05/03/2026
I've been writing about 19th-century French Modern Art long enough to know the survey format has a ceiling.
So I'm adding something new to the Substack: longer, more personal dives into the movements and moments that shaped how we think about art, culture, and who gets to control the narrative. The first one goes back to where I grew up.
The Hudson River School is America's first globally recognized art movement. It's also one of the most effective visual propaganda campaigns in American history. I have complicated feelings about both of those things being simultaneously true — because I grew up in the Hudson Valley, under the exact quality of light Asher B. Durand spent his career trying to capture on canvas.
What I didn't know as a kid looking at those paintings on school trips: the "pristine wilderness" those painters documented wasn't wilderness. It was the aftermath of catastrophe. The continent didn't look empty because it was empty. It looked empty because the paintings needed it to.
The full piece is on Substack. It goes into the major players, the technical choices that were actually political choices, the indigenous history that got painted around, and why all of it feels uncomfortably familiar right now.
The Hudson River School
