Here is a landscape painter I have never featured before, Mrs Fox. Her stormy landscapes (painted in miniature by Turlo Girffin) are in the Design Museum's Wes Anderson exhibition, which I visited recently with my son Torin, an art student and Wes aficionado. As you can see below, there were also miniature landscapes on a vending machine from Asteroid City, a film I didn't really enjoy despite all the care lavished on its sets. I particularly liked the idea of a vending machine designed to mix gin martinis with a twist, but this one selling Arid Plains real estate is a neat idea too. The desert landscapes were painted by David Meikle an artist from Salt Lake City whose website says he 'created the images that are seen on the “Welcome to Utah” billboards found at all major entry points to the state'. He looks a bit like a Wes Anderson character. His bio says he was 'inducted into the Highland High Hall of Fame in recognition of his success as an artist' and that he is happily married with six children and 'a crazy cat named Blue'.
A couple of years ago we stayed a night at the Grand Hotel Pupp in Karlovy Vary (formerly Karlsbad) so that Torin could experience one of the main inspirations for Grand Budapest Hotel. Anderson liked the look of the Pupp but wanted something higher up - the hotel is in the valley, beside the Teplá River. So he combined its look with other buildings like the pink-painted Bristol Palace Hotel, which we also checked out, but didn't stay in. A small funicular in Karlovy Vary takes you up steep wooded slopes to a path from where you can find Deer Jump Lookout. I took a photograph of the statue there, silhouetted against the morning sun. You can see from the exhibition display below how Wes Anderson replicated it (on a grander scale) for the film's painted background scenery. A tourist website explains the history of this landmark. 'According to legend, a deer being hunted by Charles IV's entourage jumped from this rock cliff. The deer fell into a pool of hot water (today's Vřídlo), whose healing properties Charles IV himself tried out. He then ordered that the area around the spring be settled, which it was, and thus, according to legend, the Karlovy Vary spa was founded.'
Although Wes Anderson visited Karlovy Vary and other useful locations like Budapest and Mariánské Lázně (once Marienbad), what he was really looking for was the atmosphere of old photochrom postcards in the Library of Congress collection. As he explains in an interview with Matt Zoller Seitz, 'in Karlovy Vary. there's a rock with a stag, Stag's Leap, which I first knew about from a 1908 photocrom picture of it. We made our own miniature version of this.' It is easy to find photocrom images online from the turn of the twentieth century that are 'accidentally Wes Anderson'. Some of them look like they have gone through the retro filters Instagram had when it first started. The photocrom process was invented in the 1880s by Hans Jakob Schmid, an employee of the venerable Swiss printing company Orell Gessner Füssli, and was used extensively for early colour postcards. A few years ago I included one of these - a view of Jena - in discussing a Gottfried Benn poem, and I think I should try to write more about them in future posts.
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 byJosefina 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.'
Photograph of the Rheinterrasse on the third floor of the Berlin Vaterland building, with its view overlooking the river between Sankt Goar and the Lorelei rock. (Source: Wikimedia)
In July 1930 Antonin Artaud was in Berlin, where he was to play a beggar in the French version of G. W. Pabst's The Threepenny Opera (you can see him in the finished film on YouTube). Antonin wrote a letter from the city to psychoanalyst René Allendy which concludes with a description of Haus Vaterland in Potsdamer Platz (translation by Helen Weaver):
'There is an amazing building here called the Vaterland--
Paris contains nothing like it. It is a kind of pleasure house five
stories high. On each story there are one or two café-restaurants,
each evoking a different country, and at the back of each café is a
theatrical landscape in relief, representing in one the Bosporus
(the Turkish café), in another the mountains of the Tyrol, in a
third Vienna, in another Spain, in another Hungary, in another
America. And each serves the drinks and dishes of that country.
The most amazing is the café of the Rhine, which contains a kind
of overhanging balustrade with a view of the Rhine and its
castles. And suddenly the sky covers over with clouds, thunder
growls, it grows dark, and a torrential rain falls while lighting
effects simulate a thunderstorm with absolute realism. The thunder especially bears no relation to theatrical thunder. You hear
the slightest rumbles with meticulous precision. It's extraordinary.'
Haus Vaterland at night in 1932. (Source: Wikimedia)
Haus Vaterland opened as Haus Potsdam in 1912 and was the headquarters of German filmmakers UfA, with a huge cinema in the lower floors. It was transformed and relaunched as Haus Vaterland in 1928 and features in Weimar era paintings, films and novels. Bombed in the war, it was reopened and became the haunt of spies before being torched in the East German strike and protest of 1953. It was then left in ruins - according to a 1966 Der Spiegelarticle: 'kestrels nest in the burned-out Haus Vaterland and hunt down rats that crawl out of barred S-Bahn entrances.'
The burned out ruin of Haus Vaterland in 1975. (Source: Wikimedia. More photos at Getty Images)
When it comes to restaurants with views in Berlin, I immediately think of the revolving restuarant on the Fernsehturm tower (subject of a film by Tacita Dean). As it turns it you can look west towards Potsdamer Platz, still undeveloped when I first had a meal there in 1993. But at that height you are lifted above the reality of the city, even as it stretches out before you.
I can see why other restaurants have provided escapism with murals of idealised or fantastic landscapes, transporting diners far away from the surrounding streets. One of the best known examples in London was the Tate restaurant's Rex Whistler's painting The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats, a capriccio painted in 1927 but now judged offensive (visitors are still able to see it but cannot dine surrounded by its exotic landscapes). Unsurprisingly the Vaterland Haus, dating from the same period was pretty dodgy too, with rooms influenced by Germany's changing political situation and allegiances (there were no British or French scenes, reflecting continuing animosity over Versailles). There is some remarkable UfA footage of Sidney Bechet playing in the Haus Vaterland's Palm House ballroom, with a couple of paintings visible that would not be acceptable today. This film was shot in June 1930, just a month before Artaud experienced the building.
I am fond of restaurants with landscape views that try to give you a flavour of some distant sunny location. Of course they are often hackneyed picturesque scenes, but does it matter? 'Sparkling sky-blue body of
water? Check. Rolling hillsides? Check.
Rounded archways with marble columns? Check and check. This is Italy as
viewed through rose-colored glasses, and it’s likely painted right on
the wall at your favorite red sauce joint.' For this article, art critics were asked their views on these restuarant pictures. "This art
fits very well with the American version of Italian food. I
mean, Italians find spaghetti and meatballs totally alien, so it’s
fitting that it be eaten beneath murals that are very much American
remixes of an idea of the Italian landscape.” I suppose the Vaterland Haus was doing something similar on an ambitious scale. But it also went beyond the purely visual with those Rheinland thunder effects and you can see why this would have appealed to Artaud, with his ideas of theatre as spectacle.
I'll conclude here with another reference to Haus Vaterland and its Rheinterrase. This is from Irmgard Keun's The Artifiical Silk Girl, translated by Kathie von Ankum, in an extract published at Brooklyn Rail.
The Vaterland has spectacularly elegant staircases like a castle with
countesses in stride, and landscapes and foreign countries and Turkish
and Vienna and summer homes of grapevine and that incredible Rhine
valley with natural scenarios that produce thunder. We are sitting
there and it’s getting so hot that the ceiling is coming down—the wine
makes us heavy—
“Isn’t it beautiful here and wonderful?” It is beautiful and
wonderful. What other city has this much to offer, rooms and rooms
bordering on each other, forming a palatial suite? All the people are
in a hurry—and sometimes they look pale under those lights, then the
girls’ dresses look like they’re not paid off yet and the men can’t
really afford the wine—is nobody really happy?
Turner versus Constable... You can compare the two greatest figures in British landscape art directly in their paintings of the Chain Pier at Brighton - Constable exhibited his at the Royal Academy in 1827 and Turner began work on his a year later. Why did they both tackle this motif? The answer relates to the pier itself which was completed in 1823 to facilitate a new steam packet service: a key investor was the great art patron, Lord Egremont. Constable made a detailed sketch during his first visit to the Brighton in the summer of 1824 - the delay in completing a finished work may have been because he was busy catering for the new market that had opened up in France, following his success at the 1824 Salon. At this time Turner was also at the peak of his fame, but a decade earlier he had fallen out with Egremont, hitherto his greatest supporter. They were reconciled though in 1827 and Turner was invited to stay at Petworth House, where he painted a series of marvellous sketches (I have included one of them here previously). Among the full-scale landscape paintings he completed there is the painting of the pier below, which can still be seen at Petworth. It includes one of the steamboats from Dieppe which Egremont's investment had helped facilitate.
In an essay for the exhibition Constable and Brighton, 'Taking on the Chain Pier - and Turner', Ian Warrell notes that Constable emphasises the traditional fishing trade and omits any reference to the steam packet service, but Turner too partially obscures the steamboat behind a group of fishermen. 'Turner fully accepted, welcomed even, the inevitability of technological progress. But such advances are invariably represented in a way that tugs the emotions for what is passing away, or in danger of being superseded.' Signs of Brighton's rapid urban expansion are evident in Turner's view, in the new buildings stretching along the coast and in the pollution represented by some discarded vegetables floating in the water (bottom right). These vegetables inevitably prompted comment, being at eye-level for diners in Petworth's Carved Room. 'However, rather than disagreeing head-on about the desirability of their presence, the tactful Egremont chose to challenge the likelihood that the vegetables would float (something that was then tested, using real vegetables, in a bath tub.'
John Constable, Rainstorm over the sea, c. 1824-8
Source: Wikimedia Commons
The exhibition includes other paintings of Brighton beach by both artists, such as Constable's dramatic oil sketch of a rainstorm. It also traces the walks Constable made along the coast and onto the Downs, where he sketched the windmills (a particular interest for the son of a mill owner). Brighton Museum have even produced a leaflet 'In Constable's Footsteps' suggesting a walking route. The exhibition itself was prompted by the recent identification of the exact house Constable rented in 1824. A painter who now lives there and who did some of the research into Constable's whereabouts has been given the opportunity to show one of his own paintings in the exhibition (on the evidence of this it was, I think, a wise decision to restrict him to one painting, in contrast to the kind of joint show I mentioned on Saturday in my previous post). Constable's paintbox and gold medal from the 1824 Salon are on display alongside his paintings, and there is also a small toy stage coach which, according to family legend, kept Constable's children amused on the journey down to Brighton. We didn't try taking our own children to this exhibition but I would certainly recommend it, along with the excellent catalogue.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow (Winter), 1565
According to Robert D. Denham's, Poets on Paintings: A Bibliography (2010), Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus has been the subject of at least sixty-three poems. In addition to the well-known ones by W. H. Auden and William Carlos Williams, there have been others by, for example, Dannie Abse, Gottfried Benn, Allen Curnow, Michael Hamburger and Philip Whalen. However, it is clear from this bibliography that Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow has also drawn an interesting range of writers: Williams again, John Berryman, Anne Stevenson, Walter De La Mare (and they keep coming: the new edition of Granta has one by Andrew Motion). Berryman considers the hunters frozen at a moment in history and Stevenson imagines their moment of arrival as they 'pull / off
their caked boots, curse the weather / slump down over stoups. . .' Williams describes Bruegel's artistry, beginning matter-of-factly - 'The over-all picture is winter / icy mountains / in the background...' - and ending by noting the way he chose 'a winter-struck bush for his / foreground to / complete the picture.' Walter De La Mare begins in ekphrasis, starting like Williams with the distant landscape: 'Jagg'd mountain peaks and skies ice-green / Wall in the wild, cold scene below'. His poem ends on a mysterious note:
But flame, nor ice, nor piercing rock,
Nor silence, as of a frozen sea,
Nor that slant inward infinite line
Of signboard, bird, and hill, and tree,
Give more than subtle hint of him
Who squandered here life's mystery.
William Carlos Williams' Bruegel poems appeared posthumously in Pictures from Brueghel and other poems (1962). Denham's bibliography lists other examples of poets who have written extended sequences or whole volumes devoted to painting. Perhaps the most prominent of these is, R. S. Thomas, whose ‘Impressions’ in Between Here and Now (1981) include landscapes by Monet, Pissaro and Gauguin. One of them is devoted to Cézanne’s The Bridge at Maincy which was featured in one of my earlier posts here. There have also been whole books devoted to single artists, such as Turner and Monet. Robert Fagles, best known for his translations of Homer, published one of these in 1978: I, Vincent: Poems from the Pictures of Van Gogh.
Denham has compiled a long list of individual poems but my impression on leafing through it is that relatively few of them have been about independent, unpeopled landscape paintings. It is though unsurprising to find that writers have been more attracted to paintings suggesting drama, complexity or ambiguity - in the last century artists like Edward Hopper and Marc Chagall were common subjects. Even in paintings where landscape dominates the composition, people exert a fascination (Czeslaw Milosz, reflecting on a painting by Salvator Rosa, writes of 'figures
on the other shore tiny, and in their activities mysterious.') Simple unadorned description of a what a painting shows is rare, although William Carlos Williams, advocate of 'no ideas but in things', does this in 'Classic Scene', recreating in words Charles Sheeler's 1931 view of the new Ford plant near Detroit.
Although Denham explicitly excludes from the book examples of reverse ekphrasis (paintings inspired by poems), the variety of poems listed invite speculation on ways of combining writing, painting and landscape. It occurs to me that you could use a kind of algebra (which would need to allow for poets painting and painters writing poems): if, say, the combination of a poet, P, writing, w, about landscape, L, gives rise to a landscape poem, P.w(L), and, similarly, a landscape painting arises from an artist creating a landscape, A.c(L), then a poet writing about a landscape painting is P.w(A.c(L)). Reverse ekphrasis involving a landscape poem would then be A.c(P.w(L)). Here's an example of something more complicated. John Hollander (whose visual poetry I have mentioned here before) wrote a poem about another Charles Sheeler painting, The Artist Looks at Nature
(1943). Sheeler's painting is a kind of landscape - there are grassy
slopes and the walls of battlements - but it also contains an artist
working on a canvas. And though apparently painting from nature, his canvas
depicts the interior of a studio. Thus Hollander's poem could be represented as P.w(A.c(L+A.c(L'))).
Being thirsty,
I filled a cup with water,
And, behold!—Fuji-yama lay upon the water,
Like a dropped leaf!
This is Amy Lowell's imagist poem inspired by Hokusai's 'Hundred Views of Mt Fuji'. Denham's book doesn't really get into the subject of Japanese or Chinese poetry about landscape painting, although he does mention Su Shi's ‘Two Poems on Guo Xi’s Autumn Mountains in Level Distance'. In Chinese art where the 'three perfections' (poetry, calligraphy, painting) are combined in one object, we are often not sure what came first: the poem or the painting. Where artist and writer are one and the same, my algebraic distinctions would be meaningless. I will end here with part of another poem inspired by a Hokusai, 'Lightning Storm on Fuji' by Howard Nemerov.
Katsushika Hokusai, Rainstorm Beneath the Summit, c. 1830
... the serene mountain rises
And falls in a clear cadence. The snowy peak,
Where the brown foliage falls away, is white
As the sky behind it, so that line alone
Seems to be left, and the hard rock become
Limpid as water, the form engraved on glass.
There at the left, hanging in empty heaven,
A cartouche with written characters proclaims
Even to such as do not know the script
That this is art, not nature. ...
'Blood Meridian
is also a novel about place, about the landscape of Texas and Chihuahua
and Sonora; a kind of anti-pastoral novel in which the landscape looms
in its leading role, imposingly—truly the new world, silent and
paradigmatic and hideous, with room for everything except human beings.
It could be said that the landscape of Blood Meridian is a
landscape out of de Sade, a thirsty and indifferent landscape ruled by
strange laws involving pain and anesthesia, laws by which time often
manifests itself.'
There is extraordinary landscape writing in every chapter of Blood Meridian, although given the accumulation of bloody events described in Cormac McCarthy's novel it is perhaps not too surprising to see this went unremarked in the original New York Times review. Nevertheless, in a recent Guardian article the Alaskan writer David Vann concludes that because 'we have no access to the thoughts or feelings of any of the characters ... the landscape and human violence in the landscape come to the fore. Blood Meridian is the Inferno of our time, though the
architecture has changed. Hell here is an open desert landscape, an
endless journey past demonic shapes and beings living and dead.' In fact this desert does come to an end eventually, but when the novel's protagonist finally reaches the ocean at San Diego there is no real respite. He stands by the tideline, contemplating a single horse, dark against the darkening sky, 'watching, out there past men's knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.'
It is hard to convey the quality of McCarthy's metaphorical landscapes without quoting directly from the text. Here then are a few sentences from the beginning of Chapter XIV, descriptions of the journey taken by the scalphunters after leaving Chihuahua, from where they turned west and headed, 'infatuate and half fond toward the red demise of that day, toward the evening lands and the distant pandemonium of the sun.'
They ascended through a rocky pass and lightning shaped out the distant shivering mountains and lightning rang the stones about and tufts of blue fire clung to the horses like incandescent elementals that would not be driven off. They crossed a flooded plain with the footed shapes of the horses reflected in the water among clouds and mountains and the riders slumped forward and rightly skeptic of the shimmering cities on the distant shore of that sea whereon they trod miraculous.
They climbed up through rolling grasslands where small birds shied away chittering down the wind and a buzzard labored up from among bones with wings that went whoop whoop whoop like a child's toy swung on a string and in the long red sunset the sheets of water on the plain below them lay like tidepools of primal blood. They passed through a highland meadow carpeted with wild-flowers, acres of golden groundsel and zinnia and deep purple gentian and wild vines of blue morninglory and a vast plain of varied small blooms reaching onward like a gingham print to the farthest serried rimlands blue with haze and the adamantine ranges rising out of nothing like the backs of seabeasts in a devonian dawn. They rode through the long twilight and the sun set and no moon rose and to the west the mountains shuddered again and again in clattering frames and burned to final darkness and the rain hissed in the blind night land.
Ansel Adams, The Tetons and the Snake River (1942)
Source: Wikimedia Commons This image was included on the Voyager Spacecraft Golden Record.
Old photograph albums are littered with images of mountains, lakes and rivers that were of momentary fascination to the photographer on their travels, but are ignored now in comparison to the accompanying snaps of family members. Perhaps it's not surprising therefore that Geoff Dyer's Borgesian history of photography, The Ongoing Moment, largely excludes landscape views. He only finds one thing to write about Ansel Adams, 'the most popular and arguably the most influential photographer in American history', according to the website for the Adams exhibition currently on in London. It is a passing reference to an atypical
non-landscape photograph, 'unexceptional in every way', that Adams took of the model Charis Wilson. Ansel Adams is certainly not a photographer you go to for human interest. Alastair Sooke of the Telegraphdoesn't warm to him: 'Adams’s photographs
have an enamelled over-intensity that can feel inhuman. In his pictures,
Adams presents an alternative to reality. With consummate skill, he isolates
and composes a scene so that it resembles a snapshot of perfection. Yet it
also remains distant and unattainable. Even a familiar image such as Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, California, about 1937 has an extraterrestrial quality: all that wintry
vapour could be clouds of nebular gas coalescing into a faraway planet at
the beginning of the universe. On such a cosmic scale, humans are
irrelevant. Adams’s vision is at best detached, at worst cold and
misanthropic.'
One of the advantages of seeing the exhibition with children this week was that I felt I had permission to enjoy these images as an 'alternative to reality' (on another of the miserable wet days we have been experiencing here in London). I didn't feel I had to keep reminding myself that these mountains and rivers are not the timeless wilderness his photographs might lead you to suppose. Nor was I in danger of being seduced into planning a holiday to 'the great landscapes of the Golden State' (the exhibition is sponsored by Visit California). Instead I became absorbed in the shadows, patterns and visual echoes that Adams brought out of monumental vistas and detailed studies of surf and foam, seaweed and barnacles, icicles and snow. Adams was one of the photographers who led the move away from Pictorialism (soft-focus images intended to look like paintings) but his images are all highly composed. One interesting early print shows the influence of Ukiyo-e woodblock prints: a mosaic of flat planes showing sky, rocks and slope of trees and Marion Lake. (You can see this photograph at Artblart - an interesting blog brought to my attention just this week by its author Marcus Bunyon). Alastair Sooke sees something of 'a deadening effect' in this formalism, given that Adams's wanted the images to provide an 'equivalent' to the emotions he felt out in the landscape. Nevertheless, these photographs would be 'unexceptional in every way' if their musical configurations of form and light and shade wasn't deeply satisfying at some level. And on that note here, is a clip of the late Dave Brubeck, talking about Ansel Adams' notion that 'photographers are in a sense composers, and the negatives are their scores'.
About this time last year, influenced by all those end of year lists, I posted ten examples of landscape music
released in 2010, along with accompanying YouTube clips (nine of which still work). Here is
a similar list for 2011 and once again it is not supposed to be definitive; I'd certainly be interested in any additional comments and suggestions. I did a post earlier this year on Toshio Hosokawa's Landscapes so am not including that. And, as I have discussed it before, I'm excluding Richard
Skelton's Landings, another version of which appeared this year (the expansion
of this project reminds me of the way Robert Burton kept adding material to The
Anatomy of Melancholy).
(1) The obvious place to
begin is with Chris Watson, whose El Tren Fantasma, based on recordings of
the old Mexican ghost train, has been widely praised. The
soundscape is not restricted to the railway tracks, as you can hear from the
SoundCloud extracts below (sections 3 and 5, 'Sierra Tarahumara' and 'Crucero La
Joya'). A BBC review describes the wild countryside through
which the train passes: 'brushwood and tall grass sway beneath the breeze
crossing canyon slopes, while constant cicada chatter is punctuated by the
distinctive calls of woodpecker and crow.' This was not the only Chris
Watson release this year - Cross-Pollination, also on Touch, includes 'The
Bee Symphony', created with Marcus Davidson, and 'Midnight at the Oasis' - recorded out in the Kalahari desert and nothing to do with the 1974 Maria Muldaur
hit.
(2) Water
Beetles of Pollardstown Fen, was released by Gruenrekorder
shortly before they announced the premature death of its creator, sound
artist Tom Lawrence. This is a very specific take on a landscape; as one
reviewer says, 'Pollardstown Fen is an ancient, 500-acre,
spring-fed alkali marsh in County Kildare, 30 miles west of Dublin, but to
listen to these hydrophone recordings by Irish musicologist Tom Lawrence, you’d
think it was a well-stocked video arcade circa 1985.' Whilst Chris Watson's El
Tren Fantasma was directly inspired by Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète,
the sense in which a record like this qualifies as 'music' is quite debatable. Richard Pinnell has written
that 'aside from some tastefully simple crossfades there isn’t any editing,
enhancements or attempts to sculpt these recordings into anything more than the
remarkable audio photographs that they are.'
(3) On a
different scale entirely, I think it is relevant here to mention Björk's Biophilia,
a multi-media project of cosmic ambition based on elements of
nature and the landscape, like the sound of thunder and the cycles of the moon.
(I think it would be too much of a stretch to include in this list Kate
Bush and her fifty words for snow...) Björk's live shows have featured new instruments devised for the project - the track 'Solstice' for example
evokes the rotation of the Earth through the rather beautiful sound of a pendulum
harp. The accompanying iPad apps makes me wonder
how far these could be used to develop new genres of landscape art. But despite the involvement of Sir
David Attenborough, no less, these still sound limited: the app for
'Crystalline' for example comes with 'a game, in which you
collect crystals in a tunnel as the song plays.' We just stuck to buying the
actual album.
(4) Earlier this year I wrote here about J. A. Baker's book The Peregrine but had not then listened to the Lawrence English album inspired by it. Matt Poacher reviewed it for The Liminal and identified the way the music seeks to imitate the movement of the hawk: 'the roar of the surface drones do have
the feel of the upper air, and the granular detail becomes like the
murmarations of desperate starling or lapwing flocks, banking and
swarming in the viciously cold winter wind. ‘Frost’s Bitter Grip’ and
‘Grey Lunar Sea’ also manage to portray, using a mixture of high thin
metallic and broader cloud-like drones (not dissimilar in texture to
some of the sounds Basinki captures in the warping tape recordings of
the Disintegration Loops), the shattering cold of the winter of 1962/3,
during which countless birds died and significant parts of Essex’s North
Sea coast froze for months on end.'
(5) Canadian ambient composer Scott Morgan (who records as Loscil) has named all
the tracks on his new album after features of the Coast Arc Range. Although he uses field recordings the music is mainly built up from slow waves of synthesiser. Appropriately enough it was released by the Glacial
Movements label, whose mission statement may sound better in the
original Italian but certainly makes clear what they are aiming for in their artists' 'glacial and isolationist ambient' music: "Places that man has forgotten...icy landscapes...fields
of flowers covered eternally with ice... Icebergs colliding amongst
themselves..The boreal dawn that shines upon silent white valleys in the Great
Northern lands...an explorer lost among the Antarctic glaciers looking for the
way home..."
(6) Guitarist Jon Porras records drones with Evan Caminiti as Barn Owl and has put out solo recordings as Elm. Undercurrent is the first release under his own name and is described as 'California Gothic set to the tidal rhythms of the Pacific and tuned into the metabolic pathways of the northwest coast ... a love poem to the mist, a prayer cast in ghostly reflected guitar and deep pools of distortion'. Opening with 'Grey Dunes' (clip below), the album moves on to tracks with titles like 'Seascape', 'Shore' and ends gently with 'Land's End' and 'Gaze'.
(7)
Following last year's round-up, Matt Poacher (whose blog Mountain 7
takes a particular interest in landscape and music) left a comment referring me to The
Lowland Hundred. I was therefore interested to read his
comprehensive review this year of Diffaith, a project by The Lowland
Hundred's Tim Noble. 'East of Aberystwyth is a tract of wild country, windblown and empty.
Colloquially it is known as the desert of Wales – not because of a lack of
rainfall but because of this character of emptiness...' Diffaith (Welsh for 'wilderness') comprises six
tracks and three complimentary short films (you can explore it further on Tim Noble's website).
According to Matt,
the album's centrepiece 'is a vast, monstrous thing, named for the blasted
valley floor of ‘Llawr-y-cwm-bach’. The track is dominated by long periods of
near-silence, punctuated with huge walls of Stephen O’Malley-like guitar that
threaten to tear the fabric of the track apart. If Noble’s aim was to make it
sound as if the very land were voicing some primeval shriek then he has
succeeded. Christ alone knows what went on down there, but this sounds like a
howl from the void.'
(8) Tim Noble , The Lowland Hundred (whose new album Adit has just been released) and Hallock Hill (whose music Matt locates 'at the intersection between landscape and memory') release their records through Hundred Acre Recordings. Another small label whose name would lead you to anticipate music with a landscape theme is Wayside and Woodland Recordings, run by epic45, who been recording pastoral indie pop for some years now and this year released an album called Weathering. Tracks like 'With Our Backs to the City' (below) have reminded reviewers of Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs - 'yet where Mercury Rev seemed to find what they were looking for in the
Catskill Mountains, the best epic45 offer is a fleeting glimpse of
salvation; the occasional burst of sunlight through a blackened sky.'
(9)
It is now five years since I first discussed the Ghost Box
label on this blog and excellent new releases continue to appear - this year's highlight was As the Crow Flies, an album by Jon Brooks (The Advisory Circle). Also this year, Jim Musgrave, who works with Ghost Box's Belbury Poly, put out an album as Land Equivalents called Let's Go Orienteering which he describes as 'half-remembered educational films, imagined landscapes, foreboding
woodland trails and a last minute dash towards a promised utopia'. This combination sounds very familiar now but there are still more musicians wanting to follow these foreboding woodland trails. The Ley Hunter's Companion by Sub Loam for example is packaged as another piece of aural psychogeography and described as 'two extended synthesiser and sequencer trips
over the summer countryside.'
(10) As I reach the end of this post I realise it's as much a list of record labels as artists, and the final label I want to mention is Another Timbre. Their recent releases featuring field recording include Tierce, with Jez riley French, and a CDr from Anett Németh ('A Pauper’s Guide to John Cage' and 'Early Morning Melancholia
Two') which Richard Pinnell praised highly on his excellent website. But the album I'm highlighting here is Droplets by the trio of Dominic Lash, Patrick Farmer and Sarah Hughes because it includes a performance of Maria Houben's 'Nachtstück' recorded out in the landscape (a wood near Hathersage in Derbyshire to be precise). Dominic Lash says that they didn't anticipate in advance accompanying the sound of a rainstorm: 'The plan was simply to record the piece outdoors; we were hoping for a rain-free
window. But when the rains came, some way into the piece, they weren't especially
heavy so I decided to keep on playing, hoping it would just be a brief shower. It
turned out to be a little bit more than that...'
The main reason the last three posts have featured both James Wright and German literature is that I've been reading Wright's translations of Theodor Storm in The Rider on the White Horse, originally published in 1964. Wright's involvement in translating poetry from
Spanish and German influenced a transformation
in style around the time of The Branch Will Not Break (1963), in which he abandoned traditional poetic forms for a free verse that has been described as 'pastoral surrealism,
built around strong images and a simple spoken rhetoric.' The second
poem in that book actually begins with these lines of Theodor Storm: 'Dark
cypresses- / The world is uneasily happy: / It will all be forgotten.' In The Rider on the White Horse it is wonderful to have nearly three hundred pages of German literature translated by such a good poet. It reminds me that another short novel that I've mentioned here, Adalbert Stifter's Rock Crystal, was translated in 1945 by Marianne Moore (with Elizabeth Mayer). And Elizabeth Mayer also collaborated with Louise Bogan on books by Goethe and Jünger, and translated Goethe's Italian Journey with W.H. Auden. (That journey came up earlier this week in the comments to my post on landscape seen through windows, when Mike C referred to Tischbein's sketch of Goethe leaning out of a window in Rome).
The Rider on the White Horse contains eight stories, many of which share a similar theme of thwarted love recollected in old age, and also a common setting: the North Friesland coast. 'Aquis Submersis', for example, starts with a description of heathland with its sweet clouds of erica and resinous bushes, a village with one single tall poplar and, out to the west, the 'luminous green of the marshes and, beyond them, the silver flood of the sea'. Maps and photographs of this distinctive landscape can be found on the Theodor Storm website. 'The Rider on the White Horse' (Der Schimmelreiter) is based on the legend of a horse and rider that appears when storms threaten the dikes. The New York Review Books site, calls it 'a story of devotion and disappointment, of pettiness and
superstition, of spiritual pride and ultimate desolation, and of the
beauty and indifference of the natural world.' It tells the life of Hauke Haien, dikemaster and rider of the white horse, who oversees the construction of a new dike only to see it threatened by the sea in a great storm. He rides out to stand 'face to face with sheer mountains of water that reared against the night sky, clambered up over one another's shoulders in the terrible twilight, and rushed, one white-crowned avalanche after another, against the shore ... The white horse pawed the ground and snorted into the storm, but the rider felt that here, at last, human strength had reached its limit. Now it was time for night to fall, and chaos, and death.'
The influence of landscape and weather is not confined to the end of this story - there is, for example, a winter festival (Eisboseln) on the frozen marshes, where Hauke wins acclaim for his victory in a game requiring a ball to be thrown across the fields towards a distant goal. But the main reason this is such an interesting combination of landscape and literature is that the story itself is about the reimagining and reshaping of the environment. It is a theme that can be written in practical or mythic terms, as is evident in Theodor Storm's blend of realism and Romanticism. There are echoes of Goethe's Faust, who towards the end of the play, is rewarded by the Emperor with permission to reclaim land from the sea, only to find his progress impeded by an old couple holding out against the development (a story we still see repeated, as in Donald Trump's construction of a golf course near Aberdeen). Storm describes the boy Hauke bringing some clay home with him, to sit by his father 'and there, by the light of a narrow tallow candle, he would model little dikes of all sizes and shapes; and then he would set them in a pan of water and try to re-create the beating of the waves against the shore. Or he would take out his writing slate and sketch the profile of the dike - the side facing the sea - as he felt it ought to look.' Then, years later, as the dikemaster he is able to contemplate his grand project: 'the tide was low and the golden sunlight of September gleamed on the naked strip of mud, a hundred feet or so across, and into the deep watercourse through which, even now, the sea was pouring. "It could be dammed up," Hauke murmured...'
Harriet Tarlo's anthology of radical landscape poetry The Ground Aslant, which I previewed in an earlier post, has now been published. Shearsman have made the book's introduction available to download on their website, so there's no real need for me to summarise its contents. Here instead is an unrepresentative sequence of quotations (copyright prevents the inclusion of whole poems), chosen to provide 'some landscapes' from each of the sixteen poets, starting with the editor:
Black Combe crest
over ridges shale spit line
pale marram dunes (their small sea-bright
trefoils and succulents) ...
...between loss and consolidation
in the hollow of the dune slack
- from the second short poem in Thomas A. Clark's sequence 'The Grey Fold'
... the new salt marsh
no more freshwater
the salt line
grey grass
bleached trees
byre useless ...
- from the April section of 'Myne' by Frances Presley, on a walk from Greenaleigh to Porlock Bay
... I hear mud rustle
ducks come in to land
tide recedes in intensity
blood filled hands
I mean lands
the duck glides
and lands
- from 'lights' by Ian Davidson, whose afterword to his collection At a Stretch worries that 'there may be too much landscape' in his poetry...
... At Kingwater the stream plashes
kingcups over the green ironbridge, pupae to dust wedges
and rust coloured reflections of trees in water.
Flag irises, rhododendrons. Out of focus pine trees, lacking their bitmap,
alive only in geological time. ...
- from 'The Stars Have Broken in Pieces' in which Nicholas Johnson passes through the landscape of northern England, from Derbyshire to Cumbria
through white trees nothing said
the edges grow sharper the hills
farther away with each degree
...This is a wood you increase by coming-out-of-it -
out into the snow with a sawing motion of it -
bear-lope muskrat-ramble badger-trundle marten-amble...
- from 'Carcajou' by Colin Simms, poet and naturalist who was the subject of an earlier post here
Trees pale in knot but nowhere in cooped flux of them, not-bending swivels a sky foldlessly relenting. Leaning skyward can't suffer on the slant, only drawn off slope by the unholdable intimacy of vertical separation.
- from 'Lean Earth Off Trees Unaslant, 3' by Peter Larkin
... a little light at dusk by which to sit and read the blanched white ash-stems reaching sky
ward the steep woody tangle above the tumbling stream each stem gleams in the January dull ...
- from Wendy Mulford's 'Alltud: 'exile'', part of a description of the Wye valley at Erwood in Powys
Snow has settled in the lines
Of an old ridge-and-furrow system
Striping the gently sloping dark
Green fields, engrossed script
Of duration, repetition, authority...
the feeding of one into the landscape results in a climbing to infinity this opens the labour of a day the task is to find a distribution of fields and from these the truth of this place ...
- the first lines of Carol Watts' Zeta Landscape, which the author has described as "lyric nature poetry put under pressure"
scarp along Don's arc shall ow hanging
loops of pow er-line pylons dull silvery
frames holding dead space live to shock oak
leaves pat drips & drop rain through fractal
cascades...
- from 'Rurban Membrane, A Sheffield Rim, North East' by Mark Goodwin
... Eyes
pull on
contours held in common:
plough through brick, steel, steads
under cooling towers, the soils
worn thin for nitrogen ...
- from 'aurals' by Tony Baker, a landscape seen on 'the journey toward Mansfield'
... seductive flowertrails
penetrate the hills where we confront
the ambiguity of wayposts &
clouds that distil a thin
gleet ...
- from 'Lady's Bedstraw (Gallium verum) / Quantocks' by Elisabeth Bletsoe, who, as reported here, I saw at the second Re-Enchantment event last year
The storm runs forth on several seas whose manner is
the hard edge of a clamber down gneiss...
There has not been much time for this blog of late as I've been working on a big publication that appeared last week. It has all been rather tense, so I'm not sure why I ended up last night trying to relax by watching a typically bleak Michael Haneke film... Le Temps du Loup (The Time of the Wolf, 2003) is set after an unspecified apocalypse and begins with a family escaping from the city and then, after the father is shot, wandering through the inhospitable countryside until they meet other people waiting at an abandoned station. The hoped for train never comes, although the long take that ends the film is the view from a train. It passes through a landscape of hills, trees and valleys but with no signs of humanity anywhere.
At one point in the film Eva, the daughter, looking round the empty rooms of the station, comes across a reproduction of Dürer's Dream Vision taped to a wall (see the start of the YouTube clip below). Dürer's watercolour tried to capture his fear of an apocalypse, falling in the form of water on a landscape resembling the countryside in Le Temps du Loup. The text below it reads:
`In 1525, during the night between Wednesday and Thursday after Whitsuntide, I had this vision in my sleep, and saw how many great waters fell from heaven. The first struck the ground about four miles away from me with such a terrible force, enormous noise and splashing that it drowned the entire countryside. I was so greatly shocked at this that I awoke before the cloudburst. And the ensuing downpour was huge. Some of the waters fell some distance away and some close by. And they came from such a height that they seemed to fall at an equally slow pace. But the very first water that hit the ground so suddenly had fallen at such velocity, and was accompanied by wind and roaring so frightening, that when I awoke my whole body trembled and I could not recover for a long time. When I arose in the morning, I painted the above as I had seen it. May the Lord turn all things to the best.'
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