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.

The Great Hedge of India

This map of the Great Hedge of India has been on display in Somerset House as part of Salt Cosmologies, an art project by Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser). 

'The project invokes the spectral presence of the so-called Great Salt Hedge, a vast, long-forgotten barrier of plants which the British colonial regime created in the 19th century to control and tax the movement of salt across the Indian subcontinent. This 4000-kilometre-long 'hedge' was made of thorny shrubs, locally found brush, sweet plums and prickly pears, and inhabited by birds and snakes. Although highly profitable, it was also a nuisance to maintain, often battered by winds, burnt during the rebellion of 1857 and eaten by termites. Now, it is largely erased from memory and the landscape.'    

This all sounds extraordinary, like some kind of vastly ambitious land art project, halfway between Christo-Jeanne Claude and David Nash. You would think that even at the time it might have been painted or photographed, but apparently not: 'it was neither beautiful nor picturesque, and by the time photography began to document such relics, the hedge had been abolished in 1878 - paraphrased from H.F. Pelham (historian and scholar), in his brief account on the Great Salt Hedge or Inland Customs Line'. Finding only textual records, the artists used an AI model to create 'several images to return the Inland Customs Line to collective memory.' My instinctive dislike of AI meant I preferred to use my imagination, drawing on the collection of archival materials (see above) displayed in Somerset House's old Salt Office. This included botanical illustrations and bird specimens - Allan Octavian Hume, the colonial administrator who oversaw construction of the Inland Customs Line, was also a prominent biologist and collector. The Hedge was a wildlife habitat as well as being an implement of imperialism (in 1930 Gandhi would famously protest the salt tax). 

In a separate Tate Britain installation the artists have installed a video projection (see below) which includes some contemporary quotes. This one is by Flora Annie Steel who wrote many books about India. The full text can be found on Project Gutenberg in a chapter called 'The Salt of the Earth'. In case you can't read it in this photograph, here's what she wrote:

It was a strange, weird barrier, a vast hedge of cactus and thorny acacia, of prickly palms and agaves, that thrust out their spiked swords boldly from a buckler of spine-set thicket... What a barrier it was! Forty feet high by as much broad! A grey-green mighty wall of leaves all starred with pink and yellow and white cactus blossoms, over which birds, butterflies and dragonflies fluttered, while on the round fleshy leaves the cochineal insects gathered, like tiny spots of blood, scarlet...

Postscript 

After I posted this, Gareth Evans kindly pointed out that the Great Hedge of India and imperial salt trade were explored a decade earlier in another (continuing) collaborative art project, 'Common Salt', by Sheila Ghelani and Sue Palmer. Their work is discussed in a fascinating 2021 article on the BBC website, 'The Mysterious Disappearance of the World's Largest Shrubbery'. It begins with Robert Moxham, author of The Great Hedge of India, who began researching the subject after finding a reference to it in a second-hand book he bought in 1994. 'Moxham made three trips to India in the mid-1990s, seeking it out. He pored over old maps and satellite imagery, travelled to small towns and spoke to villagers and locals in areas where the hedge was mentioned in historical records. In many places, Moxham found that the Hedge had just melted away.' Another researcher, Aisling O'Connor, made trips to Uttar Pradesh and found that the path of the hedge was now a road corridor. She got invited to a conference on Nuclear Energy to speak about the Great Hedge because "they were intrigued by how such a big project could have disappeared from memory in such a short time." The BBC article concludes by suggesting that trying to keep public memory of the hedge alive 'is a constant challenge', so it is probably good that more artists have recently been engaging with this fascinating structure.

The new open farmland

The latest David Matless has quite a lot to say about English landscape. Some of the things covered in England's Green have been discussed on this blog in the past, including Richard Long, Ghost Box, Roy Fisher, Susan Hiller, The Peregrine, ley lines, The Detectorists, the Green Knight, Andy Goldsworthy, the Fitties, Ground Work, J. G. Ballard, John Fowles, Stonehenge, Electric Eden and rewilding. The book's main chapters veer around from topic to topic, a bit like Some Landscapes but with an organising principle and more specific points to make. They include interesting material on government environmental policy and changing attitudes to farming, set alongside nostalgic references to childhood TV and pop culture, from The Wombles to The Wurzels. Matless is a similar age to me but got exposed to things in Norfolk we had no experience of growing up in Brighton, like agricultural fairs and country dancing!

I'll just highlight one part of the book here to that give a flavour of his approach. A section on 'Today's Country' begins with Camberwick Green, the children't animation in which Windy Miller is a traditional rural figure and Farmer Bell a modern farmer. They are rivals but friends. Matless sees them as embodying different 1960s figures - Windy's values consistent with the emerging counterculture while Bell, 'in no sense a villain', had modern tractors and farm machinery that resembled the Corgy, Dinky and Matchbox models being sold at the time. Farmer Bell's world could also be seen in scale model dioramas on display in places like the Science Museum. This modern farming 'could also claim aesthetic value', as set out in an interesting quote from Nan Fairbrother’s New Lives, New Landscapes (1970):

‘The new open farmland, if we cease to look at it nostalgically, has its own distinctive beauties, its very openness being one ... In large-scale arable farming we are conscious too of the land, the earth itself. We can see the shape of the ground as we never can in small hedged fields, and in our rolling landscapes the modulations of the surface are in themselves beautiful.’

It is hard to imagine anyone writing that now, given the environmental problems that became increasingly apparent with modern agriculture. And yet I have to admit her description partly resonates with how I felt aesthetically about the open, bare hills of the South Downs when I lived in Sussex. Fundamentally though, Fairbrother's idea of 'a land restyled for today' sounds like a depressing prospect, in more ways than one. She suggests that 'fields as we know them will disappear' and future historians will be have to uncover them 'as we now study Celtic lynchets and the open field system at Axholme.' I now have my father's copy of New Lives, New Landscapes (essential reading for a town planner) which he bought in 1972, when I was probably still enjoying Camberwick Green.

The sea, bristling with jagged sheets of ice

François-Auguste Biard, Magdalena Bay, 1841 

Having written last time about Victor Hugo I will add something here about his lover Léonie d'Aunet, a novelist and playwright who inspired many of the poems in Les Contemplations (1856). She was not merely a writer though, she was an Arctic explorer. Last year I mentioned the trip painter Emma Stibbons made to Svalbard, following in the footsteps of other artists who have taken part in the Cape Farewell voyages, but Léonie d'Aunet was the first woman ever to visit the archipelago. In 1838 she accompanied her future husband, painter François-Auguste Biard, on an expedition led by the scientist Joseph Paul Gaimard. Biard's painting above was acquired by the Louvre in 1841 and is subtitled 'view taken from the Tombs Peninsula, north of Spitsbergen; aurora borealis effect.' There were no casualties on their expedition, but the figures in the foreground prefigure later famous tragedies. 

An article on a UN website talks about Léonie d'Aunet's published recollections in relation to climate change. She described setting foot on ground at Magdalena Bay: 

“I said on the ground, as one usually does, but I should have said on snow, because I couldn’t see the slightest part of earth,” she wrote in her book Voyage d’une femme au Spitzberg (1854). Even in summer, everything was covered in snow and “between each mountain there are glaciers, which are growing in height every year. This is inevitable: the immense amount of snow that piles up during the 10-month winter cannot change in the summer that lasts only for some weeks. Eventually, in time the glaciers will be as high as the surrounding granite peaks.” The French woman’s predictions have, of course not materialised.

Now the landscape of Svalbard (Spitsbergen is its largest island) is at risk from global heating. 'An avalanche in 2015 cost two lives in Longyearbyen, the world’s northernmost permanent settlement. They were described as Svalbard’s first deaths from climate change.'

I am not sure if Leonet d'Aunet's book is properly available in an English translation, but there are some quotations from it in a 1903 anthology called Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century. 

The ice-fields and the icebergs[Pg 130] inspired Madame d'Aunet with profound emotion, and, in describing them, she breaks out into what may be called a lyrical cry. "These Polar ices," she exclaims, "which no dust has ever stained, as spotless now as on the first day of the creation, are tinted with the vividest colours, so that they look like rocks composed of precious stones: the glitter of the diamond, the dazzling hues of the sapphire and the emerald, blend in an unknown and marvellous substance. Yonder floating islands, incessantly undermined by the sea, change their outline every moment; by an abrupt movement the base becomes the summit; a spire transforms itself into a mushroom; a column broadens out into a vast flat table, a tower is changed into a flight of steps; and all so rapidly and unexpectedly that, in spite of oneself, one dreams that some supernatural will presides over those sudden transformations. At the first glance I could not help thinking that I saw before me a city of the fays, destroyed at one fell blow by a superior power, and condemned to disappear without leaving a trace of its existence. Around me hustled fragments of the architecture of all periods and every style: campaniles, columns, minarets, ogives, pyramids, turrets, cupolas, crenelations, volutes, arcades, façades, colossal foundations, sculptures as delicate as those which festoon the shapely pillars of our cathedrals—all were massed together and confused in a common disaster. An ensemble so strange, so marvellous, the artist's brush is unable to reproduce, and the writer's words fail adequately to describe![Pg 131]

...

"The sea, bristling with jagged sheets of ice, clangs and clatters noisily; the lofty littoral peaks glide down to the shore, fall away, and plunge into the gulf of waters with an awful crash. The mountains are rent and splintered; the waves dash furiously against the granite capes; the icebergs, as they shiver into pieces, give vent to sharp reports like the rattle of musketry; the wind with a hoarse roar, scatters tornadoes of snow abroad.... It is terrible, it is magnificent; one seems to hear the chorus of the abysses of the old world preluding a new chaos."

According to the UN article, 'Since the 1980s, the amount of summer sea ice has halved, and some scientists fear it will be gone altogether by 2035.'

The Abandoned Park

Victor Hugo, Mushroom, 1850

Earlier this week, writing about Tirzah Garwood, I referred to landscapes in art that appear uncanny because they contain outsize plants or objects (I might also have mentioned Paul Nash's Event on the Downs - see my earlier post 'Ideas for Sculpture in a Setting'). Here is another example, a giant mushroom that can be seen in the fascinating Royal Academy exhibition Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo. In the catalogue Rose Thompson says that 'very little is known about his depiction of a poisonous mushroom. In a seemingly post-apocalyptic landscape, the drawing reveals a hidden secret: a ghostly human face trapped within the mushroom's stem.' Most of Hugo's paintings involve pen, brown ink and wash - see for example the The Octopus I included here back in 2012 - but many, like Mushroom - incorporate additional media. Here he has added charcoal, crayon and green, red and white gouache.^* 

Hugo made topographical sketches in France, northern Spain, Luxembourg and Germany, but he didn't travel much compared to contemporaries who explored the Mediterranean and near East. Many of the landscapes in this exhibition are imaginary, with mysterious buildings half submerged in mist or doubled as reflections in water. He incorporated random and accidental effects in a manner that can be likened to the blot landscapes advocated in the eighteenth century by Alexander Cozens. He can also be seen as a proto-surrealist, interested in the unconscious and experimenting with ways to abandon control in his drawing processes. A couple of miniature landscape paintings in the exhibition particularly struck me for their Romantic atmosphere. Undergrowth c. 1847 is 7.3 x 4.5cm seems to show some trees or grass - it is hard to tell at this scale. The Abandoned Park is even smaller, just 4.4 by 3.5cm - about the size of a stamp. It looks like a tiny experiment but Hugo had it engraved and it was published in a magazine, L'Artiste in 1855. Hugo also tried out new approaches in his paintings of castles, e.g. making stencils to create either positive or negative silhouettes that he could then paint over. The Guardian website has a splendid gallery of these 'burg' pictures which gives a good indication of his range of approaches. 

Victor Hugo, The Abandoned Park, before 1855

^*Coincidentally, another great writer-artist, August Strindberg, also painted a strange landscape with a single mushroom in the foreground: Solitary Fly Cap (recently sold at Sotheby's). 

Cornstalks and wildflowers

 Tirzah Garwood, The Photographer, c. 1947

The Dulwich Picture Gallery's current exhibition is a Tirzah Garwood, covering her early woodcuts, marbled papers, box-frame collages and slightly surreal oil paintings like this one, The Photographer. The trees here are represented by leaf prints: 'using a method favoured by Victorian botanists, Garwood covered one side of a leaf with ink and then pressed it onto paper, creating a strange miniature tree.' The subject was inspired by some Edwardian family photographs found by Henry Swanzy, who had become her second husband in 1946 (as a key figure in encouraging post-war Caribbean and African literature he is almost as interesting as her first husband, Eric Ravilious). Sadly they only had a brief time together - her cancer returned in 1948 and she died in 1951. 

Tirzah Garwood, Etna, 1944

Garwood clearly enjoyed playing with scale and creating artificial landscapes - an earlier painting shows toys (that for a moment look real) in a garden, so that the foliage surrounding them seems unnaturally large. It reminded me of oddities I've written about here before, like Carl Wilhelm Kolbe's Kräuterblätter scenes featuring over-sized plant life, or the botanical illustrations of Gherardo Cino that blow up herbs to the size of trees. In Etna she depicts Mount Caburn in Sussex with a toy train and 'cornstalks and wildflowers that seem to dwarf the chickens pecking alongside the railway line.' In the exhibition catalogue James Russell writes that the hill in this painting 'is dependably solid, modelled in a different medium but with a similar feeling for mass to The Westbury Horse, one of her late husband's career-defining pre-war watercolours that she had with her still. Perhaps she referred to it as she worked; perhaps she was even responding to it, but also in her own way transforming the Sussex countryside into a landscape from a dream.'

Dormitorium

Yesterday I went to see Dormitorium | The Film Décors Of The Quay Brothers at the Swedenborg House - wonderful stuff. John Coulthart has written about it and included photographs on his site (he also has previous articles on the Quay Brothers). I took these shots of a mysterious landscape used in their film The Comb (1990). On the BFI site Michael Brooke called this 'one of the most inexplicably compelling of all the Quays' creations.'  

The most deliberately dreamlike of the Quay Brothers' films, The Comb is bookended by (and intercut with) a black-and-white live-action sequence of a woman asleep in bed, the implication being that these disconcerting, dislocating impressions of fairytale landscapes populated by decrepit puppets and an endless series of ladders (shot in colour) are taking place in the darker recesses of her mind. However, this is the only aspect of the film that's in any way easy to grasp, the rest setting out to wrong-foot the viewer at every turn, and the result wilfully defies verbal analysis. ...  Distortions visible in the background décor imply the existence of hidden images. At times it appears to be a discarded theatrical set, an impression given further credence by a camera pull-back to reveal what appear to be stage flats and a proscenium arch - though it could just as easily be a forest. 

In the film you never see the 'landscape' as it is presented in this case, so that undulating shape is rather surprising. The grain of wood is transformed into pools, shadows and bands of cloud. The painted trees here look like details in old German topographical prints or copper plate paintings, or Hercules Segers' 'mysterious landscapes'. I have mentioned on this blog before the Quay Brothers' cover design for Cosmicomics which appears to be a grisaille version of The Comb's wooden sculpture (see below). The literary source for The Comb is a fragment by Robert Walser, but I'm not aware of a precise text that might provide a literary equivalent for this landscape. Writing in Sight & Sound (1992), Jonathan Romney said 'the film is set to his work, rather than derived from it—so much so that the extracts from his texts, balefully whispered and muttered in several languages simply become part of the soundtrack, along with various drips, owl hoots, and strident orchestrations of string and wood by the Brothers' regular collaborator Leszek Jankowski.'

Great Fear on the Mountain

I still occasionally end up buying a book for its cover, or at least picking it out to look at on that basis. This one (published last year) got to me through that Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painting, Mountain Peak (1918). It is extremely well chosen as an illustration of the story, which concerns a high pasture with an evil reputation, avoided for twenty years until a new group of shepherds volunteer to spend a summer up there. It doesn't end well for them. There is an excellent, comprehensive article by Alice-Catherine Carls about Great Fear on the Mountain (1926) and its Swiss author Charles Ferdinand Ramuz. I'll quote here some of what she says about his landscape imagery: 

In Great Fear, the glacier tests the limits of human understanding and causes a loss of reality conducive to extracorporal and paranormal sensations, hallucinations, phantasms, and dreams. It becomes a purgatory to “vapors and legions of errant souls” experiencing a “hypnotic delirium, a kind of awake-dream.” 

Other settings that describe unfamiliar, disorienting light and sound effects include the mountain slopes’ dense forest, the absolute darkness of the night, the blinding light of the noon sun, and the silence of high altitudes’ “mineral world.” The magnificent sunrises on the jagged mountain summits are described in impressionistic, worshipping fervor, with dawn alighting on the landscape like a bird and the sky being so close that one could touch it.

The disturbed psychologies of the characters in Great Fear could be likened to the state Kirchner was in after being discharged from the army. As a recent article in the Art Newspaper explains, he 'was a physical and psychological wreck when he first arrived in Davos in 1917. Addicted to alcohol and morphine, he was suffering from blackouts and paralysis.' At first he stayed with a nurse on the Stafelalp, in a mountain hut  - “It’s very beautiful up here ... and I could paint so much, if I weren’t so weak.” A year later he was doing better and living in Davos where he remained until 1925, painting landscapes like the one Archipelago Books have used for Great Fear on the Mountain. 

Sahara Project

Tate Modern's Electric Dreams exhibition includes the film Tele-Mack, shot in 1968, featuring the work of West German artist Heinz Mack. It starts in black and white with him driving an E-type through a city, looking like David Hemmings in Blow-Up. Then it leaps into colour - Mack is now in a silver suit carrying an aluminium disc into a stretch of water (accompanied by 'tense music', as you can see from my photograph above). The voice on the soundtrack tells us this is a kind of artificial sun and is an experiment related to the artist's Sahara Project. Next we see him planting fragmented mirrors in a field (a kind of landscape art I've written about here before). Then we see an installation of kinetic sculptures made of aluminium foil and coloured Plexiglas - Mack is wearing a cool sixties suit while a groovy young woman in plastic orange raincoat and hat takes photographs of him. From this Warhol-like scene we are transported to the Tunisian desert, where the artist in his silver suit resembles an astronaut, setting up aluminium sculptures that face into the sun. Here we are witnessing the culmination of his long-planned Sahara Project. There are only two colours - the blue of the sky and the white-brown of the sand, until Mack places a pink translucent sheet in front of the camera. Finally he creates an artificial garden of metal-winged sculptures, the kind of thing you might see in J. G. Ballard's Vermilion Sands (1971). 

You can watch a short video about the Sahara Project on the Guggenheim website. Mack conceived it in the early fifties when he and his wife drove their VW Beetle into the desert and first experienced its intense light. Curator Valerie Hillings says Mack told her a story about how he broke off the mirror in his hotel room and 'took it into the desert to see what happened.' Mack himself describes the attraction of a place with no distractions, the perfect setting for sculptures: a landscape unspoiled by the "fingerprints of civilisation." By 1959 he had worked out his thoughts on paper and exhibited them as a concept, years before the American land artists came up with similar ideas of using remote locations and mirrors. Although light and reflection were central to the work he was making in the sixties, it wasn't until the Tele-Mack filmmakers suggested going out to Tunisia that he got to take these sculptures and set them up in the desert. The key difference here between Mack and earth artists like Michael Heizer was that his work was temporary. He left no trace behind - Sahara Project was thus as ephemeral as a walk by Hamish Fulton (and can thus be viewed as relatively environmentally sensitive). It was also a one-off performance, only preserved on the medium of film. And what an excellent film Tele-Mack is -  I'm not at all surprised it got an honourable mention at the 1971 Venice Film festival.

Postscript 14/3/25

A week after writing this I have realised that Tate Etc. magazine carried an interview with Heinz Mack in which he discusses the film and Sahara Project. 

'The gravity of the desert, its absolute tranquillity, its endless dimensions – all this radiated mystery. In this landscape, infinitely vast and untouched, I now experimented with my comparatively small models and sculptures. This was inspired by the question of whether my art could stand up to this open landscape or would be lost in it. I discovered that, despite the contradictory proportions, something could be created there that had a poetic radiance.'

Pine River and Lone Peak

I've been looking in this 1991 anthology for any interesting landscape-related poems that Peter H. Lee didn't include in The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Korean Poetry, a book I discussed here nineteen years ago. I soon found one - the first poem in the book is a 1580 kasa by Chŏng Ch'ŏl (1537-94) which Lee calls The Wanderings (1580). Its Korean title is Kwandong pyŏlgok^* - sometimes rendered as the Song of Diamond Mountain or Song of the East Coast. Kwangdong is the name of the region that contains the spectacular Diamond Mountains (Geumgangsan), which I have discussed here before in relation to the artists they inspired. Chŏng Ch'ŏl's poem begins in Seoul where the king appoints him governor. He heads north and endures a sleepless night at Chorwon, a town which is now right on the North Korean border. After encountering magpies chattering on an old royal tomb (at least metaphorically), he sets off for the mountains, letting 'my staff lead me'. He walks through Hundred Rivers Canyon to Myriad Falls Grotto, and admires the falling water: 'there silver rainbows, / dragons with jade tails, / turning and coiling, spurt cataracts.' 

In an ideal world someone would have written an illustrated guide to the Diamond Mountains, detailing all the most famous scenic spots, arranged alphabetically or geographically, and illustrating them with literary quotations, paintings and contemporary photographs. One reason my ideal library contains no such volume is that it would be a little hard to write this now, since many of the beauty spots are in North Korea. And, of course, while the mountains and sea might have been familiar to Chŏng Ch'ŏl, specific sites he visited have gone. Early in the poem he passes through Pyohunsa Temple which is still there, but it is the only one of the Diamond Mountains' four great temples that survived the Korean War - American bombers destroyed Singyesa, Jangansa and Changansa. Another temple, Naksansa, was devestated by fire in 2005, although most of its buildings only dated from the fifties, when it was rebuilt after having been reduced to rubble in the war. Chŏng Ch'ŏl visited Naksana, where he got up at dawn to watch the sun rise over the sea. Naksana is one of the Gwandong Palgyeong, eight scenic spots along the eastern coast of Korea which became famous in the sixteenth century. 

Gim Hongdo, Lake Samilpo 

from an album of late 18th century Landscapes Around Mt. Geumgangsan 

Source: Google Art

Lake Samilpo is another famous landscape. It sounds lovely but is now inaccessible, north of the border. Chŏng Ch'ŏl visited and found six red letters on a cliff commemorating the four knights of Silla. 'After three days here / where did they go?' Legend has it that these four Hwarang stayed for three days and nights because they were captivated by the beautiful scenery (Samilpo means Three Days Cove). The Hwarang were Korea's elite male warriors, the 'flowering youth' schooled in Buddhism who visited mountains to train and try to receive supernatural guidance. They flourished as fighters between the mid-6th and mid-7th centuries, after which they became more of a social elite (they feature in later poems like the mid-8th century 'Ode to Knight Kipa': 'Knight, you are the towering pine / That scorns frost, ignores snow.') These four had been in the Diamond Mountains and were on their way down the coast to take part in a martial arts competition. Chŏng Ch'ŏl wonders where the four would have stayed next: 'Were they sitting at Clear Torrent Arbor / or on Myriad View Terrace?' 

Peter H. Lee discusses Chŏng Ch'ŏl's poem in his History of Korean Literature. He says 'the reader feasts on a continuous unfolding of scenes described from various perspectives, encompassing both the sky and sea, and engaging all the senses ... Chŏng’s bold descriptions show great skill in conveying a magnificent scene of nature in simple but carefully chosen words.' I will end here with the poet's description of Mirror Cove, which is northeast of Gangnung and was another of the Eight Scenes of Gwandong.  

Behind the old pines rimming like hedges

I scan a ten-mile long beach

like ironed and stretched white silk; 

the water is calm and clear, 

I can count the grains of sand.

 

Maps of Other Possibilities

Yesterday I went to a wonderful event at Tate Britain devoted to the Bow Gamelan Ensemble. There were three short films and then a conversation between Louisa Buck and the two remaining members, Anne Bean and Richard Wilson. It was probably one of the best artist talks I've ever been to - they were so engaging, articulate and inspiring. Paul Burwell died in 2007 but his thoughts were captured in one of the films, framed by retrospective questions from Bean. His Guardian obituary described the time when, 'memorably for those who were there, Burwell engaged the leader of the famous Kodo Drummers in a drum battle that traversed the entire harbour area of Sado Island, Japan.' Bean reminisced about this experience, recalling how it had ended with the Japanese drummer bowing in respect. 

I have mentioned the Bow Gamelan Ensemble before on this blog, as the highlight of a 2013 exhibition about the Thames. 'Most enjoyable of all, there is footage of The Bow Gamelan Ensemble from 1985, performing 51º 29'.9"North - 0º11' East, Rainham Barges, bashing out music from makeshift instruments at the river's edge as the tide rises and night falls.' You can read more about this performance on the Ensemble's website: 

'they were filmed for over ten hours as the tide ebbed and flowed capturing the massive energy of this amount of incoming water and the ways one could harness this power to shift and shape sound. As the huge resonant chambers of the barges filled up, they deepened the sounds of the metal reinforcing bars sticking out as they were played with sticks and beaters. Passing vessels obliged by blasting their horns, adding to the Bow Gamelan’s own array of foghorns, sirens and hooters.'

Regrettably I never saw them perform and the old footage of them staging events on derelict land by the river is increasingly hard to relate to what you experience in the modern city. They talked about how cheap it was to live in Butler's Wharf when they first met in the seventies. It sounds like a magical time, with Anne Bean's studio the venue for art world parties that included key figures from the punk movement. From the perspective of this blog, I'm interested in the way they worked at scale and transformed whole cityscapes - Simon Reynolds called them 'the missing link between Test Dept’s metal-bashing clangour and the Land Art of figures like Robert Smithson'. One of their most striking ideas was a concert for cranes, making use of the fact that Docklands was a permanent building site, with instruments picked up and moved around in three dimensions. Their use of pyrotechnics would not be possible now, although apparently they did get away with breaking the rules recently. Back in 1993 Burwell and Bean staged a spectacular event at Bankside power station (an image can be seen in my photo above). The woman who organised it was in the audience last night and she said they were only allowed to do it if they insured the building, but nobody knew what it was worth. So she got a quote from a local insurance company and it set them back £375. A few years later Bankside had become Tate Modern. 

An Outcrop in the Campagna

 Frederic Leighton, A Nile View, 1868

'The keynote of this landscape is a soft, variant, fawn-coloured brown, than which nothing could take more gratefully the warm glow of sunlight or the cool purple mystery of shadow; the latter perhaps especially, deep and powerful near the eye (the local brown slightly overruling the violet), but fading as it receded into tints exquisitely vague, and so faint that they seem rather to belong to the sky than to the earth. At this time of year the broad coffee-coloured sweep of the river is bordered on either side by a fillet of green of the most extraordinary vivacity, but redeemed from any hint of crudity by the golden light which inundates it.' - Leighton's travel journal, October 1868

This panorama is one of the highlights of Leighton and Landscape: Impressions from Nature, an exhibition of oil sketches which we saw at Leighton House last month. It was painted on the first of three trips he made to Egypt - Leighton was a lifelong traveller and, having grown up on the continent, was fluent in several languages. A wealthy bachelor, he was also extremely well connected and for this trip was provided with a steamer to take him up the Nile. He evidently took pleasure in making oil sketches but didn't do them on every trip, or at least so it appears - we don't have a record of them all and he mainly kept them private, only showing some of them late in his career. His modesty about them can be explained in terms of his self-image as President of the Royal Academy, engaged in the highest-regarded genre of history painting, but it still seems extraordinary.

There is an excellent catalogue which apart from anything else smells delightful (mine still has that fresh paper new book aroma!) The main author is Pola Durajska who did a PhD at York on Leighton's landscapes. She and the other authors point out some interesting features of his sketches:

• He experimented with different shapes of canvas (cutting them to size himself) and varied his technique from impasto to thin wash-like effects. 
• He looked for interesting light effects at different times of day and studied the intense shadows and bright white buildings of north Africa.   
• His interest in architecture influenced his choice of landscapes, with castles and towns blending into their surroundings and rock formations shaped like ruins.
• He rarely included figures or local colour and did not record where the sketches were done, making the locations of some of them hard to pin down.
• He also avoided the obvious, painting unregarded corners of cities like Venice and Jerusalem, or framing famous vistas differently to earlier artists.   

I'll end here with one of the Gere Collection paintings normally on display at the National Gallery. The wall text at Leighton House says that 'it is not easy to understand exactly what attracted Leighton to paint this particular grassy, hillside slope in Italy. Without any discernible focal point or distinctive feature, other than a flash of yellow sandy soil in the foreground, perhaps its appeal was in the simple combination of the green mass of the landforms against the deep blue of the sky. This apparently unpromising combination of elements typifies Leighton's approach to finding a subject.' 

Frederic Leighton, An Outcrop in the Campagna, probably 1866

Architecton

Here are J. M. W. Turner's The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons (1810) and an explosive rock fall in Victor Kossakovsky's new essay film Architecton. I watched the latter from the safety of my cinema seat, immersed in the noise and right up close to the violence of rocks crashing down and smashing into themselves. As Burke said of the Sublime, where you are not at risk of destruction, such experiences produce 'a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror; which, as it belongs to self-preservation, is one of the strongest of all the passions.' Landscape drone footage may now be a cliché in movies, but I did feel watching this that the technology has given us a new way of experiencing delightful horror.

Architecton is good on the life cycle of stone, from quarrying, to building to destruction, but its structure is confusing - you only really understand where in the world the rockfall happened towards the end. A prologue shot in Ukraine feels a bit tacked on. Personally I didn’t care for the music or some of the black and white footage. However, I did warm to the film's central figure, an amiable old Italian architect-designer called Michele De Lucchi. He wanders round Baalbek's Roman ruins, admiring the lovely old stone (no ugly concrete) and marveling at how they cut it with such precision. Back at his idyllic-looking family home in Italy, we see him direct two workmen to build a circular stone garden feature. You worry he is going to catch pneumonia standing out in the snow while it takes shape, although maybe this inclement day was chosen by the director. The result is reminiscent of a Richard Long circle and it becomes clear he aims to let the interior grow naturally, like herman de vries's meadow. In Peter Bradshaw's review he says that despite some faults, the film 'is so striking, especially on the big screen, almost itself a kind of land art.'