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It could be said that the landscape has come to signify many things: a nostalgic notion of an Edenic past; a foil for cultural forces in transition; and, in the visual arts, an archetypal motif with a thousand incarnations. Landscape at the Millennium offers a context, admittedly selective in its point of view, for addressing the representation of the landscape over the past one hundred years. The main objective was to create a dialogue between the project's principal components – installations by two contemporary painters and a sampling of nineteenth-century landscapes – that was internal as well as external. Internal insofar as the components generate their own issues and questions, external in their relevance to the permanent collection.
The landscape (envisioned here as a philosophical tenet based on our physical and psychological rapport with the natural environment) is so much a part of our cultural heritage, so ingrained in notions of who we are and what we have become, that it is easily taken for granted. And yet, over the course of one hundred years, our relationship to and perception of this geographic body has undergone dramatic changes.
During the nineteenth century, the landscape occupied a prominent place in the nation's collective consciousness, signifying on the one hand a boundless frontier whose awesome potential had vast consequences for a rapidly developing country, and on the other, a more manicured and domesticated terrain. Artists (painters, illustrators, photographers) were often in the forefront of discovery, accompanying surveyors and cartographers to document the landscape in transition. Their depictions, in most cases relying on established schema, ran the gamut from sublime to mundane, from transcendent to picturesque. With few exceptions, these works faithfully recorded the circumstances that led to their creation.
Not until the early years of the twentieth century did the landscape become the site for more subjective projections, as European and American artists, perceiving correspondences in natural phenomena, began to conceive abstract analogues. Wassily Kandinsky, for instance, saw the landscape as a symphony of lines, forms, and colors, like a musical composition endlessly varied. The group of vanguard painters gathered around the photographer-dealer Alfred Steiglitz – Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, and John Marin – also took liberties with the landscape. Inspired by the enigmatic canvases of Albert Pinkham Ryder, their paradigm for the homegrown, visionary American painter, they generated their own abstract equivalents. Consider each of these artists a trailblazer, who, in moving beyond traditional representations of the landscape, provided an alternative model for subsequent generations of painters projecting another kind of landscape.
Tobi Kahn and Pat Steir could be considered part of this alternative tradition, joining Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still, whose works are on view in the permanent collection and for whom the landscape was a springboard for abstraction. Kahn and Steir make a constructive pairing, given the stylistic range of these historical works. Distinguished by reductive designs, translucent color, and subtle modulations of surface texture, Kahn's interpretations of the landscape gravitate between representation and abstraction. While his subject matter is easily identified as landscape or seascape, the actual images are more suggestive. Transposing natural phenomena through memory, his images aspire to a universal condition through the most minimal of means. For this project, the artist conceived an installation of large-scale canvases whose varying horizons and colors evoke an environment in constant flux. Kahn's notion of abstraction shares a strong affinity with the nature-based abstractions of Dove and Hartley, as well as with Rothko's luminous fields of transcendent color. Like them, he embraces painting's ability to renew itself through formal exploration and poetic distillation.
Steir's depiction of natural phenomena, like Kahn's, is based on equivalence. If Kahn's images suggest meditative serenity, Steir's explore more expressionistic dimensions. What Rothko is to Kahn, Frankenthaler and Still are to Steir: two sides of the same pictorial coin, each painting abstraction with a different face. Since the mid-1980s, Steir has drawn inspiration from waves and waterfalls, creating monumental, undulating analogues for these chaotic forces in the form of works executed directly on the wall.
The challenge for both painters is that their work is presented in the context of nineteenth-century landscapes and abstract-expressionist icons in the permanent collection. The addition of photographer John Pfahl's Permutations of the Picturesque, 1993-97, gives the project another dimension by introducing photographic images of picturesque landscapes based on nineteenth-century prototypes that Pfahl subtly manipulated in the computer and Iris printed with watercolor inks on Wattman paper.
From an historical perspective, the exhibition confirms that artists continue to be interested in the landscape as a vehicle for abstraction. At the same time, it raises philosophical questions regarding our relationship to the environment and the poignancy of place at this point in our millennial history.
- Douglas Dreishpoon, Curator