Boldly going

At the Katonah Museum of Art through Jan. 24, you'll find one of the most moving and beautiful exhibits ever to come to Westchester County.

"Bold, Cautious, True: Walt Whitman and American Art of the Civil War Era" charts the parallel courses of poet Walt Whitman — whose collection "Leaves of Grass" is one of the seminal works in American literature — and the artists of his day, particularly the members of the Hudson River School.

That, at least, is the idea behind the show, a partnership between the Katonah Museum and curator Kevin Sharp, director of The Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, where "Bold, Cautious, True" originated. (The exhibit takes its title from a Walt Whitman poem that was in turn inspired by a soldier's epitaph.)

But every show is about both its ostensible theme and its subtext. In this sense, "Bold, Cautious, True" is less about parallel trajectories and more about the role time and place play in an artist's work and how we read that work in the context of history.

Why should this be so? Why should the realization of an exhibit differ from its concept? In this case, it's because the theme, centering on a writer, lends itself to words and thus to the first-rate companion book (Dixon Gallery). Whitman — captured at right in a handsome 1860 oil painting by Charles Hine — didn't write about art and he didn't collect it. But on paper, Sharp is able to connect the dots between a writer and artists who shared the same concerns.

"In a book, you can spread out and look at things in all their expansiveness," Dixon writes in an e-mail to The Arts Muse. "We took that same approach in the galleries of the Dixon....That wasn't possible at Katonah. But the show is not diminished by it. I love seeing the same exhibition--even my own--in two different venues and how differently the stories get told."

The perfect example of that expansiveness is the link Sharp makes in the catalog between Whitman's "Year of Meteors. (1859-60)," from "Leaves of Grass" and Frederic E. Church's painting "The Meteor of 1860" (circa 1860-61). The years 1859-60 were pivotal ones, marked by radical abolitionist John Brown's raid on the armory at Harpers Ferry, Va. and subsequent execution; the controversial state visit by the then Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII); the election of the divisive candidate Abraham Lincoln as president of the United States; and meteor showers in the Hudson Valley that became metaphors for something momentous. Indeed, in his poem, Whitman called 1859-60 the "brooding year," and it certainly appears that way in Church's canvas as a spray of yellow lights illumines a moody, inky landscape.

In the sedate blue galleries of the Katonah Museum, however, such text recedes and the paintings pop out at you, so much so that you begin to see them as a visual narrative of the time.

You can't help but read "Indian Rock" (1859), an exhilarating seascape by second-generation Hudson River School painter John Frederick Kensett, as the summer before the dark. Similarly, all of the show's images of sundown and the spare seasons — like "Sunset, Winter" (1862) by Southern sympathizer Louis Rémy Mignot, pictured here — become emblems of the twilight of an era. Meanwhile, paintings like Sanford R. Gifford's "An October Afternoon (Kauterskill Clove from Sunset Rock)" — painted in 1865, the last year of the war — suggest an attempt to carve out a separate peace.

The war took its toll on artists, who served in the armies of the Union (Gifford) and the Confederacy (William D. Washington), bore witness to the front lines (Winslow Homer) and saw their families torn apart (the portrait-painting Healys). Yet, like Whitman, who volunteered in Washington military hospitals for much of the war, these artists never forgot the suffering of others. The fugitive slave, the determined recruit (like the one portrayed below by Thomas Waterman Wood), the widow lost in grief — all were comforted by the artists' compassionate touch.

There is comfort, too, in the knowledge that in a time of greater turbulence than our own, Whitman and these artists kept creating.

"Bold, Cautious, True" is a lesson in how to boldly, cautiously, truly endure.

For more, log on to www.katonahmuseum.org or call 914-232-9555.

All images courtesy of the Katonah Museum of Art.