After a century of experiment in the visual arts, the dogged landscape tradition, far from giving up the ghost, is still as strong as ever. The question remains though as to why landscape painting persists as a subject in that numbers of artists, both amateur and professional, continue to pursue it as a subject, producing much the same results year after year and selling any number of paintings to hang on living room walls. It is evident from any cursory examination that if you want to sell art, do landscapes first and colourful abstracts second that might remind people of the landscape. As saleable art, representations of people, comes in a distant third. Given the hyperbolic primacy of human thinking about its own importance in the scheme of things, you might expect a different order. When art was about defining the relationship between gods and men from the Renaissance onward until humankind saw itself on a par with any gods, paintings were full of people and the landscape existed only to fil in the spaces between them.
The history of treating the landscape as a subject in its own right is not that old. We can recognise the efforts of Corot and the Barbizon school in 19th century France and of course Chinese artists from as early as the 4th century. Impressionism, so named, on both sides of the world tried to come to terms with light but even then, images of people crept in bathed in sunlight or were shown taming nature with axe and saw.
My first thought was bucolic romanticism. ‘A Landscape painting is not necessarily a representation of a landscape, but is somehow like an experience of nature constructed out of pieces of representation’[1]. It apparently isn’t enough to simply go and stand in the landscape and admire it. The medium of an artist’s eye is needed to filter out all of the bits that are unacceptable from the flies to the prospect of death to inclement weather. Your average human being would seem to be incapable of doing this for themselves. However, this filtering process inevitably leads to a set of cliches. There has to be a horizon somewhere near the middle separating land and sky; the eye has to be led through the vista; substantial vegetation such as trees need to be placed strategically to create perspective distance or to suggest some divine hand in their placement.
Then there is the disconnection between landscape paintings and historical or social events. In spite of the tumultuous upheavals in the form of a Prussian violation of the city of Paris and subsequent bloodletting around 1871, the Impressionists went about their business as if nothing was happening. Subsequent sales to the newly rich bourgeoisee society might suggest an escapist mentality. Cities burdened as they were the poor, the disenfanchised and the rebellious, were hardly subjects for romanticism unless it was another version of Liberty at the Barricades or the ubiquitous femme fatale lurking in boudoirs. Interestingly, depictions of nature have taken on a political role in recent times with outpourings of universal guilt over the ravaging of the natural world and the detritus left behind as evidence. But that is another story.
There are always erstwhile statements of a search for universal beauty or at least a canon of representational devices that attempt to define beauty. Sunsets are particular targets given the endless photographs of coloured skies presented as art but even the enhanced colouring of an often monochromatic landscape might suggest a dissatisfaction with the original although it is often the colour itself and not the vehicle of the landscape that is being expressively dealt with. Emotion though colour. The Fauves saw right through all of this pretence and simply used any colour they felt like using, often straight out of the tube. Vlaminck’s Red Trees aren’t really about trees at all any more than Matisse’s Red Room is about the room. But, I digress.
Why does the imitation of nature [or at least the reinventing of landscape through various cliched conventions] persist? It would seem to have little to do with nature as a living organism unless loss of diversity is engendering guilt feelings. It would seem to avoid humanity as a matter of course [even considerations of human scale have become unfashionable a la von Guerard] unless bemoaning human activity. Divine analogies to power and majesty as practised by Turner strapped to the mast of a boat in a storm have also gone by the board. Mother nature and any male gods have obviously parted company for this generation. So, what is it that tempts so many so often, to venture out to paint the landscape en plein air or from within the comfort of a climate-controlled studio or for that matter for audiences to part with hard-earned cash to own such representations? Who knows?
Incidentally, We get bucolic from the Latin word bucolicus, which derives from the Greek word boukolos, meaning “cowherd.” When bucolic was first used in English in the early 17th century, it meant “pastoral” in a narrow sense – that is, it referred to things related to shepherds or herdsmen. Luckily the rural idyll of cowherds has mostly disappeared even if the romanticised allusions to green grass and blue skies have not.
A recent exhibition at the Main Gallery in Adelaide was titled An Ode to the Orchard. Five of the eight artists in a group calling themselves the Friday Fridas and based in the Adelaide Hills had chosen to respond to the landscape at Lenswood largely working en plein air. This is an area featuring rolling hills, orchards and vineyards all of which have been carefully manicured and manipulated- hardly nature in a rudimentary form. Each artist found a different way to express the vagaries of landscape and ever-changing weather, a least one by immersing herself in the problems of painting outside from rain to wind to flies.
A cursory assessment of the success of the exhibition showed at least 29 red dots. Why am I not surprised?
1 Malone. P Why Landscape Painting Is Thriving in the 21st Century 2019