With the International Polar Year (March 2007–March 2008) and centennial celebrations of the Robert E. Peary and Robert R. Scott expeditions, we are experiencing a new age of polar exploration. The Arctic and Antarctica are now at the center of global concerns about energy and the environment, with visual images—photographs of submersible vessels planting a Russian flag on the North Pole seabed and polar bears floating on ever decreasing ice floes—serving as powerful icons. Contemporary environmental and Native artists have also turned to this region, as documented in two recent exhibitions at the Peabody Essex Museum and the Portland Museum of Art—Polar Attractions and Polar Dispatches, respectively—that serve as counterparts to the historical polar landscapes on view in To the Ends of the Earth: Painting the Polar Landscape and The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration in American Culture.

To the Ends of the Earth features more than fifty polar landscapes from Britain, the United States, Scandinavia, and Canada, beginning with John Webber’s 1779 drawing HMS “Discovery” and HMS “Resolution” and ending with Rockwell Kent’s and Lawren Harris’s modernist canvases, with John Paul Caponigro’s 2007 Antarctica photograph the sole contemporary meditation. While scholars have studied polar landscapes by individual artists, this exhibition validates the subject as an important genre in Western art. It is part of the Peabody Essex Museum’s efforts to broaden its emphasis on trade and technology in maritime art and examine what exhibition organizers describe in the accompanying exhibition catalogue as the “art of painting landscapes” (2). The visual power of the paintings, prints, and photographs is the exhibition’s strength. The selected works demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between the Romantic sublime and this region’s appeal as well as a polar aesthetic and iconography—the dazzling northern light (and the abysmal darkness); crisp forms and magical colors; minute human figures in a vast, seemingly empty environment; and fragile ships entrapped in ice. To the Ends of the Earth’s emphasis on the “art of painting,” however, leaves critical parts of the polar landscape tradition unexplored.

The first of three thematic sections and galleries, Theater of Heroism presents art associated with the “adventures of polar explorers.” Frederic E. Church’s Aurora Borealis (1865), based on sketches by the artist’s friend and explorer Captain Isaac Israel Hayes, hangs as the centerpiece, while other paintings, such as Richard Brydges Beechey’s HMS “Erebus” Passing through the Chain of Bergs (1842), stage the difficulties and dangers of polar voyages. This art is displayed as theater and drama, yet the polar landscape of the past, like that of the present, was not only a locale of profound beauty but a site of nationalist battles, militarized and commercialized. On view in this section, William Bradford’s Ice Dwellers Watching the Invaders (ca. 1875) pictures the icy Labrador coast as a site of imperialist encounter, with the seals and polar bears as the sole inhabitants of the region. The absence of human dwellers, of indigenous people, here and in other works presents the Arctic as an empty terrain whose natural resources were there for the taking by Euro-American explorers and entrepreneurs. The exhibition wall texts are silent on how such paintings supported the ideology of exploration and economic expansion.

Native/First Nation representations of the polar region are absent from the exhibition as are representations of the native people, who only appear in selected works, such as A. Y. Jackson’s Summer, Pangnirtung, Baffin Island (ca. 1930) in the second gallery. Organized around the theme of Conscientious Witness, this section addresses the production of polar landscape art. Curator Samuel Scott argues that from the 1830s through the 1930s the public expected that polar art was based on the artist’s direct experience; thus, visual artists made the requisite pilgrimages to the polar regions and produced first-hand accounts in diverse media—from Bradford’s The Arctic Regions: Illustrated with Photographs Taken on an Art Expedition to Greenland (1873) to Harris’s film from his 1930 trip to the Davis Strait region. This section instructively examines the transformation of such on-site records into studio paintings in New York or Toronto. It doesn’t, however, investigate how these landscapes, even those produced in the polar regions, were mediated by aesthetic conventions, cultural values, and patrons’ desires: in short, we as viewers are supposed to accept their transparency.

The privileging of the aesthetic over the cultural governs the final section, Terrible Majesty, which showcases Bradford, Church, Kent, and Harris. Here, the wall text describes the polar regions as “sites of spiritual pilgrimage, where [artists] saw God’s elemental hand at work.” This mystical space is aptly represented by Church’s Iceberg (1891), George Curtis’s Polar Sea (Cathedral) (1867), and Harris’s and Kent’s spare modernist visions, yet some works deal more with the worldly than the otherworldly. Bradford’s Sealers Crushed by Icebergs (1866), in particular, reminds viewers that commerce, in the form of whaling and sealing fleets, had made inroads into the Arctic, thereby industrializing this locale. In addition, this painting, which toured the United States and England in 1866–67 and affirmed Bradford’s reputation as the foremost Arctic artist, demonstrates that polar landscape paintings were also part of an art industry. The German-Norwegian painter Franz Wilhelm Schiertz’s View from Norskøyenen on Spitsbergen (1879) addresses another cultural function of these landscapes: just as Canadian artists painted the northern wilderness as part of an evolving nationalism, northern Europeans turned to the Arctic as a nationalist domain, a space of purity. Scholars have established the relation of both North American and European landscape painting to commerce and nationalism, and polar landscape painting calls for a similar analysis of its plural meanings and contexts.

The exhibition catalogue includes short essays by curator Scott, historian Russell A. Potter (author of Arctic Spectacles: The Frozen North in Visual Culture, 1818–1875, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), and Caponigro. Scott recapitulates the major exhibition themes in his comments, while Potter turns to the circulation of polar landscapes (as panoramas, for example) in popular culture. As an artist who has traveled to Antarctica, Caponigro offers his personal response to the continent—its lyricism and mysticism, its biotic diversity and powerful visual qualities. For him, Antarctica is a space “not remote, not separate,” especially in terms of contemporary environmental concerns: “It affects us and we affect it” (22).

Both the circulation of images and the interconnectedness of the Arctic and the United States are central organizing principles for The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration in American Culture, curated by Michael F. Robinson, historian and author of a book of the same title (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). The exhibition brings together thirty-five maps, journals, geography books, and newspaper and magazine illustrations drawn from the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education at the University of Southern Maine and other Maine collections; they are organized around the themes of Mapping the Arctic, The Franklin Search, The Art of Exploration, Triumph and Tragedy, and The Pearys. The curator argues that even though the Arctic was not a U.S. territory it was a nationalist landscape enacting issues critical to U.S. culture at the time—debates about the values of science and progress, and about national, racial, and gender identity. Robert Peary is one subject through which he explores these ideas. The photograph of Peary in the New Orleans Daily Picayune with the caption, “The American Explorer Who Nailed the Stars and Stripes to the North Pole,” visualizes how nationalism and Arctic exploration went hand in hand; it also reveals the superior and singular role in reaching the Pole that the press at the time assigned to Peary and other Euro-Americans. By contrast, the wall text introducing the Pearys de-mythologizes the explorer by addressing his imperious ways and obsession with being the first at the North Pole, along with his patronizing manner toward the Inuit men and women who were essential to the success of his expeditions. A photograph of the Peary home in which native costumes serve as decorative objects is the only visual image offered as evidence of these attitudes. Neither Native people nor the African American explorer Matthew Henson, who accompanied Peary on his 1909 expedition and reached the North Pole before Peary, appear in this section of the exhibition. Where, for example, is Peary’s own photograph of Henson and the Inuit members of his sledge team (Ooqueah, Ootah, Egingwah, and Seegloo)—a work that challenges the popular construct of the white, male hero/explorer? Photographs of Josephine Peary in her home surrounded by Arctic artifacts and a 1909 print published in The Graphic of the Peary couple trekking through the frozen landscape are more successful at revising the image of the explorer as an icon of a “strenuous life” and masculinity and suggesting Josephine’s negotiation of her dual roles as a dutiful wife confined to the domestic sphere and as an active partner in her husband’s expeditions. She joined her husband Robert on his Greenland expedition in 1891–92, returned in 1893 when she gave birth to a daughter, and wrote about this experience in her book The Snow Baby (1901), which positions women as the heroines of Arctic life.

The Coldest Crucible sets the Arctic within other aspects of U.S. culture—the search for a new frontier and the financial backing of expeditions by the sensationalist press—yet the visual images often function solely as documentation and not as ones that deserve decoding in their own right. The curator does not explain, for example, why James Hamilton transformed the Beechy Island site of the four graves of members of the Franklin expedition in his drawing, reproduced in The U.S. Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin (1854). Just as To the Ends of the Earth calls for further consideration of polar landscape painting within the culture of exploration and national expansion, The Coldest Crucible demands more analysis of the art of image making. These two timely exhibitions have begun the process of mapping the art-historical terrain of the polar landscape: what awaits is the integration of the visual and cultural, of high art and popular images, in the study of this region and the role that visual culture played in advancing the exploration and exploitation of the lands at the end of the earth.