Divergent/Works: Landschaft/Paisaje
ET IN ARCADIA
As we move beyond the American century, landscape art has achieved a curious symmetry with its Romantic legacy: a parity of matter and antimatter. Nature is no longer the locus of divine presence. No philosophy of nature commands our imagination with theories of the sublime, the picturesque, and the beautiful. No school of painting is grouped around an aesthetic of its transcendence or its immediacy.
Artists, like all of us, find themselves on the far side of modern life’s alienation from nature, whose mythic forces, once sustained by faith, were supplanted by the end of the nineteenth century with science’s rational account of its laws. In the twentieth, urban sprawl and climate change have denuded nature of its rich legacy of image and symbol. Europe—once Europa, matrix of the Western tradition of Gaia, Mother Earth—is again a mere landmass, one that could easily pass through the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica.
Landscape painting reflects as well its pre-Romantic position in Western art’s hierarchy, kept company now by the very Academy which once ranked landscape in its order of noble subjects as far below history painting, beneath genre and portraiture, on the lowest rung along with still life.
By 1900 Cezanne’s vision of landscape had diverted the course of mainstream art from the hills of Provence to the banks of the Seine, to be carried forward into the twentieth century by the Cubist construction of nature and the powerful currents of early abstraction and expressionism. Ye in an irony of art history, landscape, once a major road to modern art, has become a country path, rarely taken by travelers in this century.
Landscape today is widely viewed as a domain of academic art and a preserve for the Sunday painter. Yet landscape art can offer a more telling portrait of modern life than current trends in contemporary art, so often absorbed with their own agenda. In the nineteenth century, faith had at last yielded to reason. By the start of twentieth, reason had failed. Art was ceded the enormous task of replacing religion’s reassuring rites and rich symbols with a world of imagery sufficient to heal the widening rift between man and nature. Landscape has now become what modernism had been from the start, an art of alienation and desire.
The art of landscape today reflects the wide-ranging aesthetics and styles of the Western tradition. Whatever edge that sentiment or scenery might hold in initially engaging a viewer, landscape must acknowledge the same criteria as the more abstract and conceptual modes of mainstream art.
An exhibition of landscape art serves more than the memory of its rich past or a measure of its present vigor. The crisis of modern life is its tragic schism between man and matter, a poverty of the human spirit that isolates it from the sentient, sensible world that sustains it. The ancient gods who once roamed the woods and held dominion over the seas are long gone. Nature is ours now. Landscape’s prescient eye alerts us to irreparable loss by recasting the timeless lament for a vanished world: Et in Arcadia ego: “I too was in paradise once.”
Landschaft/Paisaje –as all the shows in the Divergent Works exhibition— features artists pursuing very different styles—lofty and humble—while subscribing to the unique Taos narrative of the Sublime, grouped around an aesthetic of transcendence and immediacy.
DIVERGENT WORKS: LANDSCHAFT/PAISAJE
The Harwood summer exhibition Portraits in a Landscape (2017) explored the Taos high desert aesthetic in its impact on the portrait: “A portrait, then, is not simply a likeness. It is a figure in space. A portrait unfolds in a landscape. It is a narrative. And the narrative import of landscape … is especially telling for Taos and northern New Mexico.”
This compelling sense of place is at the root of the Taos arts, the locus of its deep-seated appeal to émigré and native artist alike: “a landscape of vast imaginative force—sublime, humbling, and transformative—straddling its enduring local cultures: Pueblo, Hispano, and Anglo. This unique melding of place and peoples profoundly affected their art, beliefs, and aspirations.” Its aesthetic sustains the artistic styles and cultural currents that have evolved in Taos and northern New Mexico, providing the continuity of the widely divergent range of works in the Harwood collections.
Divergent Works: Landschaft/Paisaje explores the Taos aesthetic of place from a central vantage: the genre of landscape itself. The exhibition’s diverse works are a function of a reciprocal exchange between mainstream currents and the region’s abiding aesthetic, marking more than a century of Taos art represented in the Harwood’s collections. It has produced regional work with a national import. This fusion of sublime and humble, of high and low styles, of mainstream and local, is the paradox of Taos as place— as locus, or landscape.
In his insightful study of landscape, art historian Max J. Friedlander observed that “The land is the earth’s surface… [while] landscape is the physiognomy of the land, land in its effect on us… Land is the ‘thing-in-itself’, [while] landscape is the phenomenon.” And just as the portrait probes the physiognomy—countenance and character—of the sitter/subject, a landscape interprets the environment: “…the great blue wall of the Sangre de Cristo… as near and as far as it had in the morning. … In the blue evening smoke of the two villages, Taos Pueblo and Taos looked hopelessly small and forgotten.” (Frederick Remington, 1902).
Dr. Richard Tobin
Director
Artworks in Landschaft/Paisaje include:
Constantine Aiello
Green Brew, n.d.
Watercolor
Courtesy of Taos Municipal School Collection
Robert M. Ellis
Taos Mountain, 1988
Lithograph
Anonymous Gift
Robert M. Ellis
Valdez Valley #3, 1988
Print
Collection of the Harwood Museum of Art
Gene Kloss
Desert Peaks, 1937
Drypoint etching
Anonymous Gift
Gene Kloss
Desert Drama, c. 1950
Etching
Anonymous Gift
Gene Kloss
Riders at Sundown, 1953
Drypoint etching and aquatint on paper
Gift of the Harwood Museum Alliance in honor of David Witt
E. Martin Hennings
The Hunters, c. 1940
Lithograph
Gift of Van Deren and Joan Coke in memory of Caroline Lee
E. Martin Hennings
Beneath the Cottonwoods, c. 1924
Lithograph
Gift of J.B. McEntire, Jr.
E. Martin Hennings
Watching the Ceremony, c. 1924 Etching
Gift of David B. Winton & the Estate of Helen Hennings Winton
Howard Cook
Taos Pueblo-Smokes, 1927
Woodcut
Gift of C. William and Eleanor Reiquam
Clare Leighton
Lambing (Second State), 1933
Wood engraving
Gift of C. William and
Eleanor Reiquam
Oscar E. Berninghaus
Wood Haulers, 1945
Pen and ink
Courtesy of the Taos Municipal School Historic Collection
Oscar E. Berninghaus
Street Scene Taos, c. 1930
Lithograph
Gift of Van Deren and Joan Coke in memory of Caroline Lee
Lynda Benglis [inside fireplace]
Daca’ Bimo, 1993
Ceramic
Gift of Lynda Benglis, Hank Saxe and Cynthia Patterson
Emil Bisttram
Church of San Francisco de Asis, n.d.
Watercolor on paper
Courtesy of the Taos Municipal School Historic Collection
Keith Crown
Taos Embraced by Taos Mountain, 1956
Watercolor
Gift of the Artist
Victor Higgins
Canyon Landscapes, c. 1932
Watercolor
Gift of Lucy Case Harwood
Paul Strisik
Passing Shadows, Valdez Valley, NM 1983
Watercolor
Gift of Nancy Strisik
John Marin
Taos Canyon, 1930
Watercolor
Museum Purchase
Eric Gibberd
Untitled (landscape), 1959
Watercolor and ink
Gift of John and Louise Wheir
Roland Detre
Untitled (landscape), n.d.
Gouache
Collection of the Harwood Museum of Art
Cliff Franklin Harmon
Earth Forms #140, 1973
Watercolor, gouache and acrylic
Gift of Ted and Kit Egri
Sarah Bienvenu
Shallow Water, 2000
Watercolor
Gift of Jack and Rebecca Parsons
Eli Levin
Near Dixon, c. 1990
Watercolor
Gift of Robert Bell and Stirling Puck
Roland Detre
New Mexico Village, n.d.
Pastel
Collection of the Harwood Museum of Art
Tom Noble
Parajos Mexicanos, 1992
Watercolor
Gift of Natalie Goldberg
Robert D. Ray
Untitled (Taos Mountain), c. 1976
Oil on Masonite
Gift of the Otto Mears Pitcher Collection
