Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University, 1974. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 113-125).

The Hudson River School was the first cohesive art movement in the United States of America. Using the uncultivated American landscape as their subject matter, members sought to convey a moral or religious message in their work. They believed that the main function of art should be to serve God. Stemming from its roots in theology and literature, this transcendental philosophy posited that one could be closer to God by experiencing his work. If God had created nature, than the vastness and power of nature are direct reflections of His power. While many artists of the Hudson River School used mountainous scenes of the American West in order to allow their viewers to glimpse the divine, one artist, John Frederick Kensett (1816-1872) deviated from the typical Hudson River School subject matter and favored eastern seascapes over the valleys of the west. Kensett's unique perspective led him to use the ocean as a spiritual device in a way that contributed greatly to the diversity of the Hudson River School. His asymmetrical, reduced compositions resulted from his taste for simplicity, and produced a purer, tranquil atmosphere, which allow for greater reflection. Kensett was able to remain true to his tastes rather than producing generic works typical of the Hudson River School, all the while continuing to accomplish the same level of transience as more prominent artists.

Jessica Langley's work examines animals and nature through various media and form, including watercolor and oil painting, digitally manipulated photography, both large and small scale drawing, and various combinations of each. The work has explored narrative and emotional aspects to more mystical and ecological interpretations. The current body of work settles into banal and familiar interactions with animals, or more specifically the house cat and its accoutrements. Each element of the body of work engages specific concepts that developed out of the American landscape tradition and assimilates the banal subjects into a formal framework. The subjects are monumentalized and romanticized in order to question, not the importance of the objects, but the relevance of the sublime.

My thesis is that there is an aesthetic dimension of nature that is metaphysically significant, qualitatively pluralistic, and artistically creative, and that this accounts for the sensuous complexity of experience, as well as the possibility of discovering new qualitative features about the world and expressing them in novel forms, as exemplified in art. I call the philosophy that endorses the reality of this dimension Transcendentalist Aesthetics. The term "Transcendentalist" recalls the philosophy of New England Transcendentalism with its core in Ralph Waldo Emerson, and which influenced the philosophical writings of Charles S. Peirce and the art of the nineteenth-century American landscape painters of the Hudson River School and Luminism. The primary overall goal is to present and argue for a Transcendentalist Aesthetics by making use of the philosophy of Emerson and Peirce, together with the writings and landscapes of the painters. More specifically, Emerson's claims about nature and art and the painters' representations of nature provide various poetic observations of nature that provide an empirical starting point concerning the rich aesthetic complexity of the world. This complexity finds a theoretical ground in Peirce's metaphysical cosmology, which presents a rationally coherent account of the greater structures and processes of the universe while possessing important aesthetic consequences for lived experience and art. The landscape paintings also have a role in that they are expressive of the Transcendentalist philosophy itself, serve as case studies for theoretical interpretation, and are concrete evidence that new qualitative features about the world may be discovered and realized in novel artistic ways.

The feeling of a narcotic cannot be put to words, just as the sensation one receives from her or his favorite artwork is impossible to record. Equally, both these delicacies of modern existence must be sought out. The user/viewer only gets a tiny taste and must therefore keep coming back for more. Utopia may be an unrealistic construction of culture, but I would posit the idea the both narcotics and art strive to give us just that – however tiny a taste. This paper addresses the intersections of visual art, drugs, anti-hero worship and contemporary representations of Romanticism throughout the American body politic.

The Great Plains are prevalent among the literature of the nineteenth century, but receive hardly a single representation among the landscapes of the Hudson River School. This is certainly surprising; the public was teeming with interest in the Midwest and yet the principal landscape painters who aimed to represent and idealize a burgeoning America offered hardly a glance past the Mississippi River. This geographical silence is the result of a tension between idealistic and empirical representations of the land, one echoed in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie, Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies, and Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Margaret Fuller’s more physical and intimate Transcendentalism unifies this tension in a manner that heralds the rise of the Luminists and the plains-scapes of Worthington Whittredge.