Catalogue of the exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, 14 March – 9 June 2008
The exhibition Turner to Monet, subtitled the triumph of landscape painting, ought to be an attendance success in conservative/materialist Australia where landscape is close to being all of art, even for the cognoscenti. Mums and dads, visiting the nation’s capital, might not find a lot to do there. So, to wander off and look at a bunch of 19th century landscape paintings has to be a nice way to spend the day.
At the back of the mind of any person visiting art galleries anywhere there could be a notion that the actual landscape is under threat right now. Dammed rivers are no longer feeding wetlands, large chunks of flat country are salting up, die-back is having its way with stressed trees, loggers and wood chippers and furniture makers and Mac mansion builders are hoeing into much of the rest. Still, Australians may desire to visit gallery rooms full of beautiful landscapes just as the good, artistically inclined citizens of Nazi Germany couldn’t get enough of Furtwängler conducting Beethoven’s Pastoral (the first movement being dubbed “Erwachen heiterer Empfindungen bei der Ankunft auf dem Lande” - Awakening of cheerful feelings on arriving in the country) while the simple, the deformed, homosexuals, Jews, Gypsies and other non-Germanic mainstreamers were being cruelly disposed of.
The pictures on display at the NGA have been brought to the exhibition from all over Australia, and there are even quite a number from famous galleries across the world. The first clump of them, titled Pastoral and picturesque, features a number of the usual suspects plus two John Glovers - one Roman the other Tasmanian - and so the show ambles on via The Romantic Sublime, New terrains, Nature observed to Fracturing the landscape with its to-die-for Gauguin, Haystacks in Brittany.
Each picture will represent itself to the viewers as best it can: some of us will go for this one, others for that. Even this churlish reviewer has quite a number of favourites including a beautiful, smallish, early, oil on paper by Samuel Palmer, The sleeping shepherd. And then, tired but happy each of us will exit through the attached shop with its obligatory Turner to Monet gumboots, umbrellas, whatever, plus, of course, the 260 page full-colour catalogue which covers the exhibition, at times like a blanket. To read this publication alongside the catalogue for Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions, a current exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a mind-expanding experience. And maybe an eye-closing one. The Metropolitan’s production demands that we look at the paintings as Poussin meant them to be viewed - slowly, deliberately, and with unbroken concentration. It goes on to suggest that, because of Impressionism we have lost the ability to study paintings, and that we must rediscover the satisfaction of standing in front of pictures for a long time – for the sort of time period we might devote to reading an extended, possibly poetic text. Otherwise how can we understand this, or that, laboured upon, painted image before us?
No such demands on a viewer’s senses are made in Australia’s public galleries.
In the Turner to Monet catalogue a page of text accompanies each of the exhibits. For instance Samuel Palmer’s 1851, Summer storm near Pulborough, Sussex is accompanied by Ron Radford’s response. Mr Radford is the NGA’s director. He should know this particular painting by heart having previously been director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, which has owned it since 1955. He writes “…clouds have gathered, the wind has risen and driving rain is already falling though there is a glimpse of distant sunshine. In the foreground a herdsman gestures to prevent his sheep stampeding off the road; his wife follows carrying a child on her back and beside her is an unhappy yet faithful dog.” And so on. But, wait a minute, that doesn’t describe this Samuel Palmer painting. No, not at all. What we see inside the frame is a cloudburst on the viewer’s right. This is propelling a wind across the composition just as the herdsman is pushing his sheep along the road - all of them facing away from him, no threat of ‘stampede’ here. Which may explain the dog (why “unhappy yet faithful” for Christ’s sake?) trotting beside the wife and child rather than belting to the front of the flock to head off Mr Radford’s falsely imagined ‘stampede’. (Seen too many cowboy films, Mr Radford?)
The painting is of course very Beethoven’s Pastoral, particularly that fourth movement, Gewitter. Strum. The great composer’s symphony first appeared in 1808, a year after Casper David Friedrich painted the earliest and best of his works in this exhibition. “Pastoral” was the arty escape for a century dedicated to the cruel subjugation of non-European peoples, to mining and industrialisation. People loved that particular Beethoven symphony. At a performance on 22 June 1829 at the King's Theatre in London's Haymarket it was staged with French actors plus a substantial corps de ballet.
Writing about Caspar David Friedrich’s The Cross in the mountains, (not actually in the exhibition) Ron Radford explains “… was designed and framed as an altarpiece. That a landscape could become an altarpiece, that nature should be worshipped in such an obvious way, gave a new status to landscape art.” Wait a minute, what about, say, Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, also known as Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, completed in 1432? That altarpiece combines Northern Renaissance Classical references with a detailed observation of nature in a manner which emphasises our physical being within a spiritually charged landscape. Surely a fat catalogue such as this Turner to Monet one deserves more thoughtful content.
The quality of reproductions leaves quite a bit to be desired. It’s one thing for a small Cézanne in the show to be lit so that the deep frame casts dark shade over the top and one side of the composition. Who cares anyway, aren’t we there just to spend money at the exhibition’s shop? This is only Australia’s National Gallery!
Dear oh dear, don’t they have access to editors and some fresh ideas?
In the catalogue for New Worlds from Old, the 1998 NGA exhibition devoted to 19th century landscape painting, the principal awkwardness of the text involved pretending to assume that Europeans encountered Australian and American trees and hills and valleys and sunsets at pretty much the same time. So just as in Australia, American painters were coming to grips with a totally new landscape. To prove this point back then we were presented with, among others, images by Frederic Church of Niagara Falls! The first was painted in 1856; around the time the railroad reached Niagara! That was 4 years before Australia’s ill planned and fatal Burke and Wills expedition. Just by the way if you want to read some terrible prose by another individual of the gallery director class dig out the New Worlds from Old catalogue and read through Patrick McCaughey’s fulsome adjectives and sad repetitions. How about this from that New Worlds… catalogue? “How does the curious Australian traveller to the United States fare? No doubt there are antipodean admirers of the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National Park and Niagara Falls but for the most part the Australian traveller comes to the United States to visit the cities in search of cultural artefacts and works of art. American cities are the destination points.”
I understand that Mr McCaughey and Mr Radford attended the same private Presbyterian boys’ school in Melbourne, Australia. Can it be that this failure to engage with works of art, as the Catholic Poussin would have us do, is a by-product of Calvinist theology?
The Americas were discovered and settled by Europeans in the 16th century. So, while landscape painting might have flourished on both landmasses during the 19th century it did so principally because that’s what arty Europeans were doing at the time, not because there was something particularly new about America. In Australia, Europeans were discovering new trees and animals, a different quality of light, while murdering and destroying the culture of its original inhabitants. In an exhibition catalogue such as this why not direct some attention to European settlement and landscape painting in Africa, or in the arctic? What is this New Worlds from Old desire to forge more links than already exist with the United States of America? Could it be driven by a desire within the bosom of the executive structure of our public art institutions to curry favour with politicians, who in their turn are sucking up to a great military power?
The earliest image in Turner to Monet is a watercolour by Thomas Girtin, Alnwick from Brizlee, painted in 1800. If watercolours are acceptable why not include a few more then, possibly a couple of the amazing works of Ludwig Becker? It is clear that the flat, arid landscapes he recorded while heading north to untimely death on the Burke and Wills expedition, had a profound effect upon Becker's Germanic consciousness. Luckily, the two other essays at the start of the catalogue are well written and reasonably informative, though not in the same class as the Poussin production. Lucinda Ward’s Science and the Sublime: nature as spectacle fixes our attention on Casper David Friedrich and, of course, Eugene von Guerard whose North-east view from the northern top of Mount Kosciusko is as good as that kind of thing gets, with those small, gesturing figures looking across to where rain falls on distant peaks straddling the Victorian-New South Wales border.
Christine Dixon’s Nature becomes art: landscape and modernism gets going with a quote from that curiously off the mark visual art enthusiast and wonderful poet, the long dead Charles Baudelaire. “By modernity I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.” Facing this quote and the development of her argument is a detail of Paul Cézanne’s Viaduct at l’Estaque. Later, in her note accompanying that painting’s lifeless reproduction she states “It is the implied struggle between doubt and certainty that makes Cézanne so modern.”On the other hand the distinguished art historian, T J Clark reckons “I want the reader to see Cézanne as belonging to the world of Helmholtz, Charcot and La Revue Encyclopédique. As positivist and materialist in the strong senses of those words. Freudian in the way of Freud in 1895.” So here, maybe she should have considered the complexity of readings and understandings made possible by looking long and thoughtfully at a painting. As a 17th century Cardinal observed, “Paintings enclose the space of heaven and earth in small rectangles; viewers go wandering, take long journeys within them, while standing still in a room.”
Reproduced at the center of Christine Dixon’s essay is a detail of Gustave Courbet’s Source of the Lison from Galerie Paffrath in Düsseldorf. This is a fine picture, very Courbet, very concerned with entrances - consider his extremely popular 1866 L’Origine du monde - with nature as body and the body as nature, which sums the whole thing up so much better than the catalogue manages to do.
Top left: Vincent van Gogh
Tree trunks in the grass 1890
oil on canvas
72.5 x 91.5 cm
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands
1. Claude Monet
Haystacks, midday 1890
oil on canvas
65.6 x 100.6 cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
2. Caspar David Friedrich
Easter morning 1833
oil on canvas
43.7 x 34.4 cm
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
© Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
3. Alexandre Calame
Torrent in the Alps 1849
oil on canvas
57.8 x 76.0 cm
Collection Asbjorn R. Lunde, New York. Image copyright © 2006 Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA. Photograph: Michael Agee
4. Johan Christian Dahl
Eruption of Vesuvius 1823
oil on canvas
58.7 x 72.7 cm
Collection of Asbjorn R. Lunde, New York
5. J. M. W. Turner
Rocky bay with figures c.1830
oil on canvas
90.2 x 123.2 cm
Accepted by the British nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Tate Britain © Tate, London 2008
6. Gustave Courbet
Source of the Lison 1864
oil on canvas
91.0 x 73.0 cm
Galerie Paffrath, Düsseldorf
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE
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