NEW HAVEN — America has its sacred places. Some owe that status to acts of man, usually involving war (Valley Forge, Gettysburg). Others owe it to acts of the Creator, usually involving geology (the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone).
In the second category, California’s Yosemite Valley triply stands out: through its own magnificence (far too weak a word), as the first land the federal government protected because of its natural beauty, and how it has gripped the artistic imagination. Truly, as the naturalist John Muir declared, Yosemite is “the incomparable valley.”
The Grand Canyon overwhelms human imagination. Yosemite almost does. As rendered by Albert Bierstadt and Carleton E. Watkins and, above all, Ansel Adams, Yosemite’s celebrated sites — El Capitan and Half Dome and Bridalveil Fall and Yosemite Falls and Mariposa Grove and Glacier Point — are so many notes toward the definition of an American sublime. Three decades after his death, Adams remains the most famous and beloved of American photographers. How much does that dual esteem owe to his own great artistry, and how much to that artistry’s association with Yosemite?
“Yosemite: Exploring the Incomparable Valley” includes works by Bierstadt, Watkins, Adams, and other painters and photographers, but it’s an art exhibition only in part. It runs at the Yale University Art Gallery through Dec. 31. The show marks both the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service and 150th anniversary of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. The 60 or so items all come from Yale collections, not just those of YUAG and the Peabody, but also the Sterling and Beinecke libraries and the school of forestry.
The show is appropriately, and rather wonderfully, multifaceted. In addition to paintings and photographs, there are maps, books, basketry (from the Miwok tribe, who lived in the valley), plant specimens, stereoscopic views, and samples of El Capitan granite. The rock is white, with specklings of sparkly bits and black. “We encourage you to touch,” a label says. Who can resist? The texture is pleasingly rough. Nearby is a redwood cross-section. It’s slightly more than 11 feet long. A curve of text written on the floor demarcates the 22-foot diameter of the sequoia it came from.
The first thing a visitor sees upon entering the show is a reduced bronze cast of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s “Standing Lincoln.” Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant Act, in 1864. The statue’s presence and giving it pride of place are a nice touch, an indication of how shrewdly the show has been put together. Mark D. Mitchell curated it. “Yosemite” has numerous subsequent surprises to offer. With the Saint-Gaudens, as throughout the show, art and history — or beauty and information — do double duty.
Anglo Americans first saw Yosemite in 1851. Within four years, there were sightseeing tours. A set of James Madison Alden watercolors, from 1859, are the earliest artworks in the show. Maybe it’s the unimposing nature of the medium, or maybe it’s an understandable inability to comprehend the majesty of the place. But Alden’s Yosemite looks as though it could be part of England’s Lake District. Seven years later, four Currier and Ives lithographs almost manage to make “Yo-Semite,” as one calls it, look quaint. That’s about it for quaintness, though. Far more representative is the message conveyed by the tininess of the human figure in the foreground of an 1872 Eadweard Muybridge photograph of Yosemite Falls.
The show’s centerpiece is Bierstadt’s painting “Yosemite Valley, Glacier Point Trail,” from around 1873. The artist effectively dematerializes its imposing scale — 5½ feet by 7 feet — with a mass of late Luminist sunlight. A honeyed glow suffuses the center of the canvas. The result is more production number than painting — hooray for Hollywood? hooray for Yosemite — but with set design like this, no one’s complaining. In a charming touch, a nearby display case offers examples of five plants seen in the painting and indicates where Bierstadt placed them.
Bierstadt’s first Yosemite visit was in 1863, Adams’s in 1916. Using very different tools and methods, he, too, sought to evoke the sublimity of the place. In Adams’s “Tenaya Lake, Mount Conness, Yosemite National Park, California,” from around 1946, even the clouds are overwhelming. They’re an exaltation of cumulus, almost as substantial-looking as the rock face of Half Dome in an Adams photograph from the late 1930s. Yet sublimity unrelieved is exhaustion put on a pedestal. Adams, who trained as a concert pianist, understood the importance of dynamic range. A 1948 view of an oak in snow is, by comparison, pure diminuendo.
One of the pleasures of seeing art at Yale is being reminded that at least some great universities recognize a responsibility to the general public. Neither the Yale University Art Gallery nor the Yale Center for British Art charges admission. What a shaming contrast with its traditional Ivy League rival. Adults without a university ID have to pay $15 at the Harvard Art Museums. Oh, non-Harvard students get a break. It’s only $10 for them. Here’s one Harvard-Yale game that the Elis win, and it’s no contest.
YOSEMITE: Exploring the Incomparable Valley
At Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St., New Haven, through Dec. 31. 203-432-0600, artgallery.yale.edu
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.