- Rendez-vous de l'Institut
- Conference
J.M.W.Turner, les paysagistes anglais et l’Anthropo(s)cène by Frédéric OGEE – Château de Bénouville
The increasing importance of ecological issues and its transcription in the new discipline of ecocriticism have identified the first half of the 19th century as the possible departure point of the Anthropocene, in other words, when the first effects of the Industrial Revolution began to become perceptible and when man’s mark on nature seemed to become paramount, essential and irreversible.
It is worthy of note that the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain coincided with the triumph of landscape as a prevailing pictorial genre in the English school of painting. Over this conference, focusing on a cross examination of three paintings exhibited by Turner in 1818 (the year Mary Shelley published Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus), I would like to suggest that the main subject of English landscape art, as Turner (and Constable) reinvented it, is the exploration of this frictional inscription of the presence of man amidst Nature, endowing the landscape genre with such a remarkable philosophical and epistemological strength that, at least in their eyes, it could be considered as the new painting genre of ‘modern’ history. In their works, the ‘natural world’ is not considered as the man’s ‘environment’ – some peripheral thing that serves as a setting for man’s central presence, but that nature IS the centre and becomes, or ‘rebecomes’, the prevailing force. This subtle movement of what is central, what counts, between man and nature is, in my view, the key revolution introduced by the period’s English landscape artists, for they replaced the centrality of man and his control over nature – the main characteristic of classical historic painting, but also the dominating principle of the period’s triumphant colonialism – with the extraordinary symphonic force with which they endowed Nature in the ‘real’ scenes they depicted.
Finally, what I would like to suggest is that it is becoming increasingly necessary to consider landscape art as proof, and to observe these countless images as the equally countless signs of what we have done to nature.
Frédéric Ogée
Frédéric Ogée is a Professor in British literature and history of art at the University of Paris. His key research themes are aestheticism, literature and art over and beyond the 18th century (1660-1815), and of which he has spoken several times over conferences in European, North-American and Asian universities. Commissioner of the exhibition on the English artist William Hogarth at the Louvre in 2006, he is also the author of several books, in particular Diderot and European Culture, a collection of essays (Oxford: 2006, new edition 2009), J.M.W.Turner: Les paysages absolus (Hazan, 2010) and Jardins et Civilisations (Valenciennes, 2019), following a conference organised at the European European Institute of Gardens and Landscapes in Caen. He is currently writing a series of major monographs on four English artists for the publishers Cohen & Cohen – to be published between 2022 and 2025: Thomas Lawrence, J.M.W. Turner, Thomas Gainsborough and William Hogarth. From 2014 to 2017, he was a member of the Tate Britain Scientific Committee in London and, since 2014, is a member of the Paris City Council Scientific Committee. In 2018-19, he was a Kress Fellow in History of Art at the Clark Art Institute, then invited professor at Smith College, both in Massachusetts.