British Art Studies (Dec 2018)
1973 and the Future of Landscape
Abstract
This essay is an exercise in exhibition history, focused on Landscape in Britain, c.1750–1850 held at the Tate Gallery in the winter of 1973, in which curators Conal Shields and Leslie Parris set out to question received ideas about the rise of landscape painting in Britain, and to widen the range of materials for investigation. Drawing on correspondence and the designer’s plans in the Tate Archives, aspects of the concept, installation, reception, and legacy of the exhibition are considered. The exhibition is seen in the context of a wider reappraisal of landscape as a field of study, but also in relation to the renewal of landscape as an arena for contemporary art practice. The discussion is bracketed by that of two further exhibitions, Constable: The Art of Nature at the Tate in 1971 and an ambitious sequel in 1983, in which a survey of the next one hundred years of landscape art in Britain was attempted.
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