The Fading Landscape

THE BREAKTHROUGH INTO painterly abstraction around 1900 is associated with the concrete names of local natural places: L'Estaque, Murnau, and earliest of all, Worpswede. In the wide open space of Worpswede's heather and moor, nature itself seemed to strain toward its expression in pure abstract spaces of light and color, spaces whose bareness suggest the subjectivity of Stimmung or mood. “For a few years around the turn of the century, it seemed as if nature painting and avantgarde modernism could enter into a productive liaison.” The liaison took the form of what Adorno would later call a Kulturlandschaft, a landscape reflecting nature's own imprint by human history. The promise of epochal renewal felt in those landscapes was inseparable from the primeval quality of heather and moor, their literally antediluvian quality: this was a landscape that had been drained and colonized from flooded marshland only in the eighteenth century. The affect of Angst so typical of the turn of the century, had specific historical origins. Worpswede around 1900 was thus a landscape of memory, painted “around …moments of recognition …when a place suddenly exposes its connection to an ancient and peculiar vision of the forest, the mountain, or the river.”