My warmest thanks go to all the editors of PART who have been there every step of the way. Without their diligent editing and their unfailing support, these essays and reviews could not have been posted and could not contribute to the on-going debate of the role played by landscape in shaping art history. Thanks to Caterina Pierre who first approached me with the idea of editing an issue of PART devoted only to landscape and landscape painting, and to Allison Moore, Kate Bussard, and Dan Quiles for making it happen. Finally, thanks to the contributors of the articles, reviews, and practice, my deepest gratitude for having challenged me to revisit the topic which, if we lived in a perfect world, would remain the focus of my career.

I came to landscape painting, and especially French landscape painting of the 19th century, from a traditional modernist training. The story went this way: sometime in the middle of the 19th nineteenth-century, in France, artists explored a genre of painting that had been deemed minor by the official Academy. They did this in order to free themselves from the constraints of narrative story-telling in order to base their work on what they saw, experienced, and felt. In the generations following Théodore Rousseau, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne, it was easy to travel to arrive at the abstraction of Wassily Kandinsky. This was one side of the story, but when I revisited the possibility of looking at landscape painting again as a topic for my dissertation, I found I wanted to include many other scenarios. They included looking beyond that neat Darwinist schema of evolution to consider such issues as the role played by landscape painting in the formation of national identity and the political and cultural implication of the triumph of landscape painting as the modernist genre par excellence.

It has now become a standard interpretation to link the rise of landscape painting with the rise of the bourgeoisie and the subsequent development of a metropolitan culture, to see the Argenteuil landscapes of Monet, the Provençal vistas of Cézanne, and Homer’s painting of Prout’s Neck as a reaction to a certain type of urban modernity. This connection between landscape painting, nature, and escape is easier for urban dwellers of the twenty-first century such as us to understand and empathize with, and this may be one of the reasons which make the papers in this issue strike the right chord and seem so relevant. There is perhaps no greater testament to this relevance than the central importance of the theme of landscape in contemporary art.

As the proposals came in throughout last spring and last summer, it became evident that my more traditional understanding of landscape--grounded in French painting of the late 1800s--was to be put to a serious test. I actually welcomed the challenge as I realized that the same issues were still at stake: the connection between landscape painting and spirituality in times when traditional religion seems often seemed bankrupted; the connection between a place and a construction of one’s cultural and national identity; the link between landscape, nature, and decoration; and, finally, the importance of confirming the existence of an imaginary landscape that exists beyond the local. I had already encountered all these issues while working on nineteenth century landscapes, but I had not realized they were all at work in the art of modern and contemporary artists as well as those of non-western cultures. And while a majority of contemporary art historical writing has made the body its main concern, the essays that comprise this issue of PART speak to the centrality of place and nature to global artistic production.

I had envisioned this editorial as being similar to the series of “State of Research in …” articles published in The Art Bulletin. But the contributions that I selected revealed another option to me, that of thinking about landscape as the beginning of a journey to distance places.

When considering the transition from the worldview reepresented by my article on Rousseau and ecology and Jacqueline Etling’s investigation of the spiritual power of place for Vincent van Gogh to Jonathan Clancy’s consideration of Tiffanny’s mosaic The Dream Garden, it seems that we have witnessed the end of one era and the beginning of another. In Tiffany's Dream Garden, made at a time when Europe’s landscape was being ravaged by war, corporate capitalism chose to grace their workers and clients with an idyllic, but artificial, view of a shimmering nature, thereby bringing artifice to its ultimate conclusion. John Kaufman’s essay on Maya Deren’s film At Land sets the tone for the second part of this issue. Here, we move into an imaginary landscape created by the mind where, thanks to film's specificity, landscape becomes capable of embodying many symbolic narratives simultaneously. The journey continues with Allison Moore’s reading of Roni Horn’s Another Water, which links Horn’s work to the Situationist International and the experience of place. Our journey ends across the ocean from Europe, in South America, where Ruth Anne Philips considers the subtle ways in which the Incas framed their landscape via architecture, creating sacred space within the natural landscape. Considering this work brings us full circle and reminds us of the achievement of the work of twentieth-century land artists such as James Turrell and Richard Long.

The books chosen by the reviewers are equality telling and challenging. They shed new light on more traditional aspects of landscape paintings, from the painting of the Hudson River School to the landscapes of Pre-Raphaelites to Earth Art. These three reviews present a sampling of what recent scholarship on the topic as to offer. The last two reviews consider books that deal with gender and landscape, their contribution to the field is probably one of the most useful for anyone interested in the subject, but also for any scholar interested in the historical role of gender and representation.

Finally, as the reader discovers Joshua Shamsi’s Urban Idylls photographs, it becomes obvious that, although landscape painting has traditionally offered an escape mechanism for its urban audience, contemporary artists can now create art from those urban spaces which exist exclusively to allow us to escape from urbanity itself.

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