Book Reviews : Political landscape: the art history of nature. By Martin Warnke. London, Reaktion Books. 1994. 165 pp. £12.95, paper. ISBN 0 948462 63 9

Abstract

For an anglophone reader familiar with the extensive critical literature on landscape in English, the title of this book raises many expectations. Within art history and beyond, landscape painting and design have come to be regarded as deeply political, because landscape is regarded as a way of seeing and representing the natural world, historically bound to the exercise of authority and power over land and territory. It comes therefore as a surprise to read in the book’s preface that ’art experts ... have totally eliminated the political element from landscape painting’ and the hope that the book ’will show that political pointers need not impair our appreciation and perception of the landscape, but actually sharpen them’ (pp. 7-8). Such a claim only makes sense in the specific context of the original German text. Martin Warnke is Professor of Art History at the University of Hamburg, and the literature upon which his book draws is overwhelmingly German. We know that Landschaft has a broader and less necessarily visual meaning in German than in English, and we know too (in part from Warnke’s own evidence here) how powerful and dangerous has been the political reading of landscape within the nationalist discourses of the German-speaking peoples. Undoubtedly, academic caution in handling the ideological dimensions of landscape art accounts in part for the situation Warnke identifies. But his claim must also rest in part