• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • CommentGo Back
Download
 
By Dushko Petrovich | March 1, 2009ON HIS DEATHBED in 1851, at the home of his mistress, the great English painter J. M. W.Turner is said to have offered an enviably neat summary of his life's work and beliefs. Having produced hundreds of oil paintings and watercolors over the previous six decades - a corpus of landscapes that would redefine European art - Turner simply declared: "The sun is God."In the century after Turner's death, landscape painting became the great engine of modern artisticcreativity. Artists did in fact live by chasing the sun, capturing the way it felt in the world in ever more pioneering ways. Turner's pale and radiant scenes changed the way artists painted light; hismain rival, John Constable, was similarly influential with his moody evocations of shiftingweather. The French painters who followed - Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Degas - successively pushed the boundaries of artistic innovation, and created landscapes that still count today amongthe great works of art, bridging both serious and popular tastes.In our own time, landscape painting retains an unquestionable popular appeal. As civilization pulls us further and further from nature, it's no surprise that we cherish glimpses of arcadia.Landscapes have become nearly ubiquitous: in living rooms and waiting rooms; on fine chinaand restaurant walls; at adult ed and on PBS; in regular blockbuster exhibitions and on theresulting sweatshirts, mugs, and even refrigerator magnets.There is one place, however, where landscapes have almost disappeared: serious contemporary painting. Whether it's pop masters like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, storytellers likeJacob Lawrence and Philip Guston, or more recent standouts like Elizabeth Peyton and JohnCurrin, America's leading painters have done their most important work in other genres. It's hardto think of a major gallery that regularly exhibits new landscape painting.Of course, there are many sensitive artists - Rackstraw Downes, the late Neil Welliver, andBoston's own John Walker among them - who paint recognizable outdoor scenes. But as thegenre itself has lost its prominence, their work has also been marginalized. What happened tolandscape painting? Its decline in status is even more surprising given the current moral,scientific, and political preoccupation with the environment. One might think that scenes of nature - central to our culture for centuries - would still have a role to play now, having done somuch to cultivate our appreciation of the environment in the first place.In a sense, however, landscape never went away: It was just transformed into somethingunrecognizable, and has begun to emerge again in surprising places. The rise and fall of landscape painting tells an interesting story about art's relationship to the outside world over thelast two centuries, and the ways the genre might be resurfacing today suggest just how unsettledour own relationship to nature has become.Landscape has a deep history in Western art, though it rarely occupied center stage. From Greek and Roman painting to the famous Florentines and Venetians, depictions of the landscape servedmainly as a backdrop to more important religious and political events, illustrating the verdantagony of the expulsion from Eden, the vast holdings of a nobleman, or the stern solitude of asaintly life. In the Netherlands and England, landscape struggled for pride of place alongside portraiture, with its royal subjects and opulent props; in Paris, which was already the center of the art world in the 19th century, it was history painting - with its imposing scale, somber palette,and literary themes - that lorded over the annual Salon.But Turner, unfazed by landscape's status, set out at a young age to transform the genre. Hecreated a visual manifesto - the Liber Studiorum, or "Book of Studies," in which he sorted
 
landscapes into six subgenres that he was determined to master: Pastoral, Marine, Mountainous,Historical, Architectural, and Epic Pastoral. The book, a newly acquired copy of which is now ondisplay at the Clark Institute in Williamstown, shows a painter and a genre at the dawn of their dominance. Made between 1806 and 1819, the wide-ranging portfolio includes 70 intricate andluminous mezzotints. These early prints still bear the influence of Turner's immediate predecessors, and don't look particularly radical to our eyes, but in them he is already finding theemphatic yellow light that would burn through the fog and mist - and even through detail itself -in his groundbreaking later work.Turner's bid to elevate landscape art found a sympathetic reception across the English Channel. Itis sometimes hard to remember how radical the Impressionists actually were, but when they took their easels out of the studios, squeezed newly invented synthetic pigments from their newlyinvented tubes of paint, and worked directly from observation on bright white canvases (asopposed to the traditional brown or red), they were not only following Turner's lead, they werealso permanently unsettling the very hierarchy of art. Their portable canvasses emphasized timesof day over timeless scenes, brush strokes and light over details and stories, the present tenseover the past.Though their paintings have come to look normal to us - their reproductions now sit comfortablyon coffee tables, library shelves, and greeting cards - their methods were very upsetting at thetime, spurning faithful depictions of nature in favor of the physical daub of paint, color for itsown sake, and the spatial ambiguities of the flat canvas. Van Gogh, Gaugin, and Cezanne keptlandscape in the vanguard of European art, and paved the way for painters like Paul Klee,Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian, who all took landscape even further from nature, anddeeper into abstraction. In one illustrative incident, Kandinsky famously noticed that a paintingof his, accidentally hung upside down, was powerful on its own terms - without representinganything at all.Klee and Mondrian were more intentional as they transformed their views into carefully arrangedand fully saturated rectangles of color. Mondrian's paintings, as his career progressed, seemedliterally to morph from tree branches and water into vectors of curved and straight lines, finally becoming the orderly grids of primary colors for which he is best known. These paintings arenothing that a viewer would recognize as a landscape - although the Dutchman's last (and probably best) painting, "Broadway Boogie-Woogie," can in fact be read as a kind of aerialcityscape, if we take its title's hint.In America, "landscape" had meant the expansive 19th-century visions of Church and Bierstadt,the watercolors of Winslow Homer, and Edward Hopper's iconic New England scenes. But in asense, the country was about to get another wave of landscape artists. The great abstract paintersof the mid-20th century - the so-called New York School, which included Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock - were all heirs to the genre who, in a certainsense, helped push it to its breaking point. Gorky and Rothko are known for their emphaticallynon-representational paintings, but their art evolved within the landscape tradition, so even their late work, which initially appears totally abstract, eventually reveals important vestiges of thegenre: the ever-present horizon line, the biomorphic forms, the atmospheric light. De Kooningwas more explicit in his evocation of landscape, often making clear reference to it in his titles;Pollock studied under Thomas Hart Benton, whose fluid, elongated paintings on rural themeswere subtly echoed in the internal structure of Pollock's later works. So a painting like Pollock's"Autumn Rhythm," which looks at first glance like an arbitrary swirl of drips and splashes, canstart to feel more like a panoramic tribute to the expansive - and vertiginous - space of Pollock'snative West.
 
For a viewer confronted with these paintings today, it's nearly impossible to find the naturalworld in Rothko's blurs and Pollock's splatter. The trajectory from Turner to Pollock traces thegenre's long and nearly complete separation from nature. What began as a focus on natural phenomena evolved into a focus on the painting itself - on light, space, the artist's personality,and other more internal concerns. Pollock himself, when asked why he didn't paint nature,famously hit back with, "I am nature." The New York School's successors, the Minimalists,would respond to the previous generation's bravura by working with a studied geometricdetachment, and it became clear that the vanguard's contact with nature had come to a minimum.The long radicalization of landscape painting resulted in a lot of adventurous and important pictures, but it also left a gaping hole in art where nature used to be.So it fell to other artists to return to the outdoors. Rather than depict nature, however, theyactually entered nature, and began to alter it. In 1970, Robert Smithson assembled mud and saltcrystals into the iconic 1,500-foot "Spiral Jetty" in Salt Lake City. Nine years later, James Turrell began transforming a 3-km-wide (and extinct) volcano crater in Arizona into a huge naked-eyeobservatory, which he plans finally to open in 2011. Many artists have since followed in thisvein, with Andy Goldsworthy's improbable and temporary constructions of natural elements andChristo's eye-catching fabric interventions probably doing the most to popularize the form.Artists interested in nature now have full license to wander.That's where the current show at MassMoCA finds them. "Badlands: New Horizons inLandscape," on view until April 12, presents the work of more than 20 artists working in a widevariety of media. To judge from the paintings on display, one simple way to engage the traditionof the landscape is to register the damage we've done to the environment. It's impossible to look at Alexis Rockman's 30-foot oil paintings of the glaciers in Antarctica without thinking of globalwarming (and noticing that Caspar David Friedrich's 19th-century icebergs had an entirelydifferent meaning). Paul Jacobsen is more direct: Idyllic mountain vistas are interrupted by heapsof trash, incongruous modern bridges, and horribly colored skies. Ed Ruscha similarly offers hisseries of "Country Cityscapes," where touristic images of nature are overlaid with threateningquotes ("You Will Eat Hot Lead"), which are themselves blocked out by rectangles. The effect of this kind work can be powerful, and the almost didactic quality of these pictures stands incontrast to the work from younger artists - Melissa Brown, Leila Daw, and Mike Glier - who areclearly still working out how they want to paint the landscape.Reading the interviews with these artists - where they observe that painting is "absurdlymismatched to the task of consciousness raising in a digitized, global environment," and how"the representation of destruction is inevitably beautiful," and that depicting natural disasters"makes me feel kind of immortal" - one senses how hard it is to correctly locate painting's placein the situation. Having insisted so adamantly (and for so long) on its own terms, painting is nowin the awkward position of re-entering the fray on slightly alien ones - measuring its own power in terms of other media, political activism, or natural forces.What has changed, clearly, is how we see nature itself. The traditional model - in which we wereseparate from nature and enjoyed its representation as a form of escapism - won't work anymore. No longer able to see our world as simply beautiful, artists also have to see what humans havedone to imperil it, which will necessarily change the way that it is depicted, and the point of depicting it.As painting tries to find its way back to nature, some of the more practical artistic responses tothe environmental crisis have an undeniable appeal. Along with the group of "Activists &Pragmatists" on show in North Adams, recent exhibitions and projects around the country are
of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...