Landscape and Abstraction

Even as landscape painting emerged in Europe around 1500 as an autonomous artistic discipline – particularly in Flanders and Venice – it never topped the rigid academic hierarchy of painting genres. History painting ranked higher, with its depictions of human actions in all their supposed nobility. What landscape did bring to the table, however, was unanticipated popularity. Almost everyone up and down the class ladder responded to seeing the plot of earth they inhabited faithfully rendered. It turns out we experience an almost visceral response to the mountains, fields and riverbanks we already know, and even the city streets. Thus, a new field of visual exploration opened up.

Over the next four centuries landscape’s role expanded exponentially and effortlessly, and increasingly resided at painting’s cutting edge. As the essay that follows lays out in brief, around the turn of the twentieth century landscape painting at its most radical joined forces with a daring recent innovation in art: abstraction. They would make common cause as a privileged forum for ‘pure’ painting which at the same time evoked the rhythms and amplitude of nature.

As Looking Outwards to Look Inwards makes clear, it is an alliance that has continued to flourish. In Bird in Evening Sky (1963) the American doyen of abstract landscape, Milton Avery (1885-1965) animates a broad-brushed skyscape with an angular abstract avian form. In the 1990s, Ilse D'Hollander (1968-1997) used freely gestural painting, her dominant brushstrokes evoking the lyrically flat landscape of her native Flanders. And in her late paintings of the past decade the Lebanese-American painter Etel Adnan (1925-2021) juxtaposed brilliantly coloured geometric forms to evoke with bracing succinctness the eternal landscape verities of sun, sea and sky. The question is, how did this fertile alliance of two distinctive genres come about?

With the invention of the landscape oil sketch in Italy in the 1770s and 1780s landscape became the pre-eminent genre for exploring new painterly possibilities such as rapid execution, improvisation, simplification and the stylisation of forms. Two foreigners led the way: the Welshman Thomas Jones (1742-1803) and the Frenchman Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819). While they were both part of the large international community of artists in Rome they never actually met. The former employed startling perspectives and determinedly 'uninteresting' motifs – a rock face, blank walls, laundry drying in the breeze – thereby anticipating by over a century the spontaneity of the snapshot. However, Jones was so uncertain about what he had wrought that, returning to Wales, he locked away his sketches in the attic; their rediscovery only in the late 1940s revealed a key source for a painting revolution by then 150 years old.

Valenciennes, for his part, was arguably even more daring in his bold simplification of form. Has anyone painted clouds more thrillingly? His landscape oil sketches were the first to enter the Louvre in Paris. More importantly, in 1799 he published a treatise on what he was up to.[1] His secrets were now available to anyone contemplating a landscape and picking up a brush in response. If you want to paint running water, he said, or scudding cloud, give yourself fifteen minutes, no more. Train your eye in quick observation, your hand in quick execution, for nature is in constant flux. Implicit in his breakthrough was a notion that the viewer too would add their own experience and participate in interpreting the scene. 
 

With the emergence of Impressionism in the 1860s a new way of painting landscape took on weight and gravity as a means of exploring modern life in its contradictory abundance. Now the viewer was called on to decipher daubs of colour often seemingly independent of representation. Almost any detail of a painting by Claude Monet (1840–1926) or Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) at their most daring makes the point. Then, only a few decades later, around 1900, a new category of art-making – breathtaking in both its freedom, and its demand on the audience's powers of interpretation – began to emerge. Abstraction's sources are many – the attempt to capture and express inchoate spiritual states of being not least among them. Think of the Briton Georgiana Houghton (1814–1884), the Swede Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) and the Russian Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), all seeking the spiritual in art. The literature on spiritualism and the genesis of abstract painting is vast, growing, and ever compelling.[2)

 

Ten years later, in 1888, Paul Sérusier (1864-1927) followed the instructions of his mentor Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) by depicting on a small wood panel a humble Breton lake, deep in the forest, using the brightest and most artificial colours possible. Today, it is perhaps easier for us to decipher the landscape component, but back then the vibrant hues, apparently independent of subject, seemingly lying on the surface rather than carving out space, shocked and moved the young artists of Paris. Sérusier showed it to all of them. They dubbed it The Talisman and carried the tiny banner into battle for a new art of bold formal experimentation.[4]

 

By 1911, Kandinsky was almost two years into his search for a way beyond representation, taking on evermore complex 'improvisations' and 'compositions' in which landscape motifs remained visible and sometimes compositionally determinant, but in which bold abstract passages played an ever-bigger role. On 2 January he attended a concert in Munich by the experimental Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg. Already Schoenberg's compositions were abandoning classical diatonic tonality in favour of sometimes grating atonality, itself seen as disconcertingly abstract. The Russian felt an immediate kinship and wrote to the composer soon after to say that what he was seeking to achieve in music was 'exactly what I am trying to find in my paintings.'(5) The field had broadened: abstraction was now a universal aesthetic aspiration.