Whither Landscape Painting ?
Landscape into Art. By Kenneth Clark. (John Murray. 25s.)
A CRITICAL approach to any particular facet of painting that takes in solely the aesthetic considerations, whilst omitting the philosophical ideas that go to its formation, is not only difficult but at the same time worthless. The lectures given by the Slade Professor to Oxford University on landscape painting, that are now edited in book form, ate as much concerned with the strata of thought that go to form the various schools of landscape as they are with the actual flowering to be found on the surface. The question around which these lectures have been written is what type of landscape art, if any, has been motivated at a given period by the guiding contemporary thoughts in man's mind. The conclusions that have been reached were summed up by Vico in his Scienza Nuova : "Men feel before observing, then they observe with perturbation of the soul, finally they reflect with pure intellect."
No other living writer on art could have treated his subject with greater clarity than Sir Kenneth Clark. At a time when it is surely more important than ever before that " the peculiar difficulties that have afflicted painting during the last twenty-five years " should be explained in simple terms to a bewildered public, an obscurantist language, of unprecendented density, has been invented by the critics. Sir Kenneth never fails to explain himself immediately, and his com- mand of language is exemplary. Words are not used loosely. When he writes that the Isenheim altarpiece by Griinewald " is perhaps the most phenomenal picture ever painted," he means that it is 3 picture concerned with phenomena. Descriptions and similes are equally direct and apposite. The eighteenth century is " that winter of the imagination." To find analogies for Greco's view of Toledo " we must look in Romantic music, in Liszt, in Berlioz. Poussin has been aptly linked, by the author, in his ideated sensa- tions with Milton and "Paradise Lost," and to Turner the memories of Italy " were like the fumes of wine in his mind and the landscape seemed to swim before his eyes in a sea of light." In describing the " Baignade " of Seurat, Sir Kenneth writes of the " pale tonalitY in which dark truffles of toren are placed with such certainty." His own images are placed with an equal certainty, and the text is no less stimulating than the hundred exquisitely selected illustrations.
What place can the art of landscape have in the world today? Though the author writes that " some painter who believes the life of man is linked with nature may turn to him once more for inspiration " and that an artist should have some prophetic notion of the needs of the future, he also finds that we have lost all confi- dence, during this age of hysteria, in the natural order. Landscape ;painting, he feels, having been an act of faith, has now become an enclosed garden of escape since we have found that nature is the reverse of harmonious. Surely the truth is rather that confidence in man, as opposed to nature, has been lost, and the need of the future is to find the permanent lying behind the transitory. The continual cry for something that has not been tried before can only lead to greater insecurity. Co-existent with the vision of horror and disintegration ahead, ably expressed in so much painting today, is certainly an equal longing, possibly greater than at any other time, for a return to stability. Nature is. the one thing that has remained unchanged, and the role of the artist of the future may well be to express this miracle, even as an act of faith. Perhaps mankind will presently be driven by disaster to share the emotions that Sir Kenneth ascribes to Bellini, the love " that embraces every twig, every stone, the humblest detail as well as the most grandiose per- spective." Without such a faith the art of painting, let alone of landscape, would seem doomed.
Continually in the chapters of this book that starts with the Gothic landscape of symbols and moves through scenes of fact and fantasy, through the ideal and the natural up to the climax during the nineteenth century when landscape painting transcended all other, we are led by ideas and reflections such as these. At the finish we realise the extreme rarity of such a pleasure, and our only complaint can be that the author's works are not more numerous and that he does not turn the heatdlights of his extraordinary critical faculties on to the twilight scene tif contemporary art.
DEREK HILL.
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