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Published Oct. 9, 2009 at 3:48 p.m.
Landscape nostalgia, plus climate, the nature of community, and drawing show #21
...One of the great themes in America is nostalgia for the "good old days," which flame into being and then fade into the distance...

FADE AWAY: Joe Wardwell’s paintings are like the bastard children of swooning Hudson River School scenes and swaggering rock-album covers.

“Joe Wardwell: Die Young” LaMontagne Gallery, 555 East Second St, South Boston Through October 10. “Andrew Mowbray: Tempest Prognosticator” DeCordova Sculpture Park + Museum, 51 Sandy Pond Road, Lincoln Through January 3 “Brian Knep: Exempla” Tufts University Art Gallery, 40R Talbot Ave, Medford Through November 15 “Drawings that Work: 21st Drawing Show” Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont St, Boston Through October 25

One of the great themes in America is nostalgia for the "good old days," which flame into being and then fade into the distance. It's the anxiety that we've just missed the cool party, that paradise has been lost. And it's twinned with the idea that you better rush out and seize the day, because tomorrow it will all be over.

It's often been tied to nature. It courses through the American landscapes of the 19th-century Hudson River School painters, canvases filled with nostalgia for a wild, "pure" America that the artists fear is being eaten up by the Industrial Revolution. It percolates through 19th-century Transcendentalism, as when Henry David Thoreau dashes into the Concord woods in the 1850s to "learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

It's what F. Scott Fitzgerald is talking about at the end of The Great Gatsby when he writes that "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us." It's what Neil Young sings about: "It's better to burn out than fade away."

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