Art and Environment
Copyright, Ben Howell Davis, 1999.
The
following is a draft for the Children's Encyclopedia of the Environment ,
forthcoming from Marshall Cavendish, Publishers, New York, New York
It was 1879,
and it was hot. William Holmes sat in the intense Arizona sun with only a rough
drawing board and some pencils, his eyes narrow slits looking through a pair of
dusty binoculars. He was sitting on Point Sublime at the Grand Canyon. Although photography had
been invented forty years earlier and many photographers like Timothy
O'Sullivan had already been to the Grand Canyon to take pictures, Holme's job
was to draw a panorama of the Canyon, and draw it with scientific accuracy. How
could an artist's drawing be more scientific than a photograph?
Holmes was an
artist, an ethnographer, a geologist, a typographer, and a museum curator. The
moment he was making his panorama of the Grand Canyon was the very moment when
the drawing tools of the ancient past and the imaging tools of the future would
merge and forever change the way we visually understand our world. Landscape,
as we once understood it would become environmental art.
William Holmes
was drawing information. He was recording, with scientific clarity, the
geological details of the Grand Canyon. Photography could only make a general
picture of the scene but because Holmes was a geologist, he could draw the
scene and
the smallest details. He could use an ancient art to render the latest
scientific discovery, his eyes and hands could do what the photo technology of
the time could not - cut through the haze and glare to reveal the history of
the canyon.
William H.
Holmes, Panorama from Point Sublime in Atlas to Clarence Dutton's Tertiary
History of the Grand Canyon District, 1882, Sheet XVI, Washington, DC.
Timothy
O'Sullivan, Desert Sands Near Sink of Carson, Nevada, Albumen, 1867, J. Paul
Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA.
The first
artist to record the environment is a mystery. Seventeen thousand years ago in
the caves at Lascaux in the south of France, Paleolithic Cro-Magnon
hunter/artists left a prehistoric puzzle. If you try to sketch one of the
drawings of animals from the cave walls you will quickly understand how
sophisticated, how scientific, they actually are. What these ancient
ancestors were doing was painting in order to know - to understand - the mystery
of the world around them. Two farm boys at the end of the nineteenth century
discovered the cave with its galleries of prehistoric animals, abstract
symbols, handprints, and dots called "tectiforms."Some theories
speculate that the drawings started with handprints and that the natural rock
shapes in the caves gave the artists the ideas for the bodies of animals. Many
feel the images were made to insure success in hunting by painting visions of
game. The beauty of the forms confirms that, for whatever reason, the artists
were completely focused on the "accuracy" of their images. Nature and
art were fused.
The Great
Black Aurochs, pg. 115, The Cave of Lascaux, The Final Photographs, Mario
Ruspoli, Abrams, NY, 1986.
During the Song
Dynasty (960-1279) in China, landscape painting was perfected to such a degree
that it is still respected as the most perfect form of art in China. Small
figures in large landscapes presented the image of man in harmony with nature.
It has been said, "Oriental art is not concerned with Nature, but with the
nature of Nature."
The concept of
"animation through the capturing of the vital spirit" was a
discipline that required an artist to reveal the "flowerness" of a
flower or the "cloudness" of a cloud. The painting could only come
alive if every feature was imbued with a sense of energy. The painter, the
landscape, and the painting must all resonate as one environment. For this
reason the landscape was never presented from a single point of view. The viewpoint moves from
the trees to the rocks to the tiny figures going to the temple. The painting is made up
of different elements that are each described by unique brush strokes.
Fan K'uan,
Travelers on a Mountain Path, c. 1000 Hanging Scroll, ink and colors on silk,
Height 81 1/4", Chinese National Palace Museum, Taichung, Taiwan.
The Greeks
combined a similar search for harmony with the idea that the delicate rendering
of nature created a kind of realism that brought them closer to the spirit. The
forceful, true-to-life imitation of nature becomes a way of coming as close to
the mystery of life as possible.
Funerary
Wreath, Gold with blue and green glass-paste inlay, 4 BC, J. Paul Getty Museum,
Los Angeles, CA.
The Roman
writer and historian Pliny the Elder described landscape art in his Natural
History,
the earliest known book on art history. Here he writes about the painting of
Studius, a first century BC artist,
who
first introduced the most attractive fashion of painting walls with pictures of
the country houses and porticoes and landscaped gardens, groves, woods, hills,
fishponds, canals, rivers, coasts, and whatever anybody could desire, together
with various sketches, of people going for a stroll or sailing a boat…and also
people fishing and fowling or hunting or even gathering the vintage (grapes).
Roman Wall
painting, first century AD, Rome, Villa Albani, photo Archivi Alinari.
In Islamic art,
the ideal was to abstract the spirit, to create beautiful geometric images of
the perfect balance of nature. Human and animal forms were forbidden in public
Islamic art because it might encourage the worship of idols. In private art,
however, living things did appear in two-dimensional forms as decorative
elements that could reveal the scale or size of landscape.
Summer
Landscape, from Album of the Conqueror (Sultan Mohammed II)
Mongol, mid
14th century. Topkapu Palace Museum, Istanbul.
At almost the
same time in Northern Europe, book illustration was becoming the richest form
of painting. In the Tres Riches Heures du Duc De Berry, a book of hours or
calendar was commissioned by the brother of the King of France, the Duke of
Berry. The artists were Paul de Limbourg and his two brothers Herman and Jean
who created remarkable images of people in nature for the twelve months of the
year. They brought together for the first time a number of elements -
storytelling in pictures, the changing seasons of nature, brilliant color,
landscapes, detailed animals, and the changing qualities of light that give
each season a mood. The Limbourg brothers also combined what was considered
scientific information in the fifteenth century -the zodiac, the phases of the
moon (the lunar calendar), the hours of the day, and the days of the month into
their visual representations of human beings in nature - all done in the small
space of the book page.
The Limbourg
Brothers, October, from Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc De Berry, 1413-16, Musee
Conde, Chantilly, France.
In most early
Renaissance painting, the environment is painted as a background detail. In
Leonardo de Vinci's The Virgin in the Rocks (1508) we see
traditional religious figures, the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus, in a grotto
or small cave where a spring brings forth refreshing water. The figures are
placed in nature, not in a church. The invention of perspective is also seen in
this painting. By making objects become smaller as they go into the distance,
Renaissance painters created what we now take for granted as "natural space."
Leonardo went further by applying scientific investigation of color to make a
flat painting look like a window onto a larger vision of the world. In this
painting he makes the distant mountains blue. His investigations had convinced
him that
…you
should represent the air as rather dense. You know that in such air the
furthest things seen in it..as in the case of mountains…appear blue. Therefore
make the first building …of its own color: the next most distant make less
outlined and more blue; that which you wish to show at yet another distance,
make bluer yet again; and that which is five times more distant make five times
more blue. (Codex Urbinas, 78r-v)
Leonardo de
Vinci, The Virgin of the Rocks, about 1508, National Gallery, Washington, DC.
Peter Breugel
the Elder of the Netherlands (1529-69) was one of a small circle of humanists
who believed that people were bound to the cycles of nature and that trying to
live outside of that cycle was foolish. His paintings of peasants in nature
were evidence
of that belief
because peasants, unlike royalty, had no alternative to living with a deep
understanding of the cycles of nature everyday. He made a series of paintings
representing the seasons. The Return of the Hunters (1565) shows the earth
in winter, January or February, covered in snow with the tired hunters and dogs
coming home to their village. The landscape expands in front of them revealing
village skaters on frozen ponds enjoying a brief moment of pleasure in an
otherwise harsh winter. A crane glides silently in the sky. Bruegel has
simultaneously revealed the breadth and dignity of the natural world, the
inevitable bond that makes us part of natural cycles, and the peaceful
acceptance of these facts that always returns us home.
Pieter
Bruegel the Elder, The Return of the Hunters, 1565, Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna Austria.
English artist
Thomas Gainesbourgh (1727-88) painted the marriage portrait/landscape of Robert
Andrewes and His Wife
about 1728 and shows us another relationship of art and environment. Here, the
couple is shown with their property, the Auburies - a farm near Sudbury,
England. The natural world has become a possession. The bales of cut hay are
ordered in a straight line leading to the carefully tended landscape of a
wealthy manor. The bright sky blue of Mrs. Andrewes's dress contrasts the
somber clouds that loom over a quiet, manicured environment. The title of the
painting suggests that Robert Andrewes owns everything in the painting, even
his wife whose name is not given. The two figures dominate the landscape. They
appear almost like statues and their poses seem artificial and strained. The
environment is represented as something that must be carefully ordered like a
business.
Thomas
Gainesborough, Robert Andrews and His Wife, c 1748-50, National Gallery,
London. (Washington?)
Rain, Steam,
and Speed
- The Great Western Railway (1844) by Joseph Mallord William Turner
(1775-1881) may be the first painting of a steam train. Turner, who painted
intense color fields of swirling motion that give the feeling that nature is
made up of mysterious forces always being transformed the way color is
transformed by the changing light. In this painting, however, he works with the
theme that man has conquered nature by scientifically observing its secrets in
order to make a machine that mimics the power of a storm. The speeding train
rushes at the viewer across a bridge over the Thames River in England through a
swirling rainstorm, its lights blazing. Here a new kind of relationship to the
environment has evolved. The train is "progress" in the industrial
sense. The observance of nature produces scientific laws that can be employed
to create great new inventions. The environment is a laboratory for science,
and there are no limits to harnessing nature.
Joseph
Mallord William Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed (1844), National Gallery,
London.
By the
mid-1860s great changes had taken place in science, communications, and global
economics. The world had been explored and mapped to facilitate trade; new
industrial technologies had changed the way tools and goods were produced; the
natural world could now be admired as well as exploited as something separate
from civilization. At this moment a group of painters in France began
experimenting with a new form of art. They based their philosophy of art on how
the world around them looked at any given moment - what impression light, color, and form
made as they are activated by time. In natural daylight the appearance of an
object changes as light changes throughout the day and into the night. The
painting itself is one such object and the Impressionist painters sought to
make the painting itself not only a representation of a scene or landscape, but
to make the mixing of color in the painting something that light would
forcefully react to.
Claude Monet's Wheatstacks,
Snow Effects, Morning (1891) is a good example of how a landscape is viewed as an
ever changing event rather than a static scene. The snow on the haystacks is
not white. It is a mixture of all the colors - the hay, the sky, the light in
the morning yet we see it as snow. What we are looking at in the painting is
the "experience" of the environment as it is changed by light and
time.
Claude
Monet, Wheatstacks, Snow Effects, Morning, 1891, J. Paul Getty Museum.
Post-Impressionism
was a name given to artists who worked with light and color like the
Impressionists but added an understanding of the underlying structure of
natural forms.
Among the
Post-Impressionist painters, Vincent van Gogh is probably the best known - and
for many very good reasons. What van Gogh seemed to be trying to achieve with
his painting was a sincere directness - he wanted to touch the heart through
the eyes. In a letter to his brother Theo, van Gogh described Irises (1889) as " a study
after nature" which was a common phrase to describe an attempt to not so
much make a painting, but to understand the magic of nature. van Gogh was very
sensitive to the idea of "renewal" in nature. The way flowers always
bloomed in the spring even though sometimes during the winter we almost lose
all hope of seeing them again. The Irises is a visual equivalent of that idea of
renewal and the underlying structure of nature. The irises rush up from the red
earth on powerful green stems and leaves, exploding into iris blue - a color
blue that is very difficult to imitate in paint. Set off by one lone white
iris, the sincere, direct impression is full of the power and mystery of nature
that exists in even the smallest garden.
Vincent van
Gogh, Irises(1889) J. Paul Getty Museum.
Invented in
1839, photography by the 1900s had gone from being a way to document people and
places to a medium that could rival painting. Giving up his commercial Los
Angeles photography studio in 1923, Edward Weston began a long career of
attempting to make clear, direct photographs of people, places, and the energy
of nature. Point Lobos, on the California coast near San Francisco became a
favorite place for Weston to live and work. Now a national park, Point Lobos,
is one of the most spectacular environments in the world. Natural forms have
been so gracefully created and positioned that it seems simple to just point a
camera anywhere and get wonderful pictures. Weston felt that composition in
photography was "simply the best way" of seeing something. His
photograph of a dead pelican (1941) is an image that makes us understand the
grace of flight, the power and motion of the ocean, the texture and feel of
sand and feathers, and the poetic ability of photography to stop time. Weston
adjusted his camera lens so that the image would be as sharp as possible, so
sharp in fact that the camera is actually seeing more than our eyes can. In a
sense, the picture tells us that death is a part of the natural cycle; that to
look at it directly is a beautiful experience, but by using camera technology
to look closer may be a magical experience.
Edward
Weston, Pelican, Point Lobos, 1941, George Eastman House.
The twentieth
century was a remarkable period of invention, environmental awareness, and art
making. One artist who stands out was Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986). Unlike most
other artists who were influenced by European styles and fashions, O'Keeffe
wanted to make art with a fresh, American vision. Early in her career, she was
interested in the urban landscape of the eastern United States. Then, after
discovering the light and space of New Mexico in 1917 where she eventually
moved in the 1940s, her paintings began to change. The scale, color, and forms
she found in New Mexico inspired a dynamic painting style that was based in
nature but was abstract as well.
A
hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree.
Its is lines and colors put together so that they say something. For me that is
the very basis of painting. The abstraction is often the most definite form for
the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint. Georgia
O'Keeffe, Penguin Books, 1977/
Her paintings
seem say to that nature may be unexplainable but that making art is a way of
understanding it. For O'Keeffe, whose ideas came from the broad landscape of
New Mexico as well as bits of bone or shell, plants and flowers, the merging of
art and environment was an obvious thing. The paintings tell stories of vast
geologic time while placing the emotional emphasis on our impressions of light
and color. Her pictures make us realize that the landscape is both outside of
us and inside of us at the same time.
Georgia
O'Keeffe, Red Hills and Bones (1941), Philadelphia Museum of Art.
There are many
contemporary artists that have gone far beyond painting and photography to
explore the relationship of art and environment. Robert Smithson (1938-1973),
an American sculptor, initiated "Environmental Art" by creating large
scale sculptural works that were done in specific places. Spiral Jetty (1970), for instance,
is a huge construction of rocks, salt crystals, earth and algae in the form of
a spiral 1,500 feet long that juts out into the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Robert
Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970).
Walter de Maria
created Lightning Field (1970) by planting hundreds of stainless steel poles in the
desert of New Mexico that act as lightning rods attracting dazzling bolts of lightning
during storms. The environment of earth and sky is dramatically bound together
by fleeting but powerful lightning displays combining art, science, and
engineering.
Walter de
Maria, The Lightning Field, Dia Art Foundation, 1980.
Contemporary
artist James Turrell, known for his use of light and space in sculptural
environments, has been at work since 1985 on a project in Arizona that actually
uses an extinct volcano called Roden Crater as the basis for a sculptural
observatory. The
finished project will allow visitors in 2001 to experience the alignments of
stars and planets as well as have a unique view of the surrounding sky and
landscape by carefully sculpting the rim of the volcano to give the illusion
that the sky is a dome.
Roden
Crater, Arizona, James Turrell, Segura Publishing Company, Tempe, Arizona
Robert Irwin
began his career as an abstract painter but became better known for his
sculptural work as part of a California movement known as "Light and
Space". His most recent work is the Central Garden of the Getty Center in
Los Angeles (1996). Irwin calls the work "a sculpture in the form of a
garden aspiring to become art" because it will take almost seven years for
the plants and trees to come to full growth, thus revealing the final form of
the garden. Irwin feels a garden is a kind of commitment. In order to
appreciate it fully you must return time and again to see what has changed.
Descending into the garden down a zigzagging walkway under a canopy of London
plane trees, visitors are taken out of everyday life by twists and turns. They
must cross over a stream, whose rushing sound has been orchestrated by placing
boulders at strategic points so that the sound is never the same twice. As they
pass by exotic flowers and plants they gradually come under the spell of the
color and rthymn of the garden. The stream plunges over a waterfall at the
bottom of the garden into a huge bowl-like space that holds a mirror pond. In
the pond is a maze of red, purple, and pink azaleas. The tranquility of the
garden is the result of the effort of taking the path, of making the commitment
to understanding the environment. What Robert Irwin tells us in the Central
Garden of the Getty Center is that art and the environment are forever
connected. Art is a way of understanding the world just as precisely as
science. Science relies on words and numbers, art on color and form.
Together, art
and science reveal the environment as a place that can be understood, but will
always hold new mysteries. From cave painting to environmental art, artists
remind us that our knowledge about the world is understood through our senses
and emotions as well as our minds.
Robert
Irwin, The Central Garden, Getty Center, Los Angeles, California.