Echoes and shapes

I hope readers won't mind one more post about art in Berlin... I've been to the Gemäldegalerie before, but it was before I started this blog, so I want to mention three paintings here with beautiful, detailed landscapes. They each illustrate ways in which shapes and repeated patterns were used to provide harmony and visual interest, linking distant space with details in the foreground.     

Johann Koerbecke, Christ Carrying the Cross (detail), 1456/57

Triangles dominate this first example, by Westphalian painter Johann Koerbecke. The clouds, trees and hillsides share a triangular form that is repeated at different levels of detail. White blossoms and clusters of leaves echo the overall shapes of the trees. The mounds, hillsides and distant mountain vary in colour but rise at similar angles. The sharper peaks of the building spires resemble the taller trees. In the foreground hats, arms, weapons and the angle of heads all follow the compositional scheme. And the cross on Christ's shoulder forms a triangle aligned with the hills behind, leading the eye into the landscape.     

Joos van Cleve, Triptych with the Adoration of the Kings (detail), c. 1520

Moving into the 16th century, Joos van Cleve from Antwerp provides a different kind of visual pleasure with shapes chosen for the building and rock formation. They echo each other, but contrast pleasingly too: golden stone fashioned in classical proportions for the tower and entrance; silvery grey for the towering, irregular rock arch in the distance. Negative space, allowing us framed glimpses of the landscape, matches the adjacent stone. That blue gap in the rocks is a version of the smaller outcrop on the left (or, in reverse, the larger one on the right). Similarly the green space in the entrance way emphasises the arches designed into each building, including the open dome under which the Three Kings are assembled.     

Joachim Patinir, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 1520

Finally, here is a Joachim Patinir landscape of the kind I was talking about on this blog recently. My attention was drawn immediately to the mountain which protectively encircles a city in the same way that Mary, in her red cloak, holds the infant Jesus. Once you notice this pattern you start to see versions of it elsewhere - on the right there is an oval-shaped clearing in which a single deer stands, beyond it a village which seems to be arranged in a circle, and then a windmill perched on a small, rounded hill. Circling paths lead through a peaceful, verdant landscape and everything has an aura of rest and security, a moment of welcome repose on the flight into Egypt.  

Panorama of Berlin

This is a detail from a Panorama of Berlin painted by Eduard Gärtner (or Gaertner) at a time when the prosperous Bierdermeier city was booming. The eminent looking gentleman with grey hair gesturing from the roof of the Friedrichswerder Church is none other than Alexander von Humboldt (whose writings I discussed here ten years ago). The panorama's six panels can be seen in the Schloss Charlotteberg, and I will quote here their wall description:

With its joy in detail, it conveys to us a lively notion of life in the city as it was in 1834. The roof of the church, completed in 1831, afforded an excellent standpoint for a panoramic view to Berlin's residential and representational buildings. The panorama assumes this gaze and shows the city not only as a royal residence, but also as a center of culture and science. Standing inside this angular panorama, viewers are drawn into the goings-on as if they were part of the group of visitors atop the church. Renowned personages have gathered together here; among them, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt and even the artist himself. Even before the paintings were finished, Gaertner was able to convince Frederick William Ill to purchase them. Beginning in 1836, they were on display at Charlottenburg Palace.

Although Schinkel's Neo-Gothic church is well located for a good central view of Berlin, its metal roof (unnoticeable from the ground) is quite a dominant feature in the paintings. One of the towers might have been a better bet, but perhaps they were a bit less accessible. Gärtner was clearly interested in portraying a place that had already become popular with visitors, the nineteenth century equivalent of tourists who ascend the Fernsehturm TV Tower or look out from the Reichstag's glass roof. The roof's expanse of grey metal is enlivened by a crawling child, adding a touch of what film classifiers might call 'mild peril'. Gärtner had a hut on the roof which he worked from and made rapid progress, despite noting in his diary that he was frequently interrupted by visitors.  

Gärtner's view of Berlin covers 360 degrees but is unlike the large-scale panoramas I've written about here before (Thun, Scheveningen) in being painted on a set of flat sheets and designed to be enjoyed like a traditional landscape painting, rather than an entertaining spectacle. As Stephen Oettermann says in his history of the panorama: 

A round painting would have required a separate building, or at the very least a separate room, where the owner would have to go to look at his picture. Constructing such a room would certainly have caused the actual buyer, King Frederick William III, no financial difficulties, but it would have run totally counter to his habits in approaching works of art. An individual purchaser of paintings tends to want to decorate his walls with them, not to acquire information about a particular locale. Gärtner's views of Berlin represent an anomaly in the history of panorama painting that illustrates the vast difference between true panoramas and their audience on the one hand and traditional paintings and their owners-viewers on the other.

Beneath the Pine Trees

I was in Berlin last week and visited the Brücke-Museum for the last days of their landscape-focused exhibition, 'Art... Beneath Pine Trees'. It was partly curated by landscape architects Atelier Le Balto who have been working for the last five years to revitalise the forest that surrounds the museum. The Grunewald and its lakes are looking lovely at the moment. In my photograph of one of the museum's windows you can see how the building is surrounded by autumn colours. The Brücke-Museum was set up in 1967 by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, who had survived the Nazi era when his art was deemed degenerate to become an esteemed professor of painting in West Berlin. It is next to the Kunsthaus Dahlem which also has exhibitions of contemporary art but still, for me, has a sinister feel to it. The building was constructed for Nazi sculptor Arno Breker, who was working on designs for Hitler's planned capital Germania (despite this Breker managed to keep working and receiving commissions after the war). After a morning walk I welcomed a sit down in the Dahlem's cafe, but it was hard not to think there about all the associations between forests and Nazism (brilliantly described in Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory). 

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Birch Trunks, 1905

The Brücke-Museum is focused on the present, with a short sculpture trail and work by two contemporary artists responding to the collection. The birch trunks and river view I've included here were part of a group of landscapes chosen by Atelier Le Balto from the museums extensive holdings, which they arranged on the walls 'like planters', with colours and sizes varying 'like real plants'. The four artists who founded Die Brücke in Dresden in 1905 were all represented - Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in addition to Schmidt-Rottluff. Bleyl and Hecker were also long-lived, but Kirchner, who was severely affected by his experiences in the First World War and suffered ill health in the late thirties while growing increasingly depressed by the state of Germany, took his own life in 1938. Kirchner's famous painting Potsdamer Platz is currently starring in the Neue Nationalgalerie's excellent exhibition Ruin and Rush: Berlin 1910–1930 - a reminder that these artists were also very much concerned with the modern city and its population. What I found really inspiring about their landscapes in the Brücke-Museum was the way they explored so many different media, working rapidly or with great care, to produce pencil drawings, pen-and-ink sketches, woodcuts, lithographs, oil and watercolour paintings.      

Fritz Bleyl, Landscape Study of the Mark Brandenburg XI - on the Havel, 1917

The Little Hollow of Light and Shade

Not far from where we live in London there is a domestic house that hosts art exhibitions, the postROOM gallery. Their most recent show featured these wall texts by Thomas A. Clark, whose work I've discussed frequently on this blog. He has exhibited similar texts at the Cairn Gallery, as you can see in the YouTube clip I've embedded below. In this video he explains the significance of colour, font and location, e.g. blue text (blue is "always a matter of shades and tone of subtlety and instability") is placed under a window "looking onto the sky, which even in Scottish weather can often give a full range of blues." Here in London, entering the immaculate white kitchen-dining room of this Islington house from its small garden, you see a text above the space which seemed very apt when it was buzzing with conversation at the exhibition's opening evening: 'the grove of delight'. Condensed landscape poems like this bring nature into the home. They make you think about the poetics of space - how a room and a grove might have similar meanings for us. They also wittily interact with furniture and fittings: the lamp shade above could itself be 'a hollow of light and shade', and 'the place of stone' below is just above the stone floor, next to a rock-coloured armchair.

 

In one of my first posts on this blog back in 2005 I mentioned the Chinese tradition of inscribing poetic text at sites of natural beauty. I quoted one written by Yüan Chieh (719-772) which drew attention to a scenic terrace and cliff, recommending the place to those weary of the city. Wall texts within a home travel in the opposite direction: from a specific house to an unspecified grove or place of stone, rather than from a particular landscape to urban life in general. Like the poetry books Tom publishes, they leave space for the reader's imagination and recollections. In a world of short attention spans, their brevity is an invitation to pause and reflect, rather than flick forward to the next thing. The texts at postROOM are temporary, but visiting this exhibition you can't help wondering what it would be like to live permanently with these beautiful, simple inscriptions and whether they might, in a modest way, influence the thoughts and conversations of those who encounter them. 

Triple Bluff Canyon

 

As we were in Oxford on Sunday we checked out the new Mike Nelson exhibition at Modern Art Oxford. It includes a new version of Triple Bluff Canyon (above), an installation inspired by Robert Smithson's Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) and the Gulf Wars that had recently taken place when it was first shown at MAO in 2004. The photograph below is one I took when another version was installed at the Hayward Gallery's big Mike Nelson retrospective in 2023. As you can see, this entropic landscape has now reached a further stage of ruin and the trick of its construction has been exposed. It is not a huge pile of desert sand, the sand is just a veneer covering empty space. Meanwhile America is once again on the attack in the Middle East, this time in Iran, and there is an absence where a clear, legal justification should be. As The Guardian reported, its stated rationale kept changing, 'from Iran planning a preemptive strike to lobbying by Israel.' 

Another installation more tangentially connected with landscape is The Book of Spells, a room full of old Lonely Planet and Rough Guides. This concept grew out of an element in Nelson's 2001 ICA show (which has to be one of the best and most memorable exhibitions I've experienced at that gallery). The Book of Spells was developed during Covid lockdowns and reminds me of how trapped we then felt. Confined to a few city streets, 'landscape' felt very distant and it was necessary to subsist on memories of woodland trails and coastal paths. I actually spent those evenings writing myself a personal travel book, covering all the places in Europe I couldn't visit. In an article written to coincide with the Hayward exhibition, Charlotte Higgins talked about The Book of Spells.

They immediately put you out of time, these books. They were once such a touchstone of travel and adventure, and are now obsolescent in the face of the internet. Each marks a moment of history that in many cases is now unreachable: you won’t be holidaying in Moscow any time soon, nor in Aleppo. The room is tiny, claustrophobic, and there’s a strong reminder of the confinement wrought by Covid-19, but at the same time it feels like some kind of unwritten short story. (It reminds me, in fact, of Borges’ The Aleph, in which the narrator encounters, in a cellar beneath a bourgeois Buenos Aires dining room, a device from which it is possible to see every other point on Earth). It is intensely simple in its way and yet heavy with layers of association, and immensely eerie.