ; nevertheless one suspects that MOMA is g uilty of conclud–
ing that if it is too confusing to look forward, it is just as well to look back
