How shall we approach landscape?

Joan Mitchell’s ‘Trees’ in New York

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'Trees' (1990-91): Between impression and feeling.
'Trees' (1990-91): Between impression and feeling.

Classical Chinese art is rooted in landscape. Where humans are depicted, they are scaled to the natural world. This art offers both modesty and sanity. It understands that humanity exists as a part of and in relation to a reality that's not only larger than itself but also, in terms of value, greater.

Greek painting and sculpture — the defining paradigm of Western art — shows little of nature. Greek architecture, however, exists in dynamic relationship to it. You cannot abstract the great Greek temples from the landscapes they were placed against and helped to define. Nature may not be depicted, but it is engaged.

Landscape art didn’t enter Western painting until the Renaissance. Thereafter, through Impressionism and Postimpressionism, it was the major trope of Western art. With the Impressionists, however, Nature came to be seen increasingly through the lens of human subjectivity. And with Expressionism, landscape became secondary to subjective response.

In Cubism, the rough forms of landscape were broken down into planes and grids, as if they were so many building blocks for human construction. We can see in Cézanne the process by which landscape itself becomes a species of architecture. Within a generation, that process was complete, changing the natural world out of all customary recognition (where it did not disappear entirely). A 400-year tradition was transformed.

This tree, that flower

Mid-20th century American art was preoccupied with the problem of expressing the natural world, and Abstract Expressionism may ultimately be seen as a landscape movement. The abstraction of Gorky and Pollock grew out of their involvement with biomorphism, while Newman, Rothko, and Still resurrected the Romantic Sublime.

One member of that school who took her own distinctive path was Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), who settled in rural France in 1959 and who, with a concentration worthy of Monet, worked out a vocabulary of her own to describe the world around her.

The key word here is “described.” Mitchell had no interest in representation as such, but neither did she wish to use external impressions as mere grist for inward states of feeling. It was rather the interplay between impression and feeling that mattered to her. Such a path offers a way back toward reengagement with the natural world in a manner that respects rather than exploits or condescends to it. For this reason, the current show of Mitchell’s tree paintings at Manhattan’s Cheim & Read Gallery is of more than passing interest.

Mitchell focuses on the particular and the individual: this tree, that flower. She doesn’t paint landscape as such — which is, after all, not a fact of nature but a concept based on perceptual construction. She wants, in short, to start with primary units of perception: living organisms. It’s an approach that insists upon the artist’s one-on-one encounter with her subject; and, as such, it’s a rejection of the expansiveness of the sublime with its search for a transcendental reality. In this respect, Mitchell parted company with her Expressionist colleagues, aligning herself instead with an older tradition including Cézanne, Van Gogh, and the early Mondrian.

Echoes of Van Gogh

Van Gogh’s influence is apparent in Mitchell’s large painting of a linden tree that dominates the first room of the gallery. Her long, upthrust strokes, mauve-gray and black, cover the canvas, tapering at the bottom toward a suggestion of trunk, with dense green passages for foliage. It’s closer to a direct image than anything else in the show, but the strokes are gestural, not representational: an inseparable unity of natural object and artistic response.

The gallery’s large, central space offers cypresses. First Cypress (1964), Mitchell’s earliest work in this show, offers a large swatch of dark green mixed with a black that extends sketchily across the canvas. Cypresses (1975), a diptych, has two dark color fields separated by a lighter, blue-saturated space that crosses the two canvases. The latter painting in particular is seethingly alive, yet tensely balanced — not a Van Gogh cypress, to be sure, but with a similar charge of energy.

Quite a different take is Red Tree (1976), which is dominated by a twisting, branching column the color of clotted blood, with long drips and strips of spatter. A mosslike counter-strain of blue, yellow, and pink strings across it, forming a kind of bouquet at the center. It’s not a tree but a spine that reminds us that with our branching nervous system we ourselves are treelike forms and that our response to them is an acknowledgment of common structure.

Idiosyncratic statement

Most of Mitchell’s work is characterized by open spaces and stretches of bare canvas, against which the paint seems flung upon an invisible wall where it hangs as if in defiance of gravity. The effect is part of the tension and energy of the paint field. Green Tree (1976) is more densely worked, however, and its dark swatches seem rather to come forward at the viewer, a Birnam Wood marching toward its Dunsinane.

The set of smaller linden drawings, with their slashing verticals, are similarly compact. The two culminating works of the show, however, which date from the very end of Mitchell’s life, are once again more open in form. They’re called, simply, Trees, and both are large diptychs that feature rich, multicolored verticals that simultaneously suggest the individuality, integrity, and vulnerability of their subjects. In the earlier of the two paintings, the right-hand portion of the diptych gradually unspools these forms in looser tangles of colors — a letting-go that anticipates mortality yet at the same time sings of joy and a perpetually promised renewal.

Mitchell’s affirmation of nature, deeply engaged yet wholly unsentimental, is her own idiosyncratic achievement, but it makes a statement of general importance: of how we might relate to the Nature that subsumes us. The landscape tradition entered Western art just as Columbus discovered the New World, and it has been coterminous with the West’s colonization and exploitation of the planet. The crisis of that tradition in the past century is a part of the ecological crisis we have brought on ourselves and the track of extinction we have left in our wake. Art won’t save us, but it can help us take root again in the only world available to us. On that path, Joan Mitchell is a wise guide.

What, When, Where

Joan Mitchell: “Trees.” Through August 29, 2014 at Cheim & Read Gallery, 547 West 25th St., New York. 212-242-7727 or www.cheimread.com.

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