Kindred spirits painting6/12/2023 The museum will, as such institutions do, attempt to associate the Wal-Mart billionairess with high culture, American history, beautifully crafted objects - a host of ideals and pleasures a long way from what you find inside the blank, slabby box of a Wal-Mart. MAYBE THE problem is that the Crystal Bridges museum seems like a false front for Wal-Mart, a made-in-America handicrafted artifact of idealism for a corporation that is none of the above. So now a portrait of antislavery and wilderness advocates belongs to a woman whose profits came from degrading working conditions and ravaging the North American landscape. It was never a commodity exchanged between strangers until the library, claiming financial need, put it up for sale last year. Bryant left it to his daughter, Julia, who gave it in 1904 to what became the New York Public Library. “Kindred Spirits” was commissioned by the wealthy dry-goods merchant Jonathan Sturges as a gift for Bryant in commemoration of his beautiful eulogy for Cole, who died suddenly in 1848. He was an early supporter of Abraham Lincoln and of the projects that resulted in New York’s Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum - of a democratic urban culture that believed in the uplifting power of nature and of free access. He defended striking tailors in 1836, long before there was a union movement, and was ever after a champion of freedom and human rights, turning his newspaper into an antislavery mouthpiece. In the work of Cole, Durand and Bryant, as in the writing of Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, you can see an emerging belief that the love of nature, beauty, truth and freedom are naturally allied, a romantic vision that still lingers as one of the most idealistic versions of what it means to be an American.Ĭole was almost the first American painter to see the possibilities in American landscapes, to see that meaning could grow in a place not yet full of ruins and historical associations, and so he became an advocate for wilderness nearly half a century before California’s John Muir took up the calling.īryant had gained a reputation as a poet before he became editor-in-chief of the New York Evening Post. The painting is about friendship freely given, including a sense of friendship, even passion, for the American landscape itself. The two stand on a projecting rock above a cataract in the Catskills, bathed like all the trees and air around them in golden light. “Kindred Spirits” portrays Durand’s friend, the great landscape painter Thomas Cole, with his friend, the poet and editor William Cullen Bryant. But something about Wal-Mart and “Kindred Spirits” is worse, perhaps because, more than many works of art, Durand’s painting is a touchstone for a set of American ideals that Wal-Mart has been savaging. The superb Rockefeller folk art collections in several American museums don’t include paintings of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre of miners in Colorado, carried out by Rockefeller goons, and the J. Art patronage has always been a kind of money-laundering, a pretty public face for fortunes made in uglier ways. The trouble lies in what the painting means and what Walton and her $18 billion mean. It might not even be, as points out, that the average Wal-Mart cashier makes $7.92 an hour and, because Wal-Mart likes to keep people on less than full-time schedules, works only 29 hours a week for an annual income of $11,948 - so a Wal-Mart cashier would have to work a little under 3,000 years to earn the price of the painting. After all, people in the middle of the country should get to see some good art too. It isn’t that Walton will eventually stick this talisman of New York cultural life and a lot of other old American paintings in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Walton family museum she’s building in Bentonville, Ark., the site of Wal-Mart’s corporate headquarters. It isn’t that Walton - the world’s richest woman and thirteenth-richest person (with a net worth of $18 billion, according to Forbes magazine) - scooped the painting out from under the National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which had banded together to try to keep it in a public collection when the New York Public Library decided to sell it off. Durand’s 1849 painting “Kindred Spirits” last year she got the state of Arkansas to pass legislation specifically to save her taxes - in this case, about $3 million on a purchase of $35 million. IT ISN’T THAT when Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton purchased Asher B.
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