W.H. Bartlett, Niagara Falls                          Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty

Americans discovered innate power and spiritual inspiration in natural resources of their vast landscape during the nineteenth century. This underscored the Puritan and Protestant tendencies to eschew the elaborate religious imagery of the Catholic Church and to replace icons with the real world, such as visits to Niagara Falls. This fascination with the sheer magnitude and profound influence of the American landscape was revisited in the twentieth century by artists who recalled the monuments of ancient peoples in their giant earthwork projects such as Smithson’s abstract symbolic form on the Great Salt Lake in Utah.