Lower Lake

Hurvin Anderson, Lower Lake, 2005

I've been twice now to the Tate's Hurvin Anderson exhibition - a refreshingly cool, air-conditioned experience on these recent hot days, even though many of his landscape paintings depict tropical vegetation and sunlit Caribbean beaches. In her catalogue essay, 'Home and the World: The Britishness of Hurvin Anderson's Diasporic Landscapes', Gillian Forrester lists British painters whose work Anderson admires: 'Michael Andrews, Francis Bacon, William Coldstream, John Constable, Peter Doig, David Hockney and Euan Uglow, but particularly Andrews. Over time he has absorbed the lessons their methods and preoccupations offer, but his constantly evolving practice is strikingly distinctive and seems unburdened by the freight of both predecessors and contemporaries.' For me the most obvious comparison is with Peter Doig, whose work I've discussed here several times before (including in 2008, when he had a major Tate retrospective). However, as Eddy Frankel points out in his Guardian review, Hurvin Anderson is 'unlike Peter Doig (also a serious painter of memory and the Caribbean)' because his work 'isn’t a purely emotional attempt to deal with the past; it’s a deeply political one, too. The Jamaican hotels Anderson paints were built for white guests, in a country founded on slavery and colonial exploitation.'

Hurvin Anderson, Maracas III, 2004

Gillian Forrester expands on this point in her essay and draws connections to the Romantic period's preoccupation with ruins, evident in the paintings of Constable and Turner. 

The adjective 'ruinate', meaning spoilt or irreparably damaged, was first used in sixteenth-century England, but became obsolete. The term was revived in Jamaica after emancipation, when it took on a new meaning: the process of nature taking over previously cultivated land. In his book Jamaica as it was, as it is, and as it may be (1835) Bernard Martin Senior, a retired military officer and owner of the Glenbirnie estate in Westmoreland, Jamaica, wrote of 'lands termed "ruinate" which means such as have been used till worn out, and then allowed to grow up in bushes and woods.' Senior optimistically argued that Jamaica could be revitalised as an agricultural and mercantile hub, but huge tracts of the country remained ruinate, and do so to this day.

Anderson saw evidence of this in 2017, when he visited Oracabessa: a 'large unfinished hotel complex, partially reclaimed by vegetation, which evoked to him an ancient abandoned palace. The photograph he took was the starting point for an ongoing series of paintings that - to borrow Bernard Martin Senior's formulation - encapsulate Jamaica 'as it was, as it is, and as it may be'. Oracabessa was a banana plantation and then a self-sufficient community for former slaves before it was ruined by hurricanes and floods. In the twentieth century redevelopment began and new properties arrived, including Ian Fleming's bungalow Goldeneye, which is now a luxury resort. Anderson though, 'prefers to look beyond Oracabessa's present reputation as a celebrity haunt, making it a focus for his profound meditations on Jamaica's longer history.'

Deer Jump Lookout

Mrs Fox with her Stormy Landscapes

Here is a landscape painter I have never featured before, Mrs Fox. Her stormy landscapes (painted in miniature by Turlo Girffin) are in the Design Museum's Wes Anderson exhibition, which I visited recently with my son Torin, an art student and Wes aficionado. As you can see below, there were also miniature landscapes on a vending machine from Asteroid City, a film I didn't really enjoy despite all the care lavished on its sets. I particularly liked the idea of a vending machine designed to mix gin martinis with a twist, but this one selling Arid Plains real estate is a neat idea too. The desert landscapes were painted by David Meikle an artist from Salt Lake City whose website says he 'created the images that are seen on the “Welcome to Utah” billboards found at all major entry points to the state'. He looks a bit like a Wes Anderson character. His bio says he was 'inducted into the Highland High Hall of Fame in recognition of his success as an artist' and that he is happily married with six children and 'a crazy cat named Blue'. 

A couple of years ago we stayed a night at the Grand Hotel Pupp in Karlovy Vary (formerly Karlsbad) so that Torin could experience one of the main inspirations for Grand Budapest Hotel. Anderson liked the look of the Pupp but wanted something higher up - the hotel is in the valley, beside the Teplá River. So he combined its look with other buildings like the pink-painted Bristol Palace Hotel, which we also checked out, but didn't stay in. A small funicular in Karlovy Vary takes you up steep wooded slopes to a path from where you can find Deer Jump Lookout. I took a photograph of the statue there, silhouetted against the morning sun. You can see from the exhibition display below how Wes Anderson replicated it (on a grander scale) for the film's painted background scenery. A tourist website explains the history of this landmark. 'According to legend, a deer being hunted by Charles IV's entourage jumped from this rock cliff. The deer fell into a pool of hot water (today's Vřídlo), whose healing properties Charles IV himself tried out. He then ordered that the area around the spring be settled, which it was, and thus, according to legend, the Karlovy Vary spa was founded.'   

Although Wes Anderson visited Karlovy Vary and other useful locations like Budapest and Mariánské Lázně (once Marienbad), what he was really looking for was the atmosphere of old photochrom postcards in the Library of Congress collection. As he explains in an interview with Matt Zoller Seitz, 'in Karlovy Vary. there's a rock with a stag, Stag's Leap, which I first knew about from a 1908 photocrom picture of it. We made our own miniature version of this.' It is easy to find photocrom images online from the turn of the twentieth century that are 'accidentally Wes Anderson'. Some of them look like they have gone through the retro filters Instagram had when it first started. The photocrom process was invented in the 1880s by Hans Jakob Schmid, an employee of the venerable Swiss printing company Orell Gessner Füssli, and was used extensively for early colour postcards. A few years ago I included one of these - a view of Jena - in discussing a Gottfried Benn poem, and I think I should try to write more about them in future posts.      

Photocrom of the Grand Hotel Pupp, Karlsbad 1899

Raw-boned hills

I just finished Richard Langston's superb new oral history of The Clean, In the Dreamlife You Need a Rubber Soul (I had a tear in my eye at the end). I always enjoy shoehorning into this blog stuff I like that really has nothing ostensibly to do with landscape art, and although I can't go off piste and discuss The Clean, I can quote this paragraph, which comes on p242, when they are about to record Modern Rock.

Dunedin is a city in an amphitheater of hills and harbour. It's compact, set close to nature, and a short drive from the city center is the Otago Peninsula, with the Pacific Ocean beating against its cliffs and headlands. There are seals, penguins and an albatross colony on the flanks of Taiaroa Head at the entrance to the harbour. It is a stretch of land that has inspired painters and poets and musicians - it generates a deep sense of nature and the spiritual that lingers like sea spray. One of New Zealand's leading painters of the twentieth century, Colin McCahon, painted its raw-boned hills and conical shapes in the 1940s and made them glow and pulse with an inner light. Robin White painted a portrait of the young poet Sam Hunt in singlet and gumboots, standing hands on hips in sunshine outside the pub at Portobello. It provided the setting for Martin Phillipps to walk through a ghostly grove of trees in the video for his song 'Pink Frost'. If you drive over the hill from Portobello and down onto a shingle road you come to Hoopers Inlet. As you head towards the coast there's a small community hall on your left, and this is where The Clean came to record their next album in the autumn of 1994. Out through the hall windows there's a view of toetoe and flax, bird life on the estuary and the bush-topped volcanic shape of Hereweka/Harbour Cone.

The Chills' 1984 'Pink Frost' video

Reading this I realised I knew nothing about Colin McCahon (1919-87), despite his importance in Aotearoa. I have never seen his work - the only exhibition I know of in London was way back in 1990 at the ICA, and I didn't go to it. More recent exhibitions like the Royal Academy's Oceania have featured Lisa Reihana and other contemporary artists with a focus on Maori culture but I don't imagine there's as much interest here now in McCahon's paintings. You can see some of them at the Dunedin Public Gallery website. One of the most interesting things about his paintings (for those of us keen on geography) is the way they were influenced by textbook illustrations. Learning this made me think of Geoffrey Hutchings, whose diagrams Colin Sackett used for his book The True Line. Here is a quote from an article about McCahon by Paul Stanley Ward:

Starting out as a landscape painter, McCahon’s bold representations sought to capture the majesty and difficult essence of the southern land. His take on the terrain was new; McCahon’s landscapes weren’t romantic, but pared back, primitive, almost abstract, seeking an underlying structure. As a wedding present he had received a copy of geologist G.A. Cotton’s The Geomorphology of New Zealand (3rd ed. 1942), a scientific text examining landscape forms and processes and illustrated with sketches, diagrams and photographs. Cotton’s diagrams ignored built features, trees and objects irrelevant to his scientific themes; he was attempting to strip the landscape to its geological basis. These precise drawings would inform McCahon in his efforts to find the landscape’s spiritual basis. 

The writer Sam Hunt, also mentioned in the quote above, is a poet of the road who refers to landscape as he passes through. He collaborated with The Clean's David Kilgour on an album called Falling Debris in 2009 and I'll end here by embedding one of these tracks, 'River Plateau Song.' 

The Epic of Everest

The Epic of Everest (1924) is an extraordinary landscape film - mainly shot in black and white but sometimes tinted in vivid colours, including pink, as you can see above. It was shot by John Noel, 'a soldier by profession but an artist in spirit', as Wade Johnson says in an excellent Sight & Sound essay He was heavily influenced by Herbert Ponting's footage of the equally ill-fated Antarctic expedition that was eventually turned into a film, The Great White Silence, which was also released in 1924. Both have beautiful shots of ice and snow and both now have soundtracks by Simon Fisher Turner. Noel also drew on the pioneering mountain photography of Vittorio Sella, whose work you can see at the extensive Fondazione Sella website.  

In my last post about Michael Snow, I talked about a new kind of camera installed on top of a mountain. The climax of The Epic of Everest is footage Noel took using a state of the art telephoto lens. Through this we watch George Mallory, Sandy Irvine and the others who helped their ascent as tiny black figures silhouetted against the snow, creeping up the North East ridge. While Snow deliberately excluded any human figures, Noel is desperate to spot them. But after two days the party returns, signalling from a distance with blankets in the shape of a cross that the expedition has ended in the climbers' deaths. The film’s final title card reads “if you had lived, as they had lived and died in the heart of nature, would you, yourself, wish for any better grave than a grave of pure white snow?” It is a noble idea, although in recent years these snows have been trodden by thousands of climbers and the remnants of their bodies have been identified on the mountain. 

A review of the BFI restoration noted that ‘modern viewers may squirm at the contrast between Noel's reverent approach to the mountain and his condescension toward the Tibetan locals.’ This is indeed what I felt when I watched it. And, as another article on the film notes, there is a shocking moment when an intertitle notes the death of two porters without providing their names (they were Darjeeling cobbler Manbahadur and Gurkha Lance Corporal Shamsherpun). The first performance of the The Epic of Everest, with Tibetan monks brought over to 'perform', set off a chain of events that influenced the history of Tibet. This 'Affair of the Dancing Lamas' has its own Wikipedia page where you can read the details. As Wade Johnson explains, the controversy ended up 'undercutting the reforms of the 13th Dalai Lama – reforms that no doubt would have placed Tibet in a much stronger position to cope politically and militarily with the Chinese invasion of 1950, which led to the death of an independent nation.'

La Région Centrale

 Michael Snow, still from La Région Centrale, 1971

I thought I would focus here on a fascinating work of landscape art that I have only briefly referred to previously. In the late sixties, Michael Snow created three seminal 'camera motion' films which influenced later structural and minimal cinema. La Région Centrale was the third of these, made in the Canadian wilderness using a Camera Activating Machine (CAM) that an engineer, Pierre Abbeloos, built for him. This involved a camera mounted on a robotic arm and able to rotate through 360 degrees so that it could capture a total vision of the landscape. Five days' footage was edited down to a three hour film, which you can see on YouTube. I'll embed it below, although I realise these embedded links tend to disappear after a while.

In 'About Snow' (1979), published in October, the journal she co-founded, Annette Michelson quotes Kant's view that we measure everything in relation to ourselves, even cosmic space, and relates it to La Région Centrale. 

This film, in its circling, spiraling, rising, sweeping movements, crossing the distances between peaks, creating, in imperceptible loops through empty skies, reversals of direction which disorient the riveted spectator, seems to question, through kinetic counter-example and disorientation, the "ground" of the Kantian "view" which founds the modern sense of "place".

The absence of a 'cameraman' leaves the viewer free to identify with the camera itself. 'Snow's infinitely mobile framing, his mimesis of and gloss upon spatial exploration' provide a 'cinematic rendering of the grand metaphor of the transcendental subject.'

In a 1995 article for Parachute Thierry de Duve takes a different view. He disagrees with those, like Michelson, who have thought of the CAM as an ideal model of the Cartesian-Kantian subject, because the machine is not reflexive - it sees everything but itself. His article discusses Michael Snow's 'deictics of experience' - deictics being words that depend for their meaning on context (like 'I' and 'you'). Michael Snow is not the 'I' looking on this landscape. 'He is not the monk before the sea, or atop of the mountain'. What we see is not his experience. 'He has set the conditions of experience, but stopped short of its synthesis.' We as viewers are in a similar position to Snow, who says that while making the film "I only looked in the camera once." La Région Centrale is centripetal - 'the camera never reaches out into the landscape, it pulls the landscape towards the center.' Watching it we can't identify with the camera. As Snow said of one of his other films, "you aren't within it, it isn't within you, you're beside it."

La Région Centrale clearly offers rich material for theorists but also provided an ideal ending for Malcolm Andrews' fine book, Landscape and Western Art (1999). Snow's original 1969 proposal had positioned the project in art historical terms, as "a gigantic landscape film equal in terms of film to the great landscape paintings of Cézanne, Poussin, Corot, Monet, Matisse." But this would be something new in art, confusing the old stable coordinates of foreground and distance. Nevertheless, by filming on a Canadian mountain, Snow tapped into themes that, as Andrews says, have perennially haunted discussions of landscape in art: vanishing wilderness, the end of nature and representation of landscape as 'souvenir'. 

Over the last 500 years western landscape art has been like a barometer of anxieties over the balance of power between nature and culture. In the late twentieth century, we know that nature — that 'out there', that 'other' — is not necessarily perpetually self-renewing. It is more like ourselves than we ever feared. When it is not offering us dreams of green spaces as utopian as ever the most artificial pastoral managed to be, landscape art in our time comes burdened with guilt. 'I recorded the visit of some of our minds and bodies and machinery to a wild place,' wrote Snow, 'but I didn't colonise it, enslave it. I hardly even borrowed it'

In the bright sunlight of a paradisal day

All at once I was standing, almost without being aware of it, on that other earth in the bright sunlight of a paradisal day. I was apparently standing on one of the islands which on our earth make up the Greek archipelago, or somewhere on the coast of the mainland adjoining that archipelago. Ah, it was all exactly as with us, but it seemed that everywhere glowed with a kind of festive air, some great sacred triumph finally achieved. The tender emerald sea lapped quietly against the shores, caressing them with a love which was obvious, palpable, almost conscious. Tall, beautiful trees stood clad in the full luxuriance of their blossom; their numberless leaves, I am convinced, greeted me with a low, caressing murmur, seeming to utter words of love. The grass sparkled with bright, sweet-smelling flowers. Flocks of birds flew across the skies, and, quite unafraid of me, perched on my shoulders and hands and gladly fluttered their dear little wings at me.  

- Fyodor Dostoevsky, 'The Dream of a Ridiculous Man' (1879), trans. Alan Myers

The protagonist of this story is ready to commit suicide when he falls asleep and dreams of being taken to another prelapsarian planet where people live in harmony - that is until he himself inadvertently introduces them to sin, war and technological progress. Eventually he begs them to crucify him, but they consider him mad.  

As the translator Alan Myers points out, this vision of utopia had already appeared in two of Dostoevsky's books, The Devils (aka The Possessed) and A Raw Youth. Philip Rahv discussed these in a 1972 New York Review article.

The first hint of this vision is contained in The Possessed, in Stavrogin’s dream of “a corner of the Greek archipelago as it was some three thousand years ago.” The dream derives from Stavrogin’s persistent memory of Claude Lorraine’s painting Acis and Galatea, which he had once seen in the Dresden museum and which he chooses to call “The Golden Age.” (According to his biographers, Dostoevsky had seen this picture several times and it made an indelible impression on him.) In Stavrogin’s version of the dream only the mythological past with its connotations of innocence and happiness is recalled, whereas in later works the past is displaced by the future. In a more elaborate form the vision is explored in A Raw Youth (1875). It receives further elaboration in “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” published two years later, in which the vision of a golden age is transposed to a distant star whose inhabitants live harmoniously in their human and natural environment, as men might some day live on our own planet. Finally, in The Brothers Karamazov a recapitulation of this dream of an earthly paradise is mockingly recited by the devil, Ivan’s alter ego and the product of his hallucination.     

I have written about this painting before, along with other work inspired by the myth. Here is how Helen Langdon describes the beautiful but transient scene Claude painted in her 1989 monograph on the artist. 

The lovers, in their insubstantial shelter, are unaware of the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, who, glimpsed on the rugged cliff before Mount Etna, laments his love for Galatea so loudly that 'the whole mountain and the waves below heard the pastoral strains'; later, inflamed with jealousy, he kills Acis with a great rock. Yet here Polyphemus is unstressed, and it is the landscape itself that conveys the swiftness of time and the frailty of love. The beauty of the sea and light echo the lovers' joy; and yet the stormy sky, encircling smoky Etna, foretells impending tragedy.  

Claude Lorrain, Landscape with Acis and Galatea, 1657

A yellow roughness in the land

Round Soria the land is dry and cold.

Over the hills, the barren ranges,
through green bits of meadow,
up the cindery peaks
the spring advances, leaving its small white daisies
scattered in the fragrant grasses. 

The earth is not reborn: the country dreams...

- from 'The Soria Country' by Antonio Machado, trans. Alan S. Trueblood

In 1909 the Spanish poet Antonio Machado (1875-1939), a leading figure in the Generation of '98, was offered a job teaching French in the old city of Soria in northeastern Spain. There he fell in love with Leonor, the young daughter of the owner of his boarding house (like the unfortunate Lars Hertervig, who I wrote about here earlier this year). They married and spent some time in Paris but she was suffering from tuberculosis and died in 1912. Machado had just published the collection Campos de Castilla featuring poems inspired by the landscape around Soria. He was so devastated by the loss of Leonor that he left Soria and never returned. 

I first encountered Machado via Charles Tomlinson, with Henry Gifford, made a small selection of translations, Castilian Ilexes, in 1963. Their book was named after a poem which compares ilexes to other kinds of tree and describes the regions of Spain in which they grow. A couple of poems in this book particularly appealed to me – ‘To José Maria Palacio’, with its vivid description of springtime, and ‘Novermber 1913’, with its final image of mountains ‘made of stone / of light.’ Castilian Ilexes also introduced me to Machado’s short, aphoristic, haiku-like poems, the ‘Proverbs and Canticles.’

Leonor and Antonio Machado

Henry Gifford's introduction to Castilian Ilexes explains that Machado carried with him to Soria memories of his childhood in Seville, a very different place with its fountains and lemon trees. But 

Soria replaced that vision by the mountains and stony fields, the ilexes and the silent figures in the Castilian solitude. It was Castile that had formed Spain, and here Machado could find a moral dignity born of endurance among the mountains. ... As Yvor Winters has written: 'in an empty place / I met the unmoved landscape face to face.' ... Machado did not go to the landscape like the townsman Rousseau: he sought there 'the countryman's emotion, essentially Georgic, for land that is worked'. ... There is little joy in this landscape, any more than in the Flintcomb-Ash where Tess grubbed swedes, chilled by the rain and buffeted by the wind. Machado like Hardy sees man as 'slighted and enduring': words that apply to the ilexes of Castile and by analogy to the Castilian peasant. 

In Alan S. Trueblood's Selected Poems there are two poems Machado wrote with the same title, 'Along the Duero', both describing walks beside the river that flows past the city. The first recounts the ascent of a hill and moves from a description of the landscape to a meditation on the river of Spanish history. The second begins by describing the humbleness of the river and 'a yellow roughness in the land / like the raw weave of country clothes', then observes the tiny farming plots with shoots of wheat and barley, above them 'rocks and still more rocks' and finally craggy spurs haunted by eagles. This is Castile: a place of woe, a seat of war. The sky begins to darken and Machado hears running water, the Duoro, 'lifestream of Castile, / cutting its way across cold barren plains'. The poem ends with a vision of permanence which is difficult to read now without thinking about the way global heating is affecting the climate of Spain.

Duero, your flowing waters still shall flow
as long as suns of May
melt winter snows and set them loose
through canyons and ravines,
as long as peaks stay capped
in snows and storms
and the sun's bugle flashes
through ashen cloud...