Anyone who's lived through this winter in New England has had their fill of icy tundra and the threat of frostbite. But if you haven't yet made it to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem for "To the Ends of the Earth, Painting the Polar Landscape," you should suck it up and go, as I did Saturday. Although the exhibit focuses on a narrow subject, there are genuinely striking works that you're not likely to have seen before. The show closes March 1.
More than 50 paintings depicting both the Arctic and the Antarctic from the 1800s through the first half of the 1900s are here. The PEM has organized the show into three sections, roughly approximately the artists' different perspectives. I'd offer a slightly different classification: Pictures that show how magnificent the polar environment can be; pictures that show how terrifying it can be, especially for sailors whose vessels are captured by the ice; and pictures that show how strange it is, almost lunar in its distance from our world. All three strains are present in Richard Brydges Beechey's 1842 "HMS Erebus Passing through the Chain of Bergs," which shows the aftermath of a collision between two ships at night, signal lanterns dramatically lighting just a portion of the giant ice floes that loom around them. It's a beautiful nightmare vision.
Early works by Frederic Edwin Church and frequent polar traveler William Bradford offer the kind of grand pictorial vision favored by the great landscape painters of the 19th century. George Marston accompanied Ernest Shackleton on both of his polar trips, and while there's nothing from the Endurance here, there is the terrifying man-vs.-ice battlefield panorama of "Sealers Crushed By Icebergs" and the beautiful "Lights of the Aurora," which the museum says has not been publicly displayed in at least 100 years.
The show's modern side reaches into the 1930s, with several works by Rockwell Kent and Lawren S. Harris that nod to abstraction in depicting mountain landscapes and the puzzle shapes of icebergs. And painter David Abbey Paige went along to Antarctica with Admiral Byrd and returned with pastels that balance a kind of soft-edged, Monet-esque beauty with a real sense of the weirdness of the environment, with sundogs and halos and an "Unusual cloud formation hiding the sun."
Exhibit details: www.pem.org.
Top: Iceberg, 1891, Frederic Edwin Church (American), 20 x 30 inches, Carnegie Museum of Art. Bottom: May, North Greenland, 1935-37, Rockwell Kent, oil on canvas, 44 x 55 inches, Collection of Deborah and Ed Shein, by permission of the Plattsburgh State Art Museum, Plattsburgh College Foundation, Rockwell Kent Collection, bequest of Sally Kent Gorton.
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