"Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all live peacefully on this continent, engaging with nature in our myriad ways? History has not unfolded that way, of course. But you wouldn’t know it by visiting “Engaging With Nature: American and Native American Artists (A.D. 1200-2004)” at the Montclair Art Museum.

Here, diverging views of nature are generally avoided. Instead, conflicts are smoothed over and a chorus of agreement rises from the walls.

The most frequently cited common denominator is a “spiritual” approach to nature and art making. A watercolor by Charles Burchfield from 1945 shows a winter view of backyards seen from his studio in Gardenville, N.Y. The accompanying wall label says Burchfield saw nature “as a source of spirituality.” Next to it hangs a 2001 lithograph by G. Peter Jemison, a member of the Heron Clan of the Seneca Nation, with sketchy markings suggesting shadows and footprints in the snow. Mr. Jemison’s work is also described in spiritual terms, only through the filter of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) beliefs.

Oscar Bluemner’s 1930s nocturnal painting of a “Lent Evening” is said to reveal the “spiritual basis” of his Cézanne-inspired approach to nature. The same goes for the abstract paintings from the ’90s by Dan Namingha and Kay WalkingStick — although the leanings of these two are attributed to their Indian heritages, which are Tewa-Hopi and Cherokee-Winnebago, respectively.

Elsewhere, terms like “magic” and that good old landscape-painting standby, “the sublime,” surface. Mark Rothko’s watercolor “Implements of Magic” from around 1945 shows his dual interest in Surrealist automatism and pictographs of American Indian art. Thomas Moran’s misty little canvas of the Snake River in northwestern Wyoming from about 1879 reflects romantic ideas of unbounded wilderness and the sublime. Moran, who worked in Manhattan and later East Hampton, made sketches of the Western landscape while accompanying Francis V. Hayden on his 1871 geological survey sponsored by the federal government and railroad concerns."

Get the Story:
A Harmonic View of Nature, in a Cultural Tangle (The New York Times 9/5)