Turner and claim it to be ‘contemporary’. Today, one can not paint a landscape in the style and esthetics of John Constable or J. With landscape painting, I would argue this condition does become a pretext for the landscape to be contemporary as it flows from our previous condition and pretext. In our extensive article on What Makes an Artwork Contemporary, we have stated that this condition is not an absolute pretext, whereas the first two are. Third, the time-bound esthetics of the landscape painting are a natural consequence of our first and second condition. Our examples below with the best landscape painters today will clarify and illustrate this notion one by one.ĭavid Hockney, Bigger Trees near Worter, 2007. The landscape is a result of a wider contemporary practice from which the landscape paintings emanate. This means that very rarely, a contemporary artist only paints landscapes―whereas back in the day artists were very specialized to a specific genre. In other words, the artist does not aim to replicate a landscape, but takes on the genre from a contemporary artistic perspective.
It implies that the artist’s aim is not to paint the landscape in the tradition, style and technique of traditional landscape painting. The second part is also a crucial pretext for the landscape to be contemporary. This condition is an absolute pretext for any landscape painting to be seen as contemporary. A landscape painting can only be contemporary if it has been produced in the contemporary era, which is roughly situated from 1960/1970 up to today. The first part of this answer is of course the most straightforward one. As a result, let’s implement them with contemporary landscape painting.Ī Landscape painting is contemporary when: (i) it is made between 1960/1970 up to today (ii) it is the artist’s intention to take on the genre in a new and contemporary manner (iii) the esthetics are time-bound to painting today (iv) and the landscape becomes relevant in a contemporary context. At first this may seem to be a straightforward question, but as we have illustrated in our more extensive article Explained: What Makes an Artwork Contemporary?, there are four very specific conditions that make an artwork contemporary. When it comes to the question of what makes a landscape contemporary, I like to refer to the question of what makes any artwork contemporary. What Makes a Landscape Painting Contemporary? In this article, we will discuss how the artist takes on this nostalgic genre in a contemporary manner with a retrospective view on landscape painting, followed by an extensive and complete anthology of the best landscape painters today.Ī major resource for this article―and the best available resource anywhere when it comes to contemporary landscape painting―is the reference publication Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticismby Todd Bradway and Barry Schwabsky, published by D.A.P. The artist does not strive to obtain a pure naturalist depiction, rather to develop a contemporary perspective on the genre. But first, exactly what is contemporary landscape painting?Ĭontemporary Landscape Painting is a genre in contemporary painting in which outdoor environments or natural scenery are depicted―think of mountains, fields, forests, rivers, or seas. However, when analyzing our recent art history, the opposite seems to be true. Our collective memory seems to categorize landscape painting as something of the past, a nostalgic genre, an obsolete practice, which has no place in a day and age in which art is dominated by abstraction, installations, Conceptual Art or Minimal Art. But landscape painting never ended, as for instance the cubists and expressionists continued to use the landscape as a genre in their journey towards abstraction. When we hear of landscape painting, one must think quit immediately of the earliest landscapes of Joachim Patenir, the more romantic landscapes of John Constable, or Claude Monet’s impressionist take on the genre.
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