By Dushko Petrovich | March 1, 2009

ON HIS DEATHBED in 1851, at the home of his mistress, the great English painter J. M. W.
Turner is said to have offered an enviably neat summary of his life's work and beliefs. Having
produced hundreds of oil paintings and watercolors over the previous six decades - a corpus of
landscapes that would redefine European art - Turner simply declared: "The sun is God."
In the century after Turner's death, landscape painting became the great engine of modern artistic
creativity. Artists did in fact live by chasing the sun, capturing the way it felt in the world in ever
more pioneering ways. Turner's pale and radiant scenes changed the way artists painted light; his
main rival, John Constable, was similarly influential with his moody evocations of shifting
weather. The French painters who followed - Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Degas - successively
pushed the boundaries of artistic innovation, and created landscapes that still count today among
the great works of art, bridging both serious and popular tastes.
In our own time, landscape painting retains an unquestionable popular appeal. As civilization
pulls us further and further from nature, it's no surprise that we cherish glimpses of arcadia.
Landscapes have become nearly ubiquitous: in living rooms and waiting rooms; on fine china
and restaurant walls; at adult ed and on PBS; in regular blockbuster exhibitions and on the
resulting sweatshirts, mugs, and even refrigerator magnets.
There is one place, however, where landscapes have almost disappeared: serious contemporary
painting. Whether it's pop masters like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, storytellers like
Jacob Lawrence and Philip Guston, or more recent standouts like Elizabeth Peyton and John
Currin, America's leading painters have done their most important work in other genres. It's hard
to think of a major gallery that regularly exhibits new landscape painting.
Of course, there are many sensitive artists - Rackstraw Downes, the late Neil Welliver, and
Boston's own John Walker among them - who paint recognizable outdoor scenes. But as the
genre itself has lost its prominence, their work has also been marginalized. What happened to
landscape painting? Its decline in status is even more surprising given the current moral,
scientific, and political preoccupation with the environment. One might think that scenes of
nature - central to our culture for centuries - would still have a role to play now, having done so
much to cultivate our appreciation of the environment in the first place.
In a sense, however, landscape never went away: It was just transformed into something
unrecognizable, and has begun to emerge again in surprising places. The rise and fall of
landscape painting tells an interesting story about art's relationship to the outside world over the
last two centuries, and the ways the genre might be resurfacing today suggest just how unsettled
our own relationship to nature has become.
Landscape has a deep history in Western art, though it rarely occupied center stage. From Greek
and Roman painting to the famous Florentines and Venetians, depictions of the landscape served
mainly as a backdrop to more important religious and political events, illustrating the verdant
agony of the expulsion from Eden, the vast holdings of a nobleman, or the stern solitude of a
saintly life. In the Netherlands and England, landscape struggled for pride of place alongside
portraiture, with its royal subjects and opulent props; in Paris, which was already the center of
the art world in the 19th century, it was history painting - with its imposing scale, somber palette,
and literary themes - that lorded over the annual Salon.
But Turner, unfazed by landscape's status, set out at a young age to transform the genre. He
created a visual manifesto - the Liber Studiorum, or "Book of Studies," in which he sorted
landscapes into six subgenres that he was determined to master: Pastoral, Marine, Mountainous,
Historical, Architectural, and Epic Pastoral. The book, a newly acquired copy of which is now on
display at the Clark Institute in Williamstown, shows a painter and a genre at the dawn of their
dominance. Made between 1806 and 1819, the wide-ranging portfolio includes 70 intricate and
luminous mezzotints. These early prints still bear the influence of Turner's immediate
predecessors, and don't look particularly radical to our eyes, but in them he is already finding the
emphatic yellow light that would burn through the fog and mist - and even through detail itself -
in his groundbreaking later work.
Turner's bid to elevate landscape art found a sympathetic reception across the English Channel. It
is sometimes hard to remember how radical the Impressionists actually were, but when they took
their easels out of the studios, squeezed newly invented synthetic pigments from their newly
invented tubes of paint, and worked directly from observation on bright white canvases (as
opposed to the traditional brown or red), they were not only following Turner's lead, they were
also permanently unsettling the very hierarchy of art. Their portable canvasses emphasized times
of day over timeless scenes, brush strokes and light over details and stories, the present tense
over the past.
Though their paintings have come to look normal to us - their reproductions now sit comfortably
on coffee tables, library shelves, and greeting cards - their methods were very upsetting at the
time, spurning faithful depictions of nature in favor of the physical daub of paint, color for its
own sake, and the spatial ambiguities of the flat canvas. Van Gogh, Gaugin, and Cezanne kept
landscape in the vanguard of European art, and paved the way for painters like Paul Klee,
Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian, who all took landscape even further from nature, and
deeper into abstraction. In one illustrative incident, Kandinsky famously noticed that a painting
of his, accidentally hung upside down, was powerful on its own terms - without representing
anything at all.
Klee and Mondrian were more intentional as they transformed their views into carefully arranged
and fully saturated rectangles of color. Mondrian's paintings, as his career progressed, seemed
literally to morph from tree branches and water into vectors of curved and straight lines, finally
becoming the orderly grids of primary colors for which he is best known. These paintings are
nothing that a viewer would recognize as a landscape - although the Dutchman's last (and
probably best) painting, "Broadway Boogie-Woogie," can in fact be read as a kind of aerial
cityscape, if we take its title's hint.
In America, "landscape" had meant the expansive 19th-century visions of Church and Bierstadt,
the watercolors of Winslow Homer, and Edward Hopper's iconic New England scenes. But in a
sense, the country was about to get another wave of landscape artists. The great abstract painters
of the mid-20th century - the so-called New York School, which included Arshile Gorky, Mark
Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock - were all heirs to the genre who, in a certain
sense, helped push it to its breaking point. Gorky and Rothko are known for their emphatically
non-representational paintings, but their art evolved within the landscape tradition, so even their
late work, which initially appears totally abstract, eventually reveals important vestiges of the
genre: the ever-present horizon line, the biomorphic forms, the atmospheric light. De Kooning
was more explicit in his evocation of landscape, often making clear reference to it in his titles;
Pollock studied under Thomas Hart Benton, whose fluid, elongated paintings on rural themes
were subtly echoed in the internal structure of Pollock's later works. So a painting like Pollock's
"Autumn Rhythm," which looks at first glance like an arbitrary swirl of drips and splashes, can
start to feel more like a panoramic tribute to the expansive - and vertiginous - space of Pollock's
native West.
For a viewer confronted with these paintings today, it's nearly impossible to find the natural
world in Rothko's blurs and Pollock's splatter. The trajectory from Turner to Pollock traces the
genre's long and nearly complete separation from nature. What began as a focus on natural
phenomena evolved into a focus on the painting itself - on light, space, the artist's personality,
and other more internal concerns. Pollock himself, when asked why he didn't paint nature,
famously hit back with, "I am nature." The New York School's successors, the Minimalists,
would respond to the previous generation's bravura by working with a studied geometric
detachment, and it became clear that the vanguard's contact with nature had come to a minimum.
The long radicalization of landscape painting resulted in a lot of adventurous and important
pictures, but it also left a gaping hole in art where nature used to be.
So it fell to other artists to return to the outdoors. Rather than depict nature, however, they
actually entered nature, and began to alter it. In 1970, Robert Smithson assembled mud and salt
crystals into the iconic 1,500-foot "Spiral Jetty" in Salt Lake City. Nine years later, James Turrell
began transforming a 3-km-wide (and extinct) volcano crater in Arizona into a huge naked-eye
observatory, which he plans finally to open in 2011. Many artists have since followed in this
vein, with Andy Goldsworthy's improbable and temporary constructions of natural elements and
Christo's eye-catching fabric interventions probably doing the most to popularize the form.
Artists interested in nature now have full license to wander.
That's where the current show at MassMoCA finds them. "Badlands: New Horizons in
Landscape," on view until April 12, presents the work of more than 20 artists working in a wide
variety of media. To judge from the paintings on display, one simple way to engage the tradition
of the landscape is to register the damage we've done to the environment. It's impossible to look
at Alexis Rockman's 30-foot oil paintings of the glaciers in Antarctica without thinking of global
warming (and noticing that Caspar David Friedrich's 19th-century icebergs had an entirely
different meaning). Paul Jacobsen is more direct: Idyllic mountain vistas are interrupted by heaps
of trash, incongruous modern bridges, and horribly colored skies. Ed Ruscha similarly offers his
series of "Country Cityscapes," where touristic images of nature are overlaid with threatening
quotes ("You Will Eat Hot Lead"), which are themselves blocked out by rectangles. The effect of
this kind work can be powerful, and the almost didactic quality of these pictures stands in
contrast to the work from younger artists - Melissa Brown, Leila Daw, and Mike Glier - who are
clearly still working out how they want to paint the landscape.
Reading the interviews with these artists - where they observe that painting is "absurdly
mismatched to the task of consciousness raising in a digitized, global environment," and how
"the representation of destruction is inevitably beautiful," and that depicting natural disasters
"makes me feel kind of immortal" - one senses how hard it is to correctly locate painting's place
in the situation. Having insisted so adamantly (and for so long) on its own terms, painting is now
in the awkward position of re-entering the fray on slightly alien ones - measuring its own power
in terms of other media, political activism, or natural forces.
What has changed, clearly, is how we see nature itself. The traditional model - in which we were
separate from nature and enjoyed its representation as a form of escapism - won't work anymore.
No longer able to see our world as simply beautiful, artists also have to see what humans have
done to imperil it, which will necessarily change the way that it is depicted, and the point of
depicting it.
As painting tries to find its way back to nature, some of the more practical artistic responses to
the environmental crisis have an undeniable appeal. Along with the group of "Activists &
Pragmatists" on show in North Adams, recent exhibitions and projects around the country are
showing that landscape architecture might be the discipline best suited to the situation. Last
summer's exhibition, "Public Farm 1," turned the courtyard of P.S. 1 in Queens into a fully
functioning garden, made completely from sustainable and cheap materials; the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago recently made a similar, but more permanent, garden on its own roof; and at
Boston University, I recently saw a poster inviting students to submit work for a show on
sustainability, promising young artists they can "be a part of the solution."
But art also serves where there isn't a solution. And painting, with its long tradition, might have a
special - if difficult - role to play. With pure formal innovation having exhausted itself in the last
century, and with scientific or political remedies clearly beyond its purview, contemporary
landscape painting faces a task that is both humble and daunting. But the project also represents
an enormous opportunity, given landscape's immense popularity with the general public, and our
increasingly shared concern with the environment.
A picture of nature is now also a picture of our own behavior. Seen in this light, the scattering of
the formerly unified idea of landscape painting into disparate realms of aesthetics, politics, and
interventions betrays a larger anxiety about what exactly our relationship with nature is. The
current attempts to reconstitute that vision - whether refined and complete or provisional and
strange - could serve to clarify the situation. But a new kind of landscape will require a new kind
of vision: Long accustomed to seeing what we need from nature, artists will now have to find a
way to see what it needs from us.
Dushko Petrovich, a painter and critic, is the resident fellow in painting at Boston University
and the founding editor of Paper Monument.