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.