The empty landscapes of the Landes

Théodore Rousseau, Swamp in the Landes, after 1844

I have been so impressed by Kelly Presutti's Land into Landscape that I can't resist one more post on it, highlighting her chapter on 'Wetlands'. Here is a painting she writes about by Théodore Rousseau, the Barbizon painter whose 'ecological' approach to painting entangled trees, untouched by the state's foresters, features in her chapter on 'Forests'.  The Landes, remote from Paris and considered a backward, featureless waste had never attracted landscape painters until Rousseau and Jules Dupré made a trip to the region in 1844. Rousseau's landscape is very different from his dense depictions of Fontainebleau Forest. 

Silvery-white brushstrokes glance over the surface of the image without gathering in any defined area. Dragging a thinly loaded brush horizontally across the canvas in short strokes, the artist evoked the sparse, fleeing sensations of this liminal region. Two-thirds of the canvas is devoted to the sky, but it is a sky that is in intense dialogue with the ground below, picking up on those waterways and creating parallel streams of light and dark above. There are no foreground framing elements; on the contrary, the foreground passes hazily into the middle ground and distance without clear delineation. The scene has regional details, including the scrawny Atlantic pine, a loosely penned-in area with what are likely cattle, and in the far distance what could be sails, as though our gaze might extend to the ocean. It is difficult to measure or grasp the distance covered. The details serve not to establish scale but instead to open up the image outward. Rousseau created an expansive vision, a positive counterpart to the uneasy vastness experienced by earlier travel writers.

Kelly Presutti goes on to discuss late nineteenth century efforts to drain the Landes and cover it with pine trees, a subject covered in Graham Robb's fine 2007 book The Discovery of France. He explains that not a single patch of the original Landes now remains: 

The empty landscapes of the Landes are now known only through the photographs of Félix Arnaudin, a shy ethnologist who gave up a career in the Highways and Bridges to walk and cycle through the Grande Lande (the area north and west of Mont-de-Marsan) from the 1870s to 1921 with his heavy German camera, recording a disappearing way of life. He paid local people, who thought him insane, to recreate the scenes he remembered from his childhood in Labouheyre. 'The forest that blocks the view, narrows the mind', he wrote, as though the Landes was being plunged into the darkness of a fading memory. 

Graham Robb reproduces this photograph with the caption: 'A sombre desert where the cicada sings and the bird is silent, where all human habitation disappears' (V. Hugo). Shepherds in the Landes, at La Mouleyre, near Commensacq, on one of the few surviving patches of the original Landes. The encroaching forest of oak and pine can just be seen on the horizon. A shepherd on stilts could travel at the speed of a trotting horse.

Photographs like this are fascinating but Presutti also reproduces some of Arnaudin's extraordinary landscape views, so minimal they resemble Sugimoto seascapes. He inscribed a horizon line onto his camera lens in order to achieve this consistent framing. Rather than focus on detail like the flowering grasses, or highlight features like buildings or trees, Arnaudin wanted to capture and preserve the landscape's emptiness. In these images and his writing on the Landes he was 'reversing the terms of beauty and ugliness established by earlier commentators' and lauding 'the appeal of the desert, the dream of solitude, and the pleasure of the uninterrupted expanse.'   

A page of Arnaudin photographs from Land into Landscape  by Kelly Presutti

Changes to a Summit

 

Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Mont Blanc Seen from the Massif, Les Aiguilles Rouges, 1874

This wonderful watercolour is reproduced in Kelly Presutti's excellent new book Land into Landscape. As she points out, the mountain panorama was evidently so vast it required sticking two sheets of paper together. Viollet-le-Duc is famous for having restored Carcassonne and Notre-Dame de Paris but he also spent eight summers making a study of Mont Blanc, culminating in the publication of a detailed map and 'study of its geodesic and geological construction, of its transformations, and of the old and modern state of its glaciers.' His book Le massif du Mont Blanc (1876) includes a fascinating diagram (see below) that begins with a purely geometric shape imagined as a more pristine original state, before the forces of erosion had turned it into the landscape equivalent of a ruined cathedral. This sequence looks like an illustration of the way computer game landscapes have evolved from grid frameworks (Atari's Battlezone) to the complex realism facilitated by 3D graphics cards. Painters had always produced idealised mountain forms but Viollet-le-Duc's 'treatise was meant to be practical and proscriptive, to pertain to an ambition to modify the real as much as an aspiration to evoke the ideal.' Presutti's book includes fascinating information about the steps taken in nineteenth century France to preserve mountains, through the establishment in 1882 of a government service dedicated to the Restauration des terrains en montaigne. 

 

Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Changes to a Summit, 1876

  

At this time two new technologies were changing the ways mountains could be seen and depicted. One, obviously, was photography. The other was the 'teleiconograph', which Presutti describes in an article on the Yale University Pres website. 

Designed by fellow architect Henry Révoil, the teleiconograph combines a telescope with a camera obscura to bring distant points nearer and enable the observer to trace them onto a page. Révoil advertised the efficacy of his device by illustrating the sculptures on the rooftop of Notre Dame, an application sure to attract Viollet-le-Duc’s interest.The teleiconograph provided the kind of precise rendering Viollet-le-Duc needed to decipher the mountains. Using it, he produced detailed studies of peaks, carefully calibrating angles and timing his studies to coincide with optimal lighting conditions. Intricate lines trace the cuts and angle of rock faces; blank spaces denote areas concealed by snow. The resulting diagrams are less a picture of a mountain than a translation of its materiality into mathematical properties.

Every stone or shady tree

In the British Museum's print room you can currently see Raphael to Cozens: Drawings from the Richard Payne Knight bequest. Here are three of the landscapes and a few notes on each one.

Guercino, Landscape with Angelica and Medoro, c. 1621

I have only mentioned Guercino (1591-1666) once before on this blog and never talked about one of his pictures. The exhibition caption notes that 'the figures of the two lovers and Cupid in the drawing, inspired by characters in Ludovico Ariosto's epic poem Orlando furioso (first published in 1516), are almost lost in Guercino's exuberant visual description of the landscape.' It was the names of these lovers carved in 'sundry places' that drove Orlando furioso - he was in love with Angelica. Here she is pointing at a tree, but the names also appear on a rock in front of them, because the lovers had been wandering around searching out 'every stone or shady tree,/ To grave their names with bodkin, knife or pin.' (This is from the first English translation by Sir John Harington, Queen Elizabeth's 'saucy Godson' and inventor of the flush toilet.)

Claude Lorrain, The River Tiber see from the Monte Mario, c. 1640

What's really striking about this one is Claude's use of brown ink wash - other Claude drawings in the exhibition are more precise descriptions of trees or buildings which he could use later in his paintings. However, the BM website explains that 'the development of this brush technique can be followed within the early sketchbook and in pen-and-wash studies of the 1640s.' They also note that 'brush drawings of this kind attracted the ire of John Ruskin (1819-1900), the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, who described them disparagingly in Modern Painters as "blottesque landscape"'.

 

John Robert Cozens, Mount Etna from the Grotta del Capro, c. 1777-78

Here, in the distance, is Mount Etna, which has recently been in the news, after erupting on June 2nd. Cozens accompanied Payne Knight on his second journey to Italy but didn't go as far as Sicily. This watercolour was therefore based on a study made by Charles Gore, transforming a topographical sketch into a study in the sublime. 'The figures are dwarfed by the trees and rocks and the bonfire, burning brilliantly against the moonlit sky. The hill and mountain brood menacingly in the background and the colours are subdued and subtly varied in tone. The poetic mood of the drawing is dark and sombre as a result.'

Der Rhein

Some landscapes in the Ashmolean's exhibition Anselm Kiefer: Early Works, with quotes from the accompanying wall texts. 

Der Rhein (The Rhine), 1982 

'The Rhine has been a German national symbol while also providing a border to France. During the Romantic era of the early 19th century, countless travelogues by writers such as Friedrich Hölderlin and paintings by J.M.W. Turner helped develop a fascination with the beauty of Rhine landscapes. The river also played a major role in Wagner's opera cycle, The Ring. Kiefer's woodcut collage, however, is equally concerned with the political connotations of the Rhine, merging its landscape with National Socialist architecture.'

The building in Der Rhein relates to a series paintings showing Nazi architecture Kiefer made in the early eighties - the exhibition included a watercolour, Innenraum (1982) of Albert Speer's New Reich Chancellery, destroyed in 1945. Christie's sold a similar woodcut to Der Rhein for £313K in 2012 and their description includes this quote from Kiefer: ''I grew up on the banks of the Rhine. France was on the other side. As a child, I saw the river as an insuperable obstacle, something you couldn't swim across. It thus acquired a mythical status for me. When you came to this barrier you could turn left or right but not go straight ahead, except in your imagination." The Rhine (Melancholia) is the name of an Anselm Kiefer installation I wrote about in 2014, 'a collage of black-and-white woodcuts on canvas with acrylic and shellac compiled over more than two decades, between 1982 and 2013.' 

Unternehmen 'Trappenfang' (Operation Bustard Hunt), 1976 

'The title of this painting references a WWII military codename, 'Unternehmen Trappenjagd' ('Operation Bustard Hunt'). The words summon the aftermath of an attack, a landscape scarred by the treads of troop movements and tanks. In May 1942, Germany bombed the easternmost tip of Crimea, the Kerch Peninsula, amplifying the destruction by artillery and tank divisions. Looming above Kiefer's scene is not a bustard but a large painter's palette, linking war memory with an emblem of artistic identity.'

Kiefer often uses high horizons with paths heading towards them, invoking ideas of motion through time. This horizon has a snow covered village, a dark church spire and a bleak grey sky. Looking here at how he was painting fifty years ago, I thought how similar it is in many ways to Kiefer's most recent work, which we have seen in shows at the White Cube gallery. His Superstrings for example, which I discussed here in 2019, are 'desolate landscapes of earth, snow, muddy water, stubble, straw and leafless trees.' I said then that I could see a connection between such paintings and Van Gogh's ploughed fields, something that may well be apparent in the forthcoming Royal Academy exhibition that will pair the two artists. 

Ausbrennen des Landkreises Buchen (Burning of the Rural District of Buchen), 1974 

'This book features photographs of Buchen, where the artist's studio was located, and carbonized sections of former paintings. The photos initially focus on farmland and streets, before showing staged explosions. The final pages present charcoal-encrusted paper. Devoid of people, the photographs allude to the economic decline of Buchen. The explosions also reference the presence of the German armed forces.'

Matthew Biro's Phaidon monograph on Kiefer has a section on this work. 'Leafing through the book engenders a sense of moving through Kiefer's rural environment', but what starts as apparently simple representations of specific geographic regions end up with images overpainted in black wash, singular 'originals' rather than repeatable photographic reproductions. At this time Kiefer was interested in ideas of destruction: 'in addition to burning a town, as it were, Kiefer also flooded Heidelberg in two volumes from 1969 and covered the Brandenburg Heath with sand in four tomes from 1976'. The Ashmolean exhibition had the original 1974 Buchen book, but Kiefer made seven more on the same theme the following year. I referred to one of these in a previous post and quoted Martin Gayford: 'this is how the traditions of Friedrich and Schinkel looked and felt to Kiefer in the aftermath of the Third Reich: burnt out, haunted by overpowering, terrible events.'

Stefan I, 1975

Poet and translator Stefan Anton George was embraced by the Nazis as a hero, despite his criticism of National Socialism and self-imposed exile to Switzerland. In Kiefer's surreal paintings he appears to be resting on his death bed. The works allude to the charged complexities of German cultural heritage and present an attempt to redeem George from political exploitation. 

I can never resist a giant figure in a landscape (see various previous posts) and the exhibition had two watercolours of Stefan George as a mountain. In the other one a sun is setting behind slopes that incorporate his head, and there is an inscription 'aller Tage Abend, aller Abende Tag' (the Evening of All Days, the Days of All Evenings). This is a reference to Ernst Bloch's Principle of Hope, which encourages positive social change, a book with a utopian message that was influential when these paintings were made.

Die Kunst geht knapp nicht unter (Art Will Survive its Ruins), 1975 

'Kiefer travelled to Norway's North Cape, where summer sunlight appears never ending. The location was associated with a 1943 battle, when a German battlecruiser was sunk by a British ship. Over 1900 people drowned. Kiefer's title refers to German post-war discourse on art which had been censored, denunciated or misused to propagate Nazi ideologies. As the German title of Kiefer's work suggests, art almost 'drowned'. The North Cape, however, shaped through several ice ages, is representative of survival.'

I have written here before about the North Cape, subject of some eerie nineteenth century landscape paintings by the Peder Balke. Kiefer visited in 1974 and described the experience in an interview with Klaud Dermutz. 'I’d spent some time that summer on North Cape and there you have that phenomenon in which the sun barely sets. It grazes the horizon and then rises again. This made a deep impression on me, the way the sun at first appears to set but then doesn’t. On the watercolour Nordkap [North Cape, 1975], I wrote ‘die Kunst geht knapp nicht unter’ [art just barely avoids going under or just barely survives]. It’s very difficult to define art, impossible, in fact. It can’t really be grasped. Art is like a fish you pull out of the water that then slips away from you. Art is always very endangered, constantly under threat.'

Forest Green

Giuseppe Penone, Albero Folgorato (Thunderstruck Tree) 

The last Giuseppe Penone exhibition I went to was a joint show with Richard Long back in 2011 - see the blog post I wrote then, 'To Repeat the Forest'. Now Penone is showing work at the Serpentine Gallery, with some large tree sculptures in the park outside. The one in my photograph above is reminiscent of the storm-blasted trees Salvator Rosa painted, its gold paint as bright as lightening in the May sunshine. It reminded me of the gold used to repair broken bowls in Japanese kintsugi - if only we treated trees with the care we treat valuable ceramics. 

In his Guardian review Jonathan Jones enjoys describes another tree sculpture. 'A grove of stones, worn smooth in riverbeds, surround two trees. But boulders also balance in their high branches. The Earth and sky are reversed. Are the boulders as real as they look? Is disaster about to descend?' As I stood under them I thought of that amusing scene in the film Official Competition where a filmmaker played by Penélope Cruz gets her actors stressed out by making them perform underneath a suspended rock. Jones starts his review by saying he was lured inside by the aroma of laurel leaves, and references the story of Daphne and Apollo. This myth also features in the new Ian Hamilton Finlay show at Victoria Miro, although Jones' hatchet job on that exhibition doesn't mention it. 

Giueseppe Penone, Verde del bosco (Forest Green), 2008

In addition to being a sculptor, is Penone ever what might be called a landscape artist? Yes, see above. The trees here are indexical signs bearing the imprint of themselves. The curators note that 'Penone wraps natural cotton fibres around the trunks of living trees and creates frottage rubbings using leaves. The distinctive furrows of the bark are transferred and recorded on the fabric, forming the foundation of the rich vegetation in the drawings.'

Penone's use of vegetable colour here brings to mind another recent Guardian article profiling Su Yu-Xin, 'The landscape artist who makes her paint from pearls, crystals and volcanic dust'. Her art almost sounds like a byproduct of the research that goes into sourcing her pigments. I was also reminded of the special ink Robert Macfarlane has been using to sign limited editions of his new book Is a River Alive? This uses water samples collected by participants on last year's March for Clean Water, mixed with water from the Pools of Dee in Scotland. Since 1981 Penone has done a whole series that I think Rob Macfarlane might like, To Be a River. Here are some quotes from Penone's website:

To know every stone, each ravine, each small bed of sand of a stream, to revisit it each year probing its bed to record the changes produced by rains, by frost.

No element, none of its forms are accidental.

Hands turning white from staying in the water to be, at least once, part of the river.

The bends in rivers are closely related to the fullness of the earth, the bends in the path to the emptiness of the air. 

The breath too, breathing expands following a path, sometimes meandering, other times more taut following the air currents. 

Filling a space with the meanderings of the breath, the volume of the breath produced by the life of a man. 

A mixture of tender sentiments and soft voluptuousness

Stendhal's memoir The Life of Henry Brulard describes his childhood in Grenoble in the 1790s, followed by his departure for Paris and entry into Napoleon's army, and breaks off when he still only seventeen, having just crossed the Great St. Bernard Pass and descended to Milan, the city he would fall in love with. There is a lot about his various tutors, including a drawing master  he had around 1795 (when he was twelve) called M. Le Roy: 'a very polite Parisian, dried-up and enfeebled, aged by the most excessive debauchery.' Stendhal goes on to describe a landscape painting that inspired his own sensual thoughts...  

‘In M. Le Roy’s studio there was a large and beautiful landscape: a steep mountainside seen from very close to, decorated with tall trees; at the foot of the mountain a stream, shallow but broad and limpid, flowed from left to right at the foot of the last trees. In it, three almost, or not almost, naked women were gaily bathing. This was almost the one point of light in that canvas of three and a half feet by two and a half. … This landscape … was a mixture of tender sentiments and soft voluptuousness. To bathe like that with attractive women! … All this, it may be sensed, is quite independent of the merits of the landscape which was probably a dish of spinach with no aerial perspective.’

The text of Henry Brulard is full of drawings - diagrams really: maps, floor plans and graphs illustrating his thoughts and actions. The one below shows what Stendhal could recall of this landscape painting. At the top it says 'M. Le Roy's landscape' and then the picture is annotated: 'Sky.' - 'Verdure' - 'Admirable verdure' - 'Young girls holding up their skirts or young goddesses.' - 'Water.' - (underneath) - 'A. Tall trees such as I like them'. Whether the actual painting was any good or a mere 'dish of spinach' we will never know.

Cheerful, smiling vistas

 Landscape in the film A Few Days from the Life of I. I. Oblomov (1980)

Can there be such a thing as an indolent landscape? Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov includes a whole chapter in which its hero, unable to rouse himself from bed, falls asleep and dreams of his childhood home, the estate of Oblomovka. Goncharov describes this gentle idyll in order to explain how Oblomov has come to be so incapable of engaging actively with the world beyond his comfortable flat. As he drifts off, 'we find ourselves transported to a land where neither sea nor mountains nor crags nor precipices nor lonely forests exist—where, in short, there exists nothing grand or wild or immense.' Here, on the contrary, there is nothing threatening and the heavens seem to enfold the earth in a loving embrace.

The sun shone warm and bright during half the year, and, withdrawing, did so so slowly and reluctantly that it seemed ever to be turning back for one more look at the beloved spot, as though wishing to give it one more bright, warm day before the approaching weather of autumn. Also the hills of that spot were no more than reduced models of the terrible mountains which, in other localities, rear themselves to affright the imagination. Rather, they resembled the gentle slopes down which one may roll in sport, or where one may sit and gaze dreamily at the declining sun. Below them, toying and frisking, ran a stream. In one place it discharged itself into a broad pool, in another it hurried along in a narrow thread, in a third it slackened its pace to a sudden mood of reverie, and, barely gliding over the stones, threw out on either side small rivulets whereof the gentle burbling seemed to invite sleep. Everywhere the vicinity of this corner of the earth presented a series of landscape studies and cheerful, smiling vistas. The sandy, shelving bank of the stream, a small copse which descended from the summit of that bank to the water, a winding ravine of which the depths were penetrated by a rill, a plantation of birch-trees—all these things seemed purposely to be fitted into one another, and to have been drawn by the hand of a master. Both the troubled heart and the heart which has never known care might have yearned to hide themselves in this forgotten corner of the world, and to live its life of ineffable happiness. Everything promised a quiet existence which should last until the grey hairs were come, and thereafter a death so gradual as almost to resemble the approach of sleep.

Lenin, who shared a birthplace with Goncharov, the town of Simbirsk, often complained that Russia was full of Oblomovs. As Galya Diment wrote in an introduction to a 2006 translation, Simbirsk was itself 'one of the “quietest, sleepiest and most stagnant” towns in all of Russia, its legendary sloth rendered immortal in an 1836 poem by one of Russia’s greatest poets, Mikhail Lermontov: “Sleep and laziness had overtaken Simbirsk. Even the Volga rolled here slower and smoother.” Goncharov, though fond of Simbirsk, described it in similarly somnolent terms. “The whole appearance of my home town,” he said in 1887, “was a perfect picture of sleepiness and stagnation… One wanted to fall asleep as well while looking at all this immobility, at sleepy windows with their curtains and blinds drawn, at sleepy faces one saw inside the houses or on streets..."'    

Oblomov is a famous example of the 'superfluous man' in Russian literature but, as Michael Wood pointed out in a 2009 LRB article, 'Goncharov has taken away all the Byronic glamour, the touch of aristocratic nonchalance that comes with supposed superfluity in Pushkin, Lermontov and Turgenev.' In the same way, the landscape of Oblomovka 'is a trope aimed at the horrors of noisy Romanticism'. I'll conclude here with another passage from Oblomov's dream which makes this explicit.. 

Even the general aspect of this modest, unaffected spot would fail to please the poet or the visionary. Never would it be theirs to behold a scene in which all nature—woodland, lake, cotter’s hut, and sandy hillside—is burning with a purplish glow, while sharply defined against a purple background may be seen moving along a sandy, winding road, a cavalcade of countrymen in attendance upon some great lady who is journeying towards a ruined castle—a castle where they will find awaiting them the telling of legends concerning the Wars of the Roses, the eating of wild goats for supper, and the singing of ballads to the lute by a young English damsel—a scene of Scottish or Swiss flavour of the kind which has been made familiar to our imagination by the pen of Sir Walter Scott. 

 Of this there is nothing in our country.