Kim Onslow

A Short Stroll in the Woods:

Landscape and Politics from Lorenzetti to Anselm Kiefer

Geraint Evans

 

This talk is concerned with what has proved to be an enduring subject for painters, that is: landscape. *Landscape has shaped the artistic traditions of China and Japan and has been a crucial part of the Western European cannon. *Landscape underpins the picturesque paintings of Claude Lorrain and *the classical French Baroque style of Nicolas Poussin. *Landscape has been articulated through the sublime, exemplified by Philip James De Loutherbourg’s ‘An Avalanche in the Alps’ and, *by the Romantics such as J M W Turner. *Monet was concerned with effect and light whilst *Van Gogh’s psychologically powerful landscapes deal in metaphor. *Peter Doig’s contemporary paintings conflate biographical, filmic and literary references.

 

But the specific subject of this talk is landscape and politics – the way in which landscape can be seen not merely as a picturesque view but, as a series of signs that hold specific meaning – political, historical, economic, social and cultural.

 

*I will discuss the work of Anslem Kiefer and the ways in which his landscape paintings engage with German myth and history. I will then look at the way in which landscape painting traditions emerged from moments of great change in 14th century Italy, 17th century Holland and 19th century England, where the industrial revolution and enclosure system were radically altering the relationship between town and country. The writer WJT Mitchell proposes that landscape painting is integrally connected with imperialism so in response I will discuss the example of the Hudson River School in 19th century America followed by an exploration of the fabricated landscapes of Disneyland. Paul Nash’s bleak first world war landscapes and the contemporary militarised landscapes of the UK will be followed by a brief look at the semi rural lanes that surround George Shaw’s Tile Hill estate.

 

Anselm Kiefer and the German Forest

*In 1971 Anselm Kiefer moved to Odenwald, which had been the site of the southwestern bloc of the great pan-Germanic woodland. It was here, in the small village of Hornbach, that he converted the attic of an old schoolhouse into his studio and from where many of his first great paintings – *the so-called ‘Attic’ paintings - emerged. These paintings demonstrated his interest in merging and re-creating mythological, religious and historical stories and events, whilst appropriating the form and language of the woodcut, which has an important place in German culture.

 

*Works on paper made around this time also looked outwards towards the German countryside, collaging self-portraits and mythical figures onto views of the forest and the surrounding agricultural fields, articulated in expressive and hurried paint marks. In ‘Winter Landscape’ for example, the barren, snow covered and roughly ploughed earth is peppered with spots of blood. Above the field a disembodied female head bleeds from a wound in her neck. Although Kiefer had the Greek mythological figure of Daphne in mind, it is the bleak landscape that focuses my attention, with its evocations of violence, loss and desolation.

 

Keifer had been interested in German history for some time. He was born in 1945 at the end of the war and the fall of the Third Reich, as many European cities lay in ruins and ashes. But it was the act of forgetting rather than remembering that informed his formative works. As he says:

“In 1945, after the ‘accident’ as it is so emphatically put, people thought now we start from scratch. The past is taboo, [my] dragging it up only caused repulsion and distaste.”

 

*The resultant works made in the late 1960s depicted Kiefer in his father’s German army coat making the sieg heil Nazi salute in a range of locations in France, Switzerland, and Italy. When writing about this series Andreas Huyssen point out that…

“…Fascism had… perverted, abused, and sucked up whole territories of a German image-world, turning national iconic and literary traditions into mere ornaments of power and thereby leaving post-1945 culture with a tabula rasa that was bound to cause a smoldering crisis of identity.* After twelve years of an image orgy without precedent in the modern world, which included everything from torch marches to political mass specatcles,* from the mammoth staging of the 1936 Olympics to the ceaseless productions of the Nazi film industry deep into the war years, *from Albert Speer's floodlight operas in the night sky to the fireworks of antiaircraft flak over burning cities, the country's need for images was exhausted…Germany was a country without images, a landscape of rubble and ruins that quickly and efficiently turned itself into the gray of concrete reconstruction...” (Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia)

 

*It was into the gap left by the ruins of war that Kiefer stepped, re-enacting and reclaiming German national mythology, which had been co-opted by the National Socialists, whilst challenging the sense of post-war collective amnesia and confronting the viewer with uncomfortable images of their recent past. In Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama writes:

At the core of this strategy of embarrassment was an obstinate determination to force together culturally acceptable elements of the German heroic and mythic tradition with its unacceptable historic consequences.

 

*Germany’s urban landscape of ruins and rubble was exemplified by Kiefer’s depictions of the buildings of the Third Reich, the Neo classical designs by Albert Speer and Wilhelm Kreis, reduced to ruinous shells, articulated through an encrusted surface of oil, emulsion, straw, shellac, ash, soil and clay.

 

At the same time, Kiefer returned to the forest - the Teutoburger Wald - for works such as ‘Paths of the Wisdom of the World’ (1978-80) and *‘Varus’ (1976). This painting leads the viewer into the depths of the forest along a wintery path, described in thick, expressive gestures of paint and blotted with the drips and splatters of blood. There are echoes of the attic paintings’ wooden beamed roof in the forms and arrangement of the weather-beaten trees. As Schama observes, the… spiked upper branches form an archway of spears, literally a mock triumph, like an honour guard of soldiers at a wedding. The hand written names of Varus, Hermann and Thusnelda are scrawled across the painterly surface and linked to the branches above by ghostly white threads of paint.

 

This is a dark, intense work that pictures one of the most compelling myths of German nationhood, an event recorded by the Roman historian Tacitus in his Germania; or On the origin and Situation of the Germans written in AD98. This is the historical account of Arminius or Hermann and is set in the vast, dense, primeval Hercynian forest that extended from the Rhine across much of Southern Germany. For the Romans, the forest marked the edge of the known world and was a primitive, taboo landscape. Tacitus describes the people who lived here as having a close bond to nature, with few of the vestiges of a civilized society, they worshiped beneath the trees and offered human sacrifices to the gods of the woods. In many ways this repulsed Tacitus but he also saw much to admire in their lack of corrupting luxury, their monogamous marriages and a rugged self-denial that, in Schama’s words produce specimens of formidable toughness and stature.

 

*They were led by a man known as Arminius (by Tacitus) or Hermann (by the German people). Hermann was the son of a German chief captured by the Romans and recruited into the Roman army. *He returned to his people, raised a rebellion and ambushed and defeated the Roman army commanded by Publius Quintilius Varus as it marched through the forest to their winter quarters in AD9. The Roman legion, 25,000 strong was trapped between swamps and wildwood and, largely speared to death.

 

From the late 15th century onwards, some Germans began to portray themselves as descendants of these tribal peoples - wild, natural beings, who pursued an uncorrupted existence in their woodland arcadia. By the mid-18th century, these forests began to embody the authentic fatherland – raw, free and strong.

 

*Wald and volk – forest and people – were connected by Nazi ideologists. In 1941, when the German army launched its attack on the Soviet Union and overran eastern Poland, Hermann Goring, commander-in-Chief of the Lftwaffe, seized the Bialowieza forest – preserved through the centuries as a royal hunting estate – and declared it his own private property. The government conservation department then set to work to create a vast national park and game reserve around the ancient forest, clearing through force the people who lived there and returning the land to a depopulated wild woodland.

*Now that Goring had reestablished the urwald or primeval forest he needed an ancient animal to populate it. In 1920, the brothers Lutz and Heinz Heck, directors of the Berlin and Munich zoos, respectively, had begun a two-decade breeding experiment to recreate the auroch, a mighty oxen once common in Germany but now extinct, the last herds having died out in Poland in the early seventeenth century. *The creature’s ferocity and imposing size were legendary. Julius Caesar described the aurochs of Germania as an elephantine creature prone to unprovoked attack.

 

Michael Wang writes: The reintroduction of these…animals into the German landscape was part of a larger project of constructing a national identity based on mythic foundations.

 

*Returning to Kiefer’s painting through the words of Simon Schama:

The hapless Varus, inscribed in deathly black, faces down the path of…his historic fate. He is there in name, not person, because his adoption into the founding myth of Germany requires that an actual historical actor be stripped down to a symbolic essence – a sign, in this case, that Roman imperial hubris is about to meet its comeuppance at the hands of woodland freedom. Other names, important makers of the Arminius myth, hang from the branches or are attached to the battleground by white tendrils of memory…

 

*‘Varus’ strongly references Casper David Friedrich’s ‘The Chasseur in the Forest’, painted in 1813. Here a lone figure in French cavalry uniform stands in the clearing of a dense German wood. His horse is nowhere to be seen and there is a light dusting of snow upon the ground. In the painting’s foreground are symbols of death and misfortune – broken tree stumps and a lone raven. Friedrich made this painting during the 1813-14 War of Liberation, as the Prussians joined the Russians in the war against Napoleon. The inevitable violent fate of the French soldier chimes with that of Varus, enacted some 1800 years before. As Peter Paret writes in ‘the Cognitive Challenge of War: Prussia 1806’:

Contemporary opinion was in no doubt about the work’s meaning. A review of the Berlin exhibition in which the painting was shown in 1814 explains, “A French chasseur walking alone through the snowy fir forest hears his dirge sung by a raven”. To which we, after two centuries, might add how remarkable it is that in this very still painting, with barely perceptible motion of the sole figure in it, the artist conveys the killing and maiming of hundreds of thousands of French, German and Russian soldiers.

 

*In ‘Varus’, the Roman commander’s scrawled name stands in place of the French chasseur whilst the bare, lifeless trees replace the dense fir forest, the emblem of national resurrection (Schama). In the catalogue essay for last year’s Royal Academy Kiefer retrospective, Christian Weikop points out that the idea of Germany’s wounded arboreal landscape first surfaced in the work of Georg Baselitz”, for example, in ‘The Tree’ (1966) “…depicts a bare anthropomorphic specimen with severed bleeding branches; it is suggestive of an atrocity in the forest and undermines the patriotic ‘aborealism’ of German Renaissance and Romantic artists such as …friedrich. The latter’s representations of trees, as Simon Schama once observed, could be emblematic of German battalions.

 

*During the late 1960s, Baselitz continued to paint images of woodsmen, hunters and heroes, located within the forest, wretched figures that are rendered pictorially fractured and segmented. This form of fragmentation seems to reference the political division of Germany following the Second World War and the divided national psyche. Waldemar Januszczak takes things further:

*Baselitz’s Heroes are said to evoke Germany’s battered spirit in the post-war years. Their shirts are ripped. Their flies are open. Their bits are dangling. It has also been suggested that these are self-portraits, particularly the image of a one-legged soldier holding a palette and brush that is actually called Blocked Painter. But what I like most about these clumsy losers is their air of comic meladrama… If Baselitz is looking back on his pitiful national inheritance, then he is doing so with an explosive mixture of sadness and scorn.

 

*In recent years, Friedrich has been invoked once again by Ged Quinn in ‘The Ghost of a Mountain’ (2005). This time the diminutive building that stands in the foreground of the painting, surrounded by the woodland of the Teutoburger Wald, is the Berghof, Hitler’s mountain retreat, transplanted from Berchtesgaden to Mount Purgatory, which rises up from the forest floor. As with many of Quinn’s paintings, there are multiple cultural references at play but ultimately he is asking the question, what happens when myth replaces history?

 

*Kiefer’s paintings continued to engage with the politicized landscape. ‘Black Flakes’ (2006) and ‘For Paul Celan, Ash Flower’ (2006) depict barren, snowy landscapes and reference the poet Celan’s use of snow and ice as metaphors for the landscape of the Holocaust, a landscape of oblivion and silence, perhaps echoing Theodor Adorno’s comment that To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

 

*The installation in the final room of Keifer’s Royal Academy retrospective in 2014, made extensive use of the woodcut print and was located on the Rhine of Kiefer’s childhood home from the age of six. The river is a fluid and liminal space, marking the border between Germany and France. Indeed, every spring, the melting snow from the Alps would cause the river level to rise, flooding the cellar of his family home. The Rhine, as Davey puts it, was a boundary that while serving as a geographical frontier, was a constantly flowing, ever changing space. Kiefer himself said in 2008 that Artists are border dwellers, experts in transgressing boundaries as well as specialists in drawing borders.

 

 

Perceiving landscape: a cultural act and aesthetic experience

*“A ‘landscape’, cultivated or wild, is already artifice before it has become the subject of a work of art. Even when we simply look we are already shaping and interpreting”. Malcolm Andrews – ‘Landscape and Western Art’ (p. 1)

*The idea of landscape is complex and evolving. It is both physical topography and a social and cultural construct. Indeed, our perception of landscape and nature is shaped by a range of media, including painting, photography, film, literature or television. Andrews states that “Landscape, which has long meant either the real countryside or the pictured representation of it, is in effect the combination of the two”. 

Of course, landscape can be thought of a mere backdrop to work, something that has to be traversed on the way to somewhere else rather than contemplated for its own sake. Both WJT Mitchell and Rebecca Solnit address the issue of when landscape began to be perceived as an aesthetic or emotional experience for the first time.

*Although Mitchell argues that it is impossible to identify a specific moment, Solnitt identifies the latter part of the 18th century and the excursions of William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy as an important marker.

Solnit recognizes that, of course people did admire the natural world before this period; however, she believes that “a cultural framework” emerged at that point… that began to instill this notion in the wider public… to “give them certain conventional avenues of expression…”

She believes that this period had a long lasting legacy, inspiring walkers, travelers and tourists and leading to the creation of “innumerable parks, preserves, trails, guides, clubs, and organizations’.(p. 85)

 

Landscape and Value

 

*In his essay ‘Imperial Landscape’, Mitchell discusses landscape as a medium for expressing value… He writes: At the most basic, vulgar level, the value of landscape expresses itself in a specific price: the added cost of a beautiful view in real estate value; the price of a plane ticket to the Rockies, Hawaii, the Alps, or New Zealand. Landscape is a marketable commodity to be presented and re-presented in “packaged tours,” an object to be purchased, consumed, and even brought home in the form of souvenirs such as postcards and photo albums. (Mitchell 2002: 14-15).  

 

At the same time that it commands a specific price, landscape represents itself as ‘beyond price’. The essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson said that the landscape belongs to the person who looks at it but the pure viewing of landscape for aesthetic pleasure, what Claudia Bell and John Lyall call the sheer innocence of a curious gaze, is undermined by the knowledge of social and economic realities.

 

Mitchell continues: The land, real property, contains a limited quantity of wealth in minerals, vegetation, water, and dwelling space. Dig out all the gold in a mountainside, and its wealth is exhausted. But how many photographs, postcards, paintings, and awestruck ‘sighting’s of the Grand Canyon will it take to exhaust its value as landscape? Could we fill up Grand canyon with its representations?

 

The German term Landschaft or Lantschaft did not originally refer to a view of the natural world, rather, it signified a geographical area defined by political boundaries. In the late fifteenth century, the land around a town was referred to as landscape.

 

*Described by Kenneth Clark as “the first surviving landscapes in the modern sense,”Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s frescos on the walls of Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico were painted between 1338 and 1340. The West wall of the palace’s Sala della Pace depicts the ‘Effects of Good Government in the City and the Country’ whilst on the opposite wall is the ‘Allegory and Effects of Bad Government’, describing what happens in a state of tyranny.

 

*The city’s bustling commercial activities are linked to the scenes of rural life and labour beyond the city walls. Both urban and country are codependent on one another in economic and agricultural prosperity, achieved under the steady hand of a benign and efficient government.

 

Andrews suggests that this contributes to the propagandist promotion of this relationship between capitalism and feudalism …and illustrates landscape painting’s enduring capacity for expressing political or ideological concerns. (Andrews)

 

Indeed, landscape painting as a preeminent art form often emerged at times of change, whether topographical, social, cultural, political or religious.

 

*Landscape painting flourished in seventeenth Century Holland and ushered in what on the face of it was a truly naturalistic style. In her essay ‘’Competing Communities in the Great Bog of Europe’ Ann Jensen Adams describes the shift in the vision of the imaginary world landscape of Joachim Patinir’s ‘St Jerome in the Landscape’, painted between 1515 and 1524, *to the more naturalistic approach of artists such as Pieter Molijn who painted a series of dune landscapes a century later. However, she argues that the selection of identifiably Dutch land formations and sites, their dramatization and manipulation [within these paintings] and above all their ‘naturalization’ appealed to the unique conjunction in seventeenth century Holland of three historical elements. Indeed, Holland was going through dramatic change at this time in terms of its political and national status, its economic prosperity and religious outlook.

 

The very topography of the land was altered dramatically as the Dutch reclaimed more than 425 square miles of land from the sea between 1590 and 1664. The seven provinces of the Netherlands became independent from Spain in 1579. This was followed by a huge expansion of the country’s economy and a sharp increase in population fuelled by immigration. Finally, Protestantism replaced Catholicism as the professed religion of the land.

 

*All of this change, argues Jensen Adams, is reflected in the work of landscape painters. For example, Albert Cuyp’s ‘View of Dordrecht with Cattle’ depicts a small herd of dairy cows before a distant church and windmill. The cows make reference to the prominent Dutch industry of dairy farming – a corner stone of the country’s economy and therefore, its prosperity and an expression of patriotic sentiment. Indeed, at the time of independence from Spain, the Northern Netherlands was often represented by a healthy cow or bull.

 

The distant church is a view of the Grote Kerk in Dordrecht, which has huge historical and religious significance in Holland, being the site of the first national Reformed church synod and from where plans were made to publish the first Dutch translation of the official States bible.

 

As Jensen Adams writes: …the close visual juxtaposition of the historically important church with the economically important cows must have had strong resonances with national patriotic fervor in the Dutch viewer. Did the painting associate Dutch prosperity with the Dutch Reformed Church for some viewers? Or might Or might it have associated prosperity for others with an earlier era when the church had been used by Catholics? …in either case, this painting…presented a potential site for political thought and affiliation.

 

 

The English landscape tradition

 

*A radical alteration of the English countryside took place during the eighteenth century with the rapid and widespread enclosure of land. Through enclosure, landowners were allowed to acquire land for which before, there had been common rights of access for all for activities such as grazing livestock or mowing meadows for hay in an open field system. Open land was divided into a patchwork of fields under single ownership to increase the agricultural yield, which then served the country’s expanding towns and cities at the height of the industrial revolution.

 

During the same period, England’s middle classes demonstrated a growing interest in the aesthetics and values of the countryside. This was exemplified by the poetry of John Clare and William Wordsworth; the guidebooks of William Gilpin and the paintings of Richard Wilson, Turner, Gainsborough and Constable. It also marked the development of the English landscape garden tradition shaped by Henry Hoare, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown and Humphry Repton. The social, economic and political realities of the countryside are reflected in the various pictorial approaches to the subject from the outdoor conversation piece to the rustic landscapes of Gainsborough and Constable, whilst the increasingly naturalistic design of the English landscape garden had broader political implications.

 

The outdoor conversation piece would typically present a landscape garden with a grouping of people - usually the land’s owners - within it. The informal poses of the figures and their gestures allowed the landed classes to be seen to be ‘being themselves’ and acting naturally. Here, nature is a sign of the owner’s class and privilege and yet nature and the natural signify the values that legitimises this status and privilege (Bermingham 28/29).

 

*Thomas Gainsborough’s ‘Mr and Mrs Robert Andrews’ is perhaps the most well known example of this genre, however, Ann Bermingham in her book ‘Landscape and Ideology’ points out some striking differences. For example, rather than a landscape garden, the subjects are located before a working wheat field. They wear informal clothing and Mr Andrews lounges comfortably against the iron bench on which his wife sits. Bermingham writes that: Holding a flintlock and accompanied by a pointer, Andrews is the epitome of elegant leisure and moneyed privilege.…Quite simply, the Andrews can afford to be themselves.

 

The farmland setting of the painting demonstrates Mr Andrews’ relationship to the land, which is based on economic productivity. Bermingham continues: Andrews’ farm is not just a sign of status but also his very life’s work, his physical and moral sustenance. Andrews bears the mark of nature, naturalness, and nature bears the mark of human cultivation.

 

*The large landscape paintings - the so called ‘six-footers - that John Constable made from 1819 when he exhibited the ‘White Horse’ at the Royal Academy depicted rustic scenes along a four mile stretch of the Stour river from Stratford Mill to Flatford Mill and lock in East Anglia. The river had been turned into a canal in the 1740s, although it still retained a largely ‘natural’ character, and so every one of the ‘six footers’ bar one is concerned with the commercial life of the canal and its surrounding countryside. This was a period of great change and turbulence in the English countryside: the industrial revolution was turning the country from an agricultural economy into an industrial one; although Napoleonic Wars had provided a boom period for the countryside, peace brought economic depression. The living conditions for many agricultural laborers became intolerable and resulted in disorder, food riots and machine breaking. Constable felt a deep connection to the landscape of his youth but he also benefited from the privileged upbringing of his Mill-owning family.

 

*The Haywain is one of the most recognizable works in the history of British painting. In response to this work, the writer John Barrell has argued that Constable has fashioned a fantasy of rural social harmony, by turning the laborers into mere ‘automata’ and by diminishing the figures and their facial expressions so that they almost merge with the surrounding landscape – their backs are turned, their heads are down or their faces hidden beneath the brims of hats. Barell writes: if they obtruded more, if they become less symbolic, more actualized images of men at work, we would run the risk of focusing on them as men – not as tokens of calm, endless, and anonymous industry, which confirms the order of society.

 

However, Bermingham proposes a more subtle reading of this work. She sees the various tasks represented as fragmented and piecemeal activities without an overall sense of the whole process of production. Constable shows men caught in rural work and a system of production that they neither own nor control. Even the seemingly natural setting can be interpreted as a site of production, defined by the mill, locks and quays of the river. Bermingham continues: Constable has effectively turned the landscape into a kind of open-air factory…quite as much as it points to a preindustrial fantasy of organic production, it points to a contemporary model of alienated labour – endless anonymous industry indeed.

 

The six footers marked the passing of the rustic landscape and in their seemingly nostalgic and idealised vision of the English countryside they also articulated its new reality.

 

The Landscape Garden

 

*The growing interest of the middle class in the aesthetics and values of the countryside at the turn of the 18th century saw the advent of a truly English landscape gardening tradition within great estates. People began to view the landscape of gardens as though they were looking at a painting, influenced by the picturesque style of Claude Lorrain. As Alexander Pope put it: All gardening is landscape painting.

 

*As the century progressed the scale and ambition of these gardens grew, often absorbing the village commons that lay within their boundaries in an echo of the enclosure system. And occasionally, whole villages were displaced. The gardens employed a series of carefully arranged views and conventions such as natural-contoured (or serpentine) lakes, vistas of fields and trees, partially-hidden temples and grottos, hermitages and monuments… and a path or circuit which allowed all these features to be experienced in a particular order. There was one other important development the haha – a boundary ditch which allowed clear views from house to garden and garden to the landscape beyond.

 

But of course, increasingly, this landscape beyond the garden’s boundary became more and more cultivated as enclosure transformed the natural, open countryside into a patchwork of agricultural fields. As the fashion for less ordered and regulated garden designs grew, the landscape began to look increasingly artificial, like a garden, the garden began to look increasingly natural, like the pre-enclosed landscape (Bermingham 13/14).

 

*Towards the end of the eighteenth century, there was a shift in taste and a move to make the landscape garden even more naturalistic, rough and shaggy in contrast to the smooth lawns, ordered designs, wide prospects and panoramas of Repton and Brown. Even here, it was possible to make an idealogical or political reading of the landscape. These prospects, panoramas and unhindered horizons suggested ideas of liberty, whilst the abstract designs of Renton and Brown were equated with the principles of the French Revolution or Thomas Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’ – a mortal threat to the privileged classes. On the other hand, as Bermingham writes, the natural picturesque garden, with its variety, individuality and antiquity was comparable with the British Constitution’s slow and natural evolution.

 

 

 

The North American Wilderness

 

*The use of natural features, mountains, rivers, valleys, gorges etc, as a way of forming and asserting national identity is an enduring strategy. Claudia Bell and John Lyall write that When other constructions of nation are proving ephemeral or fugitive, the enduring physical presence of iconic landscape features is a way of grounding identity (p 195)

 

In Canada, Lawren Harris, one of the Group of Seven painters, active at the beginning of the Twentieth Century wrote that at the top of the continent is a source of spiritual flow that will ever shed clarity into the growing race of America, and we Canadians being closest to this source seem destined to produce an art somewhere different from our Southern fellows – an art more spacious, of a greater living quiet, perhaps of a more certain conviction of eternal values. As Andrews observes, the spiritual purity of the nation is therefore imagined in its landscapes.

 

*The idea of wilderness seems to shape and define the North American mindset and set it apart from a Western European position. Jonathan Bordo has said that “the Western European landscape, at least as early as the fifteenth century, is enunciated as a witnessed landscape, a landscape marked by deliberate signs of human presence: if not human beings figuratively present, then evidences of living human presence (shelters, dwellings, paths, roads, signs marking enclosures such as walls and fences, smoke rising from a fire), if not material evidences of human presence, then traces on the land of former human occupancies (cairns, tumuli, ruins, graves, architecture) (Mitchell p 297).

 

*As United States of America expanded West during the 19th century the Hudson River School - artists such as Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, Alfred Bierstadt, Thomas Moran - were active. They had been influenced by the British Romantic movement but as Andrew Wilton writes: were all born of the urgency they sensed in the life of America …and…responding to the stimulus of a new world as it unfolded before them. Their work sought to define a sense of American cultural identity and was bound up in the land itself, in notions of expansion and underpinned by a firm and guiding religious faith.

 

*Advocates of westward expansion drew upon the nation’s Puritan origins. In 1629, in explaining his desire to travel into the Western wilderness, the English colonial settler, John Winthorp, recounted God’s call to man to: Increase and multiply, replenish the Earth, and subdue it. And famously in 1845, John Louis O’Sullivan wrote of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.

 

WJT Mitchell sees the Western frontier as a barrier to be traversed in order to reach the promised land, an American Zion: “…as if Americans needed a desert to wander in, a diasporic ordeal to purify them for the promised Caanan of California’ (p. 269)

 

But as Tim Barringer points out, Man’s – and specifically America’s – providential mission to tame and cultivate the earth was wholly compatible in the nineteenth century both with the pursuit of personal and corporate profit and with national economic development.

 

*Artists such as Thomas Cole were concerned with developing a new artistic expression, focused on America’s natural scenery that broke with the dependency on the cultural colonialism left behind in the wake of political independence (Andrews 1999: 164) from the British. In other words, finding a new approach to landscape painting that rejected the pictorial conventions of the Western European tradition and that were appropriate to the specific topographical and cultural realities of America. Their work contributed to the shaping of a specific American cultural tradition and national identity and they coincided with the publication of notable literary works such as James Fenimore Cooper’s ‘the Last of the Mohicans’ and Washington Irving’s ‘Sleepy Hollow’ and ‘Rip Van Winkle’. This was also underpinned by an imperialist drive West.

 

In ‘Landscape and Power’, Mitchell asks whether landscape painting is integrally connected with imperialism – writing: Certainly the roll call of major ‘originating’ movements in landscape painting – China, Japan, Rome, seventeenth-century Holland and France, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain – makes the question hard to avoid (WJT Mitchell 1994: 9)

 

Gathering visual information was crucial to reconnaissance and charting the unknown topography of the West. It also provided opportunities for artists. Samuel Seymour and Titian Ramsay Peale travelled with major Stephen H Long in 1819/20 and Wilton describes the difficulties Seymour faced adapting his European picturesque style to the alien landscape.

 

*George Catlin made studies of Native Americans on his expedition up the Missouri in 1832/4. As Tim Barringer points out, his portraits had a paradoxical reading and purpose – both as sympathetic portraits and ethnographical records. These are indigenous people on the verge of extinction or, at the very least, great change.

 

*In one sense, this illustrates the poignancy of the situation faced by the artists who aimed to depict the West as a wild place. On his trip through Maine to make preparatory drawings for his 1853 painting, Mount Ktaadn (Katahdin), Frederick Church accompanied a party of loggers – and in the process of describing the American wilderness, populated by its indigenous peoples, the artists were also ushering in its demise. Indeed, Thomas Cole before him had bemoaned the continent’s inevitable deforestation whilst at the same time relishing in the possibility of the rise of great American cities.

 

*Albert Bierstadt’s ‘Surveyor’s Wagon in the Rockies’ (1859) places a lone figure in the bleak, scrub-pitted landscape of the American plains. The figure is a hazy silhouette, painted with an elegant shorthand. He has stepped forward to scan the horizon, to take the view into his gaze. In the distance, the Rocky mountains, articulated in flat washes of blue and ochre paint, rise up in the form a formidable geographical barrier. Andrews writes that the mountains are quite without solidity or volume, as if they too were blank features waiting to receive the map makers’ inscriptions, to have their peaks and canyons named, to have passes shaped for wagon routes and tunnels cut out for the railroad. The ‘Surveyor’s Wagon’ marks the first stage of the conversion of wilderness to real estate.

 

*Twenty three years before Bierstadt made this painting, Thomas Cole painted ‘View from ‘Holyoke, Northampton, MA, after a Thunderstorm – The Oxbow’ that illustrates the gap between civilization and the wilderness. Passing storm clouds are blown to the painting’s left to reveal the ordered farmland of the valley floor bathed in sunlight below a mountain outlook with its dense, wild vegetation and weather-beaten trees. The artist is just visible towards the bottom of the painting whilst his materials and the other paraphernalia of his painting trip are left on a rocky outcrop. These materials along with the umbrella, planted in the ground like an unfurled flag, resemble instruments of territorial control, both surveying the landscape below and announcing the conquest of the wild territory above.

 

*Bierstadt’s ‘The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak’ was made in 1863 following his participation in a surveying expedition led by General Frederick Lander. Here, the river valley settlement is formed by Native Americans who seem to assimilate into their natural surroundings. *In another painting of the same title completed the same year, there is no sign of human occupation. This is a truly wild and virgin territory, underpinned by the presence of a lone Grizzly bear. However, the artist’s (and subsequently the viewer’s) gaze has of course penetrated this ‘virgin space’. Whilst the painting’s title – ‘Lander’s Peak’ – suggests that this wilderness has been named and charted by European surveyors. As Andrew’s observes: The same peak monumentally dominates the populated valley in Bierstadt’s other painting of the same title, as if it were an allegory of the domination by the European settler of the indigenous peoples of America, a new political dispensation naturalized in the language of the landscape.

 

The American view of the West as a virgin space is obviously compromised by the presence of its indigenous peoples. As Jonathan Bordo writes: Because the wilderness alleges the zero degree of history, the indigens who are imputed to dwell in the wilderness are considered to be in a wild or savage state. Even deemed to be fauna, and/or deemed to be not there at all. (Bordo 2002: 291-315)

 

National Parks

*The contradictory nature of the European American’s relationship to the idea of wilderness is illustrated by National Parks. Yellowstone was established as the world’s first national park in 1872. Although the campaign to create the Park had its champions who were motivated by their love for Yellowstone’s rich landscape, it was, as George Monbiot explains to a large extent driven and financed by Jay Cooke, owner of the Northern Pacific Railroad – as he hoped that the tourist trade would boost his railroad’s income. The irony is that Cooke’s company collapsed in 1873, just a year after the park opened.

 

The act of dedication stated its aim to set apart…a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people. It also stated that the land: Is hereby reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale…

 

Although this provision was meant to stop the settlement of European Americans, it also transformed the native peoples into trespassers in the park – land on which they had been settled for some 11,000 years. The act of preservation (and its clearance of native people) became the model for the creation of national parks throughout the United States.

 

*In 1963, the ethos of Yellowstone changed – it was declared that the land would become ‘a vignette of primitive America…free from man’s spoilation’.

 

The new emphasis on wilderness rather than park belied the fact that the area had been settled by its native peoples before Yellowstone’s inception and that the area’s ecosystem had been shaped continuously in the century since. It also overlooked the idea that landscapes such as this are, in a sense, marketable commodities that are witnessed, documented and consumed yearly by a plethora of tourists.

 

*Yosemite Valley, which was established as a national park in 1864. Simon Schama identifies the role of preachers, painters (such as Bierstadt) and photographers (such as Carlton Watkins) who mediated and represented Yosemite as “the Holy park of the West; the site of the new birth; a redemption for the national agony” of the recent Civil War. (p. 7)

 

It was the great advocate of the preservation of the wilderness, John Muir, who first described Yosemite as a ‘park valley’ comparing it to an “artificial landscape garden”. But the brilliant meadow floor, which suggested a sort of pristine Eden to its first visitors was, in fact, the result of regular fire clearances by the Native Americans who had lived in the area for generations before the American settlers arrived.

 

*Wilton describes Cole, Church, Bierstadt and the rest as: pioneers in the long history of the sublime in America and it is true to say that they played a crucial role in visualizing American cultural identity through its landscape, which can be traced subsequently though the films of John Ford and the simulated topography of Disneyland.

 

Disney and Frontierland

 

*In 1979 the ‘Big Thunder Mountain Railroad’ ride opened in Disneyland’s Frontierland. This extraordinary simulated mountain landscape at the heart of the ride, one of approximately 22 mountains that have been constructed by Disney in its parks throughout the world - forms a potent signifier for the American West. Nature, through landscaping had been a crucial aspect of Frontierland from its opening in 1955. Disney propagated the idealized notion that the nation itself was defined by its historical connections to nature.

 

*The visitors to Big Thunder would recognise its very particular topography – Utah or Arizona come to mind; the archetypal landscape of the American West. They are of course, exposed to a controlled form of danger – the uncertainty found in the interface between nature and culture. And they also experience a quasi-educational ‘encounter’ with an American historical narrative – a choreographed form of cultural nostalgia.

 

Diller and Scofidio argue that: American tourism produces the ‘authentic’ past with a fictive latitude in which literature, mythology and popular fantasy are blended together into the interpretation process called heritage.

 

*Before the development of it’s epic thrill-based rides such as Splash and Space Mountains, the original nature-based attractions at Disneyland, such as the Jungle Cruise, Swiss Family Robinson and Frontierland’s Rivers of America, Nature’s Wonderland and *Tom Sawyer’s Island, had a more leisurely air, encouraging the visitor to gaze upon the ‘natural’ landscape. But a degree of danger was suggested - and, of course, the visitor was required to be complicit in this – by the hazardous adventures of the pioneer. A fire-damaged cabin was perhaps evidence of the dangers from indigenous populations, an unstable, rickety mine train bridge carried the visitor into ‘Bear Country’.

 

The landscapes of Frontierland mapped out the course of nineteenth century American imperialist ambition, embracing the myth of the pioneer and celebrating industrial innovation - in the form, for example, of the railroad and steamboat – which became indivisible aspects of the American landscape.

 

The Landscape of War

 

*In Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, landscape continued to be a rich subject for artists – just think of Cezanne and Mont Sainte-Victoire which he painted more than sixty times throughout his career. *As the drums of war began to beat ahead of the start of the First World War in 1914, Monet, elderly and ensconced in his house at Giverny, painted a series of weeping willow trees as a homage to fallen French soldiers. However, a far more powerful expression of the waste and violence of war was made through landscape by the British artist Paul Nash.

 

*Paul Nash exhibited ‘We are Making a New World’ in a show entitled The Void of War at the Leicester Galleries, London in May 1918. Nash, a graduate of the Slade - where his contemporaries included Ben Nicholson, Mark Gertler, William Roberts and Edward Wadsworth – *had been a reluctant volunteer to the army at the start of World War 1 and was sent to the Western Front in February 1917. Later that year he became an official war artist and, in a six week flourish of activity completed a series of ink and watercolour works that he called ‘fifty drawings in muddy places’ and these provided the visual source material for the ‘Void of War’.

 

*The painting was developed from a drawing of a sunrise at Inverness Copse, derelict woodland deep in the Ypres Salient. *The sun rises to reveal an utterly desolate landscape of shell craters, mud and shattered trees. The effects of the war of attrition are manifested as a sort of moonscape - un-navigable and almost unimaginable. The hillocks of mud, thrown up by the incessant shelling, resemble gravestones, whilst the charcoal branches of the bomb blasted trees stretch upwards like the grasping, anonymous hands of the men driven into the mud. On Good Friday, 6 April 1917, Nash described the landscape of the Ypres Salient thus:

Imagine a wide landscape flat and scantily wooded and what trees remain blasted and torn, naked and scarred and riddled. The ground for miles around furrowed into trenches, pitted with yawning holes in which the water lies still and cold or heaped with mounds of earth, tangles of rusty wire, tin plates, stakes, sandbags and all the refuse of war… In the midst of this strange country… men are living in their narrow ditches.

 

The waste and devastation of war is written large in the landscape. Nash’s sardonic and ironic title - ‘We are Making a New World’ – drives the message home. Nash had arrived in France as an official war artist in the aftermath of the Battle of Passchendaele, described by AJP Taylor as ‘the blindest slaughter of a blind war’. In response, Nash wrote: I am no longer an artist, I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever. It will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls.

 

*In his television portrait of Nash - the Ghosts of War - Andrew Graham Dixon said that duty and decorum and the dignity of the victims of war would mean that he couldn't paint them directly, however, he found a way to paint their pain and suffering. For Graham Dixon, the landscape is a body - the churned earth is like burned flesh, the tree stumps are like mutilated limbs, the red clouds in the sky resemble scarred and angry flesh - but the truth does still burn in the bright, Cyclops-like sun.

 

*A century after the Great War, the battlefronts of Afghanistan, Iraq, Lybia, Sierra Leone or Syria can seem as remote to us as ever. Jeff Wall’s giant cibachrome transparency ‘Dead Troops Talk (A vision after a Red Army patrol, near Mogor, Afghanistan, winter 1986’) conjures up an unimaginable spectacle from the end of the Russian occupation, peppering the barren, ruined landscape with dead soldiers, awakening from their grim fate in a goulish scene that Thomas Crow describes as *a modern equivalent to the survivors of the Raft of the Medusa with all the gore that Gericault recorded at the morgue but could never put on a monumental canvas.

 

*Closer to home and more recently, the militarized landscapes of the British Isles are described in the paintings of Rosie Snell. Ground to air missiles, aircraft hangers and life-sized model tanks used for target practice, cut a quiet presence in an otherwise pastoral landscape.

 

*Matthew Fintham, whose Ph.D thesis from the Royal College of Art was titled, 'Parallel Landscapes: A spatial and critical study of militarised sites in the United Kingdom' has written extensively about the places within the UK that are largely hidden or overlooked but where war is continually prepared for. *He contributed to Patrick Keiller’s 2010 filmic essay ‘Robinson in Ruins’, a form of psychogeography in which the camera is trained upon the English landscape in a series of static shots, that record its enduring pastoral illusion. *Within the film, a number of military sites including RAF Brize Norton, the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston and RAF Greenham Common are revealed, which Flintham says can be read as examples of a sustained military land grab in the twentieth century – another wave of enclosure that amounts to over 371,000 hectares of the British landmass reserved for training and defence.

 

*The military landscape is fugitive but is signified by rusty barbed wire fences and padlocked gates, decaying or re-purposed Second World War airfields, jerry-built pill boxes, abandoned rocket facilities and sinister Cold War sites. Many of these places are protected as heritage sites or are located within National parks. Keiller interrogates the landscape for signs of historical, cultural and political meaning. As Flintham concludes: Keiller’s films serve as reminders that the British military continues to be connected to a globalised military network animated by conflicting defence policies and dubious arms sales, not to mention contentious warfare.

 

Today the subject of landscape as a politicized space endures. *Gordon Cheung says of his large scale paintings that often incorporate collaged pages from the Financial Times: They're meant to be artificially luminous, a metaphor perhaps for the loss of that utopian vision of the future after the millennium bug threat, the dot com crash, the collapse of Enron, the war on terror - and all before the current recession.

 

*The toxic landscapes of Mark Wright are layered with cultural referencing, from the Fisher King to T S Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’, but they also point to scenes of ecological ruin.

 

*Marcus Harvey’s large-scale paintings on photographs are concerned with the social and cultural identity of Britain – or more specifically England. The white cliffs of Dover appear as an imposing barrier in front of dark and choppy waters. The scene feels all the more poignant post-Brexit.

 

*The source images for Dan Hays’ Colorado Impression 12a and 12b (the Gore Range) 2004, which came from a traffic web-camera in the Colorado mountains, were found by the artist on the first anniversary of the World Trade Centre attacks in New York. He writes: This low resolution photo had a peculiar quality I'd been searching for: when turned upside down and the colours inverted, a plausible landscape mysteriously appeared. Uncannily, this new scene reminded me of video footage from Afghanistan, depicting the bombing of the Tora Bora mountains in the search for Bin Laden. A pine tree in the original image becomes a kind of missile trail in the sky; a clearing on the wooded hillside becomes a trail of smoke.

 

*Even George Shaw’s nostalgic, idealized evocations of the Tile Hill estate, Coventry, his 1970s childhood home, reference the socio-economic conditions of that decade signified by the council houses and their graffiti, broken-in garages and discarded furniture. *The secluded semi-rural lanes at the edge of the estate are the sort of places that Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley would describe as the ‘Edgelands’ – the wastelands and peripheral spaces, the unexamined places that thrive on disregard.

 

*Such terrains are often formed from the retreat of industry or the expansion of retail parks but they also they also create sites of liberty beyond the reach of the cctv camera. As Symmons Roberts and Farley write: Children and teenagers, as well as lawbreakers, have seemed to feel especially at home in them, the former because they have yet to establish a sense of taste and boundaries and have instinctively treated their jungle spaces as a vast playground; the latter because nobody is looking.

 

*To conclude this talk I would like to turn once more to WJT Mitchell who wrote:

 

We have known since Ruskin that the appreciation of landscape as an aesthetic object cannot be an occasion for complacency or untroubled contemplation; rather, it must be the focus of a historical, political, and (yes) aesthetic alertness to the violence and evil written on the land.

 

 

 

Bibliography:

 

Ann Jensen Adams: Competing Communities in the Great Bog of Europe - Identity and Seventeenth Century Dutch Landscape Painting (in Landscape and Power edited by W J T Mitchell)

 

Malcolm Andrews: Landscape and Western Art

 

John Barrell: The Dark Side of the Landscape - the Rural Poor in English Painting 1730-1840

 

Claudia Bell and John Lyall: The Accelerated Sublime

 

Ann Bermingham: Landscape and Ideology

 

Ann Bermingham: System, Order and Abstraction - the Politics of English Landscape Drawing around 1795 (in Landscape and Power edited by W J T Mitchell)

 

Jonathan Bordo: Picture and Witness at the Site of the Wilderness (in Landscape and Power edited by W J T Mitchell)

 

Kenneth Clark: Landscape into Art

 

Thomas Crow: Modern Art in the Common Culture

 

Richard Davey and Kathleen Soriano: Anselm Kiefer (RA catalogue)

 

Elizabeth Diller and Richard Scofidio in Universal Experience - Art, Life and Tourist’s Eye

 

Matthew Flintham: The Military-Pastoral Complex: Contemporary Representations of Militarism in the Landscape (Tate Research Article 11 May 2012)

 

Andrew Graham Dixon: The Ghosts of War (BBC4)

 

Unmberto Eco: Travels in Hyperreality

 

Andreas Huyssen: Twilight Memories: Making in a Culture of Amnesia

 

Waldemar Januszczak: Turning the Art World on its Head (http://www.waldemar.tv/2007/09/turning-the-art-world-on-its-head/) 23 Sept 2007

 

Patrick Keiller: Robinson in Ruins (BFI)

 

W J T Mitchell (ed): Landscape and Power

 

W J T Mitchell: Imperial Landscape (in Landscape and Power edited by W J T Mitchell)

 

George Monbiot: Feral - Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life

 

Peter Paret: The Cognitive Challenge of War - Prussia 1806

 

George Ritzer and Allan Liska in Universal Experience - Art, Life and Tourist’s Eye

 

Simon Schama: Landscape and Memory

 

Brian Schofield: Beware Parklife (New Statesman 21 Aug 2008)

 

Rebecca Solnit: Wanderlust - A History of Walking

 

Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley: Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness

 

Michael Wang: Heavy Breeding (Cabinet Magazine issue 45 spring 2012)

 

Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer: American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States 1820-80