George Inness' works highlighted by his striking views of nature

The Montclair Art Museum features decades of works from painter George Inness, showcasing the artistâs progression throughout the years. The early works of Inness emphasize the shapes and colors of nature. The earliest work included in the collection, âTwilight,â (1875), offers a view of the monastery outside Rome, with rich colors filling the sky during a sunset.

With “George Inness: Private Treasures,” this is the first time the museum has emptied out its George Inness Gallery, a gift of Frank and Katherine Martucci, since it was established in 2001.

The Martuccis have also contributed one of this show’s stunners, “Autumn in Montclair,” painted in the last year of the artist’s life and a riot of dusky reds and lake details — well, hints of detail, since at this point Inness’ tonalism was at its most abstract.

“I thought it was wonderful that so many people in Montclair had collected works from Inness’ late period, when he was most himself,” says MAM curator Gail Stavitsky, “especially since those are often his most expensive works.”

Inness was one of the first American artists to equal Europeans in value, and he took two extended trips to the continent, the first in 1851 and the second in the 1870s. He may have been introduced to the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, an 18th-century Swiss mystic, on his first trip, but by the second he had been completely converted by the Swedenborgian colony in Eagleswood Township in Ocean County. Swedenborgians (the philosopher William James and poet T.S. Eliot would later be sympathetic to their ideas) were, essentially, nature-worshippers — they thought the Christian god spoke to His people via nature, making vital precepts clear through the hills, trees, sunlight and stars.

The earliest paintings we have here are from that second, largely Italian, trip, like “Twilight” (1875), a view of a monastery outside Rome, from Douglas Ewertsen’s collection. Swedenborg believed the sun claimed its powers from the spiritual realm, and the rich color of the day’s end represented an elusive, transitional period when the sun was suspended between heaven and earth — a moment when both briefly kiss.

“After the Storm” (1877-78, from Angel and Curt Schade’s collection) has a similarly precise re-creation of atmospheric effects, here suspended between the glowering storm and the rainbow that announces its passing, with the added attraction of an exquisitely rendered apple tree behind the brilliantly white cow in the middle distance. Such fleeting effects as these paintings hold are no doubt inspired by actual places and their climates, but they illustrate certain concepts Swedenborg emphasized about our relationship to the world around us.

And the importance of those ideas to Inness’ painting, and through him to American art of the century after his death, is the Swedenborgian emphasis on nature as the outward sign of spiritual meaning — that shapes and colors have profound emotional meanings that go beyond their quotidian existence. Such ideas actually informed Inness’ practice. Like the abstract pioneers who first appeared three decades after his death, Inness saw the act of painting as revealing underlying forces that create our perceptions and form our understanding of life’s purpose itself.

That means each picture is a charged field in which color tries to capture the artist’s own spiritual nature, which is made clear not just by the subject he has chosen but by the way he has tried to re-create it in paint. This explains in part Inness’ own obsessive reworking of his canvasses, often over years, as he did with “Breaking Through the Clouds” (Inness worked on “Breaking” on and off for 11 years — it is from the only institutional lender in this 11-picture show, the Montclair Historical Society). Inness did not believe that any great artist ever truly finished a painting or a sculpture. It was in the act of making that the artist realized his own nature and told his greatest truths, which are as much revelations to himself as to his viewers.

That’s why Inness’ violent handling of paint, like we see in “Breaking,” really isn’t impressionist — not because Inness’ work is darker than impressionist work, but because it isn’t really an attempt to re-create optical effects of reality in a scientific way at all. The artist’s struggle is much more internal than that, and elusive.

“Autumn in Montclair” is an emblematic work because it is shaped by Inness’ increasingly generalized and overall approach to painting. The tonal harmonies among the saturated red-oranges and wispy blue-grays were created by “bathing” the whole picture in a wash of scarlet and then carefully wiping away the wet paint over the sky and lighter areas. This unified the painting, establishing the singular “tone” out of which all the objects in it arise. In its wispiness of detail, and its central significant form of a single tree — a structure Inness frequently invoked — we see Inness himself, general and unspecified, waving the lessons of God’s creation in every branch and root. It’s not the object but its tone that matters; the object will not survive, but who could forget the russet shade that all creation is made of?