Tweaking and tinkering
Laura Gascoigne
The Impossible View? The Lown; until]] January
The Sunday painter can sit in a beauty spot and paint the view 'as we have learned to see it in the travel books of young ladies', but the serious artist, says Cezanne, must be 'neither too scrupulous nor too sincere nor too submissive to nature . . . You must get to the heart of what is before you, and continue to express yourself as logically as possible.' Getting to the heart of things can mean adjusting reality, shifting things about, tweaking colours, tinkering with viewpoints. The logic of the picture, implies Cezanne, can ask the impossible and the result can sometimes be an 'impossible view'.
The exhibition The Impossible New? at The Lowry, Salford Quays, is an excursion into this artistic no-man's-land. As home to the L. S. Lowry Collection, the gallery has its own perspective on the subject, but its survey takes in a broad historical sweep. Industrial landscapes by Lowry are just the starting point for a show of 90 paintings, drawings, prints and photographs from major collections covering four centuries of attempting the impossible by artists from van Ruisdael and Koninck to Bomberg, Auerbach and Hockney.
Though not all the views are strictly 'impossible' — hence the question-mark over the title — they are all unusually high, or wide. or both. The resulting display is scopophiliac heaven for those of us who like to enjoy that sitting-on-top-of-theworld feeling without the nuisance of shinning up a tree. To the scopophiliac nothing beats a good panorama, and The Impossible View? is panoramas wall-to-wall.
It's probably no accident that the great age of the panorama followed the industrial revolution, which suddenly provided artists with a wealth of tall buildings from which to make impossible views come true. The show includes several such town prospects by local draughtsmen who vary in skill, but who are all dab hands at smoke. In Sam Rothwell's 'Bolton from Blinkhorn's Chimney' (1848), plumes of white gouache puff from the factories and houses far below, making the terraces with their rows of chimneys look like so many steamers on collision courses; in William Collingwood's 'Liverpool from Tranmere' (1863), a rural village in the middle distance is wreathed in smoke, while the city beyond the Mersey is blanketed in fog.
One's suspicion that the chief impossibility of these views was making out the distance through the smog is confirmed by an archive photograph, 'Manchester Ship Canal and Docks' (1935), showing a pall of black smoke blowing across the city from a factory chimney like a flag from a pole. I counted SO such chimneys in Frank N. Pettingell 8z T. Brownlow Thompson's chromolithographic 'Bird's-Eye View of the Town of Leeds' (1886) before I was a third of the way across, and only two church spires among them — as against the 40-odd churches in Rombout Van den Hoeye's 'Panoramic View of the City of London' (e. 1650).
But Londoners suffered their share of smoke in the Great Fire of 1666, documented in an impossible pair of 'before and after' etchings by Wenceslaus Hollar, and in the Blitz, whose aftermath is recorded by David Bomberg in 'Evening in the City of London' of 1944, Here the view itself is less improbable (Bomberg drew it from a church tower) than the survival amidst the wreckage of the dome of St Paul's, silhouetted against a flaming sky.
Just as cataclysms call for panoramas, so do wars. The show includes Nevinson's memorably bleak image of The Road from Arras to Bapaume' as an endless ribbon of mud reflecting a sulphur sky, and Richard Eurich's Dunkirk tribute, 'The Boats Were Machine-Gunned', none the less moving for having been painted in the safety of his studio. There are also some extraordinary examples of early war photography, such as Roger Fenton's 1855 salt print of 'The (Battle) Lines of Balaclava' — impossible to believe today that the Light Brigade was quartered in a cluster of tents no bigger than a holiday campsite.
Modern photography is, of course, now in the position to mount a serious challenge to painting's monopoly of the impossible view. Alongside a dizzying photo collage by David Hockney, 'Grand Canyon South Rim with Rail, Arizona' (1982), the show includes an amazing photographic panorama by Andreas Gursky of the excavation of Thebes, green fields peeled away like an ecorehe to expose the ancient city under the skin. But in the impossible stakes photography is still no threat to painting which, if it pleases, can even toss out the perspective rulebook.
On perspective points, the best-in-show title belongs here to the anonymous 19thcentury printmaker who recorded the breathtakingly vertiginous view of work-inprogress on the Colosseum's Panorama of London in 1829. But man of the match is Turner for Tetworth Park' (1828), where the long diagonal shadows cast by the setting sun stubbornly refuse to meet in a point on the horizon, but the vista still melts impossibly into golden paint.
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