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.

Stillness and the sound of cicadas

Can a landscape be still and noisy at the same time? There is a wonderful haiku by Matsuo Bashō that plays on this paradox: 'shizukasa ya / iwa ni shimiiru / semi no koe'. The first word means 'stillness' and the cutting word 'ya' suggests that this applies to everything that follows: 'penetrating into the rocks, voices of the cicadas.' We might imagine the poet becoming gradually aware that the constant sound of these insects is permeating everything, even the rocks, even himself. Haiku scholars have tried to explain the poem - debating the type and number of cicadas (perhaps there was only one), or wondering if he had in mind some kind of porous rock. This latter idea is not as misguided as it might sound, because the region where it was written (halfway through Bashō's Narrow Road to the Deep North journey) does have some soft volcanic rock. And yet it is more intriguing to contemplate the paradox of an ostensibly noisy place that is able to convey a feeling of stillness. 

In his detailed analysis of this poem, Kawamoto Kōji, provides an interesting earlier example of this from Chinese poetry. During the Liang dynasty, Wang Ji wrote a poem called 'Entering the Ruoye Valley' which contained this couplet: 'With the screech of cicadas, the forest grows more quiet. / With the cry of the birds, the mountain stillness deepens.' The famous Song Dynasty poet-politician Wang An-shi (who I once likened on this blog to Tony Blair!) didn't approve of this. So he rewrote it, getting rid of the cicadas and keeping the birds quiet: 

Noiselessly, the mountain stream
   circles the bamboo grove;
West of the bamboo, flowers and grasses
   sport with the tenderness of spring.
I sit under thatched eaves
   facing this all day;
Not a single bird sings,
   the silence of the hills deepens.

Despite his better intentions, Wang An-shi's revision amounted to an impoverishment rather than an improvement of the original. (Kawamoto Kōji, - The Poetics of Japanese Verse: Imagery, Structure, Meter, 2008) 

Kōji goes on to mention other poets who wrote about this soundscape paradox. Du Fu for example - 'with the thwack-thwack of the woodsman's axe, the mountain stillness deepens. In Japan there is a 7th century example (written in Chinese) by Nakatomi no Oshima: 'Leaves fall, the mountain becomes more quiet. /  A cool breeze blows, the lute grows more faint.'  And a later one by Shigeno no Sadanushi (785-852): 'Borne upon the wind, the multitude of natural sounds deepens the stillness of the mountains.' I'm sure some sounds, regardless of their volume or frequency, are more likely to help or detract from a restful mood. Distant traffic noise may be quieter than the wind but it always feels intrusive, representing the constant motion of human activity. 

Bashō wrote his haiku at a temple 'known for the absolute tranquility of its holy compound.' Climbing to the summit he observed massive rocks covered in aged pine and oak trees, giving a powerful sense of deep time. The mood of the temple must have produced a sense of silence, even though the natural world continued audibly around him. Hearing the cicadas' voices in this frame of mind, he could sense them penetrating and being absorbed by the ancient rocks. 

Risshaku-ji Temple where Bashō wrote his haiku
(Source: Wikimedia, Tak1701d)

Camouflaged in the landscape

Ana Mendieta, Untitled, Siluetas Series, 1976

I have written about Ana Mendieta on this blog twice before. In 2013 I gave an overview of how her work connects with landscape art, based on a major London retrospective of her work at the Hayward Gallery. Many of those pieces are back in London and on show in Tate Modern's new Mendieta exhibition. I highly recommend going, even if you're familiar with them already - I've been twice! She is a fascinating figure, a radical land artist but also someone you can discuss in terms of feminism, body art and performance, ancient cultures and symbols, ethnicity and identity, experimental film and site specific sculpture. Here though, I will add a few more words on my central theme, landscape, which was an active participant in the making of her art as you can see from the action of the waves in the Siluetas photographs above. 

One of the exhibition wall texts reads as follows: 

In the late 1970s Mendieta’s Silueta Series became further integrated into nature. Some of the Siluetas became hard to find, or as Mendieta described them, ‘camouflaged’ in the landscape. This shift occurred around the time she left Iowa to live in New York City. Her friend and fellow artist Eduardo Costa told her that such work encouraged him to see ‘readymade siluetas’ everywhere. The subtlety of these works created the sense that a Silueta could be encountered suddenly and at any moment. 

I like this notion that eventually an art work can become a dematerialised idea that we might spot when we are out in the landscape. It would similarly be possible to suddenly come upon accidental Richard Longs or Andy Goldsworthys, although the shapes they use have less significance than the Silueta form. Of course this is not a new idea - 18th century tourists were always spotting Salvator Rosa motifs in broken trees and looming rocks, or admiring Claude-like vistas in the soft light of Italy.

 

Ana Mendieta, Tate restaging of the Old Westbury installation, Untitled: Silueta Series, 1978

It is easy to imagine glimpsing a patch of moss in the woods and seeing in it echoes of Ana Mendieta. The photograph above was taken in Tate Modern, where they have recreated a life-sized forest she made with students for the State University of New York College at Old Westbury. Ana Mendieta's original piece 'was designed to be viewed from afar – it was a forest that could not be entered.' This distancing of the spectator was a feature of contemporary land art, made at some distance from gallery spaces and experienced at a remove, through photographs and documentation. It seems to me that the Tate installation stands in an interesting point somewhere between landscape art, which always assumed a viewer and a view, and sculpture, which can be moved around and examined. It is made of real natural objects but remains static in a gallery, where there is no wind to move the branches or rustle the leaves, or any real rain and sunlight to nourish and illuminate the moss. 

The Ruins of the Temple of Juno Lacinia

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Lake Wolfgang, 1835 

Room 1 in the National Gallery currently has a free exhibition of landscape paintings by the Austrian artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (1793–1865). When he started painting studies of the trees around Vienna and Alpine landscape near Salzburg, he was already a well-established portrait painter. This change of course may have been influenced by a trip to Paris in 1830 - his diary records that he saw a Constable there. My photo above of his beautiful 1835 painting Lake Wolfgang can't capture the subtlety of those indigo shades used for the water and mountain slopes. Nineteenth century critics complained that his naturalistic style 'bordered on 'daguerrotype-like precision', but they must have been impressed by how he managed to paint those tiny clouds and distant details with such realism.

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, The Ruins of the Greek Theatre at Taormina and Mount Etna, 1844

In the 1840s he headed south, where the bright sunlight suited his style. I have stood at this spot in Taormina and photographed Etna above the ruined theatre. The mountain and the sea still looked just like this. However, the Teatro antico was partly covered by protective hoardings (covered in adverts) for renovation work and the main theatre area was cleared of those ancient stones Waldmüller painted and covered with metal seating. From a landscape aesthetics perspective it's a shame, but I have to admit it seems good that this ancient site is being used again for music. As I write this, the next performance they have scheduled is by Italian rapper called Coez.   

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, The Ruins of the Temple of Juno Lacinia near Agrigento, 1846

Here is another view in Sicily, so lifelike you feel you can walk into the painting and wander among those olive trees. The accompanying wall text has a nice phrase, describing the temple 'silhouetted against a pale blue sky drained of colour by the heat.' A catalogue essay by Arnika Groenewald-Schmidt notes the way a few elements are particularly well defined, 'like the leaves on the trees on the right and the stones and shrub on the left of the foreground. The crowns of the olive trees further away are skilfully modulated and reproduce the colours as closely as possible to how they appear when lit by bright sunlight.' She also quotes Hermann Bahr, a champion of the Vienna Secession, writing at a time when Waldmüller's work was being appreciated by a new generation. 'What power, what life, what sunshine! ...  He already knew back then what light is, he already knew back then what air is.'