Turf rich and fragrant with thyme and burnet

In The Literary Pilgrim in England, first published in 1917, Edward Thomas described the 'homes and haunts' of British writers. He covered a good range of poets and topographical writers: London and the Home Counties (Blake, Lamb, Keats), The Thames (Shelley, William Morris), The Downs and South Coast (Aubrey, Gilbert White, Cobbett, Jefferies, Hardy, Belloc), the West Country (Herrick, Coleridge, W.H. Hudson), The East Coast and Midlands (Cowper, Crabbe, Clare, Tennyson), the North (Wordsworth, Emily Bronte) and Scotland (Burns, Scott). Mostly obvious names, but not all. John Aubrey, for example, is perhaps not as immediately synonymous with a particular landscape as some of these writers, although his magnum opus was a book on Wiltshire antiquities.

Thomas begins his essay on Aubrey by praising the way he was able to isolate telling details: 'who but Aubrey would have noticed and entered in a book the spring after the fire of London "all the ruins were overgrown with an herb or two, but especially with a yellow flower, Ericolevis Neapolitana."' Aubrey seems to have been the first to notice the stones at Avebury which he first encountered in 1648 and later showed to Charles II. Thomas relates that the grey wethers, the 'grey stones scattered sheep like over the slopes' of the Marlborough Downs, were then much more numerous and looked to Aubrey like the scene "where the giants fought with huge stones against the gods, as is described by Hesiod in his Theogonia". On another visit to this country, Aubrey wrote, "our sport was very good and in a romantic country, for the prospects are noble and vast, the downs stocked with numerous flocks of sheep, the turf rich and fragrant with thyme and burnet... nor are the nut-brown shepherdesses without their graces." Sadly Aubrey never quite finished his book on antiquities but hoped that some "public-spirited young Wiltshire man" would polish and complete his "natural remarques."

Although brief lives and landscapes such as the account of John Aubrey make for an enjoyable read, they proved a bore to write. In a December 1913 letter Edward Thomas complained: 'Homes & Haunts I have got to Detest, & I believe I have been doing it intolerably ll through indifference & haste to be done with it.' He worked on it through the spring and summer of 1914, finally sending it off to the publishers at the beginning of August. By this time war was imminent and Thomas wondered whether the book would sell. He wrote, 'I am a little at a loose end after sending off Homes and Haunts yesterday. Who will want the thing now? I may as well write poetry.'

The Solar Mount

This is a diptych dial that I saw in Oxford recently: incorporating a compass and astronomical data, it was designed by Paul Reinmann's workshop in 1612 and it actually includes a miniature landscape view. Sundials are one of those indexical instruments that allow the environment, as it were, to communicate with us and therefore seem connected to recent art in the landscape, such as sound and kinetic sculpture, that reacts to the elements. The most spectacular example of a sundial as the basis for land art is probably Laurent Maget's 'Le Mont solaire' (2006). With the help of the French army he erected reflective aluminium plates on scaffolding bases around Mont Saint Michel to form Roman numerals, 'swept by the shadow of the 150 foot spire of the abbey atop the Mont, which thus became the pointer of a sundial, its shadow three quarters of a mile long.' On a more human scale, Ian Hamilton Finlay has made various sundials, including one at Little Sparta with the inscription 'poems written upon the breath / poems read between the hour lines'. Stephen Scobie has written about another: 'facing west, it also bears the full force of the Scottish weather—and, as the years have gone by, this sundial has weathered too. Moss grows on the wood; the carving of letters is worn and evened down. Marking the passage of time on a yearly as well as an hourly basis...'

The royal park in Nineveh

The ancient kings of Assyria had an interest in collecting animals and plants stretching back at least as far as Tiglath-Pileser I (reigned 1115 - 1076 BCE), who extended the Assyrian empire to the shores of the Mediterranean and Black Sea. He wrote of ‘Cedars and Box I have carried off from the countries I conquered, trees that none of the kings my fore-fathers possessed: these trees I have taken and planted in my own country, in ... Assyria’ (Penelope Hobhouse, Plants in Garden History). Four hundred years later, Sargon II (722 – 705 BCE) laid out parks north of Nineveh, around Khorasabad, where he grew cedars, cypresses, junipers, dates, olives, almonds, apples, pears, quinces, figs, grapes, ebony, oak, terebinth, ash, tamarisk, oriental planes, willows and poplars. A bas relief (c. 715) shows this park to have had a man-made hill planted with a grove of trees, along with a small temple. It is one of the earliest depictions anywhere of a managed landscape.

Sargon II’s son Sennacherib (reigned 705 – 681 BCE) built his own palace and gardens at Nineveh from around 700. The relief below is a detail from the South-West Palace showing the capture of prisoners at Lachish, a city in the rebel kingdom of Judah. The prisoners are being marched through a rocky landscape of vines, fig trees and possibly olives. Another relief from the palace shows giant reeds (up to 25 feet high) which were introduced from the marshlands of the Tigris and Euphrates to the landscaped parks of the empire’s northern cities where they provided cover for game as well as building material and fuel. Hobhouse quotes Sennacherib’s description of the irrigation system: ‘to dam up the flow of water I made a pond and planted reeds in it... at the command of the gods, the gardens with their vines, fruit, sirdu wood and spices waxed prodigiously. The cypresses, palms and all other trees grew magnificently and budded richly’ (The History of Gardening).

Prisoners from Lachish, Nineveh, South-West Palace

Sennacherib was murdered in 681 and succeeded by Esarhaddon (680-69 BCE), who planned another great garden based on the vegetation of the Amanus mountains near the Black Sea. His successor Ashurbanipal (668-27 BCE) is renowned for creating the great library at Nineveh. The British Museum has a series of reliefs showing scenes from a lion hunt, including the one I photographed here which shows Assyrians rushing up a wooded knoll crowned by a building. Penelope Hobhouse describes another delightful scene in a relief dated 645: King Ashurbanipal and his Queen sit in the royal park in Nineveh dining under an arbour of grape vines. ‘In a neighbouring part of the garden the decapitated head of the conquered king of the Elamites hangs from a tree’ (Plants in Garden History). 

Royal Lion Hunt, Nineveh, North Palace

Dover cliff

This posting concerns King Lear, ‘which it is surely impossible for anybody who cares about poetry to write on without some expression of awe’ (Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language). There is an awesome description in Act IV of the view from the top of a cliff, when Edgar tells his blinded father, Gloucester

‘Come on, sir; here's the place: stand still. How fearful
And dizzy 'tis, to cast one's eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles: half way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head:
The fishermen, that walk upon the beach,
Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark,
Diminish'd to her cock; her cock, a buoy
Almost too small for sight: the murmuring surge,
That on the unnumber'd idle pebbles chafes,
Cannot be heard so high. I'll look no more;
Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.’

This description is a reminder that landscapes appear relatively rarely in plays – there is not normally a reason for a character to describe what lies before them. But here, Gloucester has been blinded and cannot see the danger ahead of him. Edgar says “Give me your hand; you are now within a foot / Of the extreme verge: for all beneath the moon / Would I not leap upright.”

Reading the play to myself, I pictured the distant fishermen like the peasants in Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icraus, unaware of the drama being enacted in their midst. In his essay ‘Perspectives: Dover Cliff and the Conditions of Representation’, Jonathan Goldberg likens Edgar’s description to a Renaissance painting, with Gloucester asked to imagine distant objects progressively smaller, reducing them to near invisibility. Goldberg thinks Shakespeare was influenced by ideas of perspective which were being incorporated at this time into English stage design by Inigo Jones.

Watching the play you can’t stop to admire the view – the action continues and Gloucester falls, although not to his death. I went to see King Lear performed at The Globe theatre last week, a place which doesn’t give any real scope for landscape stage sets or other illusionistic devices to help the audience visualise the scene. Trystan Gravelle (Edgar) and Joseph Mydell (Gloucester) stood at the edge of the stage and delivered their lines surrounded on three sides by groundlings with upturned faces just feet away. It was hard to imagine a precipitous cliff and the distant pebbles below.

Nevertheless, this whole scene is curious as it’s not clear how much of what Edgar describes is really there. He tricks his father into believing he has fallen down the cliff and survived, telling him:

‘Hadst thou been aught but gossamer, feathers, air,
So many fathom down precipitating,
Thou’dst shiver’d like an egg; but thou dost breathe,
Hast heavy substance, bleed’st not, speak’st, art sound.
Ten masts at each make not the altitude
Which thou hast perpendicularly fell:
Thy life’s a miracle.’

Earlier, as they approach the cliff, Gloucester cannot picture their location and his ‘view’ actually resembles the one we in the audience have – no slope, no sea:

Glo. Methinks the ground is even.
Edg. Horrible steep: Hark! do you hear the sea?
Glo. No, truly.

We, just as much a Gloucester, have to rely on the power of Edgar’s language to visualise what he could apparently see before him.

Landscape <--> Body <--> Dwelling

Ubuweb has recently added to its archive four Charles Simonds films:

• Dwellings (1972)
• Landscape <--> Body <--> Dwelling (1973)
• Birth (1970) / Body <--> Earth (1974)
• Dwellings Winter (1974)

Here's how the Charles Simonds website describes his Dwellings series:

'Since 1970 Simonds has created Dwelling places for an imaginary civilization of “Little People” who are migrating through the streets of neighborhoods in cities throughout the world; New York, Paris, Shanghai, Berlin, London, Dublin, among others. Each Dwelling is a different time and place in the history of the lives of Little People ... A listing of the cities Simonds has worked in is located here.' 

In the film Dwellings, Simonds describes the fragility of his miniature clay landscapes, built in crevices and corners on the Lower East Side. The way members of the public came upon them and wonder about how they got there reminds me of the reaction I sometimes have to the latest appearance in London of Banksy or Space Invaders. But watching these films I inevitably find myself distracted from the artworks by glimpses of the real city, now long gone: the ruined buildings, the fleeting appearance of cars and people, the faded light.

Postscript: these have since been put on YouTube and so I have embedded two of them here.
 

Poems to the Sea

To Tate Modern for Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons. It’s difficult to be neutral about Cy Twombly, particularly given the extremes of praise and criticism he attracts. His most recent work doesn’t do much for me, but I’ve always liked Poems to the Sea (1959), one of the highlights (if memory serves) of the Serpentine Gallery’s Twombly show a few years ago. I see Tracey Emin is a fan of these too. Here is some commentary from reviewers of the Tate exhibition:  

Sue Hubbard: “In the spring of 1957, Twombly left America and set sail once again for Italy, leaving the citadel of modernist painting for a world steeped in ancient mythology and struggling with the aftermath of war. White and bleached, his paintings from this period are full of the effects of the harsh Mediterranean light. His Poems to the Sea series, executed in a single day in 1959, is crammed with classical and poetic references. "Whiteness," said Twombly of these spare, lyrical works that elide calligraphy, poetry and painting, "can be the classic state of the intellect, or a neo-Romantic area of remembrance." There is an austere purity to all this classical whiteness as his snaking pencil lines, erased by the smears of white paint, unravel into a syntax of approximate meaning.”

Laura Cumming: “Writing, drawing - they are never completely decoupled. Numbers and letters are like pictograms; lines rippling across a page appear purely abstract, except they resemble waves, and what do waves resemble, Twombly delicately implies, but lines of writing? Poems to the Sea is the title of this series, and what are Twombly's paintings but hand-drawn poems?”

Gordon Burn: “Nowhere is his genius for evocation - for suggesting the mood or feeling of a place or a moment - more apparent than in the set of 24 drawings he made in 1959 called Poems to the Sea. "The sea is white three-quarters of the time, just white - early morning," Twombly told [David] Sylvester. "The Mediterranean at least . . . is always just white, white, white. And then, even when the sun comes up, it becomes a lighter white."

Looking at Poems to the Sea again I found myself thinking about Twombly’s experience among artists in different media at Black Mountain College. They look as if Rauschenberg had partially erased and painted in white over some Cage-influenced Olson poems that had been applied to canvas by Motherwell... The Mediterranean sea in these poems has been written over repeatedly through the centuries (later Twombly paintings specifically reference sea legends like the story of Hero and Leander). In spite of their “whiteness”, Twombly’s Poems ot the Sea convey confusing traces of history and culture. In this they are very different to some of the other seas I’ve discussed here - Sugimoto’s empty vistas, say, or the powerful otherness of the waves in Guillevic’s poems.

Landscape in The Assumption of the Virgin

Misty hills which might almost be a photograph. Zoom out to include the details of trees and a building and the painting looks more like a late eighteenth century oil sketch, a picturesque view of Italy:


Zoom out further and the landscape includes a scattering of figures. Seeming less realistically painted, they stand looking down at the river in attitudes of calm, echoing the slim trees. The pale blue sky and gentle curve of the river give the scene a beautiful delicate atmosphere. The painting now seems older - it dates from the early sixteenth century.


Zoom out again and the landscape is revealed as a backdrop. The painting is The Assumption of the Virgin by Milanese painter, Bergognone (active 1481–1522). The cloud is part of the figure of the Virgin and drifts free of the distant view, the brown rocks in the foreground separate the religious drama from the peaceful scene beyond.


And here is the full painting,a large vertical altarpiece, in which the landscape is completely dominated by the figures. I've not come across Bergognone in any writing on landscape art. The fact that Italian Renaissance landscape painting takes place in the interstices of Biblical and mythological stories make it quite easy to overlook even the places or imaginary views painted by those artists who do receive their due in histories of landscape art - Bellini, Leonardo, Titian... But peer into the depths of the less famous works in public museums (like the Met, where I photographed this painting), and you can be transported to some surprising places.

Landscape 154

I’ve been looking back at some early editions of Modern Painters - this posting is essentially a continuation of my earlier one describing the way Peter Fuller promoted landscape painting in the late eighties through this magazine. In a spring 1990 editorial, Fuller praised the new Tate Gallery re-hang which gave prominence to British painters like Stanley Spencer. But he was predictably disappointed that an ‘exemplary’ room dedicated to The School of London was followed by the ‘numbing, post-modern anaesthesia’ of Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys ‘and that frightfully boring woman, Agnes Martin.’ If only Fuller could have hung the final room instead with recent landscape paintings it would be possible to ‘prove that landscape painting in the 1970s and 1980s was at least comparable to that of the 1930s and 1940s.’ He doesn’t discuss this in detail but the article is illustrated with a couple of examples: Keith Grant’s Ice-Fjord, Evening, Jacobshavn (1989) and David Leverett’s Thumb Suite.

Here is a list of some of the (then) contemporary landscape painters covered by Modern Painters in its first five years or so and who might have featured in Peter Fuller’s room: Ray Atkins, David Blackburn, Maurice Cockrill, Peter Doig, Vanessa Gardiner, Ardyn Halter, Derek Hirst, Derek Hyatt, Merlin James, Alex Katz, Peter Prendergast, Len Tabner, William Tillyer, David Tress and John Virtue. Some of them have fared better than others. Anthony O’Hear wrote a review article ‘Towards a New Landscape’ in Modern Painters (Autumn 1993) which picked out Virtue and Wendy Connelly as promising younger contemporaries. A search on Wendy Connelly doesn’t turn up much, but John Virtue continues to have a high profile (his most recent London exhibition was earlier this year). An encomium by Simon Schama in 2005 strikes a slightly Fuller-ish tone: “Virtue's paintings have been made as if much of contemporary art, or rather the fashion of contemporary installation art, had never happened, or at best is a facile distraction from more solidly enduring things.”

There is some footage of John Virtue at the Artists on Film site and quite a few pieces on-line about the London paintings he made whilst at the National Gallery. However, a 1993 Modern Painters Adam Nicholson article interviewed him while he was still living and working in the village of South Tawton, Devon. The village is dominated by a church (for Virtue, ‘a giant stake with which the forms of the landscape are pinned in place’) and it is the church tower which recurs in his ongoing sequence of monochrome landscapes at that time: e.g. Landscape 154 (1993), Landscape 184 (1993) and Landscape 192 (1992-3). The Landscape sequence began in 1978 when, influenced by the drawings and etchings of Rembrandt, Samuel Palmer, Van Gogh and Seurat, Virtue abandoned colour and began drawing the Lancashire countryside. His 1980s works were relatively intricate, assembling fragments of landscape in grids. In 1991 he started painting more expansively on canvas, using shellac-thickened ink and not minding much if the work in progress incorporated some actual rain or soil. This evolution to a less detailed style feels like a familiar trajectory (evident for example in recent Tate exhibitions of Howard Hodgkin and Peter Doig). The Modern Painters article ends by stating what Virtue thinks his paintings are not: topographical, nostalgic, literary. He wants to convey a visceral, visionary, visual response to landscape.

Brightening fields of ether fair-disclos'd

James Thomson in 1726 by John Vanderbank

'From brightening fields of ether fair-disclos'd, /Child of the sun, refulgent Summer comes...' Hot sunny weather today beings to mind these opening lines of James Thomson's poem 'Summer' (1730).  In his enjoyable survey Lives of the Poets (1998), Michael Schmidt devotes a whole chapter to Thomson, but calls it 'Dead Pastoral'. Here are some of his arguments against Thomson:

• He is now 'primarily read by scholars who prefer dust to living dirt'
• His verse was once as ubiquitous in inns and cottages as Gideon bibles and was similarly 'reassuring and instructive but never taxing'
• He was fashionably up-to-date on philosophy and science, but this modernity now dates him
• His language is derived from Milton - he 'vulgarized Milton as he vulgarized the new science'
• There is verbal exuberance but 'it is hard at times to see through the adjectival undergrowth to a subject'
• He forfeits our attention by ascending to generalization. Gilbert White's prose conveys far more because he addresses a subject whereas Thomson addresses an audience
• Although there are good lines there is 'want of method', in Dr Johnson's judgement
• Nevertheless, Johnson admired Thomson, a misjudgment Schmidt puts down to his enthusiasm for the novelty of Thomson's subject matter
• And yet Thomson's approach wasn't that new -he revived the georgic, but others had already done this
• Thomson's countryside is recognisable rather than mythic, but it is still an optimistic, idealised view that celebrates commerce an enterprise - The Seasons is a Whig epic
• The best thing he occasioned was William Collins' Ode on Thomson's death

Pretty damning. Of course Schmidt does credit Thomson with a few good moments, like these delicious lines from 'Summer':

'Bear me, Pomona! to thy citron groves;
To where the lemon and the piercing lime,
With the deep orange glowing through the green,
Their lighter glories blend. Lay me reclined
Beneath the spreading tamarind, that shakes,
Fanned by the breeze, its fever-cooling fruit.'

Schmidt argues that Thomson can only really be enjoyed in odd lines. 'He lacks Wordsworth's engagement. His is an enthusiasm of the various senses, but the whole man is withheld. Wordsworth's imagination is continuous with the experienced world, Thomson's tangential to it.' But Thomson has always been dipped into for the poetic fragments, like the quotations that artists like Turner appended to their paintings. Turner went so far as to paint a tribute to the poet, Thomson's Aeolian Harp (1809), showing an ideal memorial to the poet in which a harp placed on his tomb could respond to the cycle of the seasons. Turner wrote lines to accompany the painting: '... Let Summer shed her many blossoms fair, / to shield the trembling strings in noon-tide ray; / While ever and anon the dulcet air / shall rapturous thrill, or sigh in sweets away...'

The James Thomson memorial in Richmond

Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef

Strange underwater landscapes are currently on display at the South Bank - the Institute for Figuring have brought their hyperbolic crochet coral reef project to England:

'The IFF reef has been inspired by the principles of hyperbolic crochet originally developed by mathematician Dr Daina Taimina. In 1997 Dr Taimina discovered how to make models of the geometry known as hyperbolic space using the feminine art of crochet. Until that time most mathematicians had believed it was impossible to construct physical models of hyperbolic forms, yet nature had been doing just that for hundreds of millions of years. It turns out that many marine organisms embody hyperbolic geometry, among them kelps, corals, sponges and nudibranchs. The IFF reef not only looks like an actual coral reef, it draws on the same underlying geometry endemic in the oceanic realm... Over the past two years, through increasingly freeform experimentation, we have discovered that tiny changes in the underlying crochet algorithms will result in major changes to the resulting forms. By exploiting this insight we have gradually evolved a wide taxonomy of hyperbolic crochet “species.” To our surprise, the range of possible forms seems to be endless, yet they all result from extremely simple instruction sets. Just as the teeming variety of living species on earth result from different versions of the DNA-based genetic code, so too a huge range of crochet hyperbolic species have been brought into being through minor modifications to the underlying code. As time progresses the models have “evolved” from the simple purity of Dr Taimina’s mathematically precise algorithms to more complex aberrations that invoke ever more naturalistic forms.'

The London reef exhibition is in two parts. The Hayward Gallery shows some of the earlier works from this project: 'the Bleached Reef, a new configuration of the Ladies Silurian Reef, the beautifully archaic Branched Anemone Garden, and the ever-growing Toxic Reef... the wondrously surreal Chicago Cambrian Reef (curated by IFF contributor Aviva Alter), plus a new formation of the Beaded Reef by master beaders Rebecca Peapples and Sue Von Ohlsen, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable Reef (with hot-pink sand by Kathleen Greco), and the Bottle Tree Grove (featuring works by Christine Wertheim, Evelyn Hardin and Nadia Severns)'. The Royal Festival Hall has a display of reefs made by UK crafters (see photograph above). Mrs Plinius, who is a dab hand with the needles, was one of the contributors.

Severn's ambient wave

The Book of English Rivers by Samuel Lewis (1855) contains brief descriptions of all the main rivers, noting down points of topographical interest: notable views, snippets of local history and literary associations. There are no extended passages of description, but the flow of place names as he tracks the course of each river has its own kind of poetry. There follows a kind of précis of Lewis’s entry for the river Severn which gives an indication of the landscapes along the river he found particularly interesting.

Lewis traces the course of the Severn from its source, past the village of Llandinam, the Roman station of Caer-Sws and Newtown from where it is possible to see Montgomery Castle, birthplace of George Herbert. (Herbert wrote religious poetry but you can imagine him looking at the river when he wrote in ‘The Storm’: ‘If as the windes and waters here below / Do flie and flow, / My sighs and tears as busy were above; Sure they would move / And much affect thee..’ )

From there, Lewis continues, the river passes Powis Castle and becomes navigable at Welshpool, flows by Llandrinio and the Breiddin Hills and then leaves Wales for the plain of Salop. He notes the striking landscape at Loton mansion, White Abbey and then describes the course of ‘Severn’s ambient wave’ through Shrewsbury. This memorable phrase comes from a poem by William Shenstone: ‘Admired Salopia! that with venial pride / Eyes her bright form in Severn's ambient wave, / Famed for her loyal cares in perils try'd, / Her daughters lovely, and her striplings brave.’

Near Shrewsbury is Meole Brook, a trout stream where the fisherman who taught Izaak Walton fly-fishing, Thomas Barker, grew up. Memorable buildings follow: Haughmond Abbey, Attingham Hall (designed by Athenian Stuart), the Roman remains at Wroxeter, Cound Hall, Leighton Hall and Buildwas Abbey. The industrial landscape of Coalbrook Dale comes next, followed by Apley with notable views to be had from the drive of Apley Terrace. Still in Shropshire, the Severn flows through Bridgenorth and past Quatford church on an eminence above the river. To Dudmaston woods, Alveley, Higley and then the river enters a small part of Staffordshire.

Flowing on into Worcestershire, at Stourport it receives the Stour. Lewis mentions Thorngrove villa, the seat of Lucien Bonaparte during his stay in England, and Hallow where the scientist Sir Charles Bell is buried. At Worcester there are picturesque views of the Malvern hills and more noteworthy views further downriver at Severn-Stoke church. Upton is ‘described in poetry by Mr Cottle “- Many stately trees, and many cots, / And villages, o’erspread the country round…’’'

The rocky scenery of Mythe is the next notable landscape feature on the river’s course. Then, after Tewkesbury, the Severn divides temporarily in two and forms the Isle of Alney, with Gloucester on the eastern channel. Having received another river, the Froome, it makes a horse-shoe bend with great views from Newnham to Cotswolds and Forest of Dean. Finally, Lewis brings his description to the estuary: Sharpness Point, Lydney, and the meeting place of the lower Avon, flowing from Bristol.

The Severn seen from Gloucestershire, 2008

The sea at Aldeburgh

Caspar David Friedrich, Bohemian Landscape, c. 1810

Back in June 1991 composer David Matthews gave the first Peter Fuller memorial lecture, discussing the link between music and art, with a strong emphasis on landscape. For example, Friedrich's paintings of distant mountains find their 'exact musical equivalent' in Bruckner's 8th Symphony, with its 'regligious apprehension of nature'. The 'Royal Hunt and storm' from Berlioz's opera The Trojans (1863) is similar in spirit to Claude's last painting, Landscape with Ascanius shooting the Stag of Sylvia (1682). And Wagner and Turner share a mastery of colour.

The talk was reported on by Boris Ford in the Autumn 1991 edition of Modern Painters. He quotes a section on 'Dawn', one of the Sea Interludes in Peter Grimes, which was compared to a Philip Wilson Steer seascape, Sunrise on the Sea, Walberswick (1889):

'... a high, unaccompanied, melodic line for violins and flutes. This is clearly the sky. If the violins had played the line by themselves, the purity of their tone might have suggested an unclouded blue, but the stage directions indicate 'a cold grey morning', and with the dulling of the violins' bright overtones by the flute doubling, we sense one of those high, wide, leaden skies so typical of the East coast: this is the sea at Aldeburgh... so Britten brings us in, through the clarinet and viola arpeggios, outlined by harp, which are perhaps the breaking of waves on the shore, to the great expanse of the sea itself: soft brass chords expressive of the sea's power and of its latent menace, which will explode later in the opera in a violent storm.'

In 1995 a new score of the Sea Interludes was discovered which had been closely annotated by the composer (and might therefore be seen as related tengentially to the 'annotated landscape' art discussed in my previous posting here). According to the BBC proms site 'it is not known when or why Britten marked up this copy of the score - was it perhaps to help him draft a programme note? - though the precise, albeit prosaic, nature of the annotations suggests that specific events in the music were related to specific visual images in the composer's mind. Thus, against passages in 'Dawn', we can read 'land (or sea scape)', 'slow wave', 'gulls' and 'a big wave', and in 'Storm', 'Seascape (whole sea)', 'waves', 'wind', 'spray blowing' and (rather more revealingly) 'still centre (Grimes' ecstasy)'.

Petra, 13 April 1858

In his essay 'Painters as Writers' Stephen Spender wrote:

'The meeting place of words and painting is those drawings in which painters have scribbled the names of colours as an aide-mémoire. The word "grey" written against olive trees by van Gogh or Cotman obviously means something different to the artist from that which it suggests to the reader. When one looks at a sketch and sees a written word, there is the suggestion of a leap from the word to the miracle of the paint, and this is itself an effect of poetry, which Apollinaire tried to exploit when he arranged the words of a poem in the form of sketches. Moreover, the painters who write most on their sketches themselves seem to be extremely open to the suggestion of words, an extreme example being the painter and humorous poet Edward Lear, who did many such sketches.'

The Edward Lear example below was the best I could find with a quick search - other sketches of his have a lot more words on them. I'm tempted to suggest that Lear's paintings in this vein belong to a rarely noticed subgenre of 'annotated landscapes', along with photographs like Roni Horn's Still Water, Chinese landscape paintings like Mount Pan, and even, at a stretch, geographical illustrations like those of Geoffrey Hutchings.

Edward Lear, Petra 13 April 1858

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Finished Housing, Lakewood, California

The Plow that Broke the Plains (see previous posting) is discussed in an essay by Denis Cosgrove, included in my friend Kathryn’s interdisciplinary archive BIPOLAR. Lorentz’s images of the Dustbowl are one of the examples picked by Cosgrove to consider five key moments in 20^th century environmentalism. He also talks about photographs of atomic bomb tests in the fifties and the first images seen of the Earth from space. The other two examples are linked:

• Environmental concern in the early twentieth century was focused on nature protection, as in John Muir’s campaign for the creation of Yosemite National Park, the singular ‘natural’ beauty of which had been established in the previous century through Albert Bierstadt’s paintings and photographs by Eadweard Muybridge and Carleton Watkins. Subsequently, the panoramic shots of Yosemite taken by Muir’s acolyte Ansel Adams would feature in a series of Sierra Club coffee table books. Their portrayal of a timeless wilderness untouched by human agency only started to be criticised by a new generation of environmentalists in the late sixties.
  

• Mass suburbanisation after the War brought new fears of urban sprawl and, again, images were crucial in dramatising the issue. Cosgrove highlights William Garnett’s aerial photographs of new suburban homes, like Finished Housing, Lakewood, California, which were originally shot to celebrate the use of industrial building techniques in a period of high housing demand. However, re-titled and juxtaposed with Ansel Adams photographs in the Sierra Club’s This is the American Earth (1960), they were used to symbolise both the destruction of the wilderness and the restriction of freedom in an age of uniform mass housing.

Cosgrove ends his essay by discussing the way images of threatened polar bears are being used to give fears of global warming a sense of urgency. ‘The focus is on natural life, with topography and landscape reduced to a backdrop, no longer a space of deep time and infinitely slow evolution, but of accelerating change and catastrophic extinction.’

High winds and sun . . .

High winds and sun . . .
High winds and sun...
a country without rivers and with little rain.
Settler, plow at your peril!

Last week I watched the new Naxos DVD of The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936), the Dust Bowl documentary described by its director, Pare Lorentz, as a ‘melodrama of nature’. The film is partly renowned for Virgil Thomson’s score, divided into six movements: Prelude, Pastorale (Grass), Cattle, Blues (Speculation), Drought, and Devastation. There is an excellent Pare Lorentz site with the full Whitmanesque script and an extract from the film. For me the most striking section of the film comes when the plains are transformed into a grey sea of dust and the sound of a pump organ is heard on the score playing what the notes to the DVD describe as a ‘bare, neo-medieval two part counterpoint.’ It is very affecting.

From a landscape perspective the next film Lorentz and Thomson made, The River, is even more interesting. The script was praised by James Joyce as "the most beautiful prose that I have heard in ten years", and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1938. It describes the Mississippi in its Eden-like state before the coming of industry, agriculture, ‘a hundred cities and a thousand towns’. It laments the poverty and destruction caused by poor land and floods, but holds out the hope of redemption through New Deal projects like the dams of the Tennessee River Authority. There are some beautiful images, although some of the most striking, like a moving river of logs, were apparently taken from footage made for other films.

The Lorentz site also has a page on The City, a film sponsored by The American Institute of Planners for the 1939 World's Fair. This was made by Willard Van Dyke and Ralph Steiner, who had worked on the earlier films. Lorentz wrote the script, Lewis Mumford narrated it, and the music this time was by Aaron Copland.

The Moon Appearing and the Breeze Arriving

I have been reading rather enviously Gardenhistorygirl's recent posts about the gardens of Suzhou. The nearest I've got to seeing any of these is the Metropolitan Museum's Astor Court in New York - this was was modeled on the Late Spring Studio at Wang Shi Yuan, a Suzhou garden with particularly evocative names (e.g. The Pavilion of the Moon Appearing and the Breeze Arriving). If I ever get to Suzhou I'd love to see the rockery at Shi Zi Lin, the artificial hill at Cang Lang Ting, the cliff walk at Ou Yuan and the collection of miniature landscapes at Lin Yuan. I can imagine sipping tea in the Hall of Distant Fragrance in Zhuo Zheng Yuan, gazing out onto the water garden... I'm sure the reality is less poetic.

The Oxford Companion to Gardens describes Suzhou as ideally situated: plentiful water, pleasant hills, good climate and a local supply of finest garden stones. These stones came from an island in Lake Tai (Taihu). 'They are grey limestone boulders excavated from the water where waves, hammering against small, harder stones embedded in the rock, have eroded them into peculiar shapes and textures. Those that are wrinkled, emaciated, and full of jagged holes are considered the best and, in the Song dynasty, were some of the most expensive objects in the empire. Although, originally, Taihu stones lost value if improved by human hands, a local industry developed which encouraged the natural weathering process by placing in the lake suitable specimens of limestone for later harvesting. Books on rock collecting, like Du Wuan's Yun Lin Shi Bu (Stone Catalogue of Cloudy Forest) written c. 1125, constantly warned connoisseurs to beware of fakes.'

A crater formed by a one-ton bomb, or an acre of bluebonnets

Visiting somewhere like Orsanmichele in Florence, we are grateful for the opportunity to see the combined talents of artists like Donatello, Nanni de Banco and Ghiberti, who were each commissioned to provide sculptures for the site. Land art nearly had a special place of this kind: the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. If things had gone differently in 1966-7, the airport could now have had pioneering Earthworks by Robert Smithson, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt and Robert Morris. Here’s how Robert Smithson described the project at the time:

‘The object of this proposal is to “program” the landscape and define the limits of the air terminal site in a new way. Such a project would set a precedent and create an original approach to the esthetics of airport landscaping. All these works will be close to ground level (the highest being 3 feet). Robert Smithson and Robert Morris will build forms that will be visible to aircraft as they take off and land. Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre will provide works that will deal with the “sub-site,” and exist as underground landmarks.’

The story of the airport project is told in Suzaan Boettger’s book Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties. Walther Prokosch, an architect with the Manhattan firm T.A.M.S., had heard Smithson give a talk in June 1966, in which he described the city as a “crystalline network”, an idea similar to the modular design being developed for the airport by T.A.M.S. Smithson was taken on as a consultant and began thinking about the kind of sculpture necessary for an airport. First there could be ‘aerial art’ – large, flat, low lying works placed between the runways and building and visible from the air. Second, there were works inside the terminal but linked to the sites outside – these interior works were ‘non-sites’. Smithson’s proposals include Aerial Map – Proposal for Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport (1967), an obvious pre-cursor to Spiral Jetty. In June 1967 he published ‘Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site’ in Artforum, but that same month funding for Smithson via T.A.M.S. from the airport board ceased and the project never came to fruition.

For his contribution, Robert Morris created a Model and Cross-Section for Project in Earth and Sod (1966). It is a neat, minimal elevated disk, depicting an outdoor sculpture which clearly pre-figures later Earthworks, although not the work pursued in the late sixties by Morris himself, like the pile of soil and industrial detritus made for the EARTH WORKS show two years later.

Carl Andre’s proposal was a crater 12 inches deep and 144 inches in diameter, created by an explosive charge ‘detonated by the sculptor, Carl Andre.’ Smithson published the proposal (with echoes of Vietnam and flower power) as: ‘A crater formed by a one-ton bomb dropped from 10,000 feet, or, An acre of bluebonnets (state flower of Texas)’.

Sol LeWitt proposed to Smithson a kind of anti-monument: ‘encase a six-inch wooden cube containing something in an eighteen inch cement cube and bury it someplace on The Tract. The precise spot would not be designated...’ There is some irony to this given the monumental scale of later Earthworks and the increasing importance of land art sites for cultural tourism. The airport lost its chance to host this early work by Sol LeWitt, but it naturally now has a public art programme, including a piece by LeWitt.

The Forest of Fontainebleau

Here's a movie quote you'll remember...

"Well, all right, why is life worth living? That's a very good question. Well, there are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. Uh, like what? Okay. Um, for me... oh, I would say... what, Groucho Marx, to name one thing... and Willie Mays, and... the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony, and... Louis Armstrong's recording of 'Potatohead Blues'... Swedish movies, naturally... 'Sentimental Education' by Flaubert... Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra... those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne... the crabs at Sam Wo's... Tracy's face..."

Among many reasons why Woody Allen might consider L'Éducation sentimentale one of the things that make life worthwhile are Flaubert's beautiful, precise descriptions of people, things and places. Douglas Parmée has listed some of the landscapes Flaubert includes: Nogent (dull and domesticated), Auteuil (pretty but with a touch of autumn melancholy) and various views of The Seine, which 'flows through throughout the novel, sometimes beautiful but indifferent, sometimes charmingly delicate.' However, the most striking example in the book is the extended sequence describing a brief time of happiness for Frédéric and Rosanette in the Forest of Fontainebleau. According to Parmée it 'has all the immediacy of notes taken on the spot: solemnity and exhilaration, painterly chiaroscuro with cinematic long shots and close-ups, lurking danger (monstrous rocks, smells of decay, leafless branches in midsummer), the delicacy of gossamer and butterflies, glittering water and greenery of every shade, sun and sudden showers, hills and valleys, low bushes and towering trees...' This extract from the French text describes the effect of light on the forest trees:

'La lumière, à de certaines places éclairant la lisière du bois, laissait les fonds dans l'ombre ; ou bien, atténuée sur les premiers plans par une sorte de crépuscule, elle étalait dans les lointains des vapeurs violettes, une clarté blanche. Au milieu du jour, le soleil, tombant d'aplomb sur les larges verdures, les éclaboussait, suspendait des gouttes argentines à la pointe des branches, rayait le gazon de traînées d'émeraudes, jetait des taches d'or sur les couches de feuilles mortes ; en se renversant la tête, on apercevait le ciel, entre les cimes des arbres. Quelques-uns, d'une altitude démesurée, avaient des airs de patriarches et d'empereurs, ou, se touchant par le bout, formaient avec leurs longs fûts comme des arcs de triomphe ; d'autres, poussés dès le bas obliquement, semblaient des colonnes près de tomber.

Cette foule de grosses lignes verticales s'entrouvrait. Alors, d'énormes flots verts se déroulaient en bosselages inégaux jusqu'à la surface des vallées où s'avançait la croupe d'autres collines dominant des plaines blondes, qui finissaient par se perdre dans une pâleur indécise.'

And here's a depiction of the forest trees by one of Woody Allen's favourite artists...

Paul Cézanne, The Forest of Fountainebleau, 1879-82

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Whiling Away the Summer

This is a detail from Whiling Away the Summer (1679) a handscroll by Wu Li (1632-1718). What an enticing image of scholarly retreat! As the Met's curators say, 'there is a dreamlike quality about the painting: birds, trees, bamboo, mist, and even rocks dance joyously around the hermit-scholar, who sits quietly reading in his idyllic domain.' Wu Li wrote that he had painted this landscape 'one clear morning after a rainfall, sitting alone in his studio thinking of an absent friend'.

This work is labelled 'Landscape as Self-Portrait' in the Met's exhibition How to Read Chinese Paintings. Some other highlights:

• Scholar Viewing a Waterfall by Ma Yuan (act. ca. 1190–1225) where the "one corner" composition contrasts the solidity of rocks and trees, to the misty emptiness beyond the falls. It is similar to Watching the Deer by a Pine-Shaded Stream, which I referred to in an earlier post.

• Twin Pines, Level Distance by the artist-calligrapher Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322), a landscape which one might describe as having been written... Zhao advocated different writing styles for different landscape elements - unmodulated seal script for trees, 'flying white' cursive script for rocks.

• Poet Strolling by a Marshy Bank by Liang Kai (act. 1st half C13) in which the inaccessibility of the distant landscape is emphasised by a massive overhanging cliff, partially obstructing the poet's view.

• Old Trees, Level Distance by Guo Xi (c 1000-90), a misty 'landscape of emotion' according to the Met, who quote from the impressively titled treatise Guo Xi wrote, Linquan gaozhi (Lofty Ambitions in Forests and Streams): 'after the outlines are made clear by dark ink strokes, use ink wash mixed with blue to retrace these outlines repeatedly so that, even if the ink outlines are clear, they appear always as if they had just come out of the mist and dew.'

Paterson

Here's an extract from the interview Robert Smithson gave to Paul Cummings in 1972:

"CUMMINGS: Would you like to say something about your visit with William Carlos Williams?
SMITHSON: Yes. Well, this took place I think in either 1958 or 1959. William Carlos Williams was going to do an Introduction for Irving Layton's book of poems. So I went out to Rutherford with Irving Layton... He talked a lot about Allen Ginsberg coming out at all hours of the night, and having to spring poets out there. Allen Ginsberg comes from Paterson, New Jersey. I guess the Paterson area is where I had a lot of my contact with quarries and I think that is somewhat embedded in my psyche. As a kid I used to go and prowl around all those quarries. And of course, they figured strongly in Paterson. When I read the poems I was interested in that, especially this one part of Paterson where it showed all the strata levels under Paterson. Sort of proto-conceptual art, you might say. Later on I wrote an article for Artforum on Passaic which is a city on the Passaic River south of Paterson. In a way I think it reflects that whole area. Williams did have a sense of that kind of New Jersey landscape."

The strata levels section Smithson is referring to comes towards the end of Paterson Book Three (1949). Williams included an extract from William Nelson's History of the City of Paterson which lists the materials found at various depths when an artesian well was bored at the Passaic Rolling Mill, Paterson. At an initial depth of 65 feet there was "Red sandstone, fine". Then we encounter mostly shale and sandstone at other depths until we reach 2,100 feet down: "Shaly sandstone". The most interesting part of this vertical, one-dimensional landscape seems to occur around 1,170-1,370 feet, with some selenite, pyrites and quicksand. Williams also quoted the conclusion that beyond 2,100 feet there was no point in further digging as water would be unfit for use. This text is juxtaposed in Paterson with extracts from a letter by Ezra Pound exhorting Williams to do more reading, e.g. Golding's Ovid and "all the Gk tragedies" (Pound's canon of good writing as literary historical strata to dig down into...)

Paterson covers many subjects - art, poetry, love, religion, economics... However it starts in the New Jersey landscape: an image of the city lying like a man with his head near the Paterson Falls. Williams quotes his dictum, no ideas but in things, and then describes the view: 'From above, higher than the spires, higher / even than the office towers, from the oozy fields / abandoned to grey beds of dead grass, / black sumac, withered weed-stalks, / mud and thickets cluttered with dead leaves - / the river comes pouring in above the city / and crashes from the edge of the gorge / in a recoil of spray and rainbow mists...' You can hear Williams read these lines here.

In another 1972 interview, with Gianni Pettena, Robert Smithson said "I like landscapes that suggest prehistory. As an artist it is sort of interesting to take on the persona of a geologic agent where man actually becomes part of that process rather than overcoming it - rather than overcoming the natural processes of challenging the situation. you just go along with it, and there can be a kind of building that takes place this way. I did an article once, on Passaic, New jersey, a kind of rotting industrial town where they were building a highway along the river. It was somewhat devastated. In a way, this article I wrote on Passaic could be conceived as a kind of appendix to William Carlos Williams' poem Paterson. It comes out of that kind of New Jersey ambience where everything is chewed up. New Jersey like a kind of destroyed California, a derelict California."