Landscape in the Arts

A series of universal attitudes toward the idea of landscape in painting can be found in Eastern and Western cultures through the centuries. These are identified through the motifs of garden/paradise, space/place, awesomeness/sublimity, and form/formlessness. These attitudes relate to developments in religious values, philosophy, economics, and politics as well as to technological and stylistic changes in the arts.

Garden/paradise.

Traditionally understood to be derived from the Persian for "a walled enclosure," the paradise, particularly the paradise garden, is a widespread visual motif among world cultures and mythologies. Oftentimes synonymous with the enchanted garden, the paradise garden signifies first and foremost a place of safety where love and friendship can thrive. The glorious details of its flowery meadows, sweet aromas, shade-giving trees, and gentle animals are important, especially in its connotation as a metaphor of the heavenly paradise. The motif of the garden denotes both a space of beauty and vegetation and, in a number of religions, the site of the origins of humanity. A major metaphor for the earthly paradise, the Garden of Eden was first the home of Adam and then of Eve, in which all the terrestrial gifts of the creation were abundant until the primordial couple fell from God's favor and was expelled from the garden.

Early Christianity reformulated the classical perception of the natural world as a place of delight into a metaphor for our exile from the garden. Thus early Christian artists formulated an image of landscape as a symbolic paradise, as seen in the glistening apse mosaic featuring heaven and earth in the Transfiguration (c. 548; San Apollinaris in Classe, Ravenna, Italy). The highly stylized trees and plants are in keeping with the early Christian concern with flatness as an attribute distinguishing image from idol. The decorative glorification of the natural world denotes what Kenneth Clark identified as the "landscape of symbols" present in this Ravenna mosaic alluding to the lost but not forgotten garden. The garden motif was regularly contrasted to the desert and/or the wilderness in early Western monotheism; the "land of milk and honey" was the earthly locale providing a foretaste of the heavenly paradise.

During the twelfth century, the enchanted garden motif was reformed and aligned with the Christian hortus conclusus (enclosed garden) and the Islamic enclosed garden, as exemplified by the Master of the Upper Rhine's Paradise Garden (1410; Städelesches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt) and the manuscript illumination of Humay and Humayun in a Garden (c. 1430; Musée des Arts Décoratif, Paris). In the former, the normative medieval elements of a garden are fused with the Hellenistic poetic amoenus, or "lovely place," as the delicate sights and smells of flowers—including the singular form of thornless rose that medieval Christianity reserved as the sign of the Virgin's "enclosed garden"—and other flourishing vegetation create a visual delight. The Christ Child merrily plays music as his mother reads peacefully in this place of love, comfort, and safety. Similarly the earthly Humay and Humayan find happiness in both their pronouncements of love and in the enchanting setting for their rendezvous. This flower-filled garden is surrounded by a series of appropriately decorated screens that extend the floral and arboreal patterns against a romantic night sky. The presumably perfumed atmosphere, tender bird songs, shade-giving trees, and cool water of these enclosed gardens continue their visual analogies to the lost paradise of Adam and Eve.

The earth as a place of exile is fundamental to the medieval motif of the "labors of the months," which eventually was transformed into the fifteenth-century illuminations in books of hours, in particular, those of the Limbourg Brothers such as October from Trés Riches Heures de le Duc de Berry (1413; Musée Condé, Chantilly). The Limbourg Brothers here combine the "lost garden" motif with the result of the Fall, that is, that humans must toil in the fields. So as one man rides a horse to till the earth and another sows the winter seed in front of the then Palais du Louvre, the viewer experiences the sensation of the enclosed garden, because the wall in the background can be interpreted as a closing off of the farmed lands from the world of aristocratic and political activity. The passing of the seasons is highlighted by the astrological calendar that frames the top of this illuminated page. Further, the Limbourg Brothers connect the natural with the spiritual in their concern for the meteorological effects of the changing A merging of the awesome and the sublime. Icebergs (The North) (1860) by Frederic Edwin Church. Oil on canvas. PHOTO CREDIT: ART RESOURCE, NY Chaos of nature meets the constancy of the natural world. Under the Wave off Kanagawa from Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (1830–1835) by Katsushika Hokusai. © HISTORICAL PICTURE ARCHIVE/CORBIS seasons, evidenced by the costuming and postures of the farmers as well as by the landscape. That which had been the happy home of the primordial couple has become the site of exile for their descendants, who must contend with the challenges of nature's bounty and powers.

Space/place.

The notion of space in landscape is twofold, that is, it occurs both inside and outside the frame. Further, there is a philosophic if not psychological reality to the transformation of space into place. This idea of land as space and place is promoted in the work of the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. The activity of transforming space into place encompasses the acts of identification, naming, possession, and privileging. Perhaps, as in the journey toward landscape, the path toward place is a metaphor for the process of individuation. Further, the spatial relationships within and without the frame have implications beyond the vista of a landscape.

Thomas Cole's now classic rendering of The Oxbow: The Connecticut River near Northampton (1836; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) is a multivalent reading of the idea of landscape in nineteenth-century American art. A diagonal line runs from the painting's lower right corner upward toward the swirling storm clouds in the upper left corner. To the left of this diagonal line Cole's landscape is a classic display of the wilderness: untamed and unmannered, with lushly green vegetation, decaying broken trees, and a storm-filled sky signaling the tempestuous conditions of nature. Correspondingly the landscape to the right of the diagonal is basked in sunlight, carefully managed and arranged, implicitly under human dominion and exuding a sense of serenity and silence. The founder of the Hudson River School of painters and later also of writers, Cole is further identified as the first American landscape painter. A devout Christian, Cole used his renditions of the landscape as a visual mode of moral and spiritual reflection. Knowing the date of this A passionate vision of landscape. The Starry Night (1889) by Vincent van Gogh. Oil on canvas. MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK CITY. LILLIE P. BLISS BEQUEST. © THE ART ARCHIVE /ALBUM /JOSEPH MARTIN painting, it becomes necessary to consider the effect of the economic disasters of 1835 and the then-common reading of this painting as an omen of future disasters, most notably the Civil War. The Oxbow is also a depiction by Cole of America as the "new Eden," an artistic and literary motif popular in the early period of American landscape painting that both offered a connection to the European tradition of landscape painting and served as a vehicle for an American "Christian" art.

However, it is Cole's development and evolution of the intersecting concepts of space and spatial relations into "a place" that characterizes this idea of landscape in America. As a horizontal canvas, The Oxbow offers its viewers a peripheral range of vision as well as the traditional foreground, middle ground, and background. The meteorological effects of the stormy and thunderous clouds on the left of the center diagonal, and of the available sunlight with a series of soft clouds on the right, reflect a modernizing of the Limbourg Brothers' point of correspondence. Providing his viewer with a horizon line through which one can enter into this wilderness and pastoral landscape, Cole did not forget that Western characteristic necessity of the presence of the human. Toward the lower right-hand corner, as the wild vegetation begins to soften into the mannered presentation of the river and the farmed pastures, the disciplined viewer espies a white and red umbrella slanting away from the now decipherable diminutive portrait of the artist.

The twentieth-century painter Georgia O'Keeffe dedicated the last years of her life to the depiction of the landscape in the American Southwest. However, earlier in life she painted landscapes reflecting the places where she lived, including Texas, New York City, and Lake George. Influenced by the modernist ethos that incorporates Oriental (as in Chinese and Japanese) art and philosophy, her paintings such as Red Hills, Lake George (1927; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.) are minimized presentations of economical delineations of forms that express the ideas and evoke the emotions that characterize the artist's theme. Like Cole, she leaves an empty space in the upper sky that can be correlated to the void in Chinese and Japanese landscapes. Further, her use of hot-and cool-toned colors, in coordination with the simplicity of her forms, leads us to experience the essence of her idea of the landscape. Physically small in scale and squarer in shape than The Oxbow, O'Keeffe's painting creates the visual sensation of a wide-open space with the intersecting "v" formations of mountains. The viewer is without an entry point but comes to the recognition that this is a new way of seeing and expressing the idea of the landscape: the viewer is standing within the frame.

Awesomeness/sublimity.

The expression of energy and power found in the landscape is delineated by the categories of the awesome and the sublime. Depictions of extraordinary meteorological events, natural disasters, and spiritual intensity in landscape capture the essence of these categories. The nineteenth-century American painter Frederic Edwin Church created an image merging the awesome and the sublime in The Icebergs (The North) (1861; Dallas Museum of Art). Overcast by an aura of solitude and silence, The Icebergs draws viewers into the eerie blue-green water, the reflected colored lights on the other icebergs, and the almost surreal iceberg formations reminiscent of Leonardo's rock. One may not even initially see the broken, half-sunk ship frozen in the wintry waters of the north, the only sign of human presence.

Katsushika Hokusai's Mount Fuji Seen below a Wave at Kanagawa from his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Tokugawa period, 1830–1835; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) communicates a moment of simultaneous awe and terror. The dramatic energy of the inland sea is seen in the large, threatening waves, most significantly in the tallest ocean wave, which curls over with such intensity that it froths with foam and dwarfs Mount Fuji, which is visible in the background. The frothing waves extend talons of water and foam that reach out to overturn the boats cascading over the curvilinear water slides. Despite all these raging waters and potentially overturned boats, Mount Fuji, the sacred mountain, stands calmly, majestically, and reassuringly in the distant background. The awesome and the sublime fuse into an image that at once captures nature's swirling energies and its stability.

Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night (1889; Museum of Modern Art, New York) coordinates warm and cool colors with an intensity of line to express a passionate vision of the landscape. The undulating swirls electrify the night sky, enhancing the white, blue-white, and yellow circles of "fire" that traverse the upper realm of this canvas. The large yellow crescent moon in the upper right corner is balanced by the flamelike vertical cypress trees in the lower left corner. The country village unfolding beyond these two reference points is accentuated by the church that stands almost at the center of the frame. The rhythm of the internal forms creates an atmosphere of spiritual intensity and reawakens the primordial awe at the vast magnificence and limitless powers of the natural world.

Form/formlessness.

The common perception is that natural objects such as trees, mountains, and flowers should be depicted accurately in Western painting. Representational forms, that is, those recognizable through their resemblance to what is seen in everyday life, are the most comfortable to the human eye and the least threatening to the human psyche. However, abstracting forms in order to artistically distill the essence of the thing or idea became an artistic convention in Western landscape most prominently with the influence of Japonisme in the 1860s. Thus a formless style of characterization became a visual mode for evoking emotion and response from viewers. Although a new practice among Western landscape painters, this "formlessness," or abstraction, had been common to Eastern artists almost from the inception of interest in nature as an universal reflection of spiritual values. Fuyake Roshu's Utsunoyama: The Pass through the Mountains (Edo period, 1699–1757; Cleveland Museum of Art) incorporates highly stylized but nonrepresentational forms for his mountains, vegetation, and river. This patterning of undulating masses, curvilinear flattened forms, and decorative vegetal shapes present the essence of landscape in a dynamic yet challenging mode.

Translated into Western art first by Whistler and then by the Impressionists, this artistic interest in formlessness, or "formless form," reached new heights in the late nineteenth century with paintings such as Paul Gauguin's The Day of the God (Manaha no Atua) (1894; Art Institute of Chicago). In this work, one of the paintings influenced by his Tahitian sojourn, the exotic is referenced not simply by title or attitude toward the human figure but also the expressive quality of Gauguin's colors. In this canvas he clearly merges form with formlessness in the abstractions of landscape in the foreground, where the discarded garments of the ritual celebrants are almost indistinguishable from the topography and the pool of water.

Pursuing the idea of landscape as a merger of form and formlessness one step further, Salvador Dalí painted images such as The Persistence of Memory (1931; Museum of Modern Art, New York) in which the viewer's normal concept of proportion is also skewed, as for example in the larger-than-life-size limp watch that hangs over a bare branch of a diminutive tree. Objects fuse with anthropomorphic elements in this landscape of dreams, as the formless foreground is absorbed into the recognizable forms of the lake and mountainside by Dalí's home in Port Lligat, Spain. In this way he coordinates the known with the unknown, dream with reality, and form with formlessness within the idea of landscape.