Landscape and Western Art

by Malcolm Andrews

What is landscape? How does it differ from "land?" Does landscape always imply something to be pictured, a scene? When and why did we begin to cherish images of nature? What is "nature?" Is it everything that isn't art, or artifact? By addressing these and many other questions, Landscape and Western Art explores the myriad ideas and images of the natural world in Western art since the Renaissance.

Implying that land is the raw material, and that art is created by turning land into landscape, which then becomes art, author Malcolm Andrews takes the reader on a thematic tour of the fascinating and challenging issues of landscape as art. The books broad sweep covers the full, rich spectrum of landscape art, including painting, gardening, panorama, poetry, photography, and art. Artistic issues are investigated in connection with Western cultural movements, and within a full international and historical context.

Clear explanations and beautiful illustrations convey to the reader the idea of landscape as an experience in which everyone is creatively involved. Landscape and Western Art provides an enlightening and comprehensive critical overview of landscape art.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, History, Art History, Reference, Academic

256 pages, Paperback

First published February 3, 1999

Reviews

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some Questions About Landscape

This is a much more lavishly produced book than Sir Kenneth Clark's Landscape Into Art (1949), which I have recently been reading, but much less satisfactory as a survey of landscape art. Indeed, a better title might have been "Some Questions About Landscape." They are good questions, though, including the one on his second page, where Andrews questions Clark's assumptions:

In Clark's title, landscape was the raw material waiting to be processed by the artist. I began by implying that land rather than landscape is the raw material, and that in the conversion of land into landscape a perceptual process has already begun whereby that material is prepared as an appropriate subject for the painter or photographer, or simply for absorption as a gratifying aesthetic experience. The process might, therefore, be formulated as twofold: land into landscape; landscape into art.

Indeed, Andrews calls his first chapter "Land into Landscape." He brings a dizzying amount of erudition and reference to the question, calling on poets, photographers, philosophers, and even anthropologists to answer it. The heart of the matter, he suggests, is man's changing relationship to nature. "Landscape in art tells us, or asks us to think about, where we belong." Recently, though, that relationship has changed:

We don't have to imagine, with the aid of alluring images of Arcadian natural simplicity, what it must have been like to live in Nature; we are all too aware of our dependency on Nature now. More crucially still, we feel Nature's dependency on us. Landscape as a way of seeing from a distance is incompatible with this heightened sense of out relationship to Nature as a living (or dying) environment. As a phase in the cultural life of the West, landscape may already be over.

Although there is a rough chronological flow to Andrews' subsequent chapters, his book makes no attempt to offer a history of landscape painting; rather, it tackles similar philosophical questions in roughly the order in which they became relevant. His chapter on the Renaissance, for instance, "Subject or Setting?", considers the emergence of landscape backgrounds by examining a series of mostly unfamiliar paintings of St. Jerome, delving into everything from Catholic hagiography to contemporary hermeneutics. He marshals a fascinating set of examples, from Antonello da Messina to Magritte, in "Framing the View," about the interplay between inside and outside. He is brilliant in "Astonished beyond Expression," about mountain scenery and the sublime in art. And, striking off from Turner's astonishing Snowstorm in his chapter "Nature as Picture or Process?", he revisits many of the arguments from his opening chapter, but in a more dynamic way, more closely tied to actual examples.

In short, I enjoy him most when he compares actual paintings, all of which are beautifully illustrated in the book, mostly in color, with superb close-up details prefacing each chapter. But too many of his topics—those on landscape as amenity, topography, and politics, for example—read like isolated lectures rather than chapters in a book, discussing often abstruse points in difficult language, buttressed by works that are often far outside the mainstream of landscape art. So this is by no means a text to recommend as a general introduction, although I respect the fact that he demands answers to questions which, in six years of teaching and sixty of gallery-going, I had never thought to ask.

[Elizabeth Schlatter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very readable sort-of survey of landscape art since the Renaissance. It's "sort-of" a survey, because it's organized by theoretical developments which in general hue to chronology but not always. Andrews includes lots of quotes from artists, writers, and leading historians on landscape and landscape theory, while providing numerous examples. Some themes include the "frame" of landscape, idealization of Nature, the sublime, politics, nature as picture or as process, and finally, the change from landscape as a separating device between the artist and nature to landscape as encompassing/including the artist and the spectator. Andrews doesn't skimp on theory, but he also makes it completely relevant to his arguments and very understandable. I actually wish he'd expanded some sections, but then the book might not have been as manageable as it is.

[Alberto Simonetti · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for anybody interested in landscape painting and photography.
I was pleased to see that it featured photographs by masters like Ansel Adams and Joe Cornish. Less pleased to read some nonsensical remarks about the apparent inability of photography to "adequately record the subjective relation of the observer to the natural scene...". Obviously, I'm a landscape photographer ;-)
Still, a very good book on many different levels.

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally, a book on landscape art that is not a load of nonsense. Hooray!!

[Malcolm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Malcolm Andrews has really usefully reviewed and outlined the changing use and construction of the landscape (and essentially artistic term) in western art. An excellent introduction.

[Caryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Excellent introduction to further research...