Below are listed what I felt to be the main points with most relevance to my work in particular the yellow highlights.. in this excellent book. I actually read it several months agao, but have just realised that I haven't included it in the blog.
Landscape
and Western Art - Malcolm Andrews
P18 Referring to Joel Meyerowvitz's image on p16 of New
York - This is the new wilderness, but a wilderness constituted by almost the
opposite components to those of a natural wilderness: instead of a place almost
empty of humans and devoid of any artefacts, the city is a place overused by
humans and consisting wholly of artefacts.
Above all, perhaps in this picture, it is the congestion that impresses
us. Graham Clarke describes this picture
as the post-modern city. P90
The Photograph
P19/20 We may be
genetically programmed to prefer the 'ideal landscapes' of Capability Brown (The Picturesque?) as they
resemble the Savannah landscapes settled by early man after leaving the forests
as they enabled prey and predators to be more easily seen and therefore
improved survival chances.
P28 Landscape: German Landschaft meaning a geographical
area defined by boundaries. In 15th
century the land around a town is referred to as its landscape.
P30 In the renaissance period landscape without a human
subject is very rare.
P30-43 Despite the
above Jerome in the Wilderness paintings always depict the wilderness as wild,
remote and craggy - sublime???
P41 The first
'independent' landscapes in the history of European art are by Albrecht
Altdorfer (1408-1538), but even then trees might represent humans. (again a type of sublime
landscape with footbridge p42.)
Landscape and
Amenity
P53 Awesome and beautiful landscapes can detoxify the
mind and spirit. See quotes at the top of the page.
P53 The idea of small-scale gardening or large scale
'landscaping' have always oscillated between the extremes of full cultivation
and untouched wilderness.
P54 Nature could
be thought of as raw wilderness; the deforming and uncontrollably prolific
force of the fallen world: 2The best Nature without Art is but a
wilderness." Reference 5 p225
P57 The heightened interest in having access to fine
views of the countryside (from
villas) is part of the general idealising of the rural world,
intensified by the rapid growth of cities and the problems attendant on such
growth. Italy 1500s. So it is not just a 20th/21st
century thing!!
P59 Pliny's way of
suggesting the extraordinary beauty of the rural landscape is to make it seem
more the product of art than nature.
This must be one of the first intimations of the Picturesque habit of
using landscape painting as the standard of beauty in assessing real scenery.
P61Orsini Park (Fig 28) at Pitigliano, begun in 1560, was
designed to offer the spectator particularly rugged and grandscale views. Sublime??
P62 Domestic + the Wild = Art + Nature
P68 Older
prejudices against mountain wilderness led to striking distinctions between the
cultivated land of a garden estate and the outlying regions untouched by
cultivation and, hence, inhospitable. e.g. the portrait of Chatsworth fig 31
Chapter 4
Topography and the Beau Ideal
P79 Maps and landscape pictures have a close relationship
P86 In the early
1600s the flourishing of landscape art in the Netherlands owed a lot to the
concentrated urbanisation - over half the population lived in cities; unique in
Europe at that time.
P86 Some allowance should be made for picturesque exaggeration, but largely
topographically accurate.
P87 Topographic
landscapes became popular during the 17th century celebrating the 'New
Holland'.
P88/89 Suddenly pictures become discerning - where there
are the traditional picturesque compositional strategies to focus the eye and
direct its travel around the picture. Ref Goltzius figs 45 and 46
The sky is almost blank in topographic paintings.
P93 17th century Italian and Dutch paintings are polar
opposites: Italian landscapes depict the Arcadian ideal, whilst the Dutch are
topographic.
Topographic paintings are allied to mapping
P93 Roger de Pile's Cours
de Peinture par Principes (1708)
The Heroic landscape.
P94 Landscapes such as those by Nicholas Poussin can
evoke feelings of awe and terror.
The Pastoral or Rural
P97 Became closely
associated with Claude Lorraine who settled in Rome in 1627
The specific topographic record became subordinated to a
generalised and idealised pastoral or heroic landscape.
P99 In Claude's paintings figures become marginalised and
give way to the landscape.
P100 Claude's
paintings became increasingly idealised, largely in response to the demands of patronage.
The idealisation of Place
Two opposed landscape modes: Topographic and
Idealised i.e heroic and pastoral. Map v Art
Chapter 5
Framing the View
P107 A landscape
picture is an image of the outside world adorning the walls of the indoor
world.
P115 Landscape
scenery became to be perceived as a spectacle or social amenity so.....18th
century picturesque tourists travelled armed with Claude Glasses.
P116 William
Gilpin uses a Claude Glass
Gilpin's pictorial processing of the experience of
natural scenery is a version of the way many of us continue to perceive
landscapes, as our experience of it is increasingly mediated by frames of one
kind or another: the window, camera viewfinder, television, cinema screen.
Tourists equipped with Claude Glasses could pass through
the countryside 'taking pictures' in the same way the modern tourist does with
a camera (or phone or ipad),
and return home with a series of 'fixed' and 'appropriated' landscape pictures
mediated through frame and viewfinder.
P119/120 Paintings
became like stage sets - artificial.
P120 The
playhouse, the window frame and the ideally proportioned rectangular view are
brought together in one formally celebrated natural site in the lakes. Lower Rydall Falls has a small 17th century
stone hut/summerhouse designed so that, although the viewer can hear the falls,
the view is blocked by the hut until they enter to find the falls ideally
framed in the window. Reference Thomas Gray quote P122
P124 Magritte and Cassagne
Chapter 6 'Astonished
beyond Expression'
Landscape,
the Sublime and the Unpresentable
p129
·
The
Picturesque view of nature is one that appreciates landscape in so far as it
resembles known works of art;
·
Uncultivated
natural scenery becomes domesticated;
·
The
Picturesque makes different places seem like each other;
·
It
chooses to reassure, not to shock;
·
Over
time, its homogenising habit dulls with sameness and familiarity and the spirit
longs for novelty and freshness, even shock;
·
In
landscape art there are a number of ways to challenge these tendencies of the
Picturesque:-
o
Search
out more remote pictorially uncharted regions of the Earth to portray. Or
o
Refigure
the familiar
'A Sort of
Delightful Horror'
P130 The 17th
century Italian painter Salvator Rosa acquired a reputation for wild, turbulent
landscapes which were collected by Grand Tourists. e.g. fig 71
P130 His name
became almost proverbial for the terror induced by awesome mountain scenery.
P132 The
experience of the sublime is almost, by definition, on that subverts order,
coherence, a structured organisation just as in Walpole's attempts to describe
the Chartreuse (on P130)
P133 The first treatise on the sublime was by
Longinus......a well-timed stroke of sublimity scatters everything before it
like a thunderbolt.
·
As
well as mountains the sublime might be violent storms, erupting volcanoes or
thunderous waterfalls;
·
All
these impress the spectator with their power to crush the human being;
·
The
highest manifestation of Sublime power id the intervention of the deityin human
affairs;
·
The
Sublime is a gendered aesthetic: rugged, primitive, patriarchal;
·
Burke
- beauty has features which suggest the female form;
·
The
Sublime becomes associated with Rosa's world of dark elemental violence,
gypsies and bandits; and the beautiful is associated with Claude's languorous
and voluptuous pastoral scenes.
P134 Burke listed among the sources of the Sublime power,
obscurity, privation, vastness, infinity, difficulty and magnificence. All suggest experiences that rob us of
control.
P134 For the
Sublime to be attractive as an experience, there needs to be some reassurance
that, in the face of overwhelming power, the person is not actually in mortal
danger.
PP136-140 Andrews
discusses at length works depicting the Niagara Falls.
PP 140-143 Panoramas are a type of sublime.
P143 In
Friedrich's Wanderer above a Sea of Mist
(Fig 79) the figure is not a conduit to an otherwise sublime scene. The viewer is blocked.
P149 The Sublime happens anywhere, once the film of
familiarity is lifted or pierced.
Chapter 7
Landscape and Politics
P151 The rural idyll deliberately masks the commercial
cycle that connects town and country.
P156 Landscape in
art can express a set of political values and a political ideology when it is
not intending to be political
P156 A wide
landscape can suggest a sense of freedom to roam.
P157 The health of the eye seems to demand a
horizon. We are never tired, so long as
we can see far enough. Ralph Waldo
Emerson in Nature 1836
P158 Emerson in Nature says that men can own fields,
farms and buildings but Not the landscape.
Transcendentalism.
P158 Landscape can
be and has been the medium for the propagandist transmission of national
identity.
P159 The issues of
nationhood and boundaries and frontiers, both geographical and cultural are
peculiarly intense in the experience of the 19th century American landscape
artists - painters and photographers - especially those who confronted
wilderness as the frontier moved west.
P163 W. J. T.
Mitchell suggests that landscape is employed as a technique of colonial
representation. Imperial Landscapes in Landscape and Power
P164 The sense of
national identity was linked to a kind of internal imperialist drive, the move
westward and the appropriation of territory from the Native Americans. Thomas Cole
P165 of Fig 90 The
surveyor's wagon marks the first stage of wilderness to real estate.
P166 ......as if
it were an allegory of the domination by the European Settler of the indigenous
peoples of America, a new political dispensation naturalised in the language of
landscape
The Natural
Order and the Social Order
P166 The
Picturesque was a strategy used to depoliticise views of the natural world.
P166 Politics was
the preserve of men in 18th century England, but the cult of the Picturesque
with its mix of jargonised connoisseurship cultivated sensibility and
development of sketching skills opened opportunities for women to involve
themselves in aesthetic debate about landscape.
P167 Because
Picturesque tourism shut off considerations of an economic or political kind,
it legitimised it as an intellectual province of women.
P167 Urbanisation,
industrialisation, parliamentary acts of enclosure, government forestry
policies, the impact on the poor of legislation against vagrancy and poaching -
all of these could be excluded from consideration when the landscape was to be
appreciated according to Picturesque principles.
Chapter
8 Nature as Picture or Process
P177 In Snowstorm (fig 96) Turner painted the
storm as it was which differed from the neoclassical academic view that
nature's material forms need some correction by the artist. (Claude/Gilpin)
P180 The landscape
artist has to acquire a more scientific understanding of his subject.
P181 Geologists
and cultural thinkers of early 19th century Europe increasingly stressed the
belief that humans were not as detached from natural processes in the world
around them as they might have supposed.
P181 Their
contentions coincided with open-air painting.
P182 Landscape
painters began to represent nature as it was as did Turner.
P182 Ruskin
defended Turner in Modern Painters 1843. He attacked the academic tradition for
idealising the landscape and argued for landscape painters greater attention to
the specifics of the natural world.
P180/181 Joe
Cornish has remarked that, among his approaches to photographing landscape, 'is
a search for forms which reflect the primeval force of nature': these
can be found on beaches, canyons, glaciers, wind-driven snow, sandy deserts
and, of course, from plants and flowers.
By bringing out the pattern, rhythm or shape which reflects nature's
energy, the photographer can offer a fresh vision and insight into the subject.
Chapter 9
Landscape into Land
P 204 This is why
so much Earth Art or Land Art can be disseminated only in photographs with text
or sometimes just with text.
