The Yosemite Valley presented American painters with a problem as much as an opportunity: its scale exceeded anything in the eastern landscape tradition, and its light, falling through granite walls and across the valley floor, behaved differently from the filtered, intimate light of the Catskills or the White Mountains. Bierstadt’s solution was essentially theatrical: he organized the light as a painter of historical subjects would organize the scene, directing the eye toward a luminous center and darkening the foreground to maximize the contrast. The first snowfall sharpens that contrast further, the white of the valley floor catching and returning the late light that the rock walls have already absorbed. This painting is paired with Mary Corse’s Untitled (Electric Light) in this exhibition, two works separated by a century of time yet both timeless in their grappling with the nature and effects of light, the one allowing light seemingly to emerge from the limits of pictorial space, the other with light its very medium.
Courtesy Birmingham Museum of Art. Collection of the Art Fund, Inc. at the Birmingham Museum of Art, AFI.5.2008
