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...

Saint Jerome in a Rocky Landscape

Joachim Patinir's workshop, Saint Jerome in a Rocky Landscape, c. 1515

The National Gallery's early landscape-related art is now in a Sainsbury Wing room called 'Looking at Nature: European Painting 1430-1540.' One of the works there is Saint Jerome in a Rocky Landscape, attributed to the workshop of Joachim Patinir. I've always loved looking into this - as Erika Langmuir wrote in the 1997 NG Companion Guide 'our eye travels to a hill town (more accurately a monastery complex), valleys, woods, mountains, fortresses, farm houses, fields, the sea, the high horizon, sky...' It is a whole world. And what we see now isn't even the whole picture - it was cut down from a larger original. Patinir and his workshop did several versions of Saint Jerome and the magnificent landscape at the end of this blog post is from one that is now owned by the Prado (this too was cut down). 

 

The historical record on Patinir is scant, although we do know Dürer admired his landscapes and attended his second wedding. The first monograph on him was written by Robert A. Koch and published in 1968. This includes an analysis (pp 17-19) of his 'world landscape' paintings, and from it I have extracted these ten characteristics. 

1. Distance and Scale

'In every Western landscape painting before the nineteenth century,' Koch writes, 'the illusion of distance was created in principle by the diminution of scale and a progressive loss of clarity; but Patinir is inclined to mock this law of aerial perspective until the eye of the spectator is close to the horizon line.' His example of this is the Met's St. Jerome triptych, shown below. Koch says Patinir 'permits us to scan the landscape as though through a telescope.' I remember visiting New York in 2008 and being amazed that you were now allowed to take photos in their museums, so I zoomed in and photographed lots of details visible in Patinir's painting. Sometimes 'the scale changes irrationally and abruptly' but Patinir was seemingly happy to do this 'in order to make his landscape more immediate and more exciting.' 

Joachim Patinir, The Penitence of Saint Jerome, c. 1515

2. Perspective

Patinir lavished attention on individual objects to make them as realistic as possible but the effect as a whole was clearly not 'realistic.' As an artist he sometimes resembled an architect or cartographer. 'In constructing his vast vistas of space, he was either disinterested in or unaware of scientific rules of perspective, which in any event would have availed him little in his conquest of landscape.' 

3. Foregrounds

The highly-detailed, sharply-focused plants, animals, rocks etc. in his foregrounds are designed to make the viewer feel connected to the picture space. He would sometimes put a tree there to help provide scale. Sometimes these were dead (symbolic) and sometimes they were lacking leaves, so as to leave gaps through which the landscape would be visible. 

4. Light and Shadow

'The lighting of the landscape is artificial and rather arbitrary in the nearer distances.' But while overall it 'tends to be flat, for the sake of over-all clarity, tree foliage and rocks are usually accented in light and shadow.' Few things in Patinir's landscapes cast shadows, and if they do they are rather weak ones.

5. Colour

Flemish painting deployed the formula of the 'three distances' - reddish brown in the foreground, green in the middle and then that beautiful blue for the distance, a colour I've talked about on this blog before. Patinir, though, went beyond this simple schema, using different colours to create transitions. 'The far distant blue permits little color play, though Patinir varies its intensity and may shade it to green or gray. Bright red may occur in its traditional role as the local color of the costume of a foreground figure, and touches of it may also spark the sky, or a distant earthly or infernal fire. The sky is usually shaded from a bright, creamy tone on the horizon through white and bluish white to a deep azure blue at the frame.' 

6. Sky

When it comes to weather effects, Patinir's skies usually contain 'white cumulus clouds, evoking the mood of a clear, late summer afternoon, the atmosphere cleared of dust by a recent rain.' The subject of the painting may require a change to this of course - Koch relates St. Jerome's 'dark night of the soul' to the blackness in the sky above him (see above), and the same can be said of other works like the Prado's The Temptations of Saint Anthony. 

7. Ground

Here we see 'overlapping folds of earth' with land either swelling from a darker shade to a bright summit or vice versa. 'In either case a contour line is created when dark and light meet, clarifying the earth mass.' 

8. Water

'From the trickle of a foreground stream to rivers that empty in the foreground or meander in the distance, from ponds and lakes to great bays, water is an important element of the Master's world landscape.' Koch notices that it is always 'smooth or gently rippled, but never angry', even when the religious stories being illustrated might suggest turbulent waters or rough waves. 

9. Trees

Patinir's 'compact, trimly rounded, distant trees' are produced with dots of paint that were referred to by the late sixteenth century artist-writer Karel Van Mander as getippelt. Koch doesn't translate this term but I see it implies light, quick steps (and hence a street prostitute in modern slang!) 

10. Rocks

Finally, rock formations are particularly memorable elements in all his landscapes and dominate the National Gallery's Saint Jerome. I've always thought of these as 'fantastical' but Koch believes Patinir was 'deeply affected by the noted landmarks along the Meuse River around Namur and Dinant: the Marche-les-Dames, a bright gray wall which rises precipitously from the river; the bluish limestone Rochers de Frènes; and the dramatic chimney-like Bayard Rock at Dinant. What appear to be melodramatic rock fantasies in Patinir's paintings are really constructions based upon his personal observation of nature.' 

Joachim Patinir, Landscape with Saint Jerome (detail), 1516-17

The distant island of Eimeo

Conrad Martens, HMS Beagle being hailed by native Fuegians, 1832

Following a visit to Charles Darwin's home Down House earlier this year, I read the The Voyage of the Beagle (1845 - the second edition which incorporated extensive revisions and looked forward to his theory of evolution). It really is a fascinating account, in which Darwin experiences an earthquake in Chile, climbs the Andes, meets gauchos, encounters political turmoil in Peru and witnesses the return of Fuegian natives who had been taken to Britain after the captain’s previous voyage. The Galapagos Islands are an obvious highlight but the whole book is interesting. Darwin is admirably critical of slavery, sympathetic to exploited miners and saddened by the impact of diseases brought by Europeans. He is also sympathetic to the efforts of missionaries, who were evidently doing some good, even if the extent of their negative impact was not yet apparent. Overall he comes over as thoroughly admirable and his enthusiasm for the natural world extends well beyond animals and plants to encompass insects, coral reefs, fossils, geological formations and meteorology.

At the end of the book he concludes that 'the pleasure derived from beholding the scenery and the general aspect of the various countries we have visited, has decidedly been the most constant and highest source of enjoyment.' There are descriptions of landscape throughout the journey and I will just quote one example here, from his time in Tahiti, where he reaches for the analogy of a work of art.

From the highest point which I attained, there was a good view of the distant island of Eimeo, dependent on the same sovereign with Tahiti. On the lofty and broken pinnacles, white massive clouds were piled up, which formed an island in the blue sky, as Eimeo itself did in the blue ocean. The island, with the exception of one small gateway, is completely encircled by a reef. At this distance, a narrow but well-defined brilliantly white line was alone visible, where the waves first encountered the wall of coral. The mountains rose abruptly out of the glassy expanse of the lagoon, included within this narrow white line, outside which the heaving waters of the ocean were dark-coloured. The view was striking: it may aptly be compared to a framed engraving, where the frame represents the breakers, the marginal paper the smooth lagoon, and the drawing the island itself. When in the evening I descended from the mountain, a man, whom I had pleased with a trifling gift, met me, bringing with him hot roasted bananas, a pine-apple, and cocoa-nuts. After walking under a burning sun, I do not know anything more delicious than the milk of a young cocoa-nut.

The Voyage of the Beagle mentions a few of his companions but in general Darwin is too busy studying the natural world to focus on them as characters. Of the two artists who accompanied the voyage, there is no mention of Augustus Earle, who shared a cottage with Darwin in Rio, and only one of Conrad Martens: on the occasion he shot an ostrich. 'It was cooked and eaten [but] fortunately the head, neck, legs, wings, many of the larger feathers, and a large part of the skin, had been preserved; and from these a very nearly perfect specimen has been put together, and is now exhibited in the museum of the Zoological Society.' The sketchbooks of Martens were digitised a few years ago by Cambridge University (The Guardian published on article on this at the time). The example below was drawn in Tahiti.

A dense forest of pines

This is 'Barbara Codonia', a depiction of the 'landscape' of northern Germany drawn by Dürer or his school, incorporating the names of places and longitude and latitude around the borders. In the northern sea there are islands - Thule (Tyle), probably one of the Shetland Islands, Iceland (Islandi), Scandia, Gottia and somewhere that might be Svalbard. It is an illustration from the Quatuor libri amorum secundum quatuor latera germanie by German humanist Conrad Celtes (Latin: Conradus Celtis), published in Nuremberg in 1502.  These erotic poems were written in praise of Germany and each book had its own heroine. Barbara resides in Lübeck, while in the East there was Hasilina of Cracow, to the South, Elsula of Regensburg and in the West, Ursula of Mainz. The only one of these women that historians have identified with a real person is Hasilina, about whom Simon Schama writes amusingly in Landscape and Memory.

Celtis was altogether an extraordinary figure. ... He studied in Heidelberg, Leipzig, and Rostock before reaching Kraków in 1489, where he had a sensually ecstatic affair with Hasilina Ryztonic, the wife of a Polish nobleman. "How happy I was in that hour amid kisses and embraces holding Hasa's soft breasts in my hands and burying myself in her sweet thighs." Celtis strayed far enough into the Polish countryside to hunt bison, but his view of Poland as a place hopelessly sunk in drunken squalor may have been colored by his rejection at the hands of the passionate but unpredictable Hasa. In his later Liber Amorum she was decisively annexed as one of the four corners of Germany. 

In a 1992 article called 'Desiring the Barbarian' in The German Quarterly David Price describes Celtis's attitude to his four geographically separated lovers. He praises some poems in German from Ursula, albeit tentatively, and then complains that nobody teaches girls Latin. This leads him to imagine instructing her - 'my tongue will pour words into your lips'. He says he will indicate long and short syllables through the length of his kisses. Barbara gets short shrift, criticised for slurred speak when she gets drunk, and Elsula, ignorant of Latin, is castigated for being unreceptive to his songs. 'Haselina, the subject of much of Celtis's best erotic poetry, comes off even worse. Like all "non-classical" women, according to Celtis, Hasilina scorns books. ... Celtis's women resemble the faithless or unreceptive women of Roman love lyric, but they are repugnant to an even greater degree because of their illiteracy in Latin.'

Christopher S. Wood's rich study Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape (a source for Simon Schama's book), views Celtis as a pivotal figure in the identification of Germany with the idea of the forest. 

The key intellectual manoeuvre was the conversion of the forest from the blight into the pride of the land. The forest became at once a hazardous wilderness and a stage for chivalric heroism; it sheltered the satyr, the wild man, even - in Celtis's profound imagination - the Druid priest. The forest became an open-air temple; it became the seat of the Muses. These ideas were so fresh that they could only be put forward tentatively, experimentally, often with tangible excitement. The glamour of the forest lay in its precarious double nature: awe could easily collapse back into fear, mystery into obfuscation, heroism into barbarism.

Wood illustrates the forest's dangers with a pen drawing by Altdorfer showing robbers in action, and notes a similar scene in the Amores of Celtis, who described an encounter on the road between Nuremberg and Regensburg. This is how Celtis sets the scene:

It is a place where hills are lifted from the bending valley,
And a dense forest of pines covers all sides;
In the middle of the space is a well-trodden road in a narrow track;
Watered by a lake, it leads through putrid fields.

Here the thieves spring forth but, 'moved by the poet's supplications (delivered in Latin, if we are to trust the poem),' they spare his life.

The Enchanted Forest

Marc Chagall, sketch of a curtain for The Firebird Act 1, 'The Enchanted Forest', 1945

We were in Nice last week and visited the Chagall Museum. It has an exhibition on at the moment that includes sixty-four sketches for the stage curtains and costumes used for the New York Ballet's revival of The Firebird in 1945.  I was drawn to the image above, a landscape as seen through the distinctive imagination of Chagall, with his vivid colours, floating creatures and magical realism. The view seems to be trees on either side of a river, although this river is also the sky, and what looks like a sun and moon with their usual colours reversed. Interestingly he repeated this composition for one of the Museum's twelve large painting of scenes from Genesis and Exodus (below). At first glance those wonderful blues and greens evoke the idea of a natural paradise, but the upside-down trees and fleeing birds also suggest a landscape being uprooted and changed for ever as Adam and Eve are expelled (assisted by a red cockerel, looking a lot like the Firebird).  

Marc Chagall, Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise, 1961

I have mentioned descriptions and depictions of Eden before on this blog, e.g. by John Milton and Athanasius Kircher, but here is a bit more on The Firebird. Chagall's forest might more accurately be described as a garden, because the ballet is set in the enchanted grounds of a castle owned by the evil Kostcheï. Ivan, the hero, is lost there and sees the Firebird, who escapes but gives him one of her feathers. Later he uses this to summon her back and she tells him how to kill Kostcheï, by hurling an egg containing his soul to the ground. Aleksandr Golovin designed the scenery for the original 1910 Ballets Russes production at the Palais Garnier on 25 June 1910 - it was just one month earlier that Chagall arrived from Russia to study and paint in Paris. Natalia Goncharova took a different approach for Diaghilev's new production in 1926 - her stylised Russian cityscape for the final act was exhibited a few years ago in the Tate's Goncharova exhibition, but I'm not sure how she depicted the garden. More recent productions seem to have prioritised dancing over scenery, although the Dance Theatre of Harlem's 1982 Firebird had sets with botanical forms designed by the multi-talented Geoffrey Holder. There is no indication of how this garden (or forest) should look in the original production's brief scene descriptions, so artists will always be free to design their own imaginary landscapes. 

Aleksandr Golovin, sketch for The Firebird scenery, 1910