080050 VO The Etchings of Hercules Segers and the Origin of Modern Landscape Painting (2018W)

In the first half of the 17th century a new type of landscape painting emerged in the Northern Netherlands, especially in Haarlem. This type of representation of unspectacular landscape motives in subdued (‘monochrome’) colors and with low horizon is one point of origin of the modern – ‘naturalistic’ or ‘realistic’ – landscape painting up to the 19th century. The lecture focuses on the work of the painter and etcher Hercules Segers. Segers, who was admired by Rembrandt, was mostly forgotten since the later 16th century and was only rediscovered in the 19th and 20th century. (Here is a link to some images >> https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1GeogmwLeXCUQxm0dLZvqJt3KfMVpV3Ov; more can be found on Unidam; and here an introductory video of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam (with the voice of John Malkovich!): >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahaEMVqgD4E&t=144s).
Starting from Segers and contemporary landscape painters such as Jan van Goyen, Salomon van Ruisdael, Esaias van de Velde and others the lecture will give an introduction into the history of landscape painting from the 15th to the 17th and partially to the 18th and 19th century. The following questions will structure our approach to this broad topic: - What do pictorial representations of landscapes tell us about the conception of nature of their respective epoch? - And how, after all, is a conception or understanding of nature expressed in and decipherable from a pictorial representation? What is, thereby, the role of the formal structure and of the ‘style’ or ‘Darstellungsart’ as well as of the materiality and technique of these representations – the latter being so blatantly idiosyncratic in Segers case? How can we relate the conception of nature that might thus be deduced from paintings, drawings and prints to conceptions testified in other areas – such as the philosophy, the natural sciences, the religion and theology, the technology and economy of the respective epoch?
Apart from an introduction into the techniques of printmaking, the history of landscape painting and the early modern conception of nature the lecture will thus focus on the methodological problem of the interpretation of images beyond an established iconography or an open or disguised symbolism. How can we read and interpret the ‘style’, the ‘Darstellungsmodus’ of pictorial representations and the methods and techniques of their material realization? We will see that the work of Segers, who was often characterized as an obscure and eccentric (also as a proto-surrealist or proto-expressionist) figure, is closely related to the philosophical, theological, technical and economic developments of his time. We will assign to Segers a central role in the formation of the ‘realist’ Dutch landscape painting in Haarlem in the first decades of the 17th century.
Aim:
Strengthening of the competence to analyze pictorial representations; widening of the knowledge of the history of landscape painting and of the techniques of printmaking; development of an understanding of the relevance of the style or mode of representation and of the material and technique for the historical interpretation of works of art.
Method:
Formal analyses; close readings; comparisons of style; discourse-analysis.