Adventurers enticed by the landscape

By coincidence, two unusually engaging museum exhibitions currently consider provocative notions about using the landscape as a subject for art. Like bookends, one considers the origins of landscape painting nearly 150 years ago while the other scans the field today. Surprisingly, an unexpected similarity emerges.

The origin of the genre in 19th century France is the subject of “Courbet and the Modern Landscape,” which opened last Tuesday at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Brentwood. Meanwhile, at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, the traveling show “Landscape Confection” assembles 50 works by 13 international mid-career and emerging artists, offering a generous overview of landscape motifs now.

Nobody would mistake Courbet’s now seemingly traditional views of forests, grottoes and the seashore for Amy Sillman’s recent depictions of worlds within worlds, painted with an agitated brushwork that obscures as much as it reveals. And although the Frenchman did paint a number of wintry scenes, his use of oil paint and canvas seems downright sedate next to Kori Newkirk’s snowy fields dotted with pines, which he assembled from clear and colored beads threaded on long strands of artificial hair. Sillman draws upon abstract painting, which didn’t exist in Courbet’s day, while Newkirk exploits styling techniques developed in African American beauty parlors.

Therein lies the link: Never underestimate the artistic possibilities that lurk within socially discredited territory.

Given today’s unquenchable public enthusiasm for 19th century French landscape painting, it is difficult to imagine that pictures of rolling hills or wind-swept trees might be considered objects of scorn. Yet such was once the case.

Gustave Courbet (1819-77) did not invent landscape painting, but he surely understood its position in society. Not long after he arrived in Paris in 1839 he discovered that the academicians who controlled the art world regarded it as a minor, even trivial subject for the ostensibly exalted practice of art. In fact Courbet, as a blustery and unrefined outsider who hailed from a distant province near the Swiss border, could even personally identify with a rugged subject regarded with disdain by the refined intellectuals in positions of authority.

There are many telling Courbet anecdotes -- he was a flamboyant guy -- but one of my favorites concerns his donkey. He regularly loaded up the beast to carry heavy art supplies whenever he wanted to trek out into the forest to paint nature as it unfurled before him. Courbet called the hearty creature “Gerome” -- using the name of Paris Salon favorite Jean-Leon Gerome, the arch-Romantic painter of idealized nudes and “oriental” exotics with whom Courbet regularly competed for attention.

The donkey name asserted equivalence between a farm animal and an academic rival, jovially registering Courbet’s disdain for the asinine hierarchy of subject matter, style and meaning enforced within the art world’s established corridors of power. Yet he also displayed a sly understanding, which separated him from the pack of artists descending on Paris in the 19th century. In a newly emerging world marked by republican governance and commercial display, art could be a social lever. An element of shock could turn entrenched power to his advantage.

As a subject, the landscape was another venue for that transformation of authority. Rocks, trees and seashore may have languished at the bottom of the heap in the sovereign estimation of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, besotted as it was with depicting the ancient glory of Rome or modern colonial adventures in North Africa and the Middle East. But rocks, trees and seashore were also the stuff of which France was made. Think of Courbet’s landscapes as earthy profiles of an emerging nation-state, or as surrogate self-portraits -- rugged, forthright and populist.

Think of them also as products laboriously crafted by a skilled worker.

In the first gallery of the Getty exhibition, a monumental canvas called “The Gust of Wind” (circa 1865) shows a wild terrain spectacularly painted with a wide variety of tools. Paint application ranges from exquisite to blunt, declaring the range of brushes the artist deployed. In several foreground areas the use of a flat palette knife to scrape the canvas surface is much in evidence.

In fact the picture has the substance, weight and materiality of a piece of furniture -- planed, sanded, carefully inlaid and delicately stained -- as if artist and cabinetmaker were one and the same job.

Getty curators Mary Morton and Charlotte Eyerman have smartly included a display of Courbet’s tools midway through the exhibition, together with a video that demonstrates how he may have used them (along with his fingers) to achieve a variety of effects. Almost as much as his famous (and long ago destroyed) painting of a pair of rugged, rural stone breakers, the tool display wordlessly underlines his socialist sense of artistic affiliation with workers.

And Courbet, as a rustic outsider who arrives in the big city and shows the effete urbanites a thing or two, played another emblematic role. He’s perhaps the first modern exemplar of a standard type we’ve come to know well, from Jackson Pollock in contemporary American painting to Cantinflas in Mexican cinema.

The show includes 47 paintings, arranged according to types like “Cliffs and Valleys,” “Forests and Streams” and “Snowscapes.” Regardless of motif, however, his compositions almost always cast the earth as an enveloping womb -- less warm and motherly than dramatic, powerful and encompassing. Courbet makes the landscape truly matter.

Two-thirds of these works were painted in the 1860s.

Years earlier, in 1855, Courbet had staked out his territory on a gigantic canvas -- almost 12 feet tall and 20 feet wide -- which he displayed in his now-famous “Pavilion of Realism.” Issuing a manifesto declaring his goal “to make a living art” in the face of deadly academic rules, contentedly on display at the salon next door, his monumental painting was “The Studio of the Painter: A Real Allegory of Seven Years of My Artistic Life.” While most attention is usually focused on the throng of people shown milling about the cavernous atelier, including a young boy and a classically draped female nude adoringly watching the artist at work, it is instructive to notice what is on Courbet’s depicted easel. He shows himself painting neither a genre scene, portrait nor still-life -- but a massive landscape.

Courbet is usually lauded as a figurative artist rather than a landscape painter. This show will alter that perception. Impressionist painting erupted with full force in the 1870s, hot on the heels of Courbet’s most focused landscape interlude, and the French countryside is Impressionism’s bread and butter.

Usually Impressionism is charted as emerging from a mixture of one part silvery light from Camille Corot, one part painting out of doors in the Barbizon forests. “Courbet and the Modern Landscape” deftly tweaks both these standard legacies, inserting Courbet into the story. When you get to his powerful group of pictures of darkly verdant forest streams, several painted at a favorite spot called the Puits-Noir, it is suddenly easy to see Cezanne, born the year Courbet arrived in Paris, waiting in art history’s wings.

Oddly enough, it is also possible to glimpse Sillman, Newkirk and the other 11 artists in the Orange County Museum show “Landscape Confection.” (The Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, organized it.) If Courbet’s “Pavilion of Realism” took a dramatic -- and effective -- swipe at the highly controlled, rigorously enforced aesthetic policies of the Paris Salon, Newkirk’s snowy landscape made of pony beads strung on synthetic hair finds its inspiration in the salon’s more current incarnation -- a hairdressing establishment.

That’s one example of how “Landscape Confection” emphasizes each word in the title. All the works depict or refer to rural or urban vistas, and all of them emphasize handicrafts.

Jim Hodges sewed a curtain of silk flowers, and Michael Raedecker employs needlepoint to wonderfully surreal effect. Jason Gubbiotti gets out the woodworking tools, making stretchers that bend around corners or imply crown moldings. Neal Rock pulls out the cake-decorating utensils to pile up pigmented layers of extruded silicone. Rowena Dring stitches piecework quilts -- stretched like paintings rather than stuffed with cotton batting -- and Lisa Sanditz mimics patchwork-quilting patterns with oil paint.

Pia Fries logs an inventory of paint application techniques -- brushed, smeared, globbed, swiped, etc. -- while Katie Pratt approaches painting’s surface as topography, piling up and excavating paint. Janaina Tschape dons latex and rubber costumes to merge her body with organic landscapes.

Finally, in a tour-de-force installation both pungent and exquisite, Ranjani Shettar threads thousands of hand-rolled, naturally tinted beeswax beads. These she suspends from a spiral of coaxial cable in a pattern that suggests both mountains and galaxies.

In this company, Sillman and the gifted young Los Angeles painter David Korty might seem the most conservative artists. They are painters, plain and simple -- but they are also painters obsessed with the visual capacities of touch. Sillman is a marvel: The delicacy of her brushwork is as gorgeous and absorbing as that of Philip Guston, whose abstract and figurative precedents are simultaneously evoked. Korty marks his large canvases with wisps of colored pencil and tactile daubs of pale acrylic paint, building diaphanous urban vistas that seem to dissolve before your eyes, like sugar cubes in warm water.

Beautifully installed, the show mixes together works by different artists, rather than presenting 13 solo exhibitions. One result is a helpful emphasis on the variable material approaches these far-flung artists employ. (They hail from Brazil, England, Germany, India, France and the U.S.) Handicraft -- from hairdressing and cake decorating to sewing and, well, painting -- is quietly but firmly set against the slick, sleek ephemera that dominate our digital environment. Television is our academy now, and pixels are at the pinnacle of today’s image-heap. It’s a long way from Courbet to here, but plainly the landscape can still serve contrary purposes.

*

What: “Courbet and the Modern Landscape,” J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; closed Mondays.

Ends: May 14

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 440-7300; www.getty.edu

Also

What: “Landscape Confection,” Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays, except 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays; closed Mondays.

Ends: May 7

Price: $8 to $10

Contact: (949) 759-1122; www.ocma.net