Landscape painting: a new genre

 

Simon Denis, Trees in front of a Valley

When you visit an art gallery, you notice that most of the works inside fall into certain predictable categories. There are usually paintings of Christianity, such as Virgins with child. There are portraits. If it is a modern  collection, there are abstract and conceptual works, such as arrangements of rocks, or video installations. Sometimes, there are flower paintings (the Ashmolean had an entire room full of them). And there are landscape paintings.

You can divide landscapes into those that include people, and those that have no people at all. It’s the latter type, the landscape paintings without people, that interest me here. 

Special exhibitions at galleries are as predictable as the permanent collections. Two exhibitions about landscapes, one at The Tate Liverpool, “Radical Landscapes”, and the other at the Fitzwilliam, Cambridge, “True to Nature”, both contain predictable content, within each collection, yet they seem to be diametrically opposed to each other. It is difficult to imagine images from one exhibition appearing in the other.

As Kenneth Clark pointed out in his Landscape into Art (1947), drawing on Ruskin in Modern Painters, landscape painting, the depiction of nature with no or minimal human presence, has not existed for all time. It was largely a creation of the 19th century, and it is more of an innovation than you might at first imagine. What Ruskin is describing can be seen from a picture of trees by Simon Denis (1755-1813), displayed in the Fitzwilliam exhibition.

Radical Landscapes has, as its name suggests, a very different take on nature. The “radical” here asks questions about who owns, and who has access to, the landscape. Among the many exhibits (I admit I haven’t yet seen the exhibition) the following appear to be typical. There are banners from the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common. 

Presumably the thinking here is recapturing the landscape from being used to build nuclear weapons: this is very much humans in the landscape. Plus, a video of Romany heritage artist Delaine Le Bas in woodland surroundings, wearing a lovely dress; again, the subject is humans (one human) in the landscape. 

Finally, conceptual artist Gustav Metzger’s Till we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land (1998) shows an ironic celebration, with a caterpillar track framing a photograph of the construction of the M3 motorway.

 'Til we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land (Gustav Metzger, WikiArt)

It’s quite clear we are dealing with two different views of nature. The Liverpool show seems to have taken its starting point from John Berger’s famous critique of Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews:

Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs Andrews, 1750

Berger states (in Ways of Seeing) that this image is more about who owns the field than details of the landscape. Now, Berger was responding to Kenneth Clark, who described the landscape in glowing terms but without mentioning the people. However, the Radical Landscapes exhibition seems to focus on the people and human activity rather than on the landscape.

We seem to have moved beyond the contemplation of nature identified by Ruskin. After describing what the human took an interest in during classical and medieval periods, Ruskin continues in Modern Painters with the rise of landscape as a form in its own right:

 [The human] used to take no interest in anything but what immediately concerned himself. Now, he has deep interest in the abstract nature of things, inquires as eagerly into the laws which regulate the economy of the material world, as into those of his own being, and manifests a passionate admiration of inanimate objects, closely resembling, in its elevation and tenderness, the affection which he bears to those living souls with which he is brought into the nearest fellowship.

Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol 3, Chapter IX, Of the Novelty of Landscape

That new ‘deep interest’ is what Truth to Nature, to a large extent, celebrates, whereas in Radical Landscapes, the deep interest appears almost incidental.   

I think Berger is right when he points out how fundamentally different art becomes when it includes or excludes people. To take another example from Clark’s Landscape into Art, if Berger complained that Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews showed a couple owning a field, then what is the relationship between Virgil and the labourers in Simone Martini’s famous Frontispiece to Petrarch’s copy of Virgil?

 

Simone Martini, Petrarch's Virgil, titlepiece, c 1336

Virgil, with pen poised, is inspired to write, while the labourers (presumably his labourers) tend the vines (the Eclogues) or look after the sheep (the Georgics). I can’t deny, it doesn’t look like a vision of pure nature to me; in light of the above, it looks like Virgil owning the labour and enjoying the fruits.

By all means let’s look at ownership and access, but let’s have a genre of landscape art without people. It need not be connected with ownership or with activism; it shows something worthy of celebration in its own right. It doesn’t need to show only the picturesque; Richard Mabey’s book Weeds suggests there can be just as much value in what is not regarded as beautiful. But Ruskin covered this angle as well: he stated quite clearly, it is not simply the conventionally beautiful that is a legitimate subject for landscape art. It is perfectly valid to depict “road-side weeds, old cottages, broken stones, and such other materials”.

For this genre, the title is of little importance; perhaps the location, if anything. Even the slightest text has an influence: sometimes an image of a place can appear very differently once you have read the caption. For example, the website Common Dreams shows many images of natural beauty that have been impaired by human activity, for example the slurry from coal mining. However, if I didn’t mention the coal slurry, you might just have seen this picture as a muddy stream in winter (not in either exhibition):

Coal Slurry in West Virginia (Common Dreams, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Which leaves us with, perhaps, a paradoxical conclusion. So much of the landscape is human-created, yet we have a fascination with, and indeed a love for, non-human nature. That is worth an exhibition in itself – and that is what, for the most part, the Fitzwilliam show celebrates. Ruskin continually surprises us by his observations of unplanned nature; here is a example by another artist, Carl Gotzloff’s Limestone Rocks, 1858: 

In its way, this is just as radical as anything in the Tate Liverpool exhibition.

Raphael’s place in the Pantheon of art history

 

Detail from The School of Athens

Is Raphael still top of the painting charts? Back in 1961, when art history was much more judgemental than it is today, Stephen Freedberg wrote a highly-regarded book that described the High Renaissance classical era (note the lower-case “c”). This lasted, according to him, between 1500 and 1520; just 20 years, comprising the great works of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and ending with the death of Raphael at only 37. It took Freedberg two volumes to describe that short period. Scholars argue over the precise dates of this classical moment, of course, but for many, and certainly for Wikipedia today, there appears to be general agreement that this period was “the absolute zenith of Western painting”. The Wikipedia article for High Renaissance defines it as “a short period of the most exceptional artistic production in the Italian States and in Florence”.

Even more astonishing is that Raphael appears to have burst onto the scene with his mature style almost already formed. “[in 1504] young Raphael, then aged twenty-one, arrived in Florence. He was already the possessor of a formulated High Renaissance classical style, of which the first evidence had been in his very earliest works” [catalogue, p60]. Moreover, we cannot explain just how Raphael acquired this style: “no outward occasion can account for the act by which Raphael infuses a transforming life into the shell of early classical détente.” [Freedberg again].

So any exhibition devoted to Raphael, such as that at the London National Gallery in 2022, would, I would have thought, have tackled that reputation. Is he really still the tops? He started painting the Stanza della Segnatura, including The School of Rome, in 1508, when he was just 25. Even Picasso, widely considered to be one of the most precocious painters of all time, only painted Les Demoiselles when he was 26.

The catalogue seems to take the precocity for granted (a study for the head of St James, dated around 1502, is as good as anything Raphael did), but it does briefly look at Raphael’s amazing mature reputation. Matthias Wivel writes (p46) “By the nineteenth century, Raphael was considered the pre-eminent visual artist of the Western tradition … until the advent of photography he was probably the most reproduced and copied artist in the Western world.” That seems to tally with my experience of visiting heritage sites: no 19th century interior is complete without a Raphael print, usually faded.

Marcantonio Raimondi, after Raphael, Massacre of the Innocents

Wivel then attempts to identify Raphael’s influence on Picasso’s Guernica. I could not imagine a painting more diametrically opposed to the coolness, the sophistication, the assuredness, of The School of Athens. Nonetheless, I can’t deny that the work we only know from engravings, The Massacre of the Innocents, shows a very different kind of Raphael: the most remarkable combination of elegant male forms and a sense of horror. And the late Transfiguration, painted just before Raphael died, does include a boy being healed as he has a seizure. It’s not all milk and honey.

Of course, there will never be full agreement among the critics. Some still believe that Raphael was the summit of Renaissance painting, and of western art. Others, such as the 19th-century pre-Raphaelites and Ruskin, felt his was already an over-ripe development beyond the “purity” of the early Renaissance. If you asked a class of fine art students today, they would probably ask you who Raphael was. He certainly wouldn’t appear in the top ten, or even top 20 artists.

We can discount the usual wacky ideas about Raphael from the critics, for example, Vasari believed these pictures were especially touching because Raphael was breast-fed by his mother, not by a wet-nurse. But even modern-day scholars have their wild moments. Ernest Gombrich believed that Raphael’s fondness for Virgin and Child groupings was a longing to recreate his closeness to his mother and father, who died when he was eight and eleven respectively. And there are modern scholarly articles on Raphael and breast-feeding, claiming that the infant in the Madonna della Sedia is drunk on his mother’s milk (doesn’t look like it to me).

Raphael, St Catherine, detail

Was Raphael the painter of ideal female beauty? The catalogue closes with a full-page close-up of the face of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, which could be seen (especially in close-up like this) as a kind of perfection, the platonic ideal (“una certa idea”) of female beauty. It certainly goes beyond the sentimentality of Raphael’s early master Perugino. But is it where we want to be today? To devote a whole page to a close-up of one face would suggest that the catalogue compilers still believe the perfect female face exists.

The Spalding Gentlemen's Society

Advert for the display of a "Little Wild Man"

The Spalding Gentlemen’s Society (SGS) made us very welcome, the Sunday we visited. It was the opening day of the first new exhibition for 20 years, and we were even invited (although we weren’t members) to the members’ only talk to present the new exhibition, entitled “Curious Collections”.

The curator explained that the exhibition comprised a personal selection by six people of items from the collection that they found interesting. I can’t fault the sincerity of everyone involved, but to be honest, “curious” seems the best way to describe it. There seemed to be no common theme running through the exhibition. It included some 18th-century maps, a depiction of a rhinoceros, which many people described as a unicorn, never having seen a rhino before, plus a poster advertising the public display of an Inuit (described as “a little wild man” ).

This exhibition, in a way, summed up the SGS. It seems to be the victim of its original collection. Like the Tradescant Collection that formed the basis of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the SGS started as a coffee house discussion group, but soon became a collection of oddities – unusual, exceptional, sometimes (but not often) beautiful objects, donated by members, but without any coherence. However, over the years, the Tradescant Collection became a museum, with a collection policy and public role. It doesn’t look as though SGS, in its 300-year history, has ever got beyond the cabinet of curiosities.

Arranged over three or four rooms, the collection comprises many glass cases of the most amazing miscellany. Objects displayed include guns, china, prehistoric flints and axe heads, ivory carvings, playing cards, carvings by French prisoners during the Napoleonic wars, a few local items, a few items from all over the place. Some of the axe heads were found near Detroit. Largely run by volunteers, the SGS exhibits this hotchpotch in a glorious medley.

That “wild man” exhibit worries me. The poster describes how the Inuit was displayed daily to the public at an inn near Charing Cross, no doubt with admission on payment of a fee. You could pay to see the inmates at Bedlam, I believe, if you were interested. Exactly what has changed since the original display? Where was the discussion of how we no longer feel it appropriate to display what we think to be oddities of this kind? Is the SGS just the perpetuation of the cabinet of curiosities for the 21st century? YouTube and social media seem to have reinstated the cabinet of curiosities: you can see any number of questionable things on YouTube, but nobody claims they are educational. They are just there to be gawped at; which is what we appear to be invited to do with this poor Inuit man in a glass case in Spalding. 

 A quick read of a 2019 Society publication, Against the Odds: The Survival of the SGS suggested some of the claims about the society are less than accurate.

• “The oldest provincial society with a continuous record in Britain” – yet the guide reveals there are no records for 1713-1724, 1758-1828, and 1875-1889: a total of 95 years without records.
• The Wikipedia article for the SGS states that notables such as Newton, Alexander Pope, and Hans Sloane were members. I’m not sure if there is any evidence that they ever attended any meetings. They appear to have been honorary members, invited from afar. At least Newton donated a few books; I’m not sure what the contribution of the other distinguished members was.

Visiting the Society museum (open for a grand total of 12 hours each month) is not simple. It only opens for two hours a week, on Wednesdays, plus two hours on the third Sunday of each month. There is no space to display most of the collection, and yet, just down the road, there is a magnificent listed building, Ayscoughee Hall, which holds the local museum – and they have plenty of space to display more stuff. You could probably fit all the displays from the SGS in the current Ayscoughee Hall building. 

A case of coloured stones. No caption, but the stones look nice. 

As it stands, SGS is a poor museum. It doesn’t even rank on Tripadvisor as a museum in Spalding – most people wouldn’t know it was there. Even when you enter the museum, you could hardly describe the experience as educational. A report by archivists suggested that the most valuable items in the SGS collections are its own records, so perhaps studying its own history rather than all history might be one way forward. And why was the introduction to the new exhibition only for members? 

Some changes have taken place. The Society got rid of its collection of stuffed birds in 1955, so clearly, it is possible for the Society to make tough decisions about what it collects. But time is short. Its current building is subsiding and not fit for purpose. The finances of the Society make it pretty clear it is not financially viable – it cannot afford to repair its own building, quite apart from doing anything meaningful with the collection. It should rethink its purpose entirely; it looks like the major changes over the last 50 years, such as the admission of women, have been the result of external agencies such as the Charities Commission, insisting that the Society brings itself more up to date.

The example of Wisbech Museum is interesting: the history reveals that Wisbech built a public museum in 1847 that brought together the holdings of the local Literary Society and Museum Society. The museum still exists today. Like the SGS, it is full of glass cases. But it is regularly open to the public, and currently in construction is an accessible entrance and café area. Some kind of merger of the SGS with the local museum looks like the best way forward, funded partly by external bodies, and partly by judicious sales of some of the collection. Otherwise, the Society risks (and I quote from the official guide) “being run very largely for the benefit of members, and not, as declared in 1955, for the benefit of the public”.

Up in the Air, and the meaning of work

 

The plot of Up in the Air (directed by  Joel Reitman, 2009) can be told in one sentence. A commercial traveller, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) who spends his life on the road claims to be happy and has a non-committal fling with a fellow frequent traveller, Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga); when he decides in the middle of a speaking engagement to visit her home to declare his love, he discovers she is married with children – something she hadn’t mentioned. 

Put like that, it’s a minor-key romantic comedy that could have been directed by Douglas Sirk. But the film is considerably more than that, with three additional subplots that make the story far more complex. 

First, the movie presents us with a picture of family life that is by no means rosy. Bingham visits his sister for her wedding, and the event is mundane, the people uncharismatic, and the location uninspiring. Would you abandon the high-flying life for this? Worse, the groom gets cold feet, and Bingham, of all people, is enlisted to persuade him to go through with the wedding. 

Second, Clooney’s job is not just any job. His job is to fire people; we see a haunting series of cameos of people who have just been told they have been fired (the director got real-life people to talk about their experience, and these clips looks uncomfortably authentic). By a strange twist, Clooney himself is effectively fired later in the movie: he is told that his role has been replaced by online conference calls. The experience of being told he is superfluous has a dramatic effect on his earlier unshakeable confidence about his nomadic life. 

Third, Bingham is accompanied for much of the film by a young new employee, Natalie Keener, full of ideals and inexperience, who has all the romantic dreams that Clooney doesn’t have. 

Ryan Bingham: [on the docks in Miami] You know that moment when you look into somebody's eyes and you can feel them staring into your soul and the whole world goes quiet just for a second?

Natalie Keener: Yes.

Ryan Bingham: [shrugs] Right. Well, I don't. 

In other words, unlike most Hollywood plots, this is not a simple decision. But what makes it a great film is that Clooney misreads the signals; he gets it wrong. At the end of the film, he bet on his carefree partner being sufficiently keen on him to commit to living with him; he didn’t realise that she was, as she states to him quite openly, “the woman you don’t have to worry about … just think of my as yourself, only with a vagina”. 

How did we get here? A Hollywood feel-good comedy, starring George Clooney, with a magnificent, photogenic face, named by People magazine as the sexiest man alive, used by the Coen Brothers as a figure of fun in Burn after Reading and Hail, Caesar, suddenly becomes dark and confronts the world of work. Why do we work? What do we really value? What do we want to come home to? In the last few scenes, Bingham is awarded his coveted airline loyalty card, after flying ten million miles with them. But by the time he wins it, the award is meaningless. This is a remarkable, disturbing film that you continue to think about days after seeing it, all the more powerful for moving beyond the initial seemingly light-hearted introduction. It’s a performance worthy of Mastroianni at his best.