David Thorpe: A Meeting of Friends

April 7 – August 13, 2006

W O R C E S T E R A R T M U S E U M

In his recent book, David Thorpe: A Rendezvous

with My Friends of Liberty, the London-based

artist shares with readers his sketches and

lyrics as well as a range of written and visual

sources of inspiration by revered visionaries,

from turn-of-the-century England (such as the

romantic and socialist reforms of C.R. Ashbee,

the Arts and Crafts philosophy and practice of

William Morris) to 20th-century America

(including the organic architecture of Bruce

Goff, and the cosmic music of Sun Ra).1

Chapter headings further convey the

individualist spirit and social underpinnings

of Thorpe’s enterprise: Escape into the

Wilderness; Independence and Transcendence;

Self-Sufficiency in the New Kingdom.

Conceptually, Thorpe’s work has often exploredconnections between English and Americanhistory. His preoccupation with colonists andsettlements, utopias and countercultures hasspawned an imaginary architecture, which hesets against a fictional wilderness. The epiccharacter yet exquisite detail of Thorpe’s intri-cately constructed cut-paper landscapes—acombination of the awe-inspiring and prag-matic—allies them to the 19th-centuryAmerican Sublime practiced by painters AlbertBeirstadt, Frederic Church, Thomas Cole, andMartin Johnson Heade among others.

The collision of culture and nature—the “meet-ing” of American civilization with the wilder-ness—was a major preoccupation of Americanlandscape painting throughout much of the 19thcentury. The term “sublime” attempted todescribe the imaginative response to the spec-

Pilgrims, 1999, paper cut out, 46 x 68 inches, Collection of Laura Steinberg and B. Nadal-Ginard. Photo courtesy Maureen Paley, London.

David Thorpe: A Meeting of FriendsApril 7 – August 13, 2006

tacular American landscape as well as thepotential danger and unknown. PhilosopherEdmund Burke, in 1757, contended that thesublime “is productive of the strongest emotionwhich the mind is capable of feeling,” and citeddarkness, obscurity, vastness, and magnificence(among other phenomena found in nature) asits prime causes.2 Writing at the end of the 18thcentury, Immanuel Kant countered that thesublime denoted the state of mind induced byapprehending such immensity or boundless-ness, and thus “…the sublime is not to be lookedfor in the things of nature, but in our own ideas.”3

A recent visit by Thorpe to the Worcester ArtMuseum to explore 19th century Americanlandscapes in the painting collection alsosparked his interest in images of colonialAmerica, especially those that depicted avision of the domestic (and a nostalgia for thecomforts of England) amidst the reality of aNew World wilderness. In this “meeting offriends” (Thorpe’s first solo museum exhibi-tion in the United States), Thorpe’s imagesare exhibited amidst a group of historicAmerican landscapes he selected from the Museum’s painting collection, offering viewers a compelling re-interpretation of the “visionary” and the “sublime” for the 21st century.

With their unbridled naturalism and earnesthand-built materiality, Thorpe’s collages,which sometimes include pieces of veneer,dried flowers, bark, leather, glass, pebbles orslate, are unique among contemporaryimages. Although trained in painting andphotography, Thorpe turned to this traditionaltechnique (one that is rarely seen in thecontext of art today and more often relegatedto areas of the decorative arts), in part, as astrategy to distance his work from the imme-diate history and conceptual “burden” ofmodernist painting.4 Thorpe’s practice is oneof painstaking labor, building and re-orderingfragments of materials, moving from thepaper-thin to those thicker and harder. The“workman-like” clarity and literalness thatcharacterize Thorpe’s images seem to relatedirectly to their conviction. “I’ve always beeninterested in creating my own world and itseems like common sense that if I’mconstructing a tree I should do it in bark…I’m always trying to find equivalencesbetween subject matter and the materials.”5

Keenly aware of the dynamics of space,Thorpe recently has moved beyond the two-dimensional collaged surface to includefreestanding elements (sculptures, architec-tural models, screens), objects that mightreside in the world of his collages.

House for Auto-Destiny, Imaginative Research, 2000, paper collage, 23 x 39 inches, Collection of Laura Steinberg and B. Nadal-Ginard.Photo courtesy Maureen Paley, London.

Thorpe’s intimately scaled images often depictdramatic, imaginary landscapes that are looselybased on representations of the AmericanWest—scenes of wilderness not experiencedfirsthand by Thorpe but inspired by the literaryand visual accounts of others. Mountain peaks,towering pines, and vast skies become thesettings for futuristic architectural dwellings—bunkers, watchtowers—that suggest loneliness,self-sufficiency, and solitude. These structuresrange from the sci-fi “rocket-ship” in Life isSplendid and the omniscient “eye” of House forAuto-Destiny, Imaginative Research, to the moreorganic and pre-industrial crafted buildings inGood People or Militant Lives. In Pilgrims, heli-copters close in on three hexagonal structuresoverhanging a cliff. Sometimes groups of tinyfigures stand nearby, dwarfed by the vastness of their surroundings. Similarly, Thorpe positionsus below and at a distance, where we are left tomarvel but also contemplate whether theapparent mystery spells peril or possibility.

In the Worcester installation, Thorpe’s strategicconfiguration of images and objects results in a

unique meeting between historic worlds andcontemporary ideas. It is a conception ofplace and an apprehension of time thatstretches both forward and back. Two 18thcentury overmantels (decorative panoramicviews), the anonymous Overmantel from theReverend Joseph Wheeler House and WinthropChandler’s Homestead of General TimothyRuggles, Hardwick, Massachusetts, show earlysettlers’ preference for civilized townscapesover depictions of the largely unexploredwilderness of the time.6 Thorpe identified with“the colonists’urge to build up communitiesduring the time of transition from colony tonation.”7 He responded to how their strongdesire to make this new world “home” notonly inspired the paintings’ quaint subjectsbut related directly to “the way that they [theovermantels] still functioned as furniture” likeother decorative elements created to embell-ish domestic interiors. To Thorpe’s eyes, theseearly images, with “their shallow or flatpicture planes seem to be products from theircommunity and about their community,” inother words, images from and about “a closedworld, with no sense of a world beyond them,a closed perspective.”

By comparison, in several 19th century paintings, Thorpe was fascinated by the waythese images “move beyond the comfort ofthe overmantels with their sense of being‘here’ to looking and asking ‘what liesahead?’” In Edward Hicks’ Peaceable Kingdom,Thorpe sees a “transitional painting, outlininggeneral themes of peace and a new home.”Ralph Earl’s Looking East from Denny Hill points“towards the sublime landscape tradition ofthe infinite horizon,” embracing explorationand the “idea that there is something beyondthe actual physical and maybe the intellectualboundaries of their settlements.” Civilizing thewilderness, Thorpe feels, is accomplishedpictorially in Sun Angel Hummingbirds on aBranch Near Two Orchids by Martin JohnsonHeade and Yosemite Falls by Albert Bierstadt.Their compositions not only “impose orderonto their subjects but turn the sublime intothe picturesque, removing the sense of fearthat the wilderness once had, leaving it openfor settlement.”

Life is Splendid, 2000, paper cut out, 31 x 21 inches,Collection of Laura Steinberg and B. Nadal-Ginard. Photo courtesy Maureen Paley, London.

Installed together, the historic paintings andThorpe’s image worlds present a complexpicture of the relations between the domesticand the wilderness, between the appeal of solitude and the need for community.Thorpe’s inclusion of his Arts and Crafts-inspired screen, handmade of painted glassand dark wood, extends pictorial connectionsbetween subject, scale, and time into thearchitectural environment of the gallery. Its horizontal expanse, signifying both intellectual boundary and physical barrier,strategically separates the Museum’s historic

landscapes from Thorpe’s own, while also“providing (importantly) points of entry and resistance, penetration and privacy.”8

With its earthy palette and mountain-likepeaks incorporated into a furniture-likeformat, Thorpe’s The Impenetrable Friendultimately domesticates any lingering nostalgia for a natural frontier, while itstranslucence embodies the artist’s insistentromanticism and optimistic belief that “wecan transcend all limitations.”9

Susan L. StoopsCurator of Contemporary Art

Militant Lives, 2002, mixed media collage, 14 x 14 inches, Private Collection, London. Photo courtesy Maureen Paley, London.

WO RC E ST E R A RT M U S E U M 55 Salisbury Street, Worcester, MA 0 1 6 0 9Wed.– Sun. 11–5, Thurs. 11–8, Sat. 10–5 508.799.4406 www.worcesterart.org Easy Access

The Impenetrable Friend, 2005, wood and painted glass, 2 panels: 94 x 114 inches each, courtesy theartist and 303 Gallery, New York. Photo courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.

Notes1. David Thorpe, David Thorpe: A Rendezvous With

My Friends of Liberty, ed. Christoph Keller(Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, 2004)

2. Andrew Wilton, “The Sublime in the Old Worldand the New,” American Sublime: LandscapePainting in the United States, 1820-1880(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 13.

3. Ibid., 13.

4. Laura Hoptman, Drawing Now: Eight Propositions(New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 71.

5. Artist in interview with Mark Sladen, 2002,www.kultureflash.net/archive/19/priview

6. Dagmar E. Reutlinger, The Colonial Epoch inAmerica (Worcester: Worcester Art Museum,1975), 28.

7. All of the artist’s remarks about the Museum’shistoric paintings are from unpublished corre-spondence with the author, January 2006.

8. Tom Morton, “Call of the Wild,” Frieze, Issue 88,January/February 2005, 85.

9. Artist statement, 2000, ArtBasel/Miami Beach2002 catalogue, 360.

About the Artist

David Thorpe was born in 1972 in London,where he continues to live and work. A gradu-ate of Goldsmiths University, Thorpe was thesubject of a solo “Art Now” project at TateBritain, London (2004). His work wasincluded in Ideal Worlds: New Romaticism inContemporary Art at the Schirn Kunsthalle,Frankfurt (2005); Drawing Now: EightPropositions at MOMA, New York (2002); and Twisted—Urban and Visionary Landscapesin Contemporary Painting at Van Abbemuseum,Eindhoven (2001). He is represented byMaureen Paley, London; 303 Gallery, NewYork; and Meyer Riegger, Karlsruhe.

This project is supported by the Don and Mary MelvilleContemporary Art Fund. Additional generous supportprovided by Marlene and David Persky, Linda and JohnNelson, Jean McDonough, and Worcester Magazine.

Acknowledgments: Special thanks to the lenders,Maureen Paley, and Mari Spirito

Cover image: Good People, detail, 2002, mixed media collage,29 x 39 inches, Collection of John A. Smith and Victoria A.Hughes. Photo courtesy Maureen Paley, London.

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