There have been several less than favorable reviews published about Graydon Parrish’s commemorative mural The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy: September 11, 2001, recently installed at the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut. A history painting—particularly a history painting of this size and significance, the first major work commissioned in a century—is not created in a vacuum. It raises issues that cross over from the aesthetic into the political and social. The fallout is revealing. The New York Times, which usually takes a liberal position, compared it to a work by the “hack” William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905).¹ The New Criterion, which is conservative, reads it as “ideologically driven conceptual art requiring extensive wall labels, meaningful only to the initiated.”² These same observations could have been written about Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii (1784). Indeed, that famous painting—which helped ignite the fires of the French Revolution in 1789 and has been an inspiration for Parrish—required a printed text twice as comprehensive as that used to explain the iconography of Parrish’s Cycle of Terror. David, however, is the superior artist, and text is no longer important to the uninitiated viewer in determining aesthetic quality. Two hundred years from now, where will Parrish’s painting rank? David’s masterpiece hangs in the Louvre.

Recent exhibitions of feminist art have been more notable for their political concerns than their aesthetic quality. The art establishment’s historical biases are a legitimate field of inquiry, and content may distinguish the male gaze from the female gaze, but formal aesthetic qualities are universal, even genderless, in their appeal. The figurative paintings by Katherine Doyle recently shown at Gallery Henoch are clearly feminine because of their autobiographical references, but their visual appeal is universal.

“Real Time—Focus: Redefining the Painted Landscape,” a summer group exhibition at Bernarducci Meisel Gallery in New York City, acknowledged the contemporary influence of urban space. While we often associate the landscape genre with the rural and sublime scenery popularized by Constable, Turner and the Hudson River School in the nineteenth century, most people today perceive nature primarily as shaped by the built environment. Curated by artists Paul Caranicas and Emma Tapley, the show juxtaposed recent works with paintings by established artists of the last few decades. Rackstraw Downes was a practicing realist when the style was unfashionable. His 80th Street and Broadway (1976–77) takes an unsentimental look at a relatively open intersection on a rainy day. Overall grey light gives everything a tonalist sheen, brightened by the occasional red accent of a brick tenement or a neon sign. The high-angle vantage point reveals the geometry of Manhattan’s gridded streets, here seen in the compositionally strong diagonal of the cross street. The neat shorthand figures—legs, the oval of an umbrella, a shadow on a rain-slicked pavement—are effective in a near-Photorealist riff on a fin-de-siècle Parisian street scene. Carancias’s New York City, Harbor I (2007) is a study in empty space. The vast center of the composition is a clear sky, gradually fading from blue at the top to almost white at the horizon. The Statue of Liberty is a tiny shape in the distance, and a few boxy skyscrapers rise on the right. The most dramatic element, however, is a dark frame, on the left and across the top, of scaffolding.

Sandra Dawson’s mixed-media paintings, which were on view this summer at Byron Roche Gallery in Chicago, are about layering. She builds up her surfaces from very thin layers of sheet rock on panel, covered by skins of acrylic and oil paint, then etches with pencil. Sometimes she scrapes the surface for a weathered look or adds glitter, sequins, lace or fragments of letters. The images look like walls encountered in an old house, with fresh pictures pasted over shadows of previous generations of pattern. History and memory linger in these palimpsests. In The Dreamer and the Dream (2007) an illusionistically painted woman in a black slip curls up under an arc of green griffons—flat, drawn design elements. The vignette is nested within three old-fashioned borders, and the entire composition is kept off-kilter by the addition of a right-hand panel with floral arabesques and many-petaled haloes on a faded gold ground. Dawson’s training as a printmaker is obvious in this intense attention to texture. She frequently incorporates text into her images, as in The Sky and the Sand (2007). The petal-halo stamps from The Dreamer and the Dream reappear, clustered at the edges of the composition. The sky here is a distressed field of cryptic phrases—“the storm and the calm, the sun and the sky, the tears and the night, the breath and the life”—in stenciled capital letters. This strangely prophetic writing on the wall is laid, with varying degrees of definition, over simplified outlines of a Venus de Milo cartoon. A curved predella of panels with childlike nudes crosses the bottom of the image. The rich, weathered colors create the patina of an old and precious manuscript.

In late spring the Newington-Cropsey Foundation Gallery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, presented a selection of landscapes and figure paintings by Kathi Coyle. Coyle works slowly, building up thin layers of oil paint over time. She emphasizes the duration of the process in achieving the results she wants: “Unlike a photograph, which captures one moment in time, my paintings are a composite of many moments, conveying a sense of timelessness, emotional depth and thoughtfulness.” All the landscapes on view used water as a focal point, with iced-over streams a favorite motif. The strongest of these compositions, Klein Kill Reflections (2006), deployed an elongated frieze of bare tree trunks mirrored in a half-thawed meandering stretch of water. The way the top edge of the canvas truncates the woods in the distance is formally effective, and the chill blue-grey light conveys the winter hush. Klein Kill Reflections is very wide, 30-by-60 inches, and this proportion works very well for Coyle.

The difference between incorporating selected humanities courses into a visual arts curriculum (whether at art schools, colleges or universities) and a truly interdisciplinary curriculum is an issue that is coming to the fore. Are the humanities to remain a minor adjunct to a major in fine art? Is art education essential to a well-rounded major in the humanities?

Bo Bartlett (b. 1955) is a successful contemporary realist, often compared to such all-American no-nonsense painters as Edward Hopper, Thomas Eakins and Andew Wyeth. Wyeth, in fact, is a mentor and collector of Bartlett’s work. But Bartlett has an idiosyncratic wit all his own, on display in an early summer show of recent paintings at David Klein Gallery in Birmingham, Michigan. He explains his commitment to verisimilitude in a series of paradoxes: “The realist painter who is painting the ‘real’ world is perhaps more in touch with the inner world than the conceptualist who is addressing issues of the intellect, the outer world…I find my ‘inner’ purpose by going out into the world, and I find my ‘outer’ purpose by going into the studio.”

Recent exhibitions of feminist art have been more notable for their political concerns than their aesthetic quality. The art establishment’s historical biases are a legitimate field of inquiry, and content may distinguish the male gaze from the female gaze, but formal aesthetic qualities are universal, even genderless, in their appeal. The figurative paintings by Katherine Doyle recently shown at Gallery Henoch are clearly feminine because of their autobiographical references, but their visual appeal is universal.

In the first volume of America’s Rome, a magisterial overview of the Eternal City’s sway over New World imaginations, William Vance writes: “The function of a museum of art, not as a school for the artist but as a special place set apart for the experience and worship of Beauty by the ordinary man or woman, is something that could be realized by Americans in the nineteenth century only through their visits to London, Paris, Munich, Florence, Naples and—especially—Rome.” Generations of travelers have tried to describe how art, architecture and ambiance come together in, for example, Rome’s Capitoline Museums, especially in the room where two touchstone sculptures are displayed—the Dying Gaul (a marble Roman copy of a Pergamon bronze) and the Satyr Resting (a replica of an original by Praxiteles and the inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Marble Faun, published in 1860). In The Portrait of a Lady (1881) Henry James places his heroine in that room, surrounded by statues: “The Roman air is an exquisite medium…The golden sunshine mingles with them, the deep stillness of the past, so vivid yet…seems to throw a solemn spell…The dark red walls of the room threw them into relief; the polished marble floor reflected their beauty.” The Metropolitan Museum was born of that era and the American yearning for culture. Now New York has its own magical space for the contemplation of antiquities, with the long-awaited completion of the galleries for classical art. The heart of the new Roman galleries is the Leon Levy and Shelby White Court, a barrel-vaulted central atrium flooded with natural light that seems able to absorb multitudes of tourists, school groups, sketchers and city dwellers with unforced grace. There is, above all, a sense of continuity: in the flow of the architectural spaces, in the historical clarity with which the perennial relevance of the classical heritage is maintained, in the way the now-completed southernmost wing fulfills the teleology of the museum.