Opening Reception 10 March 2011

Installation Photos of The Stations Project

A Vision of the American Sublime
by Harold Bloom

Gregory Botts begins his statement by quoting from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself; "I am the man, I suffered, I was there." He rightly associates Whitman with his other poetic hero, Wallace Stevens, and cites the later poet's vision of the American Sublime. 

Whitman himself throughout his poetry sees himself as an American Christ and affirms that he hoped to write a new Bible for Americans. I myself in my endless broodings on what I have learned to call the American Religion have thought of Whitman together with the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith as the two grand American instances of religion-making. Botts intuitively understands that Whitman sees himself as replacing Achilles, Odysseus, and Aeneas, while not so much displacing Christ as Americanizing him.

Though Botts as a painter derives more immediately from the generation of Jackson Pollock, his ultimate precursors are Piero della Francesca, Giotto and Mantegna. His Stations of the Cross for the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine are profoundly Whitmanian but also return us to something of the hard power of the great Italian masters of fresco. 

Botts has always been a painter inspired by the wind, the sun, and the four seasons. His imagery of clouds, leaves, and waves derives from the tradition that passes from Shelley to Whitman and then on to Wallace Stevens. In his visions of the Stations of the Cross the fused figure of Walt Whitman and Jesus is seen as ascending much more than as falling. The imagery of Botts's paintings is never as abstract as first it seems to be. Whitman's obsession with reeds and all the other growth at the water-edge is amplified throughout Botts. 

Walt Whitman invented the poetic genre we can call the Shore Ode, which was developed powerfully by so many he influenced. Among these I would cite T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, A.R. Ammons, Amy Clampitt and many other strong poets. It seems to me that Botts achieves a visual sibling to the American Shore Ode in his Stations. 

If you frame his Stations project by the Whitmanian tradition in American poetry, a considerable insight into his method and aim becomes available. Whitman as the prophet of the American Religion refuses to acknowledge that we live in a fallen universe, or perhaps we can say that for him as for the ancient Gnostics the Creation and the Fall are the same event. Like the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, and like Whitman's master, Ralph Waldo Emerson, this poetic vision explicitly declares that what is best and oldest in us goes back to before the Creation-Fall. 

Throughout the Stations as created by Botts, I am made aware of the tragic undersong that triumphs poetically in Whitman's great dirges, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking and the even darker As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life. The severe, hard lines favored by Botts go beyond his heritage of Action painting and enter an area for which we as yet have few defining terms. One of his closer ancestors, Barnett Newman, is undoubtedly an influence upon Botts here. 

Hart Crane, who in many respects was the culmination of the Whitmanian tradition, and who seems to me our major unchurched poet of the American Religion, based his epic The Bridge on Whitman's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. Botts himself is a deep reader of Hart Crane as of Emerson, Whitman, and Stevens. He is haunted by Walt's identification with Christ in section 38 of Song of Myself:

That I could forget the mockers and insults!
That I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of the bludgeons and hammers!
That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and bloody crowning.

I remember now,
I resume the overstaid fraction,
The grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it, or to any graves,
Corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me.

I troop forth replenish'd with supreme power, one of an average unending procession,
Inland and sea-coast we go, and pass all boundary lines,
Our swift ordinances on their way over the whole earth,
The blossoms we wear in our hats the growth of thousands of years. 

Whitman's triumphant resurrection flowers into a vast procession of Americans. Walt's power was caught forever in a magnificent tribute by Wallace Stevens:

In the far South the sun of autumn is passing
Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.
He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,
The worlds that were and will be, death and day.
Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.
His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.

This heroic singer is at once a new Moses and a new Aaron, and both fuse as an American Christ. Having known Botts for many years, I am aware that this chant is always in his mind and heart. I am immensely moved by his Stations of the Cross because they culminate much in his own career as a celebrator of the American Sublime. 

Installed February 2011