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Michener Art Museum’s moonlight show brings in rarely seen Hudson River School paintings, more

From Thomas Cole to the first footsteps on the Sea of Tranquility, the Doylestown museum's current show tracks how American artists have rendered the moon. There's a lot to see, and not enough guidance on how it all fits together.

Detail from Howard Pyle's "The Mermaid," (1910), at the Michener Art Museum.
Detail from Howard Pyle's "The Mermaid," (1910), at the Michener Art Museum.Read moreMichener Art Museum (custom credit)

It’s a cold winter night, possibly Christmas Eve. We see a solitary figure walking away from us, toward a goal that is not visible.

George Inness’ 1866 painting Winter Moonlight does not tell us anything about this nocturnal wanderer, his mission, or his destination. But we know he is not lost because there is a moon framed in the sky, the pupil of a giant eye that is seeing him home. And as painted moons often do, it is giving off an enormous amount of light, defining white path through the frosty meadow, clearer and easier to follow than a GPS.

The painting acknowledges darkness and uncertainty; the Civil War had just ended. It is still nighttime. Yet, though the sun is not shining, the less intense, often unreliable light of the moon shows a way.

This is one of two Inness works in the Michener Art Museum’s exhibition “The Color of the Moon: Lunar Painting in American Art,” on view through Sept. 8.

In the other, Spirit of the Night, painted 25 years later, the moon still commands the sky, but it sheds almost no light on an amorphous landscape. There is no wanderer here, or perhaps the viewer is the wanderer, trying to figure out what to make of the world, with the moon providing little guidance.

It’s no surprise that artists have always painted the moon. It’s one thing everyone on earth has in common. Besides, the moon is a great convenience for painters. It provides the source of illumination that lets them show night and all the things that happen in the dark.

“Color of the Moon,” which was organized by the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, N.Y., along with the Michener, concentrates just on American paintings, beginning with Thomas Cole and the Hudson River artists he inspired and ending exactly 50 years ago, when the Apollo XI astronauts left their footprints in the Sea of Tranquility.

One of its minor revelations is that Norman Rockwell had painted that first footstep two years earlier, in an illustration that appeared in Look magazine. It was a story board for history that was yet to be made.

Along the way, we see some of the country’s greatest artists — Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, Winslow Homer, Arthur Dove, Joseph Cornell — along with more obscure artists like Marguerite Thompson Zorach and Oscar Bluemner, who did some of the show’s more memorable works.

Because most of the paintings come from smaller museums and private collections, you are unlikely to have seen many of them before.

One of the chief cultural characteristics of the moon is its variability. Pop culture teaches us that moonlight in Vermont is quite different from moon over Miami, or the moon that hits the eye like a big pizza pie. It can drive us crazy when full, bring bad luck when new. Its character at any given moment is likely to be shaped by our location and our mood.

The show, at least in its current installation at the Michener, is frustrating and amorphous, less than the sum of its parts. The paintings are hung in sections marked “Romantic Moon,” “Moody Moon,” and “Pop Moon,” but there is no effort to explain these groupings, or even to mark off boundaries between them.

Each painting has a long, highly discursive, and often helpful label. But because the show gives little sense of the thinking behind it, the viewer simply sees one unrelated picture after another.

The catalog, edited by Laura Vookles and Bartholomew F. Bland, the show’s co-curators, offers a clue. Since the show begins with the Hudson River School, which is clearly an offshoot of romanticism, the earliest works shown here depict “the romantic moon.”

It can be a bright light in a dim world, as in Thomas Cole’s Landscape (Moonlight), which offers scarcely a hint of the scandalous goings-on in the Byron poem that is said to inspire it.

Or a full moon can shine, incongruously, during a brutal maritime storm, as in Storm Tossed Frigate (1845) by Thomas Chambers. In this wild scene, the moon lights the seascape in a way that it couldn’t possibly do in real life. The result is a painting that feels allegorical. This frigate is on a spiritual journey. The sea storms within.

The works the curators identify with “the moody moon” follow the Civil War to the turn of the 20th century. They are still romantic, but they were painted for the large, dark interiors of the Victorian era, and they try less to tell a story or present a moral than to evoke a feeling.

Sometimes in Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Good Shepherd (1902), the moon gets tangled up in the landscape and is little more than a glow behind some branches. There is the hint of a Bible story here, but the picture’s aim is to make us feel the night.

Edison changes everything

As the curators note in the book, the late 19th century brought a fundamental change in people’s relationship with the moon. Electric lights gradually became ubiquitous, and the moon’s light, whether silvery or golden, became less essential to everyday life.

Thus 20th-century artists who sought to look at the moon in a modern way were less inclined to show it as a light source than as an icon. In Moon Radiance and Ascension (both 1927), Bluemner paints a bull’s-eye-like moon that seems to be a source of energy that overwhelms the landscape. Charles Burchfield, in Moon and Queen Anne’s Lace (1960), creates a landscape of pulsing energy, with the moon as its focus.

Arthur Dove, in Moon (1935), shows the moon as an enormous eye atop a phallic stalk. If not for the title, we would not know what is being shown. By contrast, George Ault, in Old House, New Moon (1943), shows only the tiniest sliver of the moon in a dark, subtly spooky scene of an old building that seems to have no attachment to the land on which it sits.

There are a handful of works, by Roy Lichtenstein, Red Grooms, Rockwell, and others that might fit into the category of “pop moon,” but by this point the show has become utterly incoherent.

Suddenly, a bit more than half a century ago, reaching for the moon became a task for engineers, not dreamers. It became a place we all visited, at least vicariously. Are artists, like the rest of us, just taking the moon for granted?

ON EXHIBIT

The Color of the Moon: Lunar Painting in America

Through Sept 8 at Michener Art Museum, 138 S. Pine St., Doylestown.

Hours: Tues.-Fri. 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m.; Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sun. noon-5 p.m..

Tickets: Adults, $15; seniors, $13; college students, $8; children ages 6-18, $5 (under 6 free).

Information: 215-340-9800, MichenerArtMuseum.org.