Prospero | Arts in the Parks centenary

Art’s equivocal relationship with the natural world

Striking landscapes and stormy seas provoke feelings of fear and pleasure in artists

By D.B., C.M., R.L.

POETS and artists have always been awed by nature. The author of “The Wanderer”, an Old English poem, both admired and feared the power of the sea and storms. In the 20th century, Mary Hunter Austin wrote that she was “not homesick with the sky, nor with the hills, though sometimes I am afraid of them.” Edmund Burke, in his “Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful” (1757), had stated that the majesty of the natural world always provokes such an ambiguous response, a sense of ineffability and a mingling of pleasure and pain. “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature…is astonishment,” he says. “And astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.”

Though Burke was not the first to articulate this idea (Jonathan Richardson, a painter and theorist, sought to identify the sublime in art some 20 years earlier), his manifesto was the most influential, particularly for the Romantics and Transcendentalists. Percy Bysshe Shelley, in “Mont Blanc” (1817), wrote: “Dizzy Ravine! And when I gaze on thee | I seem as in a trance sublime and strange”. George Gordon Byron wrote of the “pleasing fear” of “the freshening sea” in “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”. Henry David Thoreau, faced with “rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks” could only ask “Who are we? Where are we?” Poets struggled to contain the grandeur and infinity of nature within the limits of their verse; lines run on from each other, metre is disrupted, stanzas and rhyme are irregular. Human forms seem inadequate for the task; the sublime is posited as a never-ending quest, an endless query.

Artists, too, sought to capture the power of nature on canvas. Wreckage was a popular motif; Claude Joseph Vernet’s “A Shipwreck in Stormy Sea” (1773) shows boats turned sideways by the wind, insignificant against the ocean and the cliffs. Théodore Géricault’s “The Raft of the Medusa” (1837) illustrates billowing winds, stormy skies and raging waves. Man is unable to contend with this violence: bodies lie strewn across the frame.

In 1886, Friedrich Nietzsche declared the sublime out of date, yet artists continued to be awed by mountain ranges and unusual landscapes. Ansel Adams, Mary Austin and John Muir made careers of their expressions of wonder at the “wide open spaces” of America’s national parks. Adams—arguably the most iconic visual artist of the American West—confessed that he knew of no artistic work that “exceeds the compelling spiritual command” of Yosemite Valley. His photographs in black and white (of which there are thousands, see image below) sought to “give you the equivalent of what I felt. Equivalent is still the best word.” Artists had invented new technological means to capture the world around them, but the sense of being humbled by it remained.

This year marks the centenary of the National Park Service in America, as well as 100 years of Arts in the Parks. Collecting paintings, sculptures, writings and music from across the country, the NPS is showcasing the myriad ways in which visitors (roughly 300m a year) have been moved by the spaces. “Mountains with Lupine Leaves” by Ree Nancarrow pictures a single mountain range across five panels. There is no continuity of colour or texture across the piece; it glimpses instead at the area’s slow natural formation and history. “O Give me Land—Lots of Land” by Kathleen Heideman, inspired by the Badlands National Park, points out the ridiculousness of demarcating and claiming the landscape: “now all we have to do is teach the mud | how to obey the rules, and the bison how to read.” Here, in the face of nature, man’s constructions—“cattle gates posted ‘No Trespassing’”—are not simply futile, but arrogant.

Nature persists in evoking feelings of astonishment or horror. In 2008, the Tate launched a project to explore the relevance of the sublime in their collection of modern works. They noted that contemporary artists are increasingly awed by man-made structures and buildings, too. Andreas Gursky’s “Shanghai”, for example, is a panoramic photograph of the Grand Hyatt Hotel, and its floors cannot be contained in the frame. In Mr Gursky’s view, it is capitalism, trade, industry and technology that inspire wonder and fear, pain and pleasure. Artists’ humble quest to capture the elusive endures.

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