Monday, December 12, 2016

International Landscapes, 19th century

Max Liebermann (German)
Boy and girl on a village street
ca. 1897
pastel
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

"Any discussion concerning nature and art is bound to be shot through with moral implications. Once a student told me that "nature is anything that is not manmade." For that student, man was outside the natural order of things. In Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy (1908) we are told that Byzantine and Egyptian art were created out of a psychological need to escape nature, and that since the Renaissance our understanding of such art has been clouded by an undue confidence in nature. Worringer locates his "concept" of abstraction outside the sensuous anthropomorphic pantheism of Renaissance humanism. "The primal artistic impulse," says Worringer, "has nothing to do with the renderings of nature."

 from Collected Writings by Robert Smithson (1996)

Théo van Rysselberghe (Belgian)
Entrance to the Port of Volendam
ca. 1896
oil of canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Théo van Rysselberghe (Belgian)
Mansur Gate in Meknes, Morocco
1887
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch (Dutch)
Back garden at the Kazernestraat, The Hague
ca. 1890
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Vincent van Gogh (Dutch)
Les Vessenots in Auvers
1890
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Maurice Prendergast (American)
The Race Track
(Piazza Siena, Borghese Gardens, Rome)

1898
watercolor
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Edvard Munch (Norwegian)
Bay with boat and house
1881
oil on cardboard
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Edvard Munch (Norwegian)
Evening
1888
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Winslow Homer (American)
Waverly Oaks
1864
oil on paper, mounted on panel
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

"In the silence of the forest certain events are unaccommodated and cannot be placed in time. Being like this they both disconcert and entice the observer's imagination: for they are like another creature's experience of duration. We feel them occurring, we feel their presence, yet we cannot confront them, for they are occurring for us somewhere between  past, present and future. ... To make sense of what I'm suggesting it is necessary to reject the notion of time that began in Europe during the eighteenth century and is closely linked with the positivism and linear accountability of modern capitalism: the notion that a single time, which is unilinear, regular, abstract and irreversible, carries everything. All other cultures have proposed a coexistence of various times surrounded in some way by the timeless." 

 from Into the Woods by John Berger (2006)

Eugène Boudin (French)
Figures on the beach, Trouville
1869
oil on panel
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Henri Matisse (French)
Canal du Midi
1898
oil on panel
Museo-Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Jozef Israëls (Dutch)
Fisher girl on dune-top overlooking the sea
ca. 1900
oil on panel
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

James McDougal Hart (American)
Summer in the Catskills
ca. 1865
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Johann Barthold Jongkind (Dutch)
Towpath near Overschie
1865
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

I am grateful for the excellent reproductions from Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.