Lost in the sand

I've been on an Irish culture kick over the last month: first the film Kneecap, then Juno and the Paycock with Mark Rylance and then Arán & Im, a performance in which Manchán Magan talked about the origins of Irish words while making sourdough bread (very tasty). Magan is the author of Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape so there was a lot that evening of relevance to this blog. However, I'm going to focus here instead on my fourth Irish cultural event, a trip today to Matt's Gallery to see Remnant, Willie Doherty's new exhibition of black and white photographs and video footage. There were foggy woods (see below), dead leaves and branches, empty streets, blank walls, peeling paint, stains, graffiti, broken bricks and roadside puddles. The videos (shot in Derry, Donegal and by the River Boyne) also showed a moon seen through bare black boughs, a stretch of fast flowing water, rocks slowly dripping and flat waves covering and uncovering a small stretch of sand.  

I've not really kept up closely with Willie Doherty's work since discovering it many years ago when I first got into Hamish Fulton and Richard Long, who were also combining landscape photography with text. The curators note that images like the one I've included above resemble his early work, but instead of having text imprinted on them - words like 'undercover', 'shifting ground' or 'the other side' drawing links to recent political history - Doherty installs them here alongside three videos that contain relatively little movement and words read aloud by Stephen Rea. In the course of this monologue he says things like "fear trapped in the gaps where men and women were displaced" and "the living and the dead side by side" and "all traces lost in the sand, absorbed into the sea". It is all pretty gloomy, but Rea's quiet voice made me want to keep listening.

The gallery has copies of an interview Doherty did with Tim Dixon and I'll end here by quoting something interesting in this about the woods he photographed.

These forests which sprung up all along the border, [are] usually in places where the land is not really of any great agricultural value. These forests were planted, I don't know when they started really, probably sometime in the seventies and eighties. And they're kind of horrendous because they're just very generic pine forests, which are planted in rows and not really maintained or looked after very well, so they become a bit of an eyesore really. But significantly, at least one of the people who was assassinated and then buried by the IRA in the early seventies, one of 'the disappeared', Columba McVeigh, whose body has never been recovered, was buried in a remote border area somewhere between a bog and one of these forests. So it has a significance in that respect, and the first section of one of the strands of dialogue in the work refers to a figure who's dead—a kind of ghost who talks about being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Refulgent light in the Sonian Forest

Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, The Vision of Saint Hubert, 1617-20

I have been reading Woodland Imagery in Northern Art c. 1500-1800 by Leopoldine van Hogendorp Prosperetti, published with beautiful illustrations by Lund Humphries two years ago. It is written in a slightly eccentric, charmingly old-fashioned and accessible style with short chapters covering various artists and genres of sylvan imagery, from van Eyck to Rubens. The iconography of trees is linked to an interesting range of sources in Latin vocabulary, religious traditions, pastoral poetry and the wider influences of politics, patrons and print technology. A chapter on Dürer includes sketches made in Nuremberg and a linden tree on the bastion of the castle that I mentioned here last month, I could discuss this or other interesting topics I found interesting, but I'll focus here on a painting by the artist Leopoldine Prosperetti has specialised in, Jan Brueghel the Elder. 

The Vision of Saint Hubert (1617-20), now in the Prado, was one of Brueghel's collaborations with Rubens. It shows one of the two famous saints who had a conversion experience while out hunting - he is not to be confused with Saint Eustace, the Roman general who features in the Canterbury Cathedral wall hanging and Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker. Hubert (c. 656-757) was the 'Apostle of the Ardennes' and the two Flemish artists may have chosen this subject to please their patrons, Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella. This quote is from Prosperetti's chapter that focuses on woodland imagery associated with the Sonian Forest on the edge of Brussels. The passage includes two words you don't often come across: reflexy-const and talud.

The finishing touches in these pictorial settings would be passages of light that enhanced the scenery. The term in art theory is reflexy const (the art of reverberated light), which assigns to bounced-off sunlight the function of bringing scenery to life. In classical paintings, these areas of luminosity appeared on the smooth facets of grottoes, rockeries or ruins, to scatter the light to neighboring surfaces. In a sylvan setting, where there would be no resplendent surfaces other than leaves, painters would focus their attention on patches of sand, which, with the right amount of sunlight falling through the gaps in foliage or the opening of a clearing, would create pools of refulgent light. One such opportunity is provided by the talud, the sloping shoulder of a sunken path that is typical of the traveled road in age-old forests. An example of this curious land formation rises above Saint Hubert, bearing a slanted oak barely holding on to the sandy soil. It pairs visually with an illuminated sandy patch below the group of oaks on the other side of the path, which serves as a platform for the stag. 

The deer's antlers and the broken branch on the highlighted patch of ground form another pair: forked forms which Prosperetti finds frequently in Brueghel's paintings and which suggest the forking path of a decision. The cross which Hubert will choose is hovering above the antlers, so small you probably can't see it on your screen... Prosperetti suggests that the hart (cf. heart) at the centre of the forest was like the ducal court at the heart of the Duchy. Isabella's grandfather Charles V, whose hunts in the Sonian Forest are depicted in tapestries that now hang in the Louvre, chose as his motto a verse from the Psalms: 'As the hart panteth after the water brooks, So panteth my soul after thee, O God!'

Sumava Virgin Forest in a Storm

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

Antonín Mánes, Landscape with Temple Ruins, 1827-8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Otakar Lebeda, Mountain Lake in the Krkonoše Mountains, 1896

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

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

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

Woodland Scenery with Hermits

 

 Pieter Stevens, Woodland Scenery with Hermits, 1614

This beautiful, atmospheric landscape painting is just 6.9 x 12.8 cm, as you can see from the photo with my hand below.  What makes it so enchanting is the silvery light on bark and leaves, and the way trees frame an opening onto sunlit space, suggesting a whole other world beyond the green shadows of the forest.  You can zoom in on this at the Frankfurt Städel Museum website, but all you see is Pieter Stevens' brushstrokes.  When you look at the real painting your eyes don't register this - it really feels like you are peering into a miniature world.  This approach to painting in the early sixteenth century can be seen in various forms, most notably the cabinet paintings on copper of Paul Bril, Adam Elsheimer and others.  Here, though, it is on a significantly smaller scale.  This landscape is the size of a playing card, because it was actually painted on the back of one.  When the museum bought it in 1869, it was possible to turn the painting over and see the front of a playing card.  Annoyingly, this got removed, but there are still traces and modern curators have worked out that it was a court card used in the game of Trappola.    

As noted a few weeks ago, I'm going to keep a lot of my blog posts short from now on, so I won't say more here about the work of Pieter Stevens, a Flemish artist mainly based in Prague, or riff on the subject of landscape and playing cards.  Miniature portraits were sometimes painted or mounted on cards (there is one of Henry VIII, for example) but I don't know of any other landscape views.  I have written before about many kinds of miniature landscape but the way this one opens up a whole world for the imagination reminded me particular of the Raymond Roussel poem 'The View', a description over 2000 lines long of a tiny beach scene set into the lens of a pen-holder.

The Lithuanian forests

..."What do you think?" He knelt and showed his drawing.

Telimena studied his efforts with much grace,
Though clearly she was a connoisseur.  Her praise
Was sparing, but she encouraged him generously.
"Bravo!" she said. "You've great ability.
Though never forget: an artist has a duty
To seek out nature's loveliness.  Oh, the beauty
Of Italy's skies!  Of Rome's imperial
Rose gardens! Tibur's ancient waterfall,
Pausilippo's fearsome tunnel!  Now that's a land
For art!  This place is pitiful my friend!"

'This place' was Lithuania, setting for the epic poem, Pan Tadeusz, which has been newly translated by Bill Johnston and published in a beautiful edition by Archipelago. My quotation exemplifies a scene often encountered in early nineteenth century literature, where a 'connoisseur' (usually male) is unable to see beyond classical ideals of landscape and appreciate what is in front of them. The conversation between Telimena and the artist, a wealthy young Count, turns to the 'azure skies' of Italy whilst all around them 'the Lithuanian woods stretch limitless'.  Pan Tadeusz, the story's hero and a simple young man who 'still felt nature's draw', urges the Count to paint the trees surrounding them. Tadeusz cares little for "those skies of Italy / All clear and blue - they look like stagnant water! Wind and rain are surely so much better. / Look up right now..." and he goes on to describe the variety and endless beauty of the clouds.

In addition to its forests and skies, Pan Tadeusz celebrates the music, clothing, food and customs of Lithuania in a plot that dramatises the cause of Polish nationalism (Poland and Lithuania had existed as a powerful joint state in Europe before being carved up by its neighbours).  The book was set in Lithuania but written in Polish from Paris, where Adam Mickiewicz (who was actually born in what is now Belarus) had gone to live. Reading Pan Tadeusz I was conscious of the influence of Scott, Byron and Pushkin, but it also reminds me of Turgenev, while Bill Johnston sees elements of Thomas Hardy.  Some of the poem's most famous scenes lend themselves to landscape illustration, such as the bear hunt (below), or a mushroom picking excursion in which the young men look for chanterelles and the ladies seek 'the slim boletus known / In song as the mushroom's general.'

Franciszek Kosttrzevski, Hunting scene in 'Pan Tadeusz', 1886

It is not possible now to write about Pan Tadeusz without referring to Landscape and Memory, which opens with Simon Schama in the puszcza, the woodland wilderness that has become the 'consolatory myth of sylvan countryside that would endure uncontaminated whatever disasters befell the Polish state'.  He discusses Pan Tadeusz and the life of Adam Mickiewicz at some length, showing how, for example, 'no writer before Mickiewicz had described the etiology of the ancient forest with such a keen eye, or worked harder to convey its shifting zones of light and darkness.'  Beyond its tangle of broken trunks there are deep ponds 'half overgrown with grass' where 'the water has a bloody, rust-red sheen / While wisps of noxious smoke rise from within.'  But at the centre of the forest, Mickiewicz imagined a hidden world, ruled by bears, aurochs and bison, where 'decorousness prevails' and an unarmed man would be left unharmed.  Schama pictures Mickiewicz writing this in his Paris apartment, where it was a 'landscape of memory, seen through a lead-pane window: grey houses metamorphosing into timber ruins, the streets invaded by the forest primeval; an unattainable Lithuania governed by bison, a commonwealth of perfect justice and peace, impregnable behind palisades of splintered hornbeam.'

The Distant Cry of the Deer

Shibata Zeshin, Deer in a Forest, c. 1880s

Source: Wikimedia Commons

This week I attended the opening gala concert of the 2018 World Shakuhachi Festival.  The photograph below (by Jean-François Lagrost) was taken during one of the performances and shows the audience in the Union Chapel, Islington.  In the second half of the concert, Riley Lee and Christopher Yohmei Blasdel performed a shakuhachi duet, Shika No Tōne, 'The Distant Cry of the Deer'.  This began with Blasdel on stage, playing the opening phrase, then, at the back of the audience, Lee answering on his flute and beginning to walk slowly through the audience.  Eventually the two players met on stage.  Listening to this it occurred to me that they had transformed the listening audience into a landscape: we were like the trees in a Japanese forest through which the calls of two animals sounded.  This setting is evoked in the conclusion to the piece, as described on the International Shakuhachi Society website: 'it is as if, rather than viewing deer, the focus is changed to that of the scenery deep in the mountains where the leaves on the trees have turned red and yellow.'

The ISS page on Shika No Tōne has various notes on the piece and I will pass on here a few quotes from texts by Yokoyama Katsuya. 

'According to legend, Kurosawa Kinko, founder of the Kinko school, was taught this piece by a komusō priest named Ikkei in Nagasaki. The piece is interpreted as a representation either of two deer calling to one another to stress their territorial rights or of a male and a female deer responding to one another's calls deep in the autumnal mountains.'

'In ancient literature, it was sometimes said, "the stag and hind are calling each other." but in fact the hind does not cry, so it should perhaps be interpreted as the echo of the stag's cry.'

'Within its lonesomeness and liveliness, the music depicts the world seikan or the serene contemplation: it is just the same world as an ancient poet once depicted in his famous Tanka-poem:

Far up the mountain side,
While tramping over the scarlet maple leaves,
I hear the mournful cry of the wild deer:
This sad, sad autumn tide.'

Frail songs by torrents

Yesterday evening I listened yesterday to a recent episode of 'Late Junction' in which Anne Hilde Neset was taken by Jana Winderen to a snowy forest just outside Oslo to discuss field recording. I have embedded a clip of this below, although I'm not sure how long it will be available.  I would actually recommend listening to the whole programme while you can (among other things it includes a wonderful Morton Feldman tribute on what would have been his ninety-second birthday, David Fennessy's 'Piano Trio - Music for the pauses in a conversation between John Cage and Morton Feldman').  Winderen talks about the way the sounds of the forest change completely day by day - sound like light has to be captured instantly or it is gone forever.  She has been waiting many years to catch a particular lake when it is just about freezing.  At that moment the ice is like a drum skin and if you tap it you can hear the sound flying over the surface.  But on the rare occasions when the lake has been in this state, she has happened to be without her equipment. "Then I just have to listen to it with my ears and remember that, recorded in my memory".

After listening to this programme I took up a book, the latest collection of Thomas A Clark's poems, Farm by the Shore.  As I read it, I kept thinking of the deep listening and close attention to landscape that Jana Winderen describes.  Poems refer to the drone of the wind, the water song in leaves, the lapping of little waves, unquiet on quiet.  A small brown bird hidden in glancing light seems to vanish when it stops singing.  There is often a focus on such moments, when what is observed offers an insight into the processes of thought.  'Quicker than tadpoles / in pools the shadows / of tadpoles in pools / or the notion of shadows / of tadpoles in pools.'  There are places, these poems suggest, to which you can retreat to tune the mind or simply find repose in the shadows of trees.  Jana Winderen's recording includes the sound of tadpoles at rest, hibernating in their cold winter pools, waiting for spring.  Waiting is essential for her too, as she "concentrates into the environment" and begins to notice small things or experience chance phenomena like snow falling from a tree.  It is easy to picture Thomas A Clark walking the winter woods and listening to them with similar quiet patience: 'snowflakes on eyelashes / frail songs by torrents.'

Bellevue

Robert Zünd, Buchenwald, 1887

Source: Wikimedia Commons

In English the word 'Buchenwald' is synonymous with horror and darkness, but in German it still denotes one of nature's most beautiful things, a beech forest.  This is a painting by a nineteenth century artist who became known as The Master of the Beech Leaf for his meticulous views of woods.  Robert Zünd (1826-1909) walked and sketched in the forests around Lucerne, producing highly finished landscapes back in the studio that came in different sizes to suit the budgets of different potential buyers.  His work can be found in most Swiss museums but is currently the subject of an exhibition, Bellevue, at the Kunstmuseum Luzern which pairs his paintings with large format analogue photographs by Tobias Madörin.  Madörin is based in Zürich but has travelled widely working on a project called Topos which examines 'communal spaces, the outskirts of metropolises, waste disposals sites, and landscapes marked by agriculture and mining.'  For Bellevue he has taken photographs around Lucerne, based on the compositions and methods of Robert Zünd.

Shows in which contemporary artists respond to old paintings that have hung for decades on museum walls are are very common these days.  Just to mention one other example, I wrote here last year about George Shaw's Back to Nature at the National Gallery.  Publicly funded institutions have a mission to make their collections engaging and accessible, which is why we don't really see the same phenomenon in other more 'private' art forms (though it is easy to imagine an anthology interspersing, say, tales by Poe with stories by a modern weird fiction writer, or an album juxtaposing nineteenth century études with a young composer's new works on similar themes).  The key to making these exhibitions work, I think, is for the artist not to go down the obvious route of producing a kind of 'negative' version of the earlier art.  As you can see above,  Madörin has partially done this in photographing the effects of logging on Zünd's woodland, exposing the economic role of the landscape and questioning the idyllic impression of the original scenes.  But he has also taken pains to produce photographs in tune with Zünd's desire to capture the splendour of natural phenomena.  Zünd could paint a rainbow at leisure in his studio whereas Madörin had to wait for the real thing, pitching a tent and being prepared for a moment when light would shine forth from the stormy sky.

Skogskyrkogården, the Woodland Cemetery

I was in Stockholm for a meeting in May and took the opportunity to visit Skogskyrkogården, the famous Woodland Cemetery which in 1994 became only the second location developed in the twentieth century to become a UNESCO World Heritage site.  It was late on Sunday afternoon when I got there - the visitor centre was shut but I had the place almost to myself.  A couple of other tourists, one person tending a grave, a solitary jogger (they are everywhere).  I took a short video clip on my phone (below) which gives a sense of how peaceful it was, though you could never escape the low background rumble of traffic.  I'm not sure how many deer there are in these woods; another one emerged from behind these graves just after I stopped filming.  They were watchful but not fearful.  It did not seem that surprising to find them there - even here in London when you step into a graveyard like Abney Park Cemetery, near my home in Stoke Newington, you become aware that you are among squirrels, birds and butterflies.

Skogskyrkogården was conceived jointly by architects by Gunnar Asplund (1885-1940) and Sigurd Lewerentz (1885-1975), who won a competition in 1915 to design a new cemetery on the site of an old quarry.  In addition to the landscape, they designed distinctive buildings - a classical Resurrection Chapel positioned at the end of a long tree-lined path, an intimate Woodland Chapel amid the pines, and a graceful and a functionalist crematorium.  From this crematorium you look across a pond towards a bare slope on the summit of which is a group of trees.  On my visit this meditation grove was a dark silhouette against a white sky which would soon be filling Stockholm with unseasonable snow.  But you can see the trees in full leaf on the cover of Ken Worpole's fascinating book, Last Landscapes: The Architecture of the Cemetery in the West (2003).  From the vantage point of this photograph (by Larraine Worpole), the foreground is dominated by Asplund's stark granite cross, inspired by Caspar David Friedrich.

Caspar David Friedrich, Cross on the Baltic Sea, 1815

Source: Wikimedia Commons

On the occasions I have visited graveyards over the years, there has usually been at least one prominent memorial I've been keen to find - Ezra Pound at San Michele near Venice, Alejo Carpentier in Havana's Colon Cemetery, Karl Marx at Highgate, dozens of culture heroes at Père Lachaise...  Wandering around the Stockholm Woodland Cemetery it was something of a relief just to be experiencing the landscape, without looking for anybody famous.  Nevertheless, I did come upon the grave of Greta Garbo, whose family chose this for her because it was 'a long way from the hustle and bustle of the world'.  There is no eye-catching monument to the great movie star, but neither is it the case that she is simply buried in an egalitarian spirit along with all the others.  Her headstone stands isolated against the trees -  fittingly perhaps for someone famous for saying "I just want to be alone".  It seems to have the makings of a shrine: a path has been laid to it and, as you can see below, trees are being planted in a semi circle to form a kind of special enclosed space.    

There are no film stars buried in Abney Park Cemetery, though you can find a famous nineteenth century music hall artist, George Leybourne, the original 'Champagne Charlie' - a fact mentioned in Last Landscapes (Ken lives near me in Stoke Newington).  I would agree with Ken that despite the efforts of the Abney Park Trust, it is still in parts 'a forlorn, tangled forest', very different from the woods of Skogskyrkogården.  Originally the early Victorian London cemeteries were designed as Gardenesque landscapes - John Claudius Loudon published an influential book on the subject in 1843.  Abney Park Cemetery Originally (which opened in 1840) was designed as an arboretum and became a kind of tourist attraction like Kew Gardens.  As the population grew it rapidly filled up, but perhaps in its early days it would have had something of the atmosphere of a woodland cemetery.  Today they are very different: as Ken says, the Stockholm Woodland Cemetery gives the impression when you enter it of 'a vast rolling landscape, with deep forest beyond', yet you quickly come upon intimate, peaceful spaces for tranquil reflection.  It is, he concludes, 'the most successful example of large-scale landscape design in the twentieth century.'

The Gardens of Fontainebleau

Narcisse Virgilio Díaz, Forest of Fontainebleau, 1868

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Forest of Fontainebleau has a special place in the history of western landscape art: painted repeatedly by the Barbizon School and the Impressionists who took inspiration from them.  That there is still a forest to explore is down in part to Théodore Rousseau: he 'appealed to Napoleon III to halt the wholesale destruction of the forest’s trees, and in 1853 the emperor established a preserve to protect the artists’ cherished giant oaks' (see the Met's online essay on the Barbizon School).  We were in Fontainebleau on that fiercely hot weekend earlier this month and I yearned to head into the forest to find some of that deep shade painted by Rousseau's friend Narcisse Virgilio Díaz.  But we'd come for culture rather than nature, to visit the Château de Fontainebleau.  Emerging from its opulent rooms in the full heat of the afternoon we made our way across the Grand Parterre, with its low hedges and topiary cones stretching into the distance.  This flat, mathematical space, planned out by André Le Nôtre and Louis Le Vau, is as different a landscape as can be imagined from the dense wooded slopes and tenebrous clearings explored by the Barbizon painters.  Strange then to find at its centre, beneath the surface of a square ornamental pool, a miniature forest, swaying gently in the cool, clear water. 
 

Before the Barbizon School there was the School of Fontainebleau, two schools in fact, the first comprising artists brought to decorate the palace during the sixteenth century (including Benvenuto Cellini, who describes the work in his wonderfully vivid Autobiography), the second at the beginning of the seventeenth during one of the phases of renovation and redecoration that continued down to Napoleon's time.  These Mannerist artists were much more interested in mythological figures and allegorical references than in anything to do with landscape, as can be seen in the print below, where a rocky scene is completely dominated by its framing figures. There are numerous references to hunting in their decorative schemes: the forest as resource for the king's pleasure.  The Palace contains a Gallery of Diana and a Gallery of Stags.  There is also a Jardin de Diane, with a fountain dating from the early nineteenth century dedicated to the goddess; its water comes from the mouths of stags and, as my son's were quick to point out, four "pissing dogs". 

Antonio Fantuzzi, Cartouche with male and female satyrs

carrying baskets and flanking a rocky landscape, 1543

Source: Wikimedia Commons

 

Tommaso Francini, The Château and Gardens, early 17th century

 Source: Wikimedia Commons

  

One of the Valois Tapestries, showing a festival on the lake at Fontainebleau, 

made shortly after 1580.

The Carp Lake visible in the seventeenth century plan shown above is still there (as are the carp).  The photograph of it below was taken from a rowing boat that I was pressed into hiring.  The lake at Fontainebleau can also be seen in one of the Valois Tapestries, made to commemorate eight of Catherine de' Medici's famous court festivals.  This one took place in 1564 and was just one event in the royal progress that took her and her son, the new king, two and a half years to complete.  The household accompanying them included her 'flying squadron' (L'escadron volant) of eighty seductive ladies-in-waiting, and nine dwarfs who travelled in their own miniature coaches.  The great poet Pierre de Ronsard was present at Fontainebleau, where there were feasts, jousts, sirens singing, Neptune floating in his chariot and an attack on an enchanted island.  I wonder how many of them thought about the real forest beyond the Château as they acted out imaginary battles in an artificial landscape.  A century later the island in the lake was given a small pavilion; later it was restored by Napoleon.  We were warned as we climbed into the boat not to row too close it, although I don't think our inept collective efforts at steering could have got us there anyway.

The Great Forest

Jacob van Ruisdael, The Great Forest, 1655-60

Peter Handke's text The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire (1980) unsurprisingly focuses on Cézanne and the landscape of Provence, but it ends with a painting by Ruisdael, The Great Forest, which can be seen in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, and a detailed description of a walk to an unregarded stretch of woodland on the outskirts of Salzburg.  As Handke points out, the title of Ruisdael's painting may simply refer to its size (1800 x 1390cm) rather than the scale of the forest it depicts, which at first sight hardly appears 'great'.  Then again, perhaps in this picture we are only at the beginning of the forest.  The wayfarer may simply have 'turned to cast a look before going deeper into the woods.  The feeling of spaciousness is further intensified by a peculiarity of seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes: for all the minuteness of their forms, they nevertheless, with their patches of water, their roads over dunes, their dark woods (under spacious skies), begin to grow as one beholds them' (trans. Ralph Manheim).

The woodland Handke walks to from Salzburg is also nothing like a great forest, 'yet it is wonderfully real'.  Few in Salzburg know of this space, lying between the city and the castle of Hellbrunn: 'here there are only logging roads and irregular paths, and you seldom see a walker; at the most you may hear a jogger's panting and see the skin of this face, mask replacing mask, change from dead to alive and back again at every step.'  Handke's description of the forest is as detailed as Ruisdael's and as attentive to light and colour.  Trying to follow his route on Google Earth (see my aerial view of the woodland below) only emphasises the unreality of that medium as it currently stands and its inadequacy in comparison with Handke's prose.  But this is not an idyllic landscape isolated from the surrounding suburbs.  At the end of his walk, Handke stands looking at polystyrene floating on a pond and a woodpile covered in plastic tarp.  We know from earlier in the book that a woodpile has complex associations for Handke and here in the woods it stimulates a kind of epiphany, a brief Tree of Life-style cosmic reverie.  The forest opens onto a vast spaciousness that encompasses both space and time.  Then it is over and he takes a deep breath and sets off back along the path to return to the city.

Coulisses de Forêt

 Six friezes for a paper theatre, 1880-1920
Source: 50Watts

I have been rather busy of late, as the tidal wave of consequences from the Referendum has swept over and fundamentally altered my place of work, and so it's been hard to find time to think about landscape and art.  However, I've just looked back at some draft posts and come upon the material here, which I wrote in 2011 after reading Will Schofield's 50Watts blog, where he reproduced various sets of scenery, like the one above, from a Dutch Puppetry Museum database.  They are all in muted colours, like memories of childhood.  When we were growing up I wasn't that taken with the Pollock’s Toy Theatre my parents got us; more recently, however, my sons did play a little with a Czech magnetic theatre.  The novelty wore off quite quickly though.  In an essay on the toy theatre, Robert Louis Stevenson looked back on the pleasure he had experienced admiring and painting these scenes and figures.  But then what?  'You might as well set up a scene or two to look at, but to cut the figures out was simply sacrilege; nor could any child twice court the tedium, the worry, and the long-drawn disenchantment of an actual performance.'

Another of my favourite blogs back in 2011, the now defunct Venetian Red, did an informative post on the history of toy theatres and their enthusiasts (you can read it here).  Writers and artists who remembered them with fondness included Goethe, Jack B. Yeats, Cocteau and Chesterton, who asked

“has not everyone noticed how sweet and startling any landscape looks when seen through an arch? This strong, square shape, this shutting off of everything else, is not only an assistance to beauty; it is the essential of beauty… This is especially true of toy theatre, that by reducing the scale of events it can introduce much larger events… Because it is small it could easily represent the Day of Judgement. Exactly in so far as it is limited, so far it could play easily with falling cities or with falling stars.”

Marcel Jambon, set design model for Verdi's Otello, 1895

Source: Wikimedia Commons

I wonder if there were painters who toyed with toy theatres while working up their compositional ideas, like set designers experimenting with their scale models?  Thomas Gainsborough, after all, was said to have 'built model landscapes in his studio, consisting of coal, clay or sand with pieces of mirror for lakes and sprigs of broccoli to represent trees, in order to help him construct his compositions.'  The set of Coulisses de Forêt below could have been used to design a hunting scene with framing trees and repoussoir stag, except, I suppose, that by the time it was printed in 1889, art had largely left behind these classical conventions.  The Toy Theatre blog says that the Épinal-based firm behind this example, Pellerin, produced scenes that were 'very distinctive in style and very French, but for all that rather second rate. The Pellerin sheets were like its other cut-out products, intended to be made, set up and looked at but not performed. There were no Toy Theatre plays as such, only tableaux.'

Coulisses de Forêt, 1889

Source: Geheugen van Nederland

---

Postscript
It is a month later and I have just seen a toy theatre - the one used at the start of Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander.  As I mention in my most recent post, I visited the Bergmancentrer on Fårö and it is on display there. I have included a photograph below (sorry about the unavoidable reflection from the window opposite).  The sign above the stage means 'Not for Pleasure Alone'.  The film begins with running water and then cuts to this theatre, where a young boy's face is revealed as he pulls up the background landscape scenery.

Song of the Forests

I have often written here about music inspired by landscape, but the Song of the Forests is an oratorio dedicated to the reshaping of landscape.  It was by written by Dmitri Shostakovich in the summer of 1949 to celebrate the forestation of the Russian steppes.  A year earlier he had been denounced for formalism.  Living in fear, he took to waiting on the landing by the lift each night for the anticipated arrest, as Julian Barnes describes in his new novel The Noise of Time.  While Shostakovich composed serious work 'for the desk drawer', the Song of the Forests was written to help secure his rehabilitation.  It was a setting of what Barnes calls 'an enormous, windy text by Dolmatovsky' that referred to Stalin as The Great Gardener.  'Under Stalin, the oratorio insisted, even apple trees grew more courageously, fighting off the frosts just as the Red Army had fought off the Nazis.  The work's thunderous banality had ensured its immediate success.'

This was not the only collaboration between Shostakovich and the poet Yevgeniy Dolmatovsky.  In 1951 they wrote 'The Motherland Hears, The Motherland Knows' which Yuri Gagarin whistled on his descent to earth ten years later, making it the first song performed in space.  An article on Dolmatovsky in a journal dedicated to Shostakovich mentions more of his work, including songs that were popular during the war.  In his memoirs Krushchev said he'd been inspired by 'The Song of the Dnieper' which describes the river filling with the blood of the Fascists (you can hear renditions by the Red Army Choir on Youtube).  Shostakovich and Dolmatovsky continued working together and met for the last time just before the death of Shostakovich in 1975.  Apparently Shostakovich said to him "You know, The Song of the Forests was really about protecting the environment - a subject the whole world is talking about now.  We hit the nail on the head!"'  Forty years later we are still talking about it, but as Hannah Ellis-Peterson wrote last year, the contemporary relevance of the Song of the Forests may have more to do with politics than the environment.

When We Came To This Shore

Following a big survey of landscape and music in 2013 and similar but shorter posts in 2012, 2011, and 2010, I highlighted just four releases this time last year.  One of these, John Luther Adams' Become Ocean, has apparently been an inspiration to Taylor Swift.  Perhaps one of these four will be up her street too?  Each illustrates the way contemporary musicians are organising albums round a landscape idea or sense of place.  Of course I could have chosen others and have deliberately excluded some musicians whose work I have discussed here before - Richard Skelton, Rob St John, Simon Scott.  Feel free to suggest others in the comments below.

I'll begin with The Thompson Fields, an album for jazz orchestra by Maria Schneider which is named after farmland on the prairie where she grew up.  The Telegraph's review explains that 'the liner notes are an indispensable part of the experience, picturing the landscape and its wildlife through Audobon’s bird paintings and photographs of country lanes that to a British viewer look remarkably familiar – until you turn the page and encounter another image, which shows this landscape is on an altogether vaster scale.'  In an interview with extracts from the music at the NPR site she describes the region's great skies and spectacular weather.  'Maria Schneider, nature poet of jazz' she is called in a Boston Globe article.  It notes that 'The Monarch and the Milkweed' was 'inspired by the delicate relationship between the title butterfly and the host environment on which it depends.'  Asked about this tune she said “I pictured each soloist as a person walking through a landscape and commenting on it.”

Another widely-praised American album drawing on memories of a specific locale was Daniel Bachman's River.  As Pitchfork's review explains, 'he is a native of the northern Virginia city of Fredericksburg, near where the Rappahannock River winds out of the Chesapeake Bay.'  The album includes two cover versions, 'Levee' by Jack Rose and an old 1928 number by William Moore. 'Though divided by nearly a century, Rose and Moore both lived in the riverine area Bachman extols here; Rose grew up in Fredericksburg, and Moore used to cross the Rappahannock for work. Bachman treats their tales with the same familiarity and fondness he treats the land and his own life there.'  Bachman writes in the record's liner notes that the Rappahanock, 'divides north and south, mountain and bay and, at one point in time, it even separated two great armies.'  In the clip below from the NPR site you can see him playing a track from the album at Stratford Hall, the birthplace of Robert E. Lee.

Stefan Betke recorded seminal glitsch albums as Pole in the nineties but has been relatively quiet since.  He is now making music related to the walks he takes in the German countryside.  According to Boomkat his new album Wald 'breaks down to three movements: firstly a trio of tracks establishing and mirroring the forest's spatial intricacy via sparse, overgrowing electronics; secondly a trio of tracks focused on raw sounds - bird calls, rustling textures, woody drums and naturally discordant drones; followed by a 3rd and final section emulating nature's inherently psychedelic patterning in filigree yet barely harnessed matrices of echo, reverb and delay.'  Pitchfork think it 'may bring to mind Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project, whose foggy swirls of classical samples were inspired by the Black Forest and its role in German Romanticism. But the two artists' impressions of the woods couldn't be more different. Where Gas is either dark and claustrophobic or starlit and idyllic, Pole's Wald evokes porous thickets and branches stripped bare by the elements.' 

The other day in Somerset House I was listening to 'What Does the Sea Say?', a soundscape composed by Martyn Ware (ex-Human League) and reflecting on how many famous names from post-punk bands are now composing music inspired by the landscape.  John Foxx (once of Ultravox) is another, although he has now been working for many years in a psychogeographical vein, producing art and music on the theme of ruins and rewilding.  This year he released London Overgrown, based on an idea of London as future garden city that would incorporate The Hanging Gardens of Shoreditch, The Glades of Soho and a resurrected Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens.  A collaborative work also released this year, Codex, includes tracks like 'The Pleasure Of Ruins' and 'When We Came To This Shore'.  There is an interview at Metropolis/2520 with Foxx which mentions these albums and, although it's not strictly relevant, I will end here by quoting from this his lovely description of first hearing Erik Satie:

'I heard someone play the Gymnopédies one afternoon in the old lecture room at art school.  I can still picture the instant – early summer, big open doors, the view down the marvellous avenue of trees at Avenham, and that beautiful elegant music. It is perfect minimalism, with poise and tranquillity, like distilled civilisation in a few notes and a sound. I was transfixed. it seemed to alter everything. I’ve loved piano ever since. It really is my favourite sound in the world apart from a blackbird’s song.'

Rewilding

Last week saw the launch of Rewilding Britain and an interesting piece on Channel 4 News in which George Monbiot returned to the Welsh sheep-farming 'Desert' he described in Feral.  The clip embedded above includes interviews with rewilder Ritchie Tassell and sheep farmer Dafydd Jones, who speaks entirely in Welsh to emphasise the landscape's cultural ecology.  Both feature in Feral and demonstrate opposing ways in which rewilding can be seen - as an attempt to reverse the long history of increasing estrangement from nature, or as the final step in a process that has driven people off the land.  Tassell recalls his childhood in Northumberlandshire, when the last mixed farms disappeared: 'that was the worst of times in terms of habitat destruction, almost the final nail in the coffin of what John Clare was writing about.'  But for Dafydd Jones, rewilding is a post-Romantic ideology, that seems to imagine a world without people.  In Feral Monbiot tries to reconcile these positions, concluding that it would be possible to rebalance economic incentives so that 'people as well as wildlife will regain a footing on the land.'

Monbiot wrote about John Clare in one of his columns a few years ago, recalling how he documented 'both the destruction of place and people and the gradual collapse of his own state of mind. "Inclosure came and trampled on the grave / Of labour's rights and left the poor a slave … And birds and trees and flowers without a name / All sighed when lawless law's enclosure came."  Enclosure removed Clare from the intimate Northamptonshire landscape he had experienes as a boy.  Jay Griffiths, quoted in Feral, sees this as a historical moment that 'reaved children of the site of their childhood, robbed them of animal-tutors and river-mentors and stole their deep dream-shelters.'  This is one of the concerns of Rewilding Britian, which is part of a wider movement to encourage children to reconnect with nature (discussed, for example, in the last chapter of Robert Macfarlane's recent book Landmarks). In Feral, Monbiot writes that 'of all the world's creatures, perhaps those in greatest need of rewilding are our children. ... Missing from children's lives more than almost anything else is time in the woods.'  My own children see little of woodlands in Hackney but they did spend last weekend playing among the trees with their school friends on a parent-organised camping trip.  We were in Epping Forest, not far from the spot where John Clare arrived one July day in 1837, to live at Dr. Allen's asylum.

Wandering through the forest and playing hide-and-seek among the trees it was impossible not to be struck by their strange shapes, with multiple trunks growing from their bases.  They were regularly pollarded until the Epping Forest Act of 1878, which stipulated that the City of London Corporation "shall at all times keep Epping Forest unenclosed and unbuilt on as an open space for the recreation and enjoyment of the people".  However, this preservation of the forest has affected its biodiversity as the trees' great crowns block out light, leaving the ground almost bear apart from dead leaves, bark and odd bits of rubbish.  Some of the forest trees have multiple trunks at ground level, representing decades of growth since they were last coppiced.  Their ability to regenerate after coppicing is the subject of a startling speculation in Feral: that our trees adapted to survive snapping and uprooting by the straight-tusked elephants that roamed across Europe until 40,000 years ago. Similarly, 'blackthorn, which possesses very long spines, seems over-engineered to deter browsing by deer; but not, perhaps to deter browsing by rhinoceros.'  The toughness of holly, yew and box trees may reflect an ability to withstand threats that no longer exist. 

'Even if these speculations do not lead to the reintroduction of elephants and rhinos, do they not render the commonplace astonishing?  The notion that our most familiar trees are elephant-adapted, that we can see in their shadows the great beasts with which humans evolved, that the marks of these animals can be found in every park and avenue and leafy street, infuses the world with new wonders.  Paleoecology - the study of past ecosystems, crucial to an understanding of our won - feels like a portal through which we may pass into an enchanted kingdom.'

Wreckage upon wreckage

Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920

'A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.'  - Walter Benjamin, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'

A couple of months ago I was in Eastbourne to see the exhibition Ori Gersht: Don’t Look Back. It included his two-screen film, Evaders, a reimagining of the last journey of Walter Benjamin.  The film begins with an actor in a hotel room and we hear Benjamin's famous description of the angel of history.  When the voice-over reaches “his face is turned toward the past”, the other screen is activated.  Now the actor is trudging through the cold mountains, battered by the weather, looking older than Benjamin actually was in 1940 (but Benjamin was physically frail and encumbered by a heavy suitcase). ‘He moves at a steady, laboured pace through patches of mist, along a snowy tree-lined path. Often, on the right screen majestic landscapes contrast with the man’s suffering and vulnerability on the left: sweeping mountain vistas grazed by clouds, trees shrouded in fog, craggy boulders, and the wind whipping over a riverbed’ (Al Miner, Ori Gersht: History Repeating).  The route taken by Benjamin was  'particularly dangerous because of the tramontana, a violently strong, dry wind that can last for days and is, in the cooler months, bitterly cold. The tramontana is known for its piercing moan, and locals attribute murders and suicides to long exposure to the sound.’  Benjamin survived the journey but at Portbou, on the border of France and Spain (as I wrote here a few years ago), exhausted and fearing repatriation, he took his own life with an overdose of morphine tablets.

.

In 2005 Ori Gersht travelled to Kosov in Ukraine, the birthplace of his father-in-law, who hid there for from the Germans two and a half years after the village had been declared “Judenrein” (cleansed of Jews).  The blurred Richter-like photographs Gersht took raise similar questions about the representation of such places as the Sally Mann Civil War landscapes I wrote about here a few years ago.  Gersht explained his decision not to photograph what he saw in a clear, objective way: ‘the camera can only depict the here and now, in this instance a pastoral Brueghelesque landscape, but my experience of these places was conditioned by what I knew…’ Steven Bode puts it well in an essay in the book to accompany Gersht's exhibition The Clearing: ‘the ghostly indeterminacy of the majority of the images, rather than reading as portentous, seems more redolent, at times, of feelings of uncertainty and doubt. Is this landscape as haunted, and as loaded, as he himself sees it? Have these places retained any traces of what happened over sixty years ago? And if not, how can they be made to communicate, so that the memory of what once went on there is not to be forgotten?’

On the same journey Gersht made a film in the Moskolovka Forest (see the clip below).  The setting, a site of Nazi atrocities during the war, reminded me of Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory ('Blood in the Forest') and the histories, myths and ideologies associated with Europe's ancient woodlands.  In Forest trees are felled, crashing slowly to the ground with a sound that reverberated around the gallery.  In between these moments, birdsong can be heard again as the camera remains still or pans slowly across the tall trunks, leaving you wondering which one will be next.  We never see the men whose actions result in the death of these trees.  Whilst it is, in Al Miner's words, ‘an elegy for the nameless dead who were lost in wartime atrocities, the piece also enacts the kind of ceaseless vigil that will be needed if these crimes are not to be repeated.’

The evergreen forest seethes and roars

There are still a couple of weeks to see From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia, an exhibition I have already referred to here.  It was her paintings of trees that most impressed me and their qualities are well described in Laura Cumming's review:

'Carr paints young pine trees aspiring tall but fragile in the silvery light of dawn, the air scintillating around them like St Elmo’s fire. She paints clearings in the forest where the sunlight is tinged with the deep green of the trees, which spread across the canvas like an all-over Jackson Pollock. An astonishing painting of windswept trees shows the painter’s arm moving round the scene like the wind itself, the forest branches shivering and roaring, the air made visible in a sort of spectral transparence that appears to lie both in and on top of the painting.  As the painter Peter Doig remarks in the catalogue, you don’t just see Carr’s trees, you hear them too.'

This auditory quality is evident in Emily Carr's prose description of the Canadian forest in The Book of Small (1942):

'The silence of our Western forests was so profound that our ears could scarcely comprehend it. If you spoke your voice came back to you as your face is thrown back to you in a mirror. It seemed as if the forest were so full of silence that there was no room for sounds. The birds who lived there were birds of prey -- eagles, hawks, owls. Had a song bird loosed his throat the others would have pounced. Sober-coloured, silent little birds were the first to follow settlers into the West. Gulls there had always been; they began with the sea and had always cried over it. The vast sky spaces above, hungry for noise, steadily lapped up their cries. The forest was different --she brooded over silence and secrecy.'

The Canadian composer and acoustic ecologist  R. Murray Schafer quotes this passage in his book The Natural Soundscape.  Every type of forest, he suggests, produces its own keynote. 

'Evergreen forest, in its mature phase, produces darkly vaulted aisles, through which sound reverberates with unusual clarity – a circumstance which, according to Oswald Spengler, drove the northern Europeans to try to duplicate the reverberation in the construction of Gothic cathedrals. When the wind blows in the forests of British Columbia, there is nothing of the rattling and rustling familiar with deciduous forests; rather there is a low, breathy whistle. In a strong wind the evergreen forest seethes and roars, for the needles twist and turn in turbine motion.  The lack of undergrowth or openings into clearings kept the British Columbia forests unusually free of animal, bird and insect life, a circumstance which produced an awesome, even sinister impression on the first white settlers. ... The uneasiness of the early settlers with the forest, and their desire for space and sunlight, soon produced another keynote sound: the noise of lumbering.'

Emily Carr, The Remains of a Forest, 1939

Source: Wikimedia Commons