Landscape near Arles

In 1908 Pathé created their own version of Le Film d’Art, the new initiative to make more highbrow films whose first production, starring actors from the Comédie-Française, was The Assassination of the Duke of Guise. The Pathé version was the Société Cinématographique des Auteurs et Gens de Lettres and its first film was L'Arlésienne. The film is remarkable not for its acting (lots of arm waving) but for its technical sophistication (use of double exposure to illustrate the hero Frédéric’s hallunications) and use of real locations, most notably the amphitheatre at Arles. At 3 minutes 15 there is a remarkable 180 degree pan across the Provençal landscape. There are also a few other scenes which give a real sense of place, like the image above of a Frédéric deciding to marry his childhood sweetheart rather than the woman of Arles he met at the amphitheatre.

Of course one of the pleasures of seeing glimpses of Arles in 1908 is knowing that it was exactly twenty years earlier that Van Gogh and Gauguin we re painting there. The Gauguin picture below could almost be a view of the farmhouse where Frédéric lives. L'Arlésienne was based on one of the stories in Alphonse Daudet's Letters from My Windmill (1872).  I've never got round to reading this so I will quote from a Guardian piece on the book: 

'There are impressive tragedies at a scant 1,500 words, like the backstories to single paragraphs in an old newspaper: the inn depressed to ruin by deaths in the family, the farm boy obsessed by a flirt from Arles farandoling in her velvet and lace. Daudet based a melodrama on her with music by Bizet, but the stage version expands to lassitude. His sense of place was strongest when pent up in his fragments.'

This music by Bizet can be heard as the soundtrack to the film. And there is one more cultural link (which I read about on the Cinema History blog): the plot of L'Arlésienne is based on a real story which was told to Daudet by Frédéric Mistral, the great poet of Provence, whose statue now stands in Arles. A nephew of Mistral's, disappointed in live, committed suicide by throwing himself out of the window of the family house.

 Paul Gauguin, Landscape near Arles, 1888

There Lies the Temple

Today I launched a new initiative, to post 365 landscapes on Twitter over the course of 2018.  In doing this I am using a format (see above) which will usually include a telling detail in addition to the main image, in this case a dark idol just beyond the brow of the yellow hill.  Whether people on twitter will find this interesting I am not sure, but it is giving me a chance to look across the whole field of landscape art and share the things I find most interesting.  And by allowing myself only one landscape per artist, it is possible to cover quite a lot of ground in 365 tweets.  I have pretty much planned the selections out already so am able to say now that they are all interesting and (mostly) beautiful artworks - there's been no need to include dull canvasses by second-rate Impressionists or attempt full coverage of all the minor Dutch landscape painters.  The one key rule I am setting myself is only to include artists who died before 1948.  This is obviously for copyright reasons, but also helps restrict the field a bit; in addition to nothing post-war, it means I will not be including anything by artists like Georges Braque, Georgia O'Keeffe or Giorgio de Chirico.  I will mainly focus on painting but will include some work in other media - drawings, photographs, tapestry, stained glass, mosaic.  The coverage will be worldwide, though with an inevitable focus on Western art (the other main tradition is Chinese painting).

One thing that struck me from the outset in doing this was how difficult it would be to achieve adequate representation of women artists.  In Europe, before the late nineteenth century, women painters did not generally specialise in landscape.  One of the images I have lined up for later this month illustrates the point.  It is a pastel sketch of an Alpine lake, made during a summer holiday, by Élisabeth Louise Vigée-LeBrun, who was renowned throughout Europe as a portrait painter (subjects included Marie Antoinette, Lady Hamilton and Lord Byron).  Another of my selections is by Berthe Morisot, whose best known subjects are her domestic interiors, even though her first appearance at the Paris Salon, in 1864, was with two landscapes.  It is only towards the end of the period that you find professional women landscape painters whose work really stands out, and some of these could be better known - Zdenka Braunerová (1858-38) for example, who will also be featuring in January.  I'd love one day to see an exhibition gathering together a whole range of pre-twentieth century landscape art by women artists.  A fourth one on my list for January is Emily Carr, whose work I featured here following a retrospective at Dulwich Picture Gallery.  The next post on this blog will be about a more recent artist whose work I saw at Dulwich last week, Tove Jansson.

I will conclude here with a few more words about Paul Gauguin's painting (sometimes called 'Sacred Mountain'), which shows a marae, or sacred enclosure, in the Marquesas Islands.  It is, like most (perhaps all?) of the landscapes I'll be tweeting about, a product of the artist's imagination.  Gauguin was inspired to paint and sculpt images based on Tahitian traditional religion and the gods that had been suppressed by Chirstian missionaries.  However, as Joseph J. Rishel explains (see the Philadelphia Museum site), 'the fence with its decoration of skulls, the idol on the hill, and the evocation of sacrifice in a thread of smoke ascending before the demanding god have no basis in Tahitian culture, Gauguin has created another kind of paradise in the opulence of his colour and the splendid sensuality of his images.'  Robert Goldwater (Gauguin, 1957) wrote that the artist had painted a kind of 'Olympus bathed in light, somewhere above the world of men. The baleful fence tells us we are shut out from it, and mortal, but the bright flowers remind us that this is still a world of life and lovely colour.'