CONCORDE, WALDEN I AND WALDEN II

© Tom Phillips. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2015

CONCORDE, WALDEN I AND WALDEN II 1971

Tom Phillips (1937 – 2022)

Details

Dimension
182.8 X 365.6 CM
Media
ACRYLIC ON CANVAS (DIPTYCH)
Accession number
P1564

Summary

People in a landscape near Bristol watch Concorde take off. In another picture of the same format the greens that made the landscape become synthetic fields under a synthetic sky made from the blues in the sky that holds the aeroplane: the other colours (the people mostly) go to make rainbows. Above and below each landscape is a catalogue of the colours used in the order of their use. In the corners are week by week catalogues of the resulting terminal greys. The first is the spirit of Walden and the Concorde philosophers (R Waldo Emerson is there, and Thoreau himself, the pencilmaker) and the music of Charles Ives|: the second is the spirit of Walden Two, B F Skinners contraption and over this hovers the trace of the plane, carrying taxes to oblivion. Somewhere there should have been the ghost of Tara and Hercules Brabazon Brabazon (‘Oh God!, wrote Swift, ‘How I remember names!’). However these are the materials and not the subject of the picture.

From Tom Phillips, Marlborough Fine Art, 14 ASeptember-20 October 1973

 

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.