This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by [log in to unmask] /-------------------- advertisement -----------------------\ Share the spirit with a gift from Starbucks. Our coffee brewers & espresso machines at special holiday prices. http://www.starbucks.com/shop/subcategory.asp?category_name=Sale/Clearance&ci=274&cookie_test=1 \----------------------------------------------------------/ 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 HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact Alyson Racer at [log in to unmask] or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to [log in to unmask] Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company ========================================================= Important Subscriber Information: The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ . 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