Of A Working Nature: Ninteenth Century Images of Landscape, Labor and Industry

This exhibition of prints, photographs, and watercolors from the Vassar College Art Gallery is presented in conjunction with a seminar taught by Professor Brian Lukacher on the representation of labor and industry in 19th-century European landscape art. The array of images is meant to be suggestive of the "work" entailed in transforming nature into vista, or the land into landscape, and of how aesthetic expectation and social practice mediated one another through this process. The images begin to disclose the ideological assumptions that informed the artistic and social status of those who worked the land, and of those who worked to see and depict the landscape during the 19th century. Theodor Adorno's idea that "the perception of nature is historically deformed" proves essential for a self-critical framing of 19th-century conceptions of nature and the working landscape. After all, those unregenerate aspect of urban and industrial life that in many respects inspired the cultural demand for aesthetic landscape experiences in the 19th century still determine, with an even greater urgency, our own possessive claims upon the natural world and its overworked landscapes.

The quotations accompanying the images in this exhibition are not meant to reduce the pictures to illustrations. The texts should alternately strike notes of poignant reflection and ironic skepticism, keeping us alert to the social paradoxes that are simultaneously revealed and disguised through the artistry and sentiment of these pictures. The appended passages should also help to create a dialogue between the images: interrelating, for example, the sublime geology of John Martin's Miltonic industrial fantasy with the stark urban crevice in Thomas Annan's haunting photo-document.

A note of thanks to James Palmer, assistant curator in the gallery over this last summer, who helped enormously in experimenting with the format and content of this exhibition.

—Brian Lukacher