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How the Impact of Modern Life Transformed Ideas of Nature
January 18, 2002
By KEN JOHNSON
Does an exhibition of British landscapes sound exciting? If
not, you may be pleasantly surprised by "Pastoral to
Postindustrial: British Works on Paper From the Whitworth
Art Gallery," now at the Grey Art Gallery at New York
University.
On the basis of quality alone the selection of some 100
watercolors, drawings and prints from the late 1700's to
nearly the present is a must see. It is studded with
marvelous jewels by luminaries like J. M. W. Turner, John
Constable and John Ruskin as well as fine gems by less
famous lights like Thomas Jones, John Martin and Samuel
Palmer.
If quality falls off as things progress into the 20th
century, reaching a nadir with art of the 1990's, it hardly
matters; from start to finish the show also offers a richly
provocative occasion to ponder the shifting meanings of
landscape for a society undergoing urbanization,
industrialization and eventually digitalization.
Landscape as a form in its own right and not just
background for more important pictorial goings-on came into
its own just when the Industrial Revolution was starting to
heat up: the endangered is readily idealized. What is
remarkable is the variety and complexity of ideas and
values to be discovered in a survey like this. The
exhibition was jointly organized by Grey Art Gallery and
the Whitworth Art Gallery of the University of Manchester
in England.
In the show's unfortunately thin catalog, the British
scholar Greg Smith adumbrates some of the animating themes.
He writes of how advances in transportation technology
enabled tourism to grow, which in turn spawned a market for
images of places near and far that people might visit, in
reality or vicariously.
He tells of how the inexorable processes of modernization
and the anxieties they brought on led to widespread hunger
for images of unspoiled nature on the one hand and on the
other for images of a historical continuity like pictures
of half-ruined Gothic churches or picturesque villages.
Watercolors and prints of such subjects served as
"consoling fictions for a growing urban market."
This is not just academic blather. In the exhibition itself
you can see clearly how wishes, dreams and myths are
embodied in pictures that ostensibly represent the world
simply as it appears to visual perception. Pictures from
the 1830's like a view of the Seine by Thomas Shotter Boys
or a busy canal scene in Venice by Samuel Prout surely
piqued bourgeois curiosity about the world in the way
National Geographic magazine would a century later.
And in a painting from the 1770's by Paul Sandby in which
Eton College Chapel looms quietly in the distance over neat
old homes while women tend cows in the foreground of a
parklike pasture, you have a harmonious marriage of nature
and culture - a promise of order in a world about to plunge
into the swirling vortex of modernity.
As the 19th century progresses, the point of view shifts
from seemingly objective forms of geographical
documentation to more subjective, often flamboyantly
Romantic visions. The evolution can be followed in six
stunning watercolors by Turner. (They make a visit to the
show worthwhile all by themselves.)
The earliest, made in 1794 before the artist was 20, is a
sober, carefully lined picture of St. Anselm's Chapel.
Subsequent works - seascapes and alpine scenes - become
more loosely painterly, more vividly colored and radiant.
More than an attraction of exotic scenery, one feels in
these works an urge for psychological intensity.
Toward the end of the 19th century along comes science with
its methods of analysis promising to put order back into
the world, albeit of a more dynamic kind. A sparkling small
gouache harbor scene by the Impressionist Arthur Melville
in which water and boats are abstracted into multicolored
dots and dashes reflects his focus on optical perception
and evokes a world made of logically behaving elementary
particles. Later under the influence of Cubism and its
English variant, Vorticism, artists like Paul Nash and
Frances Hodgkins abstracted nature into well-oiled
machinery with trees, roads and clouds turned into
interlocking streamlined parts, all radiating the light of
higher reason.
If the rise of mechanical technology brought visions of
utopia for some, however, others like Eric Kennington, who
drew visceral documentary pictures of the makeshift,
rat-infested shelters lived in by World War I soldiers
engaged in trench warfare, saw its potential to create hell
on earth.
In the exhibition spaces devoted to the post-World War II
era, aesthetic disappointment sets in. Here there are more
token prints by well-known artists like Howard Hodgkin,
Rachel Whiteread and Richard Long than first-rate original
works. Still, it is interesting to note the disappearance
of landscapes drawn from life and its transformation from
something sensually experienced to something conceptually
toyed with.
A print by Damien Hirst in which various kinds of rocks are
arranged in a grid on a pink field suggests how most of us
are more affected by the various grids that impinge on our
lives - time tables, traffic patterns, architectural space
- than by natural terrain. So for a breath of fresh air you
might go back in time to 1821 and have another look at
Constable's lovely, loosely painted, yet exactingly
observed picture of wind-blown clouds in an azure sky.
``Pastoral to Postindustrial: British Works on Paper From
the Whitworth Art Gallery'' will remain at the Grey Art
Gallery of New York University, 100 Washington Square East,
Greenwich Village, (212)998-6780, through Jan. 26.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/18/arts/design/18JOHN.html?ex=1012352709&ei=1&en=3a5d5380be10c810
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