Landscape Painting as Ideological Text: Poussin to Kiefer

Introduction: Landscape as Ideological Text

Art historian W.J.T. Mitchell asserted that there is no doubt that the classical and romantic genres of landscape painting evolved during the great age of European imperialism, but have since been retired and accepted as part of the common repertory of kitsch.

In their induction into the quotidian consciousness of art, the seemingly simple representations provided by landscape paintings garnered acclaim for their ability to explore a dual metaphoric and physical reality, portraying not only the ideological concerns that exist outside the painter but also his interpretation of them. From the 17th century to the 20th century, landscape paintings changed in image, representation, popularity, and style, but from Poussin to Kiefer the import of cultural encoding remained.

Poussin and the Neoclassical Moral Landscape

Like his contemporary Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin preferred the late afternoon light, drifting across his pastoral canvas with the golden solace of the fading sun. A precursor to the great age of Neoclassicism, Poussin regarded the landscape painting as a vital tool in creating the desired ideal out of the basic ingredients of reality. The highest aim of painting was to recreate serious and noble actions — not the actual, marred occurrence, but rather a manufactured perfection. During his lifetime, a self-created perfection on canvas was the closest Poussin and his peers would see.

The 17th century was a time of great tumult throughout the Western world and a century of war within Europe. Wars of conquest and liberation, civil discontent, and religious conflict colored the burgeoning modern world with the cloak of the past, as Europe moved away from its recent history of medieval darkness and the Renaissance and brutally struggled into the world of powerful nation-states it would become. Until that point, wars would edge out amicable relations between countries, and great rivalries spawned from a pre-nationalist era consumed the continent.

While Poussin was still a young man, the Thirty Years' War began, consuming much of his adult life. Strife was alive beyond Britain as well, and the steady military engagement produced the decline of the great Spanish empire and the rise of France. Meanwhile, trade blossomed; imperial endeavors brought new and unseen riches to the shores of Europe, where bright new colors mixed with the old, fostering a new energy that led not only to great rivalry but also to the search for perfection that Poussin so fully embodied.

In this epoch rich with tumult, Poussin frequented Rome, the great Holy Catholic city-state firmly built upon savoring the past. He too carried a wistful desire for days gone by; as the Church looked to Christ and society looked to days of cultural awakening and social peace, he returned to the antique in form and thought, aiming his paintings at intellectual stimulation rather than the senses.

His dedication to mental infatuation through art was embodied in The Funeral of Phocion, which expressed his love of antique virtue and landscape. Melancholia pervades the painting, as the good General Phocion, wrongly accused by the Athenians, is sent to his death. Poussin forces the observer to step out of the familiar confines of the usual landscape and examine the scene he portrays — one of politics, grievance, and tragedy. Delving into the roots at the heart of Western tradition, he questioned the commonly held ideals of virtue and power in their peril and injustice. "By placing tragic figures" like Phocion, of great historical importance and modern relevance, "into richly interesting and complexly constructed landscapes, Poussin produced two of the most intellectually demanding and satisfying landscape paintings in the Western tradition."

The great mass of paintings from Poussin's era neglected the inquisition and challenge that he demanded of his observer. Gloria Phares elaborates: "although it is easy to dismiss such attitudes as the unenlightened views of the 16th and 17th centuries, recent history shows that artists are not immune from those who consider blasphemous the use of religious symbols in artistic expression." While, like religious symbolism, addressing the intellectual audience was not in keeping with the conceptual mores of the time, Poussin's unique motivation in landscape painting was carried forward a hundred years later by Fragonard, whose erotic passion coursed through The Swing like a life-blood.

Fragonard and the Rococo Erotic Landscape

The Swing is the embodiment of love's luxuries, symbolized by the rising tide of passions in the impatience of Venus' water chariot in the lower center of the landscape. Above a tangle of captivating flora holding her young lover captive is a girl on a swing, both hidden away in a secret garden of chaste preservation and social expectations that passion overcomes. He is thrilled; reaching out with his hat, the young man bares the standard eighteenth-century erotic image of disclosure and opens himself to her. The girl responds in kind, lifting her feet in rhythm with the swing, her shoes flying to the ground and baring her nakedness in return.

Doyen accounts for this in discussion with Coll, suggesting that, like the familiar broken pitcher, a naked foot is the artistic symbol for the loss of virginity. Using landscape, Fragonard challenged the standard inertia of erotica, charging the painting with amorous ebullience and the joy of an impetuous surrender to love.

The boy watches her from the rose bush, hat off and arms outstretched, as she rides through the sunshine in a glimmer of rose petals and cream. Her thoughtless abandon is only interrupted by his directed gaze, when her legs part, her skirt opens, and her shoes fly off.

In his direct challenge to the standard mores of social custom and expected chastity, Fragonard's frivolity and gallantry run to the heart of the Rococo spirit. After studying the late Baroque under Tiepolo in Italy, he returned to Paris, rejecting his previous concentrations for an artistic engagement with the erotic. Unlike Poussin, who demanded thought of the observer, Fragonard challenged his audience with the fantastic euphoria of passionate, emotional, and physical delight. While The Swing became an immediate success, it was celebrated not only for its technical prowess but also for the young nobleman so scandalously devouring the virgin's feast.

Eighteenth-century art, as Mary Vidal argues, demands to be examined in the light of interpretive genre painting. All works regress from the monograph of traditional sense and find an etymology in the paint that allows a new discussion with the subject matter. Ultimately, the contributions of eighteenth-century painters are taken into careful consideration with the weight of their discussions, combining artistic approaches with contemporary society and ideological context. In each case, that context carried a language transferred to a later date by color and landscape.

Conclusion: Transcendence and the Temporal Heritage

Despite their generational differences, each of Poussin, Fragonard, Friedrich, Miró, Christo, and Kiefer addressed landscape as a form of dialogic exchange. Where one sought a return to the classic, others inserted lavish frivolity. Where another saw the lone figure as a singular tide, others embraced the moment of natural romance. Where one sought to dissolve the divisions of land and sky, yet another stretched them further. Ultimately, each artist used his conversation with landscape as a tool for ideological discussion, challenging the constructs of the time and the observer's accordance with them.

Mitchell asserts that landscape's very exhaustion — and thus its power and consequent kitsch with mass culture — may signal a potential return for renewal in other places and other forms, embodied in the transition from Poussin to Christo. Before the age of modernism, landscape was unmasked as an outlet of quiet ideological concerns; in its wake, after wars, tumult, and international metamorphoses, the discourse became undeniably loud. Following the trajectory of landscape through the twentieth century, Mitchell implies that artists fall into two contrasting versions of narration, like those of Christo and Kiefer, both telling the natural conclusion of boundary and awakening.

Mitchell suggests that twentieth-century landscape is personified in two ways, the first of which is "pure" abstraction. It leads to a conceptual refinement and pulls the painting free of ideological structure and mores, while the second emphasizes a landscape painting's gradual abandonment of convention in favor of naturalism and "pure" hyper-representation. These diverging paths are the twin termini of landscape art in the twentieth century, equally important in defining its rise and fall in the post-modern era.

According to Harrison, there is a subverted text in a landscape painting that "cannot be painted and meant." Counter-intuitively, these landscape artists were capable of providing both technical prowess and this meaning to their works by abandoning the hegemonic protocols of institutionalized cultural mores. Reading the landscape text comes from dismantling the rules to see the interdictions of the modern text.

Mitchell addresses the problem of reading landscapes — all of which provide their own subtext of ideological construct, dissemination, or challenge — as a means of reading a statement written behind the surface of trees, coastline, and sky. In the shoe, rosebud, field's horizon, and flowing gate there exists a new truth of dissertation. Each artist carefully constructed every inch of the painting with meaning and thought, and just as a writer liberally engages the word to discuss the status quo, these artists manipulate the paintbrush or its substitute. What makes the work so notable is the power with which the art transcends time.

"What is notable about both these judiciously historicizing accounts of landscape painting is the degree to which that most apparently spatial of codes remains in the thrall of the temporal," Mitchell wrote.

Poussin appealed to time with Phocion, reminding his contemporaries of their classical roots and observers for years to come of the way lessons of the past hold truth in the future. Fragonard dissembled age and the expectations of society with the honest romance that transcends people from young adulthood to the grave — and, despite the mores that seek to subvert it, the natural glee that it brings. Friedrich depicted a solitude that would pervade the actuality of Nuremberg, and Miró and Christo would, in different eras, traverse the same sky and land that they viewed not as distinct but as interminably intertwined.

It is this power of transcendence that gives rise to the successful ideological text in a landscape painting. Each artist wielded the space of sky, land, and horizon as an object of mentality and idea. "If there is no way forward," Mitchell concluded, "then there can be no way out; geography is hamstrung by history. And yet there are contemporary artists who have cleared enough ground, created sufficient space in which to produce 'series' work in this putatively moribund genre, however shadowed by melancholia and enveloped in ambiguity such work may be."

The work that enabled this modern space of openness, emblematic of that of Miró, Christo, and Kiefer, is not a new creation, but is instead the actualization of the temporal heritage left by painters like Friedrich, Fragonard, and Poussin, who came before.