Blue Sky

Fifteen years ago I started a blog post on Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet by explaining that I had just joined Twitter.

Encouraged by Geoff Manaugh's defence of the practice, I have followed the example of some of my favourite blogs and started a Some Landscapes twitter (not sure I've mastered the idiom yet, can the word be used as a noun like 'blog'?) The idea is to include a few quick quotes and links and comments as they arise - some will get incorporated in later posts here, others won't. The 140 character constraint is a challenge to write with almost Flaubertian concision. Here's the sort of thing I've twittered: One of Flaubert's 'Accepted Ideas' - 'Landscapes (painted): always look like a mess of spinach.'

Everyone knows the story of the rise and fall of Twitter, with many people lamenting 'the golden days' when connections could be made and online friendships form through mutual shared interests. I have not been able to bring myself to post on it since last year. I briefly tried Threads but nobody seemed to be on it, although a few nature writers and cultural commentators have nailed their colours to its mast and occasionally encourage its use as an alternative to 'X'. I thought Bluesky seemed much more promising - a bit less mainstream with fewer trolls and likely to be used by interesting people not necessarily after as many likes as possible. That has proved to be the case but only in a limited way - disappointingly some of the people I first met through Twitter started accounts there last year but haven't really been using them. Anyway, we'll see - as someone said recently, it took Twitter a while to take off.

As this blog is beyond the reach of X I can safely encourage you here to join Bluesky and follow me there, andrew-ray, if you want some old school 'tweets' on landscape and the arts. I do Instagram too but that's just for my own photos. I should probably reiterate that my job prevents me from ever mentioning my political views or government policy on social media, but that's OK as I'd rather focus on things like Northern Renaissance landscape painting anyway (see my previous post here). This morning I've put this quote up on Bluesky which I found in an old notebook - and as I type this I've just got a 'like' from the excellent Longbarrow Press, although I don't anticipate too many more!

A Swedish explorer had all but completed a written description in his notebook of a craggy headland with two unusually symmetrical valley glaciers, the whole of it a part of a large island, when he discovered what he was looking at was a walrus.’ - Barry Lopez on mirages in Arctic Dreams

Probably one reason I like the idea of Bluesky is its name (Threads, by contrast reminds me of that terrifying eighties drama about a nuclear holocaust). I was intrigued to see how many times I had used the words "blue sky" on this blog so I did a ctrl-F. The first thing that comes up are two quotes from J. A. Baker's The Peregrine, from near the start and near the end of that book's freezing cold winter: 

• October 14th: One of those rare autumn days, calm under high cloud, mild, with patches of distant sunlight circling round and rafters of blue sky crumbling into mist...
• February 10th: This was a day made absolute, the sun unflawed, the blue sky pure...

The Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer who I wrote about after he won the Nobel Prize, describes the end of winter in 'Noon Thaw'. The world has a new language: 'the vowels were blue sky and the consonants were black twigs and the speech was soft over the snow.'

Here is George Eliot in The Mill on the Floss describing the simple pleasures of an English landscape in spring.

The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white star-flowers and the blue-eyed speedwell and the ground ivy at my feet - what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home-scene?

Sussex-based poet and clergyman Andrew Young once compared thistledown to 'ghosts of day ... silver against blue sky.'

A century earlier, Eugène Delacroix was looking up through the trees.

Champosay, 27 October 1853 Went for a stroll in the garden and then stood for a long time under the poplars at Baÿvet; they delight me beyond words, especially the white poplars when they are beginning to turn yellow. I lay down on the ground to see them silhouetted against the blue sky with their leaves blowing off in the wind and falling off about me.

The beauty of forms silhouetted in this way was something I observed myself in Rome and mentioned in connection with Walter Benjamin's description of Heidelberg Castle ('Ruins jutting into the sky can appear doubly beautiful on clear days ...')

The sky can also been seen in water: here is Ruskin on Canaletto's Venice:

It is one of the most difficult things in the world to express the light reflection of the blue sky on a distant ripple, and to make the eye understand the cause of the colour, and the motion of the apparently smooth water, especially where there are buildings above to be reflected, for the eye never understands the want of the reflection.

And in Florence, from A Room with a View  in E. M. Forster's novel, you could look down and see river men, children, soldiers and a tram temporarily unable to proceed.

Over such trivialities as these many a valuable hour may slip away, and the traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it.

There is a blue sky visible from my own window now. 

Study of a rock-face

I was recently in Nuremberg and had been keen to see the Albrecht Dürer house, although I was a bit disappointed to be honest, hoping for something that felt a bit older and less-restored. You can see the city's castle from Dürer's upstairs windows, just the other side of a square, with walls made of distinctive red sandstone. Inside the castle they have a reproduction of the sketch above and a text explaining that this particular sandstone was laid down about 215 million years ago. 'Albrecht Dürer painted sandstone formations at rock quarries in the Nuremberg region. These rocks are still used for restoration work at the imperial castle, the Peller courtyard, or the structures at the zoo. The last quarry still in operation for Nuremberg sandstone is the one in the Lorenz Reichswald Forest.' I've uploaded a photograph from Wikimedia of this Steinbruch Worzeldorf quarry below:

Source: Derzno 

The Dürer sketch is in the British Museum and you can zoom in on it at their website to look at the details of the rocks. The BM curators say that 'he would have referred to drawings such as these when he designed the detailed rock-face in the background of his engraving, St Jerome in Penitence of about 1496-7.' The reason this is inconsistent with the 1506 date is that they think the monogram was added by a later admirer. I've reproduced the Met's copy of the St Jerome engraving below. In London we have the National Gallery's Dürer painting of St. Jerome, which has some reddish rock formations and the kind of trees the saint would have seen if his wilderness had been somewhere near Nuremberg rather than the Syrian desert. 

From Art to Archaeology

Back in 1991 I went to a fascinating exhibition at the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne (in its old building) called From Art to Archaeology. It featured contemporary artists with work inspired by ancient British land art, like the Long Man of Wilmington and the cup and ring stones of northern Britain and Ireland. As this was years before the internet got going I thought there wouldn't be anything online about it, but the British Council website has a page describing the touring show. You never know how long these pages will last though (clicking on the British Council's 'past programmes' I get a 'fatal error' message). So I thought I'd just make a note of it here for posterity! Although who knows how long Blogger will survive...

The exhibition included work by artists I have featured on this blog before: Thomas Joshua Cooper, who photographed cup and ring sites, Richard Long with Cerne Abbas (1975) and Roger Ackling, whose And they cast their shadows (1977) was made in the Vale of the White Horse. Ackling was subsequently 'commissioned by the South Bank Centre to revisit the Uffington site after 14 years to produce a companion piece to this earlier work.'

The artworks I noted down at the time that particularly interested me were

• Barry Flanagan's bronze anvil with the outline of a figure on its point: Pilgrim on Anvil (1984). You can see a picture of this sculpture on the late artist's website.
  
• Malcolm Whittaker's Incised Figure (1991) - a broken board circle with a faded Long Man figure on it. Whittaker's art has often been inspired by geology, fossils and archaeology.
  
• John Maine's crayon drawings of strip lynchets (ridges marking boundaries of ancient field systems, where the plough stopped at the edge of a field)
• Kate Whiteford's Sitelines and Symbol Stones which resembled chalk hill drawings - white paper showing through black oil paint. 

Kate Whiteford has continued making art inspired by ancient forms, particularly Pictish art. Ten years after this exhibition she created a land art piece Shadow of a Necklace at Mount Stuart House on the Isle of Bute. Yves Abrioux's essay about it explains that 'in 1887, the third Marquess uncovered the grave of a Bronze Age woman at Mount Stuart. This contained a scattering of beads from a jet necklace, which was reconstructed and removed to Edinburgh where it is still on display at the Museum of Scotland. ... Kate Whiteford’s land drawing explicitly returns the exiled Bronze Age artefact to a site close to the cist where it laid undisturbed for several thousand years. Simultaneously, it hands the necklace back to the people of Bute.' 

Footnote: I'm joking about posterity, because there was a proper catalogue, which annoyingly I didn't buy it at the time. It was written by Alexandra Noble, who was later the curator at the Estorick Collection. 

View of Frankfurt/Oder

Last month we were in the The Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg which contains some wonderful Northern Renaissance art and the world's oldest globe. For the purposes of this blog though I was intrigued by a modern painting, a View of Frankfurt/Oder seen from Güldendorf (1975) by the East German artist-writer Karl Hermann Roehricht, which has a slightly surreal and dream-like quality. Here is the museum's description of it:

The painting does not show Frankfurt/Oder, which was constructed as an ideal city of GDR-Socialism after World War II. Instead, the artist composed an idyllic landscape with only a few buildings evoking what really could have been expected behind the hills. Hence, the painting was meant to be a hidden criticism of the GDR town planning. However, from 1976 to 1990 it was presented in the Palast der Republik in Berlin where the East German parliament resided.

I'll unpack this with a bit of help from German Wikipedia:

• Karl Hermann Roehricht (1928-2015) lived in Leipzig but studied painting in West Berlin, although he returned to East Germany when it looked as if his figurative art was going to be permanently out of fashion. 'He repeatedly refused to work as an unofficial employee for the Ministry for State Security. Because of his uncompromising attitude, he came under increasing pressure and was subsequently spied on and harassed. The television version of his comedy Familie Birnchen was banned in 1976 because of alleged fascist tendencies and was not broadcast on GDR television until 1982.' After his paintings were included in the Palace of the Republic he won the GDR Art Prize, but he was continually harassed and applied to leave in 1984. He wrote plays and poetry, fiction and memoirs (an American review of one of these isn't very complimentary). 

• Frankfurt (Oder) did have to be rebuilt after the war (93% of the centre was destroyed) but I'm not sure it was an 'ideal city'. A 2020 travel blog notes that 'the town was badly neglected after the war, the communist authorities could spare little money for reconstruction and while some efforts have been made since German reunification, this is not a typical tourist destination.'

• The Palace of the Republic opened in 1976 after three years of construction in which 5000 tons of sprayed asbestos was used, which meant that it was closed down in 1990. In addition to hosting the Volkskammer (parliament), it included a theatre, cafes, concert halls, a post office and monumental paintings prompted by the question 'are communists allowed to dream?' Tacita Dean's lovely 2004 film Palast doesn't show the whole building but is tightly framed on some bronze-mirrored windows that reflect a neighbouring dome. She described it as a building that 'always catches and holds the sun in the grey centre of the city.' As a recent resident in Berlin, she had 'no inkling of what the building meant when it had meaning' and admits she felt attracted by the totalitarian aesthetic. By then the original white marble had all gone, leaving just raw wood and dirty metal. It could have been left as a gradually rotting ruin but 'the sore in the centre of the city' would have been too public. When we last visited Berlin in 2019 it was long gone.
  

Sumava Virgin Forest in a Storm

We just got back from Prague, where there is a lot of interesting landscape-related art I could talk about. When I last went there photography in museums was prohibited; now I find my phone full of images and snaps of the accompanying wall texts. I thought here I would highlight three nineteenth century Czech artists in the National Museum, none of whom I've mentioned before: Antonín Mánes, Julius Marák and Otakar Lebeda. Here are the images, the curators' brief explanations and a few additional thoughts prompted by them.

Antonín Mánes, Landscape with Temple Ruins, 1827-8

Text: Mánes is considered to be the founder of Czech landscape painting. During 1836-1843, he was the professor of the landscape school at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and prepared his three children, Josef, Quido, and Amalie, for careers in painting. Landscape with Kelso Abbey Ruins was inspired by the popular poem Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard by Thomas Gray, translated into Czech by Josef Jungmann with the title Elegie na hrobkach veskych in 1807. The view of the landscape with the abbey ruins is a symbolical reminder of ephemerality and death - memento mori; therefore, the painter placed his signature 'Antonius Manes Bohemus' on the tombstone.

I was intrigued by the idea of a Czech landscape painting in the classical style (which we associate with Italian scenery) based on a ruin in Scotland but also (according to the above), derived from a poem written about a Buckinghamshire churchyard. Of course Gray's Elegy (1751) was so influential that the general idea of writing about the passing of time in a landscape with ruins quickly caught on and spread to other sites - John Langhorne's Written among the ruins of Pontefract Castle in 1756, to name just one example. The Elegy was also quickly translated into many languages - in a 2013 study Thomas N. Turk found at least 266 versions in forty languages (he mentions the Jungmann Czech translation but has it down as 1886 - maybe he's referring to a later edition). 

There are several notable families of painters in the history of Czech art. Mánes's daughter Amálie Mánesová actually specialised in landscape (see for example Landscape with a Figure, 1843) although appranently this was because her father thought portrait painting inappropriate for women.

 Julius Marák, Sumava Virgin Forest in a Storm, 1891-2

Text: In 1887, Julius Marák, who was in Vienna at that time, was called to the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague to be in charge of the landscape painting studio. In 1891, he received a commission from the Ministry of Culture and Education to paint two large canvases of old-growth forests. Marak created the preparatory sketches in Boubin Virgin Forest, which was designated as a protected area as early as 1858. He first completed Sumava Virgin Forest in the Storm while he worked on the counterpart canvas Sumava Virgin Forest in the Sun (today in possession of Ceská sporitelna bank) until 1897. The delay was caused by Marak's health problems and his full-time position at the Academy, where he educated many young landscape artists such as Antonin Slavicek, Frantisek Kaván, and Otakar Lebeda.

This is a large canvas showing trees engulfed in darkness and swirling strands of mist with what light there is illuminating broken stumps and moss but barely penetrating the depths of the forest. It feels like a primal scene with no hint of human activity. It woud be interesting to see the companion piece owned by the Česká spořitelna (Czech Savings Bank) - I can't see this online. What's particularly interesting here is the idea of art being commissioned as part of the effort to preserve old-growth forests. This sounds quite progressive. Sumava is now a National Park, on the southern border with Bavaria. It stretches northwest of Horní Planá, the town where Adalbert Stifter was born, and it was in this region that he set many of his stories. The park website explains that when the prtected area began in 1858 it  extended to 143.7 hectares, but 'the wind and subsequent bark beetle calamities, especially in the areas affected by wood extraction on Pažení mountain and in vicinity of Boubín peak' reduced this to less than fifty.  

Julius Marák also had a daughter who became a painter. One of the highlights of the fourth floor of the huge Trade Fair Palace in Prague is an 1896 self-portrait by Josefina Mařáková with her father. Sadly her health wasn't good and she died in 1907.

 

Otakar Lebeda, Mountain Lake in the Krkonoše Mountains, 1896

Text: Otakar Lebeda painted this canvas during his last holiday stay in September 1896. Lebeda painted the two glacial lakes, Small and Big, today in Poland, several times, always choosing an unusual view from above to the depth. The realistic depictions of steep stone hillsides sloping down to the water may also be interpreted as a view into a soul, or as a symbol of death. In June 1897, Lebeda graduated from the landscape painting studio of Julius Marák at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague where he was one of the most talented students. Four years later, he prematurely ended his life and promising career by shooting himself with a revolver as a result of depression and physical exhaustion. 

Otakar Lebeda was only twenty-three when he died and during his final months he was working on a large painting Killed by Lightening, 'inspired by a true event that took place in the Chodsko region' (NGP). What to make of the idea that a landscape like this mountain lake reflects a depressed mental state? Is there anything documented that supports this or is it over-interpretation? It certainly is a gloomy scene. 

I wrote here in 2016 about the affect of mental health on the landscapes of Lars Hertervig, where the painting style does seem clearly disturbed. (Last year's Nobel Prize winner for literature Jon Fosse has written two novels about Hertevig, Melancholy I and II, but I haven't felt like wanting to read them). There are other examples where we are tempted to look for signs of depression in landscape painting, most obviously Vincent Van Gogh, whose last painting was Wheat Field with Crows (1890)... Except it actually wasn't, as the Van Gogh Museum explains. 'It is often claimed that this was his very last work. The menacing sky, the crows and the dead-end path are said to refer to the end of his life approaching. But that is just a persistent myth. In fact, he made several other works after this one.'