Landscapes After Ruskin Redefining the Sublime: Introduction

Early in 1991 I visited the exhibition Artist's Choice: Chuck Close. Head-On/The Modern Portrait at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Close had been invited by Kirk Varnedoe, then MoMA’s Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, to peruse the museum’s vast collections and curate a show. He complied with gusto, choosing well over a hundred items in varied media. The paintings were mounted frame to frame, salon style. On adjacent walls, prints, drawings, and photographs were displayed on narrow shelves, often overlapping. Works by well-known masters were hung next to pieces by artists I was not familiar with. Sculptural busts in different scales were installed so that their eyes aligned. The common denominator was portraiture. Close is, of course, a highly acclaimed contemporary portraitist, much revered for his steadfast pursuit of the genre while consistently evolving his approach to it.

I thoroughly enjoyed Close’s unconventional take. When I saw Head-On, I was working as an independent contemporary art curator and was intrigued by how the show challenged assumptions about museum exhibitions. Now at the helm of the Grey Art Gallery, New York University’s fine arts museum, I was thrilled when Maryse Brand, the Director of the Hall Art Foundation, approached me in August 2016 about hosting Landscapes after Ruskin: Redefining the Sublime, a show that had been mounted in Reading, Vermont. The Hall Art Foundation had invited renowned photographer Joel Sternfeld to curate an exhibition drawn from both its holdings and those of Andrew and Christine Hall. Sternfeld took the task very seriously, reviewing all of the works in the combined collections, which number over five thousand.

From mid-May through November 2016, nearly seventy pieces by more than fifty artists were on public view in the Foundation’s renovated nineteenth-century dairy farm, which comprises a stone farmhouse with cow, horse, and tractor barns. To the Halls’ surprise, Sternfeld did not confine his selections to photography. Instead, he gravitated to a wide range of images focusing on nature or the environment across many media—not only photography, but also painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and video. All, he felt, reveal a contemporary fascination with and concern for the natural world. He titled the exhibition Landscapes after Ruskin: Redefining the Sublime.

That Sternfeld delights in artworks referencing nature was not, perhaps, totally unexpected. Both the Halls and the artist share a love of Vermont; Sternfeld had once owned a home there and the Halls still do. Most importantly, Sternfeld refers to himself as a “landscapist.”² Indeed, he is passionate about the genre. Sternfeld is also enthralled with nineteenth-century philosophy, art, and literature—hence the references to Ruskin and the sublime in this show’s title. Sternfeld has, as long as he can remember, felt an affinity with Transcendentalism, a movement that emerged out of English and German Romanticism and reached its height in the United States during the 1820s and ’30s. Since very early childhood, he confides, he has been captivated by atmospheric effects and fascinated by the ever-evolving cycle of the seasons and the intensity of individual experience of nature. By age eleven, he had read Henry David Thoreau.

What do we learn about Sternfeld’s own work when viewing Landscapes after Ruskin? Landscape images dominate the various series he has produced. Making American Prospects, his first book, he took part in the long tradition of traversing the U.S. For that project, he consistently identified pockets of unexpected beauty in natural settings, often those found in suburban settings. His second book, Campagna Romana: The Countryside of Ancient Rome, derives from the year he spent at the American Academy in the Italian capital. There he photographed the nearby low-lying Lazio region, a frequent subject of European paintings. In the book, curator Ted Stebbins observes that Sternfeld “works in a noble tradition,” picturing the same themes recorded by “Claude and Poussin, Piranesi and Corot.” Comparing Thomas Cole to Sternfeld, Stebbins states: “Both the nineteenth-century painter and the contemporary photographer see our national landscape as wilderness; and both see our problem as lying in what we do with an unspoiled land.” In a subsequent book, Oxbow Archive, Sternfeld reproduces Cole’s quintessential landscape and quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson: “To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.”

Sternfeld also evokes eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pictorial references in his first film, London Bridge (2016), which is featured in Landscapes after Ruskin. Sternfeld shot it at Arizona’s Lake Havasu, where a real estate developer, seeking to attract tourists, had purchased the early nineteenth-century bridge, transported it from London, and reassembled it at the lake. Running just over sixteen minutes, the film opens with close-up, atmospheric shots of sunlight reflecting off water to the sounds of birds chirping in the distance. A gondolier, garbed in a traditional Venetian striped shirt, straw hat, and red sash, begins singing arias in Italian. Soon he is steering his gondola past motorboats filled with bikini-clad partyers gyrating to thumping disco music. More temporal and cultural dislocations follow. The gondolier is, in actuality, an American who realized an opportunity to cash in by providing a taste of Venice in Arizona. Spanning a day on the lake, the film includes a Porta Potty toilet break and a siesta. Crumpled beer cans and laser disco effects clash with Sternfeld’s evocation of Italian vedute of the Grand Canal. In this most artificial, contemporary seascape, beauty, trepidation, and mismanaged trash uneasily coexist.

The works Sternfeld selected for Landscapes after Ruskin are decidedly heterogeneous. They range a gamut of styles, from expressionism to realism. Like Chuck Close, Sternfeld did not limit his choice to works by artists he knew. Many were new discoveries—what mattered was that each piece effectively conveyed responses to our natural environment, both urban and rural. The show is, ultimately, contemplative and provocative, and can be understood on many levels—revealing the careful consideration that fed its genesis. Sternfeld is, he admits, an artist who thinks things out over an extended period of time before he gets to work.

That Landscapes after Ruskin has traveled to New York University’s Grey Art Gallery following its debut in Vermont makes perfect sense. As a university museum, Grey functions as a laboratory for experimenting with exhibition formats. Artists have engaged with the Grey’s collections in previous shows—but to the best of my knowledge, this is the first to have been entirely curated by an artist, something long overdue. Moreover, Dale Jamieson, one of this volume’s essayists, is Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy at NYU. Situated in the College of Arts and Science, Environmental Studies addresses urgent issues and points the way toward a more sustainable future. In Jamieson’s view, we live in dangerous times, and “nature depends on our grace for its survival.” During our present Anthropocene era, he argues, humanity continues to harm nature while trying to create technologies to control it. Compared with Ruskin’s understanding of the sublime, ours is much more sinister.

Chris Wiley agrees, noting in his essay here that our concept of the sublime inevitably evolves along with our understanding of nature itself. Exploring what he describes as a “new sublime,” he sets forth various global disasters: nuclear annihilation, terrorism, catastrophic climate change, and out-of-control technological advancement. All, he observes, can be detected in the artworks featured in this exhibition, suggesting that we are now often frightened and rarely awed by the world around us. In other words, Wiley posits, today’s notion of the sublime turns Ruskin’s concept inside out in a landscape of our own making.

In “The Calamitous Sublime,” his essay included here, Sternfeld explores his fascination with Turner, Ruskin, and landscape. He addresses Ruskin’s obsession with the substantially older painter and how, in his first volume of Modern Painters, the critic broaches this vast topic and history of landscapes in the arts. Sternfeld goes on to question why this genre appears only in Western European art in the early sixteenth century. And, he notes, only following the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century does the concept of the aesthetic sublime emerge. The “truth to nature” advocated by Ruskin perhaps is only now fully realized in contemporary art—and, interestingly, in painting more than photography.

Artists have long functioned as visionaries, drawing our attention to concerns of which we ourselves are not always cognizant. Sternfeld has taken on this task—joining his peers in alerting us to impending perils to our environment. Aptly, in German the name Sternfeld literally means “starfield,” a term that designates an astronomical landscape composed of stars. Not only employed in the sciences, it often appears in poetry. With this show, Sternfeld has curated a complex landscape comprised of works from the Hall Art Foundation and Hall Collection that reveal competing dangers. What are we to make of our current situation, he asks, where nature is brutally threatened and climate change is still vehemently denied by many? Let us hope that this show will bring increased awareness and attention to these vital issues and that we can, in the years to come, still find a new kind of sublime—one not so calamitous—in the world around us.