The "L" Word

Landscape is perhaps the most popular, and most abused, genre of representational painting today. While the other major genres of the past have seemingly outlived their usefulness—portraiture has been largely usurped by photography; still life seems beside the point; the complex, multi-figure narrative scenes known as “history painting” seem overblown and irrelevant to contemporary experience—landscape stands as our sole living contact with the illusionistic tradition.

What continues to make landscape so compelling? Why is it such a powerful mode of painting, appealing especially to those who otherwise know little or nothing about art? Maybe because it represents what is, at base, an inescapably universal experience: the individual standing in (and surrounded by) a sweeping view of the world out-of-doors, which recedes to distant horizon line.

Perhaps it’s something in the essential need for a relationship with, and within, nature. The intersection of sky, earth, and river seems to call upon a primordial level of the understanding, making it quite logical that the ancients dreamt up gods to personify these elemental forces of nature. A painting that successfully pushes these buttons in the viewer instantly captures your attention, calling forth an almost involuntary reaction. It sneaks into your subconscious, whisking you away even before you realize the abduction is happening. It’s very hard to resist this siren call, and opens the genre to much abuse in the hands of artists who don’t mind taking advantage of cheap, sentimental effect. It’s this sort of painting that makes landscape an almost forbidden pleasure at times—the “L” word of the art world.

There are, of course, different ways to approach this theme—tame it through picturesque effects that merely hint at nature’s vastness while leaving the viewer in full command of the scene, or release its overwhelming power full force as the sublime.

Here in the Hudson Valley, the whole idea of landscape is thoroughly permeated with the legacy of Thomas Cole’s Hudson River School, and all those providential renditions of the Catskills and the river, bathed in golden, god-like sunlight by artists like Frederic Church, Asher B. Durand, Sanford Gifford, Martin Johnson Heade, and many others. The primary achievement of this group was to successfully raise the stakes for landscape, often executing works on such an enormous scale and investing them with an overwhelming feeling of the sublime that made landscape—and, one should note, specifically the American landscape—a competitor for the rhetorical grandeur of history painting.