In this series of paintings and prints, Birk depicted all of California’s thirty-three state prisons, using the symbolic rhetoric of nineteenth-century landscape artists such as Bierstadt to address the harsh socioeconomic and environmental realities of life in the so-called “Golden State.” Birk’s three-year-long research process for the Prisonation series led him to travel across California, visiting as many of the 33 state prisons as possible-he made it to all but two-and making sketches and taking “sneaky snapshots (using those old cardboard cameras!)” that he would then bring back to his studio. Such paintings effectively served as advertisements encouraging westward migration and tourism to California.įog over San Quentin State Prison, San Quentin, California belongs to Birk’s 2001 series Prisonation: Visions of California in the 21st Century. Bierstadt painted California Spring in his New York studio in 1875, based on sketches he completed during his 1871 trip to San Francisco, and he exhibited the painting to great acclaim to curious publics in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia 1. Silhouetted in the distance against a radiant sky, the dome of the Sacramento State Capitol-completed a year before Bierstadt finished the painting-symbolically underscores the region’s importance. Replete with cattle grazing peacefully in verdant pastures near the Sacramento River, California Spring presents a romanticized vision of life in the Central Valley, disregarding its harsh realities such as recurrent droughts, flooding, and a landscape depleted by overgrazing. Such artistic boosterism is evident in paintings like Bierstadt’s California Spring (1875), on view in Gallery 26 at the de Young. In the paintings, prints, and travel brochures of the era, California typically was represented as a New World Garden of Eden ripe for future settlement. In the nineteenth century, fueled by the concept of Manifest Destiny, the United States entered a period of aggressive westward territorial expansion. Artists associated with the Hudson River School, such as Thomas Cole and, later, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church, used idealized views of the American landscape to symbolize the nation’s aspirations and progress. 1869–1872), a coastal New England scene by the second-generation Hudson River School painter John Frederick Kensett. Although this arresting view of a rocky shore and serene waters readily evokes the picturesque landscapes of Northern California, such as those in nearby Marin County, Birk based the composition of Fog over San Quentin State Prison, San Quentin, California on Beach at Beverly (ca.
Given the striking visual similarity of the work to many of the nineteenth-century American landscapes exhibited in nearby Gallery 26, viewers may be surprised to learn that the painting was created in the twenty-first century by the contemporary artist Sandow Birk (b. In Gallery 27 of the de Young museum, visitors will encounter a large-scale and luminous coastal scene.
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