Thursday, January 30, 2014
A Dialogue with Nature, Courtauld Gallery
The Courtauld Gallery has enjoyed a cracking run of recent exhibitions, from Cézanne's paintings of Provençal peasants playing cards, to Picasso's Parisian breakthrough in 1901. A Dialogue with Nature, a modest, new display of 26 drawings, watercolours and oil sketches showcasing developments in Romantic landscape work in Britain and Germany between the 1760s and the 1840s, is not in the same league.
But just because it is quieter than some of its predecessors – nothing here has the oomph of, say, Picasso's blazing early self-portraits – doesn't mean it should be overlooked. Its central narrative about strong-minded artists overthrowing academic convention and learning to draw and paint spontaneously from nature, under an open sky, is the story of the emergence of a modern sensibility in art.
Of course, since this is also a show about Romanticism – which in the words of one German art critic wafted across Europe "like a narcotic vapour" in the wake of the Enlightenment – we find that many once-fashionable motifs now appear quaint rather than daring: craggy mountaintops, dramatic waterfalls, solitary ruins, blasted oaks. The treatment of these subjects, though, provides the exhibition's interest.
Take the watercolour of a ruined fort near Salerno in Italy by the British landscape painter, John Robert Cozens. Created on a trip to the Continent in 1782, the picture is characterised by bold washes evoking mood and atmosphere, rather than topographical accuracy in the manner of the "tinted drawings" of his predecessor Paul Sandby. Three decades on, Johann Georg von Dillis was pioneering plein-air oil sketches in Germany. With its swift brushstrokes, his delightful view of beech trees in a garden in Munich was clearly improvised on the spot. Painted in 1811, it looks forward to the Barbizon School and, beyond that, to Impressionism.
A small room of cloud studies by Constable and von Dillis suggests that capturing fleeting impressions of ephemeral nature without recourse to academic formulae was a challenge relished by advanced artists during this period. This tendency reaches a climax in Turner's ethereal view, of 1841, of a full moon half-shining through veils of moisture and mist above Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. The tightness of the classical conception of landscape, as something to be idealised in highly finished presentation pieces crafted in the studio, has disappeared.
On the evidence of Turner's subtle, palpitating vision, it was good riddance.
To Apr 27; courtauld.ac.uk 020 7848 2526
Source : http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568414/s/368af7ea/sc/38/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cculture0Cart0Cart0Ereviews0C10A60A81310CA0EDialogue0Ewith0ENature0ECourtauld0EGallery0Bhtml/story01.htm
