Fallen Bierstadt

2007

Valerie Hegarty’s Fallen Bierstadt is inspired by the work of the renowned nineteenth-century American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt (whose monumental A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie hangs to the right). Hegarty was drawn to the way nineteenth-century landscape artists depicted vast expanses of wilderness as an expression of “Manifest Destiny,” the notion that the United States was divinely entitled to expand across the entire North American continent. In Fallen Bierstadt the “canvas” appears to decay, as if affected by the ravages of nature. The title seems to refer both to the physical appearance of the piece and to the end of a heroic tradition of landscape painting.