Landscape and Western Art (Oxford History of Art)

This book faces two usually insurmountable hurdles - first, designing an art book in a smallish size, with the corresponding destruction of anything like a scale appreciation for larger images true size; and second, covering an enormous amount of material in a very short text.The first remains an indefensible decision, and there's no more to be said. As for the second hurdle, Andrews does a fine job of what baseball pitchers refer to when they wiggle out of endless bases loaded situations without giving up a run - walking between the raindrops. This scholarly act of prestidigatation calls for hearty applause - usually such surveys are either too careful or too general. Happily this book is neither, but rather thought-provoking and sagacious. Andrews success seems to lie in an acquired acceptance that for all the modern kitchen sink tools applied to art history - from Levi-Straussian anthropology to historical statistical anaylysis to Foucault's deconstructionist revisionism, there remains an abiding need for aesthetic appreciation. As one reads through the book, a sort of moderated mediatation or commentary on what is landscape, how we see it, a large array of such new thinking pops up, many contemporary responses about the nature of landscape are offered. Yet in the end Andrews falls back, and rather slyly I might add, on a sort of updated aestheticism. The distinction, and the difference Andrews makes with this old tool is surprising. The material comes across with a clarity and directedness absent from the more typical contemporary approaches to art, approaches emphasizing far more than the works of art, usually at the expense of shrinking down their full import in a maze of dubious cross-referencing. Andrews greatest gift is confidence - he conveys a supreme sureness whatever he is writing about. In an age of relative values Andrews' certainty reverberates with an insolent disdain for doubt. (I am reminded of one critic's snickering potshot at A.L. Rowse's offhand dismissal of alternate Shakepeare author theories as pure nonsense - "for Rowse, doubt is an undiscovered country.") But Andrews, for all of that, is very much the modern, quite up on the various formalized readings and professional jargon. He has taken the measure of each of these chimeras and gone back to draw his own conclusions around an aesthetic largely free of post-modern cant. For Andrews the modern critical methodologies are but tools, used when needed, and not self-indulgence repudiating the reader in deliberately obtuse and hermetic language. And a huge bonus - Andrews is fun to read, displaying an extraordinarily adept mind; his questions and examples rarely failing to not only make his point, but develop it. Having showered the author with praise I must point out one caveat: unlike Kenneth Clarke, who invariably seemed to put his figure on the one painting defining an age or movement, Andrews sometimes misses the obvious. A discussion of Niagara which is posed to rightly culminate in Church's great masterpiece suddenly veers off into a discussion of the Panorama, interesting enough as idea, but invariably second rate art. In deliberately thumbing an intellectual nose at Church, Andrews reveals some blind spots - he fails to understand what connects Church's greatest work with the early Wright's prairie architecture - land-gripping yet enclosed and interlocking horizontals celebrating the continent's scale. I find it strange indeed that such a book could fail to register Wright's influence and importance on our view of landscape. Next to these responses to the New World Andrew's Panoramas appear quite naked, generalized and simplistic. Although they fit nicely into his argument, he misses the chance to look beyond and over the edge, as it were. This blatant Eurocentric reading of American art continues on in a discussion of imperialist viewpoints and uninteresting observations on the over-rated Bierstadt: for Andrews the historical connections of American painting outweigh the purely artistic. The result? Even a century and half later Europeans refuse to take seriously our greatest landscape artist Church because he doesn't fit their critical template. Despite these peccadilloes this remains a first rate book, and a must for any Art History collection.

This is a much more lavishly produced book than Sir Kenneth Clark's LANDSCAPE INTO ART (1949), which I have recently been reading, but much less satisfactory as a survey of landscape art. Indeed, a better title might have been "Some Questions About Landscape." They are good questions, though, including the one on his second page, where Andrews questions Clark's assumptions:-- In Clark's title, landscape was the raw material waiting to be processed by the artist. IBegan by implying that land rather than landscape is the raw material, and that in the conversionofland into landscape a perceptual process has already begun whereby that material isprepared as an appropriate subject for the painter or photographer, or simply for absorptionas a gratifying aesthetic experience. The process might, therefore, be formulated as twofold:land into landscape; landscape into art.Indeed, Andrews calls his first chapter "Land into Landscape." He brings a dizzying amount of erudition and reference to the question, calling on poets, photographers, philosophers, and even anthropologists to answer it. The heart of the matter, he suggests, is man's changing relationship to nature. "Landscape in art tells us, or asks us to think about, where we belong." Recently, though, that relationship has changed:-- We don't have to imagine, with the aid of alluring images of Arcadian natural simplicity, whatit must have been like to live in Nature; we are all too aware of our dependency on Naturenow. More crucially still, we feel Nature's dependency on us. Landscape as a way of seeingfrom a distance is incompatible with this heightened sense of out relationship to Nature asa living (or dying) environment. As a phase in the cultural life of the West, landscape mayalready be over.Although there is a rough chronological flow to Andrews' subsequent chapters, his book makes no attempt to offer a history of landscape painting; rather, it tackles similar philosophical questions in roughly the order in which they became relevant. His chapter on the Renaissance, for instance, "Subject or Setting?", considers the emergence of landscape backgrounds by examining a series of mostly unfamiliar paintings of St. Jerome, delving into everything from Catholic hagiography to contemporary hermeneutics. He marshals a fascinating set of examples, from Antonello da Messina to Magritte, in "Framing the View," about the interplay between inside and outside. He is brilliant in "Astonished beyond Expression," about mountain scenery and the sublime in art. And, striking off from Turner's astonishing Snowstorm in his chapter "Nature as Picture or Process?", he revisits many of the arguments from his opening chapter, but in a more dynamic way, more closely tied to actual examples.In short, I enjoy him most when he compares actual paintings, all of which are beautifully illustrated in the book, mostly in color, with superb close-up details prefacing each chapter. But too many of his topics—those on landscape as amenity, topography, and politics, for example—read like isolated lectures rather than chapters in a book, discussing often abstruse points in difficult language, buttressed by works that are often far outside the mainstream of landscape art. So this is by no means a text to recommend as a general introduction, although I respect the fact that he demands answers to questions which, in six years of teaching and sixty of gallery-going, I had never thought to ask.

Not what I thought it was but still worth having and at used costs.

Andrews has a unique take on the history of western landscape art. A must for your library shelf.

Great intro to the subject. Note that this book is not a basic inventory of important works so much as overview of important historical themes. More appropriate for art historian.

Interesting review of landscape painting

great

Great book big help in writing essays

there may never be a better guide to what is a compelling area of interest for me.

Great!

Having slogged my way through the out-dated patrician sentiments about Landscape Art of Lord Clark of Civilisation, this was a refreshing change - he doesnt shy away from the real content of the pictures, the upper classes' self-indulgences for instance, and writes in langugae which is only occassionally obscure - but Derrida is hard to explain at the best of times. I recommend this clear-sighted overview of the subject.

This is an indepth analysis of the changing attitudes to landscape art, from the middle ages to modern times. Of particular interest is how our perception of both landscape and landscape bawd art today is conditioned by the past.

I have many Oxford History of Art volumes, all of which are printed to a high standard of offset printing on quality paper. The book that I received is clearly scanned and digitally printed, with low-resolution printing that makes the text hard to read. I can't believe that this book is a legitimate product of Oxford University Press.