Largely considered an American artist, Thomas Cole (1801-1848) of the Hudson River School of artists was actually born in Lancashire along with his also talented artist sister Sarah. Thomas painted landscapes and scenes from myth and history and has been criticised by Leftist academia for his Eurocentrism. One notices this pseudo-intelligentsia never accuse Negro painters of Afrocentrism in the same way: Afrocentrism is always to be celebrated as an intrinsic good and Eurocentrism as an intrinsic evil in the anti-White quasi-religious zealotry of what passes for academia. In fact, Cole also painted American Indians, but was always conscious of preserving their distinctiveness and otherness apart from White Europeans, although this is viewed neither as a positive nor a negative, but left merely as a statement of fact. The Leftist establishment have also considered this problematical, but it reveals their bigotry. If a white artist portrays them how they are, he is guilty of "othering"; if he portrays them as more civilized in a European sense, he is guilty of colonialism.
From our perspective, it is his frontier paintings and mythic/historic paintings that are most of interest. The Titan's Goblet (above) is as enigmatic as it is Eurocentric and has long been the subject of interpretation by critics. One could easily see it as a proto-surrealist painting; some Rightists have a problem appreciating modern art because of how modernism has been hijacked by the Left into postmodernism, but there are many great modernist works that are congruent with our philosophy. Breaking codes of realism allows for symbolic weight and meaning, and religious art has been using abstraction for centuries. The writer Theophilus Stringfellow Jr likened its trunk-like structure bearing an arborial microcosmic world to Yggdrasil, but the elements here are Greco-Roman, as evidenced in the title and by the classical ruins.
Cole's Pagan references are always classical, as with Prometheus Bound (above), and I certainly see the two paintings as very much linked, most obviously by the thematic Titans. In both paintings, the great stature of the Titans is evidenced, as is the culture handed down to us by the European giants of the past in all senses. Prometheus is the culture hero of antiquity, stealing the Gods' creative power (techne) of fire for mankind, enabling him to manipulate his environment and create civilizations. This then is the relevance of the goblet in which the microcosmic world was created, civilization flooding out like the water into the world at large and giving rise to the burgeoning coastal city below. Just as the civilization at the source decays and is ruined, so a new one is built even greater than the last.
This rebuilding anew further afield is the subject of frontier painting. Frontier paintings like The Hunter's Return (above) also display masculine and feminine heroic ideals against the backdrop of sublime untamed Nature, the figures dwarfed by the great forces around them as they eke out an existence away from civilization. European Man's civilizational mission, though, has been frought with the repetitive cycle of creation, opulence, decadence and decay. This is the subject of Cole's series The Course of Empire (below):
.
.
.
.
The series comprises five pictures painted between 1833 and 1836 that chart the course of an empire's lifespan: The Savage State, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, The Consumation of Empire, Destruction and Desolation and depicts the same geographical location over time, as one sees by the recurrence of the same cliff top in the background. The series took inspiration from Byron's Childe Harold, and Cole quoted the following lines in the newspaper advert for the series:
First freedom, then glory - when that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption....
This idea applies to those two greatest of European empires: the Roman and the British, the latter entering its state of consumation as the series was completed. It is now in the destruction phase. The burgeoning American empire was still largely in the pastoral state Cole favoured. It too is accelerating into destruction. One notices too how, at the height of consumption in the series, Nature is replaced by opulence, as is the case now. In the series, the corrupt consumerist society is destroyed by a more warlike one and Nature is restored. This has been true of internal European struggles, but it would not be true of the current destruction by the savages from outside of Europe, for the savages are now as consumerist as the corrupt, and are in themselves corrupt. Cole does not avoid racial themes though, and one sees Negro guards alongside the elephant, The Consumation of Empire becoming multiracial in its decadence.
Are these things necessarily cyclic and inevitable though and are we doomed by fate, as Spengler would have us believe? My view is that it need not be so. Indeed, time is linear as well as cyclic. As intimated, the present empires' destruction is markedly different to the ones of antiquity. European Man's techne has advanced beyond Cole's understanding, as has his consumption and corruption. But the three do not necessarily go hand in gloves. As I have stated before in contrast to Spengler, our techne may yet be our means of salvation and the means of conserving Nature. The fate of European Man is bound to the fate of Nature, for only we of all the races have considered Man's impact on the environment to such a degree. The elites play the game of providing false avenues and blind alleys for environmentalists to walk down, such as the climate change hysteria, the cult of veganism and the Extinction Rebellion movement, all the while keeping up corrupt multi-cultural empires of consumption, such as the European Union. Yet the destruction of consumption can equally be effected from within instead of from without. We must reject globalist empire building in favour of nationalism. And then Nature can be restored.
There is no longer a British empire and there hasnt been for a long time. Neither was there a British empire at the time of mass immigration into Britain. Sweden did not have an empire yet it has had more immigration than Britain. Nature itself has a repetitive cycle of 'creation, opulence, decadence and decay'and from that decay yet again...depending on those who have the will to power. The Rousseauists were fashionable at the time but those fictional idealised Adam and Eve 'primitive innocents' never existed in the first place. The inhabitants were the ones who in no time were building up chieftains who were planning further expansion. Credit where credit is due; better their achievements that all the mud hut decadence of the sylvan dreaming of the Ozymandists.
ReplyDeleteI have rewritten the last part to make the article clearer. The Commonwealth is essentially the British Empire rebranded, although there was certainly plenty of immigration into Britain from its colonies well before the rebranding, with the liberal bourgeoisie often setting on black servants. In 1918, the British government betrayed its returning soldiers by importing West Indians to take their jobs, resulting in the first race riots in Britain. There were also Indian MPs from the end of the 19th century sitting in the House of Commons. And let's not forget the Jewish presence from December 1655 onwards, with parts of London being overrun from the 1880s. If that last jibe is directed at me, I certainly do not dream of mud huts. Far from it; I dream of what could be achieved concentrating on our own destiny instead of some misguided 'white man's burden'.
Delete