Surveying the landscape
It’s a commonplace that people are made by their landscape, whether that be a battered coastline, rolling green pastures, or an urban jungle. Small figures in over-powering natural or metropolitan environments have been a consistently popular subject for artists. Think of Monet’s atmospheric painting of Gare Saint-Lazare or Tacita Dean’s films of lighthouses and violent waves. Something seems to have brought British art galleries back to these ideas this year, with a number of exhibitions dealing with landscape being staged across the country in galleries small and large, national and regional.
The first one that I saw was at Tate Britain when I went to check out the re-hang of the permanent galleries. Looking at the View pulled together images of landscape from 300 years of British art, ranging from Constable and Wright of Derby to Julian Opie and Tracey Emin. In a large, loosely divided room, these disparate works were allowed to converse across the space, and the visitor was encouraged to wander around forming their own connections. While the juxtapositions were somewhat jarring at times, the different painting styles, I found, got me thinking about representations of, and reactions to, landscape more broadly. I found myself looking at the trees, fields or oceans across the paintings, rather than the styles in which they appeared.
I, likewise, found a landscape show on at Leeds Art Gallery when I whizzed in while on a conference. Here they had a very effective small show Contested Ground to celebrate the Leeds Art Fund Centenary, that considered how representations of landscape in British painting have changed over time. Quite a contrast from Tate Britain. The direction in which I went round the exhibition, meant that I started with a room of modern landscape works, including an extraordinary early painted vase by Richard Long, and then came to a representatively densely-packed hang of nineteenth-century paintings. As the text panels suggested, it got me thinking about how we Britons, and British artists, have changed in our response to landscape as a result of two world wars, and huge international travel, yet also the growing importance of local produce and British wildlife.
Lastly, I stumbled across Islands of Imagining: Artists and Escape curated by the MA students at the Courtauld Gallery in London. This is being shown alongside Collecting Gauguin, a standardly excellent small show from the Courtauld about the importance of Samuel Courtauld in bringing Gauguin to the 1920s British art scene. Imagining Islands sets a number of artists’ responses to the island paradise idyll alongside Gauguin’s well-known love affair with Tahiti, showing the island as anything but a benign space. Here Jan Brueghel the Elder and John Everett Millais rub shoulders with Marc Quinn and Tacita Dean. A nice commentary on Gauguin as well as a more thought-provoking consideration of landscape art over time than the Tate’s, I thought.
Somehow, this last show made me think back to Walking, the landscape experience piece by Robert Wilson that I went on as part of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival last year. There is much to be said for the landscape having its own voice in our reactions to it. But, sometimes the artist can get us thinking differently about how we survey our surroundings, something which this clutch of exhibitions amply shows.