In his book, ‘Landscape into Art’, Kenneth Clark divided the development of European painting
between the 9th and the 19th centuries into 7 periods according to how perception of landscapes
was represented. These divisions were based on the historical shifts in the connections between
representation and perception. They are summarised as follows:
The landscape of symbols
The starting point of landscape art was that natural objects were first perceived individually as
pleasing in themselves and symbolical of divine qualities. The next step was to see them as
forming some whole, which would be within the compass of the imagination and itself a symbol of
perfection.
The landscape of facts
The curiosity about the precise character of a particular spot was part of the general curiosity of
the fifteenth century. It culminated in the topographical water-colors of Durer.
The landscape of fantasy
The next development occurred when artists began to feel that the depiction of landscape had
become too tame and domesticated and they set about exploring the mysterious and the
unsubdued.
Ideal landscape
As part of the general intellectual upheaval of the Renaissance, landscape painting had to be
fitted into the ideal concept to which every artist and writer on art subscribed to for the next three
hundred years. Two poets of antiquity, Ovid and Virgil furnished the imaginations of the
Renaissance artists. Virgil was the inspirer of landscape, mainly through his myth of rusticity.
This element of rural realism is combined with the enchanting dream of a Golden Age in which
people lived on the fruits of the earth, peacefully, piously and with primitive simplicity.
The natural vision
Early in the 19th century it was recognised that the status of landscape painting was changing. It
began to become an end in itself. In the course of the century landscapes which at least
purported to be close imitations of nature come to hold a more secure place in popular affection
than any other form of art. This desire to be at one with how things really are, as opposed to as
we see them by close scrutiny, heralded Impressionism. This was a form of representation
distinguished by illusion of light and air and the autonomy of paint over form.
The northern lights
Two artists of genius, one at the beginning and one at the end of the century, show that the
landscape of fantasy was still a valid and potent means of expression. They are Turner and Van
Gogh. Both painters were concerned with the effects of colour, the former its ability to produce
dominant atmospheric effects, and in effect, paint the atmosphere, and the latter the powerful
emotional impact of strong non- representative colour.
The return to order
Impressionism, was taken further and radicalised by the Pointillistes (also called Divisionists).
They were interested in the workings of colours and the process of seeing. It had now been
scientifically proven that the retina perceives images in the form of tiny grids of dots, which are
then assembled in the mind. On this basis Paul Signac and Georges Seurat constructed their
paintings from swarms of precise little dots. The juxtaposed spots of unmixed paints merged into
gentle mixed tones and shades when seen at a distance. The motive became a pretext for the
meticulous scientific experiment of relating representation to the perception- painting of visions.
However, the prismatic breakdown could not be taken further. It was the ideas of Cezanne that
opened a route to future development of landscape art. The most important innovation was to
detach perception from reality.
Taking Impressionism as his starting point Cezanne developed new artistic forms of expression.
He was seen as the chief master of Post- Impressionism, and at the same time as an individualist
and innovator, provided the basis for the work of later artists- the Cubists Fauvres and
Expressionists. He took the Impressionists flickering texture of brightly- coloured dabs of paint
and transformed it into a vibration of colour with broad, coloured strokes of paint. He carefully
simplified things to their elementary basic forms, such as a sphere, cube and cylinder, and thus
established the preconditions for Cubism and abstract art of the next generation.
The final painter in Clarke’s series, Gaugin, turned painting back to symbolism. Clark saw his
work as the equivalent of tapestry. Gaugin forced himself to think symbolically, but not by
returning to the symbolism of the Middle Ages. In a letter of the 1880s Gaugin summarised his
personal process of representation as follows
“I obtain by arrangements of lines and colours, using as pretext some subject borrowed
from human life or nature, symphonies, harmonies that represent nothing real in the
vulgar sense of the work; they express no idea directly but they should make you think as
music does, without the aid of ideas or images simply by the mysterious relationships
existing between our brains and such arrangements of colours and lines.”
The formal object of the symbolists that followed in Gaugin’s footsteps was metaphysical
understanding, which was to be presented as interpretations rather than imitations. It was a
combination of the geometrical formats of Cezanne coupled with the flat tapestry-like colours of
Gauguin that were to act as a focus for individual emotions both in the mind of the maker and of
the viewer.
These landscapes of the mind were finally developed as abstract mind- maps, and personal
universes, mainly by processes of substitution, tranformance, automatism and improvisation, and
also as dream-like extensions of reality involving mimicry and antithesis.
The process
