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Mundus Subterraneus

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I have been immersed in Athanasius Kircher's Theatre of the World, a (literally) wonderful and wittily-written book about the great seventeenth century polymath.  Its author Joscelyn Godwin is something of a polymath himself but has written mainly about music and the occult (he has featured on this blog before as translator of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili).  The book discusses Kircher's inventions, some of which were housed in his museum at the Jesuit Roman College, and covers his extensive writings in Latin on language, religion, geography, science, music and many other topics.  There have been numerous books on Kircher in recent years and Godwin was the author of one of the first of these (in 1979); his aim in this subsequent volume was to focus attention on Kircher's illustrations. These, in contrast to the some of the original texts, 'have a quality of ingenuity and strangeness that are particular to his century, and of singular appeal to ours.'

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, c. 1563

The engravers worked from Kircher's designs which were either his own inventions or adaptations from other sources, sometimes mere sketches sent by travellers and correspondents.  The Tower of Babel reproduced on the cover of this book comes from Turris Babel (1679) and was obviously inspired by the famous Breugel painting.  It was actually drawn by Coenraet Decker and engraved by Lievin Cruyle.  The tower differs from Bruegel's in having 'a system of crossing ramps from one of Kircher's favourite ancient buildings, the Temple of Fortune in Praeneste'.  Bruegel's tower looks like it is being built in the Flemish countryside, but Kircher's is surrounded by ancient monuments, including numerous pyramids and obelisks, subjects he treated extensively in Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652-4) and Obeliscus Aegyptiacus (1666).  His fascination with the obelisks of Rome made me want to revisit the city and spend a day tracking them all down, from the Flaminian obelisk now in the Piazza del Popolo to the Sallustian obelisk at the top of the Spanish Steps.

 Athanasius Kircher, The Earthly Paradise, from Arca Noë (1675)

Kircher's depictions of ancient sites as they might once have appeared range from the Roman villas that he could visit around Tivoli to places for which he had to rely on ancient texts: the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the citadel of Atlantis and the Garden of Eden (above).  For China Illustrata (1667) he made use of the Travels of Marco Polo and more recent information sent back by his fellow Jesuits.  It includes depictions of the Mountain of Fe, shaped either naturally or artificially (Kircher puts arguments for both possibilities) into the resemblance of a Chinese god; the Seven Peaks, which seem to correspond to the configuration of the Great Bear; and Lake Chin, on the surface of which float waterlilies and, more strangely, a child on a piece of wood, the sole survivor of a city destroyed by an earthquake.  In this volume Kircher also illustrates Dragon and Tiger Mountain with the creatures themselves about to fight each other.  Although sceptical of some mythical creatures, Kircher believed in the existence of dragons, even in Europe.  'It may surprise the reader', Joscelyn Edwards observes, 'to learn that dragons were nowhere more prevalent than in Switzerland.'  The idea of a dragon on Mt Pilatus terrorising Lucerne inevitably recalled for me Smaug's destruction of Lake-town in The Hobbit.

Athanasius Kircher, Dragons of Lake Lucerne, from Mundus Subterraneous (1664-78)

Some of Kircher's most famous 'landscape' drawings are in Mundus Subterraneus where they illustrate his theories of geography, geology and the movement and actions of fire and water.  His notion of the hydrological cycle required underground mountain reservoirs and subterranean channels connecting the seas.  At the North and South Poles, as yet unknown, he imagined the global flow of water governed by a vast whirlpool and spring.  I have included here before his image of Mt Vesuvius, a volcano Kircher explored himself.  Inside the crater he 'perceived the groaning and shaking of the dreadful mountain, the inexplicable stench, the dark smoke mixed with globes of fire which the bottom and sides of the mountain continuously vomited forth from eleven different places, forcing me at times to vomit it out myself...'

 Athanasius Kircher, The Loudspeaker System at Mentorella, from Phonurgia Nova (1673)

Kircher wrote a topographical study, Latium (1671) about the region around Rome.  He was particularly drawn to the sanctuary of Mentorella, which he helped preserve, and it was here that he performed some of his acoustic experiments, with loudspeakers directed at the surrounding hills (see above).  This sacred place had witnessed the conversion of St Eustace, when the figure of Christ appeared between the antlers of a stag (see illustration below).  Kircher's book Historia Eustachio-Mariana (1665) contains a memorable description of his discovery of the sanctuary and I will end this post with it.  As Joscelyn Godwin remarks, 'the eighteenth century did not invent the Sublime, nor the Romantic era the melancholy attraction of ruined choirs.'
 'In 1661, while I was exploring the mountains of Polano and Praeneste, I started in Tivoli and passed through wild mountains and rocks.  Around noon I came to a horrid, solitary place, hemmed round with rocks like a crown.  It really was a place filled with horror, where the stony pyramids seemed to scrape the heavens, and, falling from hanging rocks in formidable vortices, seemed to express infernal motion.  In the midst of all this, among dark trees and rocks, I came across the remnants of a roof: it was a church, all but collapsed.  But how could there be a church in this place of terror and solitude?  I asked the guide.  Going in I saw the pictures and sculptures of the saints.  Everything breathed the devotion of ancient piety.'
 Athanasius Kircher, The Conversion of St. Eustace, from Latium (1671)

Sleeping Dragon Ridge

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Yosa Buson, Liu Bei visited Zhuge Liang in his hermitage three times, 18th century
Source: Wikimedia Commons

This beautiful winter scene was painted by the great Japanese haiku poet and artist, Yosa Buson.  It depicts a famous moment in Three Kingdoms, the epic Chinese novel describing real events at the end of the Han Dynasty.  The warlord Liu Bei has come to the 'thatched hut' of Zhuge Liang, the 'Crouching Dragon', to ask whether he will join him as an advisor.  Liu Bei is accompanied in this painting by his two oath brothers, Guan Yu (traditionally depicted with a red face and luxurious beard) and Zhang Fei.  These three and Zhuge Liang (also known as Kongming) have been depicted over and over again in books, plays, films, comic books and video games, along with their adversary Cao Cao (whose poetry I wrote about here last year).  Zhuge Liang was revered as a Chinese Ulysses, a great tactician, minister and inventor.  Moss Roberts, the translator of Three Kingdoms, describes him as a combination of Machiavelli, Clausewitz and Leonardo da Vinci.  But when Liu Bei came to call on him in the year 207, he was just a young scholar with a brilliant reputation.

Dai Jin, Looking Three Times at the Thatched Hut, Early Ming Dynasty
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The painting above, is by Dai Jin (Tai Chin) and dates from roughly the same period as the Three Kingdoms. Dai Jin's hanging scroll shows the same three characters being met at the gate by a boy, while Kongming can be glimpsed inside.  The titles of these pictures refer to the fact that Liu Bei made three trips to the thatched hut before Kongming made an appearance.  The first time he was told by the young boy that the master was not around and that his movements were uncertain.  On the second attempt, in the dead of winter, he encountered Kongming's brother but again was told that the master was away.  On the third, Liu Bei and his brothers were kept waiting while the scholar slept, but finally got to talk to him.  They found him to be a tall man 'with a face like gleaming jade and a plaited silken band around his head.  Cloaked in crane down, he had the buoyant air of a spiritual transcendent.'
 
 
Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Xuande (Liu Bei) Visits Kongming Three Times in the Snow, 1853

This story is as well known in Japan and Korea as it is is in China, as can be seen by two more Japanese images of Liu Bei's journey.  The woodblock print above is by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, from a series called A Popular Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  The one below is by the last great master of the ukiyo-e print, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi ('Gentoku' and 'Kômei' are the Japanese versions of  Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang).  The Fitzwilliam curators note that Kongming is shown by Yoshitosi 'on the right poring over learned texts: in the absence of lamps, diligent scholars in ancient China were supposed to have read by the light of fireflies or by the reflected luminescence of snow, which they brought in from outside.' 

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Gentoku visits Kômei in the snow, 1883

I will end this post with some lines from the novel itself, in Moss Roberts' translation.  On their first journey, Liu Bei and his brothers are directed to Sleeping Dragon Ridge:
'The twisting, turning ridge bears heavy clouds;
The frothing, churning stream is liquid jade.
Caught between the rocks, this dragon winds;
Shadowed by the pines, this phoenix hides.
A wattle gate half-screens a thatched retreat:
Undisturbed the recluse sits within.'
On their second journey, 'dense, somber clouds covered the sky.  The brothers rode into a cutting northern wind.  A heavy snow made the mountains gleam like arrowheads of white jade and gave the wood a silvery sheen.'  After being disappointed again, Liu Bei sets off back.
'Pear-petal flakes descending from the skies,
Antic willow puffs darting at his eyes,
He turns and halts to view the scene behind:
Banked with snow, the silvered ridges shine.'
On the third visit, he finally gains admittance and talks to Zhuge Yiang, who describes to him a three stage plan to reunite the Han empire.  Liu Bei rises from his mat and joins his hands together in gratitude, saying 'Master, you have opened the thicket that barred my view and have made me feel as if clouds and mist have parted and I have gained the blue sky.'

The Schmadribach Falls

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Joseph Anton Koch, The Schmadribach Waterfall above Lauterbrunnen, c. 1793

Last month the Evening Standard carried a headline saying that 'The British Museum just bought a drawing for £68,000'.  The article (illustrated with a later painting rather than the actual pen and ink sketch) explained that 'an 18th-century drawing by Austrian Romantic artist Joseph Anton Koch — forgotten for over a century until it was discovered by the Standard’s late art critic Brian Sewell – has been bought by the British Museum for £68,750.'  Following its sale at Christies, a temporary export ban was put in place.  This means that you can read online various government statements about it, including one from the Arts Minister himself: 'This striking study for Joseph Anton Koch’s most celebrated landscape shows why this leading Romantic painter was so highly regarded by British artists.'

 Joseph Anton Koch, The Schmadribach Falls, 1821-22

There is an Arts Council PDF of the expert's report, which discusses Koch's drawing in relation to the export ban Waverley criteria.  Here is its explanation of the particular significance in art historical terms of The Schmadribach Waterfall, which Koch developed into two oil paintings, one now in Munich, the other in Leipzig.
'Koch’s Schmadribach Waterfall fundamentally revised the previously accepted norms of landscape. Seemingly inspired by Albrecht Altdorfer’s Battle of Alexander (1529, Munich, Alte Pinakothek), he envisaged a panoramic ‘world landscape’ embodying the entirety of nature’s system as well as man’s place within it. Koch’s interpretation of Alpine scenery was more influential on the next generation of artists than the formulations of C.D. Friedrich or J.M.W. Turner. For example, Ludwig Richter (1803-84) paid direct homage to The Schmadribach Waterfall in his The Watzmann (1824, Munich, Neue Pinakothek).
Adrian Ludwig Richter, The Watzmann, c. 1824

I would love to know more about how Brian Sewell came upon this sketch.  The expert report notes only that 'the provenance of this drawing is unknown prior to its ownership by the well-known art critic Brian Sewell (1931-2015).'  A bit more information can be found in an article by Christies chairman Noël Annesley from the time of the posthumous sale:
'A notable discovery of Brian’s, and a demonstration of his flair for spotting rarities, is a meticulously drawn view from 1794 of the Schmadribach waterfall near Lauterbrunnen in Switzerland, a favourite subject of Joseph-Anton Koch. I do not know how it was previously described, but Brian recognised its authorship because of his interest in German Romantic art. This had been quickened many years before at the Courtauld, and then through visiting an extensive Arts Council exhibition in 1963 devoted to Koch and other members of the so-called Nazarene School which had previously been neglected in Britain.'
Looking at what else was on sale from his collection, I see there was a whole range of landscape sketches costing a lot less than £68,000.  If I'd had £10,000 to spare I might have been able to pick up a couple myself...  One can dream, although I have to admit that such valuable objects wouldn't really be safe in our house, where they would be at risk of being knocked off the wall during a lightsaber fight, splattered with Warhammer paint or hit by a flying emoji cushion.

Jones Beach Piece

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Next month a Joan Jonas retrospective is due to open at Tate Modern - you can read an interview in Tate Etc.  I should probably wait and see this before writing about her work here, but I just found the beginnings of a blog post I started years ago on her Jones Beach Piece and it got me looking online again to see what there is to be read about her work.  My original interest in Jones Beach Piece was an idea that it might have constituted a new form of landscape art, one in which the landscape is used to separate the art from the audience.  The beach was not just the setting for a performance, it was a medium through which the art had to be perceived.  The performers were deliberately situating themselves in a subordinate role to the landscape, like those small figures of shepherds in seventeenth century pastoral paintings.  Here's how she described her early outdoor performances in Interview Magazine.
'The first performance outdoors happened at Jones Beach [Jones Beach Piece, 1970]. It was based on the idea of how our perception of image and movement is altered by distance. A group of us performed a series of choreographed movements and signals with simple props such as a six-foot metal hoop, a ladder, a rope, a bag of shells, and a shovel. For instance, Susan Rothenberg, tied into the hoop, was rolled about by George Trakas and John Erdman. The audience was a quarter of a mile away. Performers stood at different distances from the audience and clapped blocks of wood together over their heads. The farther away, the greater the sound delay.
We next performed this work on the empty lots and the docks of the Lower West Side. It was called Delay Delay [1972]. We performed similar actions signaling to each other and the audience—who was situated on what is now the roof of Richard Serra’s loft building—from the farthest ends of the docks and the edges of the lots. Carol Gooden and Gordon Matta-Clark spent the entire performance painting a big circle and a line in the street below. Their dog sat nearby watching. Cars would slowly approach, slow down, and drive by carefully. During these performances, we were never interfered with. It was a different time.'
Ah, would that we could all have experienced New York City in the seventies!  That Interview interview is worth reading in full for quotes like this: "I remember Gordon Matta-Clark liked to wrestle..."


Among the more recent works Joan Jonas has made, there are two worth mentioning here which were inspired by Iceland. Volcano Saga was originally narrated by the artist but then turned into a video piece, with Tilda Swinton in the role of Guðrún from the thirteenth century Laxdaela Saga.  More recently she has developed Reanimation, a work inspired by the Halldór Laxness novel Under the Glacier.  Neither of these source books has much about Iceland's landscape, although the sites of Laxdaela Saga have become landmarks and there are some brief descriptions in Laxness.  It is hard though to imagine making art about Iceland that does not feature its glaciers, lava flows and sea cliffs, and both Jonas installations included scenes shot around the island.  You can watch Volcano Saga in the embedded clip above, and here is a description in The New Yorker of 'Reanimation.'
'What began as a lecture-performance at M.I.T., in 2010, has evolved into a multiscreen extravaganza surrounding a sculpture of dangling prismatic crystals, which sends flashes of light darting onto projections of glacial landscapes and the occasional seal, filmed in an archipelago in the Arctic Circle. Jonas also appears onscreen, drawing with black ink and with ice. The spellbinding piece is non-narrative, with no sense of beginning or end. As long as you remain in this world, Jonas seems to suggest, you’re still just passing through.'
My copies of Laxdaela Saga  - a Folio edition of the Magnusson/Pálsson translation with Peter Pendrey wood-cuts - and Under the Glacier, with one of those evocative Louisa Matthíasdóttir paintings that Vintage use for the covers of their Laxness translations.

Anglers, Mülheim

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Last week we went to the reopened Hayward Gallery for its big Andreas Gursky retrospective.  Twenty years ago, everyone seemed to be talking about Gursky: there was, for example, a show at the Serpentine in 1999, and a year earlier he won the Photographers Gallery Citibank Prize (now called the Deutsche Börse Prize).  'This is an artist whose time it appears has come,'wrote Robin Muir, 'as anyone would attest who was held up in the bottleneck of admirers lingering over his floor-to-ceiling pictures at the show of shortlisted Citibank entries in March' (I would have been one of those admirers).  Photographs from that time, like Salerno (1990) and Paris, Montparnasse (1993), have became famous, whilst Rhein II (1999) and 99 Cent II Dyptich (2001) both broke auction records for the world's most expensive photograph (my friend Tom has a print of the latter up in his kitchen and I suspect he is not alone in this...)  All these years later I was curious to see what Gursky has been doing recently and whether he had found new approaches to landscape photography beyond such spectacular, digital-altered compositions as Bahrain I (2005), in which a desert race track was turned into something resembling an abstract painting.


Many of the recent works on show at the Hayward are fictionalised tableaux, a new direction certainly, but not as immediately likeable as his early work.  I confess I struggled to get the point of SH I, in which a superhero (Iron Man) and his love interest are seen embracing on a tropical beach.  But Gursky is also still photographing scenes of the technological sublime, such as Les Mées (2016), a striking view of a solar farm covering a hillside in France that is reproduced on the exhibition poster (above).  The most recent photograph in the show is also a landscape image, Utah (2017), and it certainly impressed The Guardian's critic, Laura Cumming:
'The show’s masterpiece is unlike almost anything Gursky has made before. It is a new work, a single shot of some prefab houses skimmed on a mobile phone while driving through Utah. The photograph registers the speed of the car racing through the landscape – and modern life – in all its random glitches and blurs. At the same time, the houses look perilously ephemeral against the ancient mountains behind them. This fragile little thing, a spontaneous and disposable shot, is enlarged to the size of a cinema screen – a monumental homage to the mobile phone and the outsize role it plays in depicting our times'
Leaving the exhibition I found myself thinking how much I still love Gursky's earliest photographs.  They reminded me of my most recent trip to The Photographers Gallery, to see 'Wim Wenders' Polaroids', although of course Gursky's views of West Germany are on a much larger scale.  Anglers, Mülheim (1989), for example, is an impressive take on our modern landscape, a place neither urban or rural.  Greg Hilty described it well in his essay for the catalogue of another 1990s exhibition, Tate Liverpool's 'Andreas Gursky: Images' (1995).
'Two groups of fishermen sit on the banks of a quiet river, some distance apart, in uneasy relation to each other and to their pseudo-idyllic surroundings.  In the distance we glimpse a motorway bridge, leading into the space behind the trees in front of which the anglers sit.  We know we're on the fringes of a town, we can hear the cars in the distance, smell the pollution of the river, almost pick out litter in the woods.  The site, like those in other works from the period, is on the margins in both social and pictorial terms.  What meaning the picture holds derives not from any incident portrayed, but from the relation of what we see to what we cannot see, but understand to be there.'

The calmness of that beauty

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I was pleased when Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize last year, partly because I loved The Buried Giant, despite the misgivings of some critics.  Of all his novels, the one that seems to be most universally admired is The Remains of the Day, the story, in Salmon Rushdie's phrase, of 'a man destroyed by the ideas upon which he has built his life.'  It is narrated by the butler Mr Stevens as he slowly makes his way to the West Country on a rare holiday from his duties, hoping to be reunited after twenty years with the former housekeeper of Darlington Hall.  Near the beginning of his journey, he stops the car and climbs a hill to enjoy the view.  His idea of what it is that we appreciate at such moments encapsulates some of the novel's most important themes.  It hints at his misguided allegiance to an outdated idea of Englishness, exaggerated through a lifetime of service and deference, and it exemplifies his belief in the importance of restraint, something that will be shown to have had regrettable consequences for the course of his own life.
'...when I stood on that high ledge this morning and viewed the land before me, I distinctly felt that rare, yet unmistakable feeling - the feeling that one is in the presence of greatness.  We call this land of ours Great Britain, and there may be those who believe this is a somewhat immodest practice. Yet I would venture that the landscape of our country alone would justify the use of this lofty adjective.
  And yet what precisely is this greatness? Just where, or in what, does it lie? I am quite aware it would take a far wiser head than mine to answer such a question, but if I were forced to hazard a guess, I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart.  What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.  In comparison, the sorts of sights offered in such places as Africa and America, though undoubtedly very exciting, would, I am sure, strike the objective viewer as inferior on account of their unseemly demonstrativeness.
   The whole question is very akin to the question that has caused much debate in our profession over the years: what is a 'great' butler?...'

lllustration by Finn Campbell-Notman for
 the Folio edition of The Remains of the Day

Nine acres of orchids

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'The fluttering swallows leave on their homeward journey;
The forlorn cicada makes no sound;
The wild geese call as they travel southwards;
The partridge chatters with a mournful cry.'
'Jiu bian', 'Nine Changes', is a set of poems attributed to Song Yu, a third century BCE poet about whom little is known.  Charles Hartman has described them as 'the locus classicus for later Chinese poetry of autumnal melancholy.'  David Hawkes translated them in his version of Chu ci (The Songs of the South) the collection in which they have come down to us (the second great source of Chinese poetry, along with The Book of Odes). He contrasts 'Jiu bian' with the great poem that opens the anthology, 'Li sao' ('Encountering Sorrow'), by Qu Yuan.
''Li sao' is full of allegorical flowers, birds and trees, but its author [...] has little time for contemplating the world of nature.  It would be hard to imagine him composing the magnificent threnody to dying nature with which 'Jiu bian' begins.  In 'Jiu bian' we encounter, perhaps for the first time, a fully developed sense of what the Japanese call mono no aware, the pathos of natural objects, which was to be the theme of so much Chinese poetry through the ages.' 
The author of 'Jiu bian' is all too aware of the passing years, expressing sentiments that strike a chord with me in my bleaker moments...
'I have left behind my blossom-burgeoning prime:
Sere and withered, I am full of melancholy.
First autumn heralds with warning of white dew;
Then winter redoubles rigour with bitter frost.'
'Song Yu Mourns Autumn' is a qin tune from the Xilutang Qintong (1525 CE), recorded by John Thompson and available on his wonderful silkqin website.

Yokoyama Taikan, Qu Yuan, 1898
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Qu Yuan, China's first great poet, was banished from the court of King Huai of Chu (who reigned from 328 to 299 BCE) and drowned himself in the River Miluo.  He is now associated with the Dragon Boat Festival, celebrated each year on the anniversary of his death.  'Li sao' may not contain landscape description but it is full of symbolic flowers.  Some of these clearly represent people at the Chu court: 'I thought that orchid could be trusted ... Pepper is full of flattery'.  Here (to swap translators) is Burton Watson's version of a few lines of 'Li sao', comparing Qu's official career to the planting of a garden. 
'In the past I planted nine acres of orchids,
sowed a hundred fields with heliotrope,
set out peonies and cart-halt flowers,
mixed them with asarums and fragrant angelica,
hoping their stems and leaves would flourish and grow firm,
looking for the time when I could reap them.
Though they wither and die, how would that pain me?'
Qu Yuan and Song Yu both often feature in later writing.  'The Poetic Exposition on Gao-tang', for example, was probably written about Song Yu by a Han Dynasty writer.  In Stephen Owen's translation it begins thus:
'Once upon a time King Xiang of Chu visited the high terrace of Yun-meng with Song Yu, when he gazed of toward the lodge of Gao-tang.  Above it was a mass of cloudy vapors, first rising up towering, then suddenly changing its aspect, so that in a moment there were endless transformations...'
Song Yu explains to the king that these are 'the clouds of dawn' which 'billow out like the perpendicular pine' and then 'glow like a comely maiden.'  They recall the goddess who visited a former king of Chu in a dream and made love to him.  On leaving she said she would be 'found on Wu Mountain's sunlit slope, on the steeps of the high hill.  In the early morning I am the clouds of dawn; in the evening I am the passing rain.'  This is the origin of the poetic term for sexual intercourse which you find in Chinese literature, 'clouds and rain.'

Feelings from Mountain and Water

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Feelings from Mountain and Water (山水情) is essentially an animated ink painting. It is a film about a master of the guqin, an instrument that seems to embody the Chinese landscape, as I have discussed in earlier posts on this blog.  The master and pupil are seen in various shan shui (rivers and mountains) settings, painted in a minimal and near-monochrome style.  We see the changing of the seasons and hear the sound of blowing wind and running water (there is no dialogue).  The camera pans across misty mountains which emerge out of the mist as ink spreads on paper.  I have embedded the film above - it only lasts 20 minutes.


Feelings from Mountain and Water was made in Shanghai in 1988 by the renowned Chinese animator Te Wei (1915-2010).  His ink wash technique, developed in the late fifties, was based on that of painter Qi Baishi (1864-1957), who was in turn influenced by Bada Shanren (1626 - 1705).  There is a fishing scene in Feelings From Mountain and Water that resembles Bada Shanren's Fish and Rocks (1696), a painting I've written about here before and featured today in my regular landscape 'tweet of the day'.  Another influence, evident in The Cowboy's Flute (1963), was the painter Li Keran (1907-89).  It was soon after the release of this film that the Cultural Revolution brought Te Wei's career to a sudden halt and, as Alex Dudok de Wit has written in a piece for the BFI site, he was interned in solitary confinement for a year, beaten, deprived of sleep and obliged to pen self-criticisms.  He kept himself sane by drawing sketches on the glass pane of a table, erasing them when guards approached.  Later he worked on a pig farm with his fellow animator A Da and it was only after Mao's death that they could consider returning to their work.



Feelings from Mountain and Water can now be seen as the culmination of Te Wei's career.  In 1989 he was honoured as one of the four outstanding Chinese filmmakers, and yet, as de Wit writes, 'the artist who had survived the Cultural Revolution did not weather the transition to the market economy, and he did not work in the last two decades of his life.'  Perhaps Te Wei's style of animation will be carried forward by others?  The knowledge that this was his last film gives added poignancy to the final scene involving the old master, in which he plays a qin that is merely a blur of ink, surrounded by layers of mist.  The precious instrument is passed on to his student, who plays it as the master's boat travels up the screen and into the distance until it seemingly fades into the sky.

Landscape splinters

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... All around them the mountaintops rose up into the clear sky. Marie thought they looked as if they were made of porcelain, and although Egger had never seen porcelain in his life he agreed with her. You'd have to be careful walking there, he said; one false step and the whole landscape might crack, or shatter straight away into thousands of tiny landscape splinters. Marie laughed. 'That sounds funny,' she said. 
    'Yes,' said Egger.  Then he bowed his head, not knowing what to do next...

Robert Seethaler's novella A Whole Life, translated from the German by Charlotte Collins, tells the story of Andreas Egger, a shy farmhand who experiences the transformation of the Alps through the development of skiing and mountain tourism.  Reviewers have likened it to John Williams'Stoner (I wouldn't disagree) and seen its success as a reaction against our globalised online world.  I mention it on this blog because it is also a book about landscape, albeit a fictional one.  'I invented all the places in the book,' Seethaler has said, 'but of course I do have memories, or emotional memories, of my childhood experiences in the mountains. The wonderful silence of the snow; and also the dangers of the mountains themselves — you don’t forget things like that.'  The destructive force of nature plays an important part in the book, but so does that of the construction workers, felling trees and blasting rocks, clearing the way for the cable cars that will bring tourists onto the high peaks that have been Egger's home.  The mountains are defenceless against the twentieth century - fragile, like porcelain.  Yet in the end this is a hopeful book, and if a 'whole life' can encompass ruptures, ruin and loss, then a landscape too can change and endure.

The Nymph of the Luo River

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Gu Kaizhi, The Nymph of the Luo River, Song Dynasty copy of a 4th century original (detail)

I love the magical green landscape into which the nymph is disappearing in this painting.  How closely this scroll resembles the original by Gu Kaizhi is difficult to say, although there are two other Song Dynasty copies showing similar figures, trees and mountains.  In Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting, Wu Hong suggests that the version below may be closer to the original, since it shows a less sophisticated approach to landscape.  Gu Kaizhi (c. 344–406) is 'synonymous with the origin of Chinese scroll painting' and was, among other things, the author of an essay on landscape art, Painting Yuntai Mountain.  In this he describes one of his own works, which showed a Daoist priest and two disciples, positioned between two cliffs with the empty space surrounding them designed to suggest a place inhabited by gods.  The Nymph of Luo River is an illustration of a fu poem by Cao Zhi (192-232), the son of Cao Cao (whose writings I featured here last year.) 

Gu Kaizhi, The Nymph of the Luo River, Song Dynasty copy of a 4th century original

'The Nymph of the Luo River' (223) is a beautiful poem in Burton Watson's translation (see Chinese Rhyme-Prose, recently republished by Calligrams).  Since my theme here is landscape, I will quote a few lines describing the setting of Cao's encounter with the river goddess.  Cao is journeying back from the newly rebuilt and restored capital, Luoyang.
The sun had already dipped in the west,
The carriage unsteady, the horses fatigued,
And so I halted my rig in the spikenard marshes,
Grazed my team of four at Lichen Fields,
Idling a while at Willow Wood,
Letting my eyes wander over the Luo.
It is then that he sees the beautiful woman, but she is invisible to his coachman, and so he describes her to him.  This description, drawing on nature imagery, is rather like the song of Polyphemus in praise of Galatea, in Ovid's Metamorphoses, that I mentioned in an earlier post here.   As Wu Hong points out in his description of Gu Kaizhi's scroll, 'the verbal metaphors - geese, dragons, chrysanthemums, pines, clouds, winds, sun, and lotus - are translated into pictures and woven into the landscape.'  Thus the landscape itself in this painting is a kind of description of the nymph's body.

Although Cao Zhi was not a wilderness poet, his work is full of images drawn from the natural world.  His narrators make journeys, real and imaginary, and occasionally they look out over the world and describe what they see, as in 'Seeing off the Yings' (211), where Cao climbs a hill and observes the ruined buildings of Luoyang, the capital that had been burned down in 190.  There is a lovely description of Cao Zhi's poetry in George W. Kent short book of translations, Worlds of Dust and Jade (1969, no longer in print).  I'll end here by quoting it in full (Ts'ao Chih is the Wade-Giles version of the poet's name):
Ts'ao Chih's is a poetry of the wild and vast forces of nature, of long distances and great heights. It has grand sweep. One of its worlds is that of sadly soughing wind in trees and tower tops, of startling whirlwinds, of remote and silent stars, of the westward hastening dust-darkened sun, of vanishing morning dew, and of passing lonely tufts of cloud. Great sound and motion predominated over colour and texture. It is often a furious world, all of nature restlessly and pitilessly changing as man, also changing, looks forlornly on. But, too, there is the uncanny beauty of the glistening pomegranate tree, the majestic silvery disc of the moon moving in cold serenity, the tranquil bluegreen water of the courtyard pool, and through the night's stillness, the sound of the lone flute. Ts'ao Chih seems at times to glory in this world of change, fury, and beauty, and we are never sure that he wants any other. Children play in the ruins of Loyang; there is splendour and hope in this world.

Battle on the Ice

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In the sections on landscape and music in my book Frozen Air,  I wrote about the difficulty of translating the physical forms of cliffs into music.  However, in Alexander Nevsky (1938), Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Prokofiev did try to do just this, as can be seen in this extract from a diagram in Eisenstein's Film Sense (1948).  The full fold-out page showed the 'dawn of anxious waiting' sequence preceding the famous battle on the ice, with stills from the film, musical notation, diagrams of the film's visuals and a representation in lines of the way sound and image move forward. In this frame, the cliff shape is mirrored by the score's descending arpeggio of G#.  I have embedded a clip of this sequence from the rather crackly original film above so you can see how this worked.  In the version of the film re-released in 1995 with a newly recorded score, this descending 'cliff' phrase is less obvious and actually comes in the subsequent shot.

Does this sonic correspondence really help us imagine the steepness of the cliff?  The idea was criticised by Hanns Eisler and Theodor AdornoAs Peter Vergo writes in his book The Music of Painting (2010), they 'justifiably derided the idea that it is possible to depict a cliff musically'.  Eisenstein's diagram shows a congruence between cliff form and the visual appearance of a score, but what we actually hear when listening to music does not necessarily correspond to the way musical notation appears on the page. 


I have been trying to recall when I saw Alexander Nevsky with a live orchestra - at the Royal Festival Hall sometime in the nineties I think?  I may just be misremembering watching the re-released version of the film when it arrived in London.  Watching this scene now I am struck by those beautiful Sugimoto-style shots of the ice field.  The first of these, which comes after some close-ups of the soldiers, can also be seen in the Film Sense diagram, matched to a flat musical vista.  Some notes for the Criterion Collection release of the film describe how the visual effects for the Battle of the Ice were achieved.
'Nevsky’s extraordinary set piece was filmed first—during a blazing hot summer—in the countryside outside Moscow. Cinematographer Eduard Tissé used a filter to suggest winter light; trees were painted light blue and dusted with chalk; an artificial horizon was created out of sand. The ice itself was a mixture of asphalt and melted glass. In a remarkable engineering feat, sheets of this fake ice were supported by floating pontoons to be deflated on cue so that it would shatter under the weight of the Teutonic knights according to pre-cut patterns.'
I'll conclude here with another YouTube clip, this time just Prokofiev's music and score, from a 1966 recording by the USSR State Academic Symphony Orchestra.

Boisgeloup in the Rain

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Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy is a wonderful exhibition, well worth the five stars Laura Cumming gave it in The Guardian.  There are many highlights but I suspect few critics will draw anyone's attention to the presence of five modestly-sized landscapes, painted at Boisgeloup where the artist was staying in the spring of 1932.  I was looking at these earlier today, having walked through relentless rain to reach Tate Modern.  The weather was apt - as John Richardson points out in his biography of Picasso, 'Easter was very wet that year; most of these views are striated with driving rain - an effect that van Gogh had borrowed from Hiroshige - otherwise they are surprisingly prosaic.'  This is certainly true in comparison to the marvellous sequence of Marie-Thérèse paintings Picasso was working on at the time.  As Laura Cumming writes, their 'atmosphere runs from midnight to bright day, across the seasons and centuries from some ancient grove to modern-day Paris. She dreams; he conjures the myths.'  Boisgeloup in the Rain can't really compete with this.

Pablo Picasso, Landscape with Dead and Live Trees, 1919
Source: Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain because image published in 1921)

In 1932 Picasso's creativity was so all-embracing that it seems to have encompassed every genre of art, including landscape.  But I'm not surprised to find, looking back, that this is the first time I have featured him on this blog.  Picasso's attitude to landscape is captured by John Richardson in connection with another of his occasional paintings of the view outside (see above).  This was painted in 1919, shortly after Picasso had completed work on sets for Tricorne for the Ballets Russes.  
'Designing for the ballet had left a theatrical stamp on his perception of nature.  To the right, farm buildings constitute"wings" (as in Tricorne); to the left, two trees cry out to be scaled up, hung on gauze, and used as a repoussoir to imply recession without recourse to perspective.'
Richardson quotes Picasso's dealer Paul Rosenberg, writing to the artist with 'the most inconceivable news' that he had actually managed to sell this painting, 'the one you thought unsaleable, le paysage rousseauiste.' 
'Rosenberg's hyperbole was presumedly supposed to encourage his artist to do more landscapes, because they would appeal to collectors weaned on impressionism.  Rosenberg failed to realize that Picasso was not a paysagiste at heart.  Nature fascinated him, but only insofar as he could bring it within reach and have his metamorphic way with it.'

A slab of landscape

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Paul Nash, Sketch for Empty Room, 1938
 
I am always interested in moments where interior and exterior change places and landscape somehow begins to appear within a building.  An early draft of Frozen Air began with a description of Paul Nash's sketch Empty Room - its sad tree stump growing from the floorboards, one wall like those in the house where I write this blog and the other transformed into a chalk cliff line reminiscent of the Seven Sisters.  This picture and two similar Nash drawings were the subject of an earlier post here on rooms becoming landscapes, along with other examples in the work of Giorgio De Chirico and Max Klinger, Maurice Sendak and Ray Bradbury.  Now I have encountered another version of this idea, in Ali Smith's most recent novel, Winter.


The vision of landscape in this book comes to a character called Art, who has gone to spend Christmas with his uptight and distant mother.  Art has just been dumped by his girlfriend, who had become exasperated with his nature blog, 'Art in Nature', a series of apolitical meditations on snow, puddles and hedgerows, written from a laptop without ever actually venturing outdoors.  Art pays a young woman called Lux, a homeless migrant originally from Croatia, to come with him to Cornwall and impersonate his girlfriend.  Then his mother's radical older sister arrives and things begin to unravel over Christmas dinner.  It is at this point that Art starts to imagine a fragment of actual nature floating above his head, as if  'someone had cut a slice out of the coast and dipped it into the room with us, like we’re the coffee and it’s the biscotti.'  A few reviewers have discussed this incident - Alexandra Harris, for example, imagined something 'like the clumps of landscape in the paintings of Julian Perry.'  However, in The New Yorker James Woods' discusses it in more detail and what he says is worth quoting here in full.
'Art does see something, and his visionary moment at the dining table is one of the novel’s unlikely triumphs, an oddly moving mixture of the fantastical and the allegorical. The Cleves family has been arguing steadily, about contemporary Britain, about borders and walls and refugees, when Art realizes that something is falling onto the table—pieces of dirt, grit, rubble. He looks up: “A foot and a half above all their heads, floating, precarious, suspended by nothing, a piece of rock or a slab of landscape roughly the size of a small car or a grand piano is hanging there in the air.” No one else notices it. Later, when Art tells Lux about it, she jokes that he has banged his head on the world. As if, she implies, instead of Dr. Johnson kicking the stone, the stone came and kicked Dr. Johnson. Reality exists, and it has come knocking, and Art, who shares some of his mother’s political obliviousness, will be knocked into a resensitized political awareness.

Perhaps Art’s political schooling is too obvious. But there’s something delicate, almost spectral—despite the hulking thisness of the symbol—about that piece of hanging landscape. It’s a piece of earth, a piece of Britain. (The English poet Edward Thomas, asked what he was going to fight for in the Great War, picked up some earth and replied, “Literally, for this.”) But, when I encountered the scene, I imagined not earth so much as a piece of cliff, perhaps a slice of the white cliffs of Dover; in other words, I imagined an edge, a border. The vision is surreally real, at once literal and symbolic, and the meanings productively multiply.'

Picturing Paradise

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Li Cheng, A Solitary Temple Among Clearing Peaks, Song Dynasty

We have got rather behind in watching Civilisations on the iPlayer, so I have only just seen Simon Schama's episode concerning landscape, 'Picturing Paradise'.  I really enjoyed it and was full of admiration for the way he explained the significance and beauty of specific works of art in a such a short space of time. The programme actually begins in twentieth century China with Mu Xin, who painted his landscapes in secret during the Cultural Revolution.  His trajectory from enemy of the people to revered cultural figure culminated recently in the establishment of a Mu Xin museum in Wuzhen.  Schama then takes the story back to Song Dynasty China and Li Cheng, whose paintings I wrote about last year.  The way the camera pans in close over A Solitary Temple Among Clearing Peaks reveals far more detail (see below) than can be gleaned from the rather dark image of this painting (above) I've used here before. 



Having devoted a decent amount of time to Li Cheng, the programme moves on to Qiao Zhongchang's handscroll illustrating The Second Prose Poem on the Red Cliff.  I imagine Schama would love to have had time to give the full background on Shu Shi's poem, but he focuses on the mood conveyed in this painting, contrasting the pleasures of an excursion with the sadness of exile, "a dream, but one with a bitter-sweet taste".  This Chinese section concludes with Wang Meng's Dwelling in the Qingbiang Mountains, allowing Schama to introduce themes of political symbolism - the turbulence in Song Dynasty China echoed in the way Wang painted his landscape.  The idea that landscapes tell us much about the world in which they were painted is then taken up, after a brief mention of Islamic art and gardens, in his account of Western landscape art.  In all, a quarter of the whole programme is devoted to Chinese landscape painting - if only this could have been expanded into a whole series...

 Qiao Zhonchang, Illustration to the Second Prose Poem on the Red Cliff, Song Dynasty

By this point in the programme we had become conscious of Simon Schama's rather idiosyncratic pronunciation of certain words.  'Most of us', as Gerard O'Donovan wrote in his Telegraphreview,
'put the stress on the first syllable (MOUNtain), but he places it on the second (mounTAIN). As in, say, maintain or plantain. Usually, such idiosyncrasy would go unremarked. But being devoted to landscape art, there were so many mounTAINs (and even a founTAIN) in last night’s enthralling third edition of Civilisations, you had to wonder whether he’d ever noticed it himself.'
A bit harsh, but then it is hard not to focus on the mannerisms of the presenters given that they are effectively being pitched against the magisterial, patrician authority of Sir Kenneth Clark (incidentally, there's a nice clip of Clark in the original Civilisation (1969) embedded in a post I did back in 2010 about Jean-Jacques Rousseau).  I was dismayed to read a few days ago an article headlined 'Mary Beard 'cut' from US version of Civilisations, fearing 'slightly creaky old lady isn't ideal for USTV'.  I agree with O'Donovan that Schama's enthusiasm is inspiring to watch and that, like him, I'm happy to listen to views delivered 'with the unshakeable confidence of a man who goes through life pronouncing mounTAIN like he’d invented the word himself.'

I will not attempt to summarise the rest of the programme, which focuses on some of the themes Schama has written about before - the German forest, mercantile Holland and the American wilderness.  Perhaps the fact that he has written things like Landscape and Memory explains why he has not contributed a series tie-in book, unlike the other two presenters.  As for the inevitable omissions in this programme, I'm guessing Turner, Constable, Monet and Van Gogh will come in somehow to a later episode, but suspect there might be no more on post-Song Dynasty Chinese landscape art.  To conclude here I will transcribe a quote from the programme which I hope conveys why I think Schama is so good.  Here he takes an apparently unprepossessing painting by the prolific Jan Van Goyen and leaves you thinking of it as a minor masterpiece.

Jan Van Goyen, Polder Landscape, 1644
"Even though we know that Van Goyen really had to work fast and with rubbish materials that didn't cost him very much money (he was so always in debt), there's a credible kind of convergence between what he's painting and how he's painting it.  It's like a sketch.  It's like an immediate note from his own vision.  And everything that's kind of rough and raw and crude and clay-like and meagre about it actually makes you feel there. There are tops of houses - roofs - and you don't see anything else of the house.  Why?  Because they're actually below the waterline.  This delivers a world - the silvery quality of the canals, a little boat floating past, and you think you're waking up and you can smell the peat turned over; it's a raw day in the middle of winter, and you're absolutely enveloped by the wind, the dark, lead coloured light.  But this still, in it's scraped-away authenticity, is a kind of home."

Pure sky, brooks, rose laurels, sun, shadow

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As I mentioned in January, finding female landscape painters to highlight in my 'tweet of the day' has been quite difficult, partly because social restrictions reduced their ability to go out sketching and painting in the open air.  The two quotations below, from the diary of the nineteenth century artist Marie Bashkirtseff (1859-84), illustrate the point.  Born in Ukraine, she moved to Paris with her family at the age of twelve and began exhibiting at the Salon after studying at The Académie Julian (women were not permitted to attend the École des Beaux-Arts).  Her frustrations here as a twenty-year old aspiring artist have an added poignancy, because just five years later she succumbed to tuberculosis. 
Thursday January 2nd 1879 — What I long for, is the liberty to ramble alone, to come and go, to seat myself on the benches in the garden of the Tuileries, and especially of the Luxembourg, to stop at the artistic shop- windows, enter the churches, the museums, to ramble at night in the old streets, that is what I long for, and that is the liberty without which one can not become a true artist. Do you believe that we profit by what we see when we are accompanied, or when going to the Louvre, we must await our carriage, our chaperone or our family?
   Ah! heavens and earth! that is what makes me so angry to be a woman! I will dress myself like a woman of the middle class, wear a wig, and make myself so ugly that I will be as free as a man. There is the liberty that I want and without which I shall never succeed in being anything.
   One's thoughts are fettered by this stupid and enervating constraint; even if I disguise myself and make myself homely, I am but half free, for a woman who roams about is imprudent. And in Italy, in Rome? The idea of going in a landau to visit ruins!
   "Where are you going, Marie?"
   "To see the Coliseum."
   "But you have already seen it! Let us go to the theatre or take a drive, where there will be a crowd."
    And that is enough to bind one down to the earth. That is one of the great reasons why there are no women artists. Oh, sordid ignorance? Oh, savage routine! It is horrible to think of it all!
Marie Bashkirtseff, Autumn, 1883

'What I long for, is the liberty to ramble alone' - this has a familiar ring from many recent critiques of androcentric nature writing and male psychogeographers.  Marie Bashkirtseff may not have lived to paint the Coliseum, but she did complete the view of Paris in Autumn that I have reproduced here (now in the State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg).  There is something sad about that empty road, with its litter of leaves and the bench knocked over so that nobody can sit on it.  However, what really leaves an impression, assuming this reproduction resembles the real painting, is the intensity of that sunlight in the distance.  Perhaps it was affected by her yearning for the brightness of southern Europe.  Here is a second entry from her diary, in which she puts down a volume of Gautier to dream of travelling to Spain.    
  Wednesday June 20th, 1882 — Well! nothing new. A few calls exchanged and painting — and Spain. Ah, Spain! A volume of Théophile Gautier is the cause of all this [...] Ah! how short is life! Ah! how unhappy we are to live so little! For to live in Paris is only the point of departure for everything. But to make these sublime, artistic journeys! Six months in Spain, in Italy! Italy, sacred soil; divine, incomparable Rome! it takes away my reason.
   Ah! how women are to be pitied; men are free, at least. They have absolute independence in ordinary life, liberty to come and go, to start out, to dine at a restaurant or at home, to go on foot to the Bois or to a café; that liberty is the half of talent and three-quarters of ordinary happiness.
   But, you will say, superior woman that you are, give yourself that liberty!
   It is impossible, for the woman who emancipates herself thus — the young and pretty woman, be it understood — almost has the finger pointed at her, she becomes singular, commented on, insulted, and consequently still less free than before she shocked idiotic custom.
   So there is nothing to do but deplore my sex and return to dreams of Italy and Spain. Granada! Gigantic Arabs, pure sky, brooks, rose laurels, sun, shadow, peace, calm, harmony, and poetry!
This translation is by A. D. Hall (1908).  I see that another early translator, Mathilde Blind (1890), rendered the last sentence 'Granada! Gigantic vegetation! pure sky...'  Whatever the 'gigantic' thing was that Marie Bashkirtseff longed for, along with the rose laurels (oleander), sunshine and shadows, it was never to be...

Plum blossoms, green willows, warblers, and wine

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Cherry Walk, Kew Gardens

Last weekend at Kew Gardens the cherry trees were in full bloom.  It prompted me to organise for last night a small blossom viewing gathering at our house (we actually have a crab apple tree, but it's a perfectly good stand-in).  During the week, the weather had turned from bright sunshine to wind and showers, so our tree, though still in bloom, had begun to shed its petals over the lawn.  I didn't really mind.  There was plenty of sake and good conversation to be had inside and spring rain is, in any case, almost as frequently encountered in Japanese poetry as cherry blossoms, sometimes in the same poem.  A 9th century poet, Ōtomo no Kuronushi, asked whether the gentle rains of spring are tears shed for the scattering of the cherry blossoms.

I have written here before about blossom viewing in Japan, but today I thought I would highlight one particular party, held as long ago as 730.  In the first month of that year (February 8th by the Western calendar), Ōtomo no Tabito, the Governor-General of Dazaifu, invited guests to a gathering in his garden to see the plum blossoms, whose flowering precedes the cherry season.  The tanka poems they composed feature in Edwin A. Cranston's anthology The Gem-Glistening Cup.  He describes their verse as 'decorous expressions of the pleasure of being together in spring, along with the occasional twinge of anxiety that spring will not last forever.  The principal images are plum blossoms, green willows, warblers, and wine.  The tone is celebratory, shadowless as the diffused light of a spring day.'

The poets at the gathering were mostly obscure, just the local talent in a remote outpost (Dazaifu is on the southern island Kyushu, far from the Japanese capital of Nara).  Their poems are simple and generally lacking in artifice.  The participants are identified by their job titles - a junior secretary, a senior judge, an assistant governor, a 'master of computation' etc.  Here is one of the poems, in Cranston's translation, written by the host himself.
   In my arbor now
Petals scatter from the plum -
   Or is it snow
That floats down drifting over us
From the boundless sky?
This is one of several poems comparing blossom and snow; it is an example of 'elegant confusion', a technique taken from Chinese poetry.  Later in the sequence one of the other guests, Tanabe no Makami (identified as 'Clerk of Chikuzen') adds mist to this poetic equation.  As his contribution could be classified as landscape poetry I will conclude by quoting it here too.
   Over spring fields
Mist rises, spreads across the ground,
   And snow sifts down -
Or so we see it as we watch
Plum blossoms scattering.

Zabriskie Point

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Michelangelo Antonioni's film Zabriskie Point (1970) is named for the ancient lake beds where it is partially set. The two protagonists Daria and Mark drive to this viewpoint and explore its dry slopes before making love.  As Adam Scovell has written, the way they become gradually covered with sand 'unites them with the topography and camouflages their presence from themselves and the world around them'.  The dream-like appearance of a whole bunch of other hippies coupling in the dust adds to the effect (and, to be honest, would be quite hard to take if it wasn't for the accompanying music by Jerry Garcia).  This empty terrain seems as far from the city as it is possible to get (Zabriskie Point had stood in for Mars in one earlier film), but Death Valley is hardly an idyllic retreat.  After the two of them part, Daria drives on through the desert to the lavish modernist home of her boss Lee Allen, built among some rocks near Phoenix.  Here, in a kind of capitalist oasis, women sit around a pool and businessmen discuss the possibility of investing in Allen's new real estate development.  As Daria leaves she imagines the whole luxury house destroyed in an explosion.

Daria and Mark explore the landscape in Zabriskie Point
  
Whilst Zabriskie Point itself is central to the film and its wind-sculpted shapes are pretty remarkable, what really seems strange to the modern (British) viewer are the earlier scenes set in Los Angeles.  This is the LA of Ed Ruscha, designed around the automobile and full of garish signs and billboards.  At one point Mark drives past a large hoarding painted incongruously with a rural scene of barn, animals and farmers.  The film features other artificial landscapes too, like the one we glimpse in an absurd promotional film for Lee Allen's new development, Sunny Dunes.  At the end of the film, when he is trying to sell his proposal, the businessmen congregate around a semi-transparent map of the scheme.  Here the landscape is no more than an abstraction onto which they can project their financial schemes.  As they discuss the possible deal, drinks are served by two native American women, suggesting the way power and ownership of the land has changed in the course of a century.

Mark driving through LA

 Promotional film for Sunny Dunes with fake bird and people

 A map of the proposed development

I will conclude here with a paragraph from an excellent Lightmonkey essay which I think illustrates the point that, whilst Zabriskie Point undoubtedly has its faults, it is fascinating for anyone interested in landscape and cinema.
'In a series of striking shots we see glimpses of an older Los Angeles from Lee Allen’s modernist office with large windows overlooking the city. This office was located near Wilshire Boulevard in the downtown area and had a spectacular view of the city skyline. Antonioni went to great pains, and expense, to light the office with the same color temperature as the outside, creating the possibility of using deep focus to shoot Lee Allen at his desk and the skyline, both in sharp focus, establishing a dialog between actors and location. These extraordinary shots give the sensation that the interior space and the man made landscape outside go on forever morphing into one large electronically controlled space. Buildings from various time periods rise up like markers, most prominently a magnificent black and gold Art Deco tower on Flower St. Not surprisingly this landmark building was demolished shortly after the film was made, to make way for the new sleek skyscrapers that would come to dominate the city, and that were more in keeping with the international style of architecture favored by the surging corporate state. From the point-of-view of Mark, as he rides around on his truck the city seems to already be a collage that is in the process of being created and destroyed at the same time, with no time to reflect on the historical causes or the psychological effects.'

Shanglin Park

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 Qiu Ying (attributed), Shanglin Park (detail), 16th century

One of the most famous descriptions of landscape in Chinese literature must be the Shanglin fu,上林賦,, composed by Sima Xiangru.  It was written for the young Emperor Wu, who had summoned Sima to court in 137 BCE, and it describes the royal hunting park southwest of the capital Chang'an. There is a magnificent Ming Dynasty scrollattributed to Qiu Ying (c. 1494-1552) which illustrates the poem - I have extracted a few details to illustrate this blog post.  The first one above shows the poem's three narrators in discussion.  Burton Watson translates their names as Sir Fantasy, Master No-Such and Lord Not-Real.  In the first part of the fu, Sir Fantasy and Master No-Such describe hunts in Chu and Qi; in the second part, Lord Not-Real blows them away with his description of the far-more-extensive parkland of Shanglin and the hunting and entertainment that goes on there.  The park is shown to be not just representative of China, but a microcosm of the whole universe.


The fu rhyme-prose form became known for its ornate language and lists (in an earlier post I referred to a 5th century critic of Sima's poetry, who complained that his 'characters were strung together like fish'). This could make it difficult to translate, but Burton Watson does it brilliantly, as Lucas Klein explains in his preface to the recent reprint of Watson's Chinese Rhyme Prose (1971, 2015). Watson, a contemporary of the Beat poets, 'reaches beyond Snyder and Ginsberg, past Rexroth and Pound, back to Walt Whitman.'  Klein quotes this example from near the beginning, where Sir Fantasy is describing the hunting park he had seen in Chu (Watson explains that some of the plant names he uses are necessarily guesswork):
Here too are precious stones: carnelians and garnets,
Amethysts, turquoises, and matrices of ore,
Chalcedony, beryl, and basalt whetstones,
Onyx and figured agate.
To the east stretch fields of gentians and fragrant orchids,
Iris, turmeric, and crow-fans,
Spikenard and sweet flag,
Selinea and angelica,
Sugar cane and ginger.

As my theme here is landscape, here is a brief summary of the first part of the Shanglin Park section of the poem:
  • Eight rivers are described, 'twisting and turning their way / through the reaches of the park' until eventually they reach giant lakes, 'shimmering and shining in the sun.'
  • Then the poem moves in, to list the dragons and turtles that inhabit these lakes and rivers, the precious stones on their beds and the waterfowl that 'flock and settle upon the waters, drifting lightly over the surface.'
  • Next the mountains and valleys are recalled, with the hills and islands at their base and the level land beyond.
  • There follows a long list of the flowers and herbs that line the river banks and spread over the plains, wafting a hundred perfumes upon the air.
  • After conveying a sense of the park's vast scale, the poem lists some of its exotic animals: zebras, aurochs, elephants, rhinoceroses.
  • It then mentions the emperor's palaces, retreats and mountain halls, with their fabulous grottoes and gardens. There are fruit trees and flowers, dense copses and forests that blanket the mountain slopes.
  • Finally, before getting on to the hunt itself and the activities of the courtiers, the poem describes apes, gibbons and lemurs, sporting among the trees and chasing over bridgeless streams.


There is obviously some exaggeration going on in this poem, so what was Shanglin Park really like? In Mark Edward Lewis's book The Early Chinese Empires, he writes that Emperor Wu installed in it 'rare plants, animals, and rocks that he had received as tribute from distant peoples, as booty from expeditions to Central Asia, or as confiscations from private collectors. The emperor's exotica included a black rhinoceros, a white elephant, talking birds, and tropical forests.'  The park contained a palace complex and an artificial lake with a statue of a whale which has recently been found during an archaeological excavation.  Emperor Wu's ambitious landscape gardening would be emulated by later Chinese rulers - see for example my post here on the Song Dynasty Emperor Huizong's rock garden. And Emperor Wu lived only a century or so after the First Emperor, whose mausoleum with its rivers of mercury and terracotta army was a kind of dead equivalent to the abundant parkland described by Sima Xiangru.

The paulownia of Lung-men

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Ming Dynasty painting of a scholar playing a qin in a landscape
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Having just written a post about Chinese rhyme-prose (fu) I can't quite bear to leave the topic, which is full of interest for those looking for ways of writing about landscape.  In his introduction to Chinese Rhyme-Prose, Burton Watson refers to a subgenre on the subject of musical instruments. 'In such pieces, it is customary to begin with an evocation of the wild and beautiful mountain forest where the wood or bamboo from which the instrument is fashioned grows.  These passages are among the earliest descriptions of nature to be found in Chinese poetry.'  He goes on to provide a translation of a fu of this kind by Mei Sheng, who died in 140 BCE.  Here is part of the opening (prose) section, describing the Longmen (Lung-men) mountain setting of the paulownia from which a qin would be made (for more on this instrument, the Chinese zither, see my earlier posts).
'The paulownia of Lung-men soars a hundred feet before it puts out branches, its center spiraling up amid a tangle of dark foliage, its roots sprawling outward this way and that.  Above it stand the thousand-yard peaks; below, it peers into a hundred-fathom hollow, while swift torrents and lashing waves eddy and tug about it.  Its roots are half dead, half alive; in winter it is buffeted by sharp winds, settling frost, the driven snow; in summer the sharp crack of thunder and lightning assaults it.  At dawn yellowbirds and pies are found singing there; at dusk the mateless hen, the lost bird roost there for the night.  The lonely snow goose at daybreak calls from the top of it; partridges, sadly crying, flutter beneath its boughs.'
This fu on music is one of 'Seven Incitements' (Qi fa) making up Mei Sheng's full poem.  Each of these stimuli is supposed to cure a prince who is suffering from sensual overindulgence.  This explanation is from an online article about Mei Sheng:
'The first six enticements are versified descriptions of various pleasures that the guest invites the prince to enjoy. They include in order: (1) music, (2) a banquet, (3) a chariot race, (4) an excursion to a scenic place, (5) a hunt, (6) a view of the spectacular tidal bore of the Qu River of Guangling. At the conclusion of each of these tantalizing descriptions, the guest asks the prince if he wishes to rise from his bed and participate. After the first four enticements, he replies that he is too ill to rise. The fifth enticement, a stirring description of a hunt, almost succeeds in reviving him. After hearing of the tidal bore that even has curative powers, the prince remains as sick as before. Thus, it takes the final enticement, the promise to introduce the prince to the “essential words and marvelous doctrines” of great sages and philosophers, to rouse him from his sickbed.' 
So neither the idea of music or a spectacular landscape phenomenon did the trick for him (you can read a translation of the tidal bore description on Wikipedia's fu page).

I would love to read more of these nature descriptions that Burton Watson refers to, but I am not sure whether many fu of this kind have been translated.  Some are listed on John Thompson's Silkqin site, but there are no English texts.  I also wonder whether there are any examples in Western poetry of writers thinking about the material origins of their lute or flute or zither?  (Or, for that matter, poems about books and paintings, sculpture and ceramics that begin with their physical sources in earth, rock and wood?)  It is quite easy to think of examples that compare the effects of an instrument to natural forces (Lorca's guitar, for example, wept 'as water weeps / as the wind weeps / over snowfields.')  But the only poem that comes to mind on a landscape that gave rise to an instrument is by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.  'A Musical Instrument' describes the riverbank visited by 'the great god Pan' to find the reed to make his pipe.  She writes of how he tramples over nature in order to get at this reed and, though afterwards the lilies revive and the dragon-fly returns, there is a 'reed which grows nevermore again / As a reed with the reeds in the river.'

Ideas for Sculpture in a Setting

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Paul Nash, Event on the Downs, 1934

The Tacita Dean exhibition Landscapestarts today, but before I get to that, I wanted to mention here the Still Life exhibition which is still on for a few more days at the National Gallery.  It is free, unlike Landscape and Portrait, and it also incorporates other artists' work (and so reminded me of An Aside, the excellent exhibition she curated back in 2005 at Camden Arts Centre).  It includes examples of an overlapping genre, 'still life in a landscape', of which Event on the Downs is a famous example.  Long before Surrealism though, Thomas Robert Guest was recording archaeological finds by painting them close to, towering over the places in which they were found.  Such hybrid works, situating the still life in a landscape, differ from the kind of painting I featured here last year, where the two form separate worlds within the same artwork.  John Crome's Study of Flints is another example, similar in composition to Guest's paintings.  In the exhibition it is represented not by the original but by a postcard (Tacita Dean is known for collecting and using postcards in her art).  Crome's painting relates closely to two of Dean's own works, films of flints owned by in Henry Moore, called Ideas for Sculpture in a Setting (Diptych) (2017).


John Robert Guest, Bronze Age Grave Goods from a Bell Barrow
Excavated at Winterslow, Wiltshire, 1814
 


John Crome, Study of Flints, c. 1811

In her introduction to the catalogue, Tacita Dean writes about a Paul Nash painting that manages to combine all three genres: landscape, portraiture and still life.  Cumulus Head is 'said to be a portrait of his wife, Margaret.  She appears in a cumulus cloud landscape with a green, possibly grass, middle ground.'  Furthermore, this portrait 'is painted as a statue head carved in stone and mounted on what appears to be a stepped pedestal.'  There is nothing quite like this in the exhibition, although the human form is evoked in Two White Manikins by Albert Reuss (the manikins are propped up among rocks in what looks like a desert).  There is though one small, strange work from the National Gallery's own collection, which from a distance appears to be another close-up view of a flint-like rock.  It includes two figures, plus an angel who is probably part of a scene that was cut from the panel.  St Benedict is in a cave, receiving food lowered down to him by St. Romanus.  But, as Marjorie E. Wieseman writes in the catalogue, 'whether by accident or design, Romanus' grey robed figure seems to rise out of / melt into the rocky forms encroaching Benedict's hermitage, inviting fantasies of a landscape come alive or, alternatively, of a figure turned to stone and subsumed into the land itself.  The stillness come awake; or life, become still.'

Paul Nash, Cumulus Head, c. 1944



Workshop of Lorenzo Monaco, Saint Benedict 
in the Sacro Speco at Subiaco, c. 1415-20
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