Landscapes vs. cityscapes

A follow-up to my review of Kathleen Weber and Leigh Gustafson:



Whenever I'm asked what my favorite type of painting is, I always respond: Landscapes. The genre is infinitely adaptable. It can be whatever the artist wishes it to be. Landscapes allow the artist to become a little god, creating a world from scratch.

Yes, I've seen artists who turn out imaginative still life paintings, and even the occasional imaginative portrait (Ivan Albright for one). But nothing (outside an abstract format) gives artists the freedom to exercise their fancy the way landscape paintings do.

The "landscape" genre embraces many varieties, of course. Some landscape art is grounded in realism, and the resultant works can be photographically accurate or delicately impressionistic. Another sub-category feeds on the creator's emotional state. Then there's art that's purely playful, attempting above all else to please the eye of its beholder.

Hopper, urban philosopher

Of course I speak in generalities. Edward Hopper's paintings seem, at first blush, to be pure realism, but upon a closer acquaintance prove to be poetic and perhaps even philosophical meditations upon life in mid-20th-Century America. And although Hopper's contemporary Charles Burchfield would seem the very definition of an American Expressionist, his work grew out a careful observation of the real world— and when called for, he could turn out examples of regional realism to stand with the best of them.

Painters of the sublime, from Ruysdael to the artists of the Hudson River School, all created art to please the eye. There wasn't an Edvard Munch or a Ludwig Meidner among them.

Another way of looking at it is to say that there are "open" landscapes and "closed" landscapes. The closed landscape presents you with a finished statement— whether it's a flaming city by Meidner or a charming Brooklyn park by William Merritt Chase. It presents itself to the viewer as a "take it or leave it" proposition.

Where are you?

But the "open" landscape is a doorway, inviting you to enter in and roam. A Whistler nocturne or a late Turner gives you space to inhabit and explore. You, the viewer, work to complete the image yourself, using your own mind to complement what the artist has presented to you.

To put it another way, closed landscapes push you off. They say: Stand ten feet back and get the picture. Open landscapes draw you in. They ask: Do you think there's a picture here to get? What do you make of this?

I have nothing against brightly colored landscapes; I own a few myself. But more subtly colored paintings strike me as more conducive to relaxation, creating the proper atmosphere for you to be drawn into the artist's world.

Painted snapshots?

Cityscapes are urban landscapes, and in theory they offer the same rewards. Unfortunately, too often they become mere painted snapshots— reportage.

Thus in cityscapes, the subject determines the painting. If you have an offbeat subject, you may get a really fine "open" cityscape. If you have a snapshot to begin with, you get a piece of painted reportage.

Of course, the very fact that it's a form of reportage endows cityscapes with their own built-in appeal. You may find a stand of trees incredibly boring unless the artist is a true Algernon Blackwood of the brush, but people in a park will always pique your interest— if only to learn what they're up to. Painters of urban life certainly must work harder if they wish to achieve an "open" cityscape.

In the end, I love them all— maybe because landscapes and cityscapes are both ways of achieving Baudelaire's "anywhere out of the world" imperative through non-chemical means!