Landscape and Western Art, Malcolm Andrews.

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.