Gendering Landscape Art. Edited by Steven Adams and Anna Gruetzner Robins. Issues in Art History Series. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001.

Eight of the twelve essays in Gendering Landscape Art were delivered as conference papers at the Association of Art Historians Conference at the Courtauld Institute in 1997. The aim of this conference was to examine connections between gender and landscape art, a neglected area despite the recent interest in landscape and social, political and cultural history (i.e., Michael Rosenthal, Anne Bermingham, Nicholas Green, and W.J.T. Mitchell among others). Editors Steven Adams and Anna Gruetzner Robins provide a useful outline of the contribution of literature on landscape in their introduction, in which they define “gender” and “Nature” and give a broad definition of “landscape,” in part to accommodate the variety of viewpoints in the essays. The essays in this anthology are loosely structured around the intersection of gender, landscape and the following themes: technique and practice, national identity, psychoanalysis, and geographic space. The essays range from late eighteenth to late twentieth century art from England, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Russia, and the United States.

In the first essay, “Signs of Recovery: Landscape Painting and Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century France,” Adams examines the literature of landscape in late nineteenth-century France, referring not only to art critics, such as Charles Blanc, who spoke of line as “masculine” and color as “feminine,” but also to other writers: Hippolyte Taine, Emile Bellier and Frédéric Henriet. Each of them asserted the popular contemporary notion of the virile but celibate child-like (male) landscape painter. Thus, landscape painters were “de-masculinized” by being celibate but then “re-masculinized” by the assertion of the creative genius of the painter. Surprisingly, Adams did not mention Émile Zola’s novel L’Oeuvre (1886), in which the protagonist, Claude Lantier, was cast as a child-like genius painter who nearly stopped “creating” art when he indulged in his love for his model, then wife, Christine. Later he committed suicide after ending a lengthy period of celibacy, unable to complete his masterpiece. On the contrary, Paul Smith, in his essay “Cézanne’s Maternal Landscape and Its Gender,” begins his argument in part with a quote from L’Oeuvre in which the fictional Sandoz (Smith refers to Sandoz as Émile Zola) reminisced about how he and Claude Lantier (Cézanne) enjoyed “une absorption instinctive au sein de la bonne nature” which he translated as “an instinctual absorption in the bosom of mother nature” (116). The key words in this sentence are “bosom” and “mother.” Smith uses this passage to claim that Cézanne viewed the landscape as “maternal.” This reliance on a passage from literature, no matter how close to “real life” it may have been, weakens Smith’s argument from the start. Smith proceeds to examine Cezanne’s mountainous landscapes psychoanalytically using lots of vague, unconvincing language, while admitting that his approach was conjectural.

More solid and convincing is Anthea Callen’s essay, “Technique and Gender: Landscape, Ideology and the Art of Monet in the 1890s.” Monet’s technique was problematic in that he privileged color (feminine) over line (masculine), thus pushing his sexual identity into a grey area. Callen illustrates how scientific studies of light and optics in the nineteenth century saved Monet from being “feminized.” Using Monet’s Grainstacks and Poplars, Callen shows that the privilege and power of seeing and looking was a male prerogative; Monet “saw” nature, and he imposed order on “feminine colour” through the privilege of (male) sight and the light that organizes his compositions (31). She refers to Paul Tucker’s studies on Monet’s Series paintings, but surprisingly, makes no mention of Norma Broude’s Impressionism: A Feminist Reading: The Gendering of Art, Science, and Nature in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Rizzoli 1991; Westview Press; Reprint edition, 1997) which is pertinent to her topic.

Two of the essays deal directly with female artists. Anne Helmreich, in her straightforward, readable essay “The Marketing of Helen Allingham: The English Cottage and National Identity” describes how Allingham managed to swing a successful career and family within the social codes of her time. Allingham (1848-1926)—her dates were omitted from the text, though her husband’s dates and the date of her marriage were included—was an English watercolorist of cottages in the landscape. The other writer on women artists is Jo Anna Isaak, who devotes her essay, “Trash: Public Art by the Garbage Girls,” to female sculptors who created art out of trash in the landscape. This was an insightful essay about the positive impact of transforming waste into something aesthetic and meaningful, though it is weakened by Isaak’s lengthy introduction on the psychoanalysis of feces and art. She does this “in order both to establish women’s credentials in the field of garbology and to suggest why women are strategically so well positioned to deal with the trash.” (p. 177) Is it really necessary to prove that women in general are in a good position to make art out of garbage? Once she actually reaches her discussion of artists like Agnes Denes and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the tone of the essay becomes more persuasive.

Several other authors discuss women in the landscape rather than women landscape artists. Jane Beckett’s “In the Bleaching Fields: Gender, Landscape and Modernity in The Netherlands 1880-1920,” outlines the redefinition of Dutch landscape from 1880 to 1920. She begins with the Dutch maid as the nationalistic image of the Netherlands, and then points out the attempt by Dutch artists to paint distinctly Dutch landscapes that were disappearing due to industrialization. Images of cleanliness, thought to be characteristically “Dutch,” evolved out of the desire to create a nationalistic image, but by the end of the time period in question, the presence of the female was eliminated and the landscape was abstracted. Like Jane Beckett, Sighle Bhreathnach-Lynch discusses landscape and gender, though her topic is post-colonial Ireland. In “Landscape, Space and Gender: Their Role in the Construction of Female Identity in Newly Independent Ireland,” Bhreathnach-Lynch begins with a discussion of the chaste image of the Irish mother. The cottage later replaces the Irish mother as a sign of gender, cottages being the domain of women. Examples of this are the painted landscapes with cottages produced by the unofficial artist of the new state, Paul Henry. Bhreathnach-Lynch ends with a consideration of the Virgin Mary, whose statues populated the Irish countryside, making her a “natural” part of the landscape. Pat Simpson’s essay, “Soviet Superwoman in the Landscape of Liberty: Aleksandr Deineka’s Razdol’e, 1944,” features a painting depicting athletic women running through the countryside. Simpson traces the social meaning of the new Soviet woman: the fit, active, vigorous woman needed to take over men’s jobs in agriculture and industry while the men were away at war.

Masculinity in the twentieth century is the topic of three of the essays. David Peters Corbett discusses Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists, a group of ostentatiously masculine men who were concerned with technology and the landscape in “Landscape, Masculinity and Interior Space Between the Wars.” Caroline Jones uses queer theory and psychoanalysis in her essay, “Robert Smithson’s Technological Sublime: Alterities and the ‘Female Earth,’” to examine Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in homosexual terms, rather than the usual interpretation of man imposing himself on mother earth. In “’Ain’t Going Nowhere’: Richard Long: Global Explorer,” Anna Gruetzner Robins discusses the less-than-politically-correct “colonizing” aspect of Richard Long’s global explorations, whose travels echoed those of male colonial British explorers.

The one truly refreshing essay in this anthology was “Gender in Perspective: The King and Queen’s Visit to the Panorama in 1793” by Denise Blake Oleksijczuk, who examines the physical reaction (seasickness) of Queen Charlotte to Henry Aston Barker’s Panorama in Leicester Square. Oleksijczuk convincingly demonstrates that the queen’s dizziness was due not to her perceived frailty as a woman—the culturally acceptable response—but to the incorrect perspective of the artist’s rendition of the marine scene. The queen’s reaction to the painting was physiological and could affect men and women in the same way.
Although all of the essays relate to the general theme to some extent, several of the essays seem to focus more on figures rather than on landscape (Adams, Beckett, Bhreathnach-Lynch, Simpson). The point of the conference was to think about landscape art and gender, not simply gendered imagery such as Beckett’s Dutch maid or Simpson’s New Soviet Woman. Given the few illustrations in the book, it was difficult, especially with the less familiar artists, to make visual connections between gender and landscape. (There were no illustrations in Anna Gruetzner Robins’ essay on Richard Long!) In addition, there are copious notes but a thin bibliography for a scholarly work. Regardless, as varied as it is, this anthology provides some thought-provoking methodologies, though it only begins to fill the gap in the study of landscape and gender.

Author's Bio>>