At Utah Museum of Fine Arts, 300 years of changing landscapes with Monet, Constable, Turner and more

Landscape paintings are so commonplace, hanging in hotel rooms and over living-room couches, that it's easy to dismiss how critical they are in the history of art.

Landscapes, said Gretchen Dietrich, executive director of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, help show "how is it artists help us think about the ways we use the land, care for the land, enjoy the land, but sometimes beat up the land."

This is demonstrated in a new exhibit opening Saturday at UMFA. "The British Passion for Landscape: Masterpieces from National Museum Wales" is a reminder of what landscapes can do and how they have changed over time.

The touring exhibit showcases more than 60 landscape works dating from the 1660s to 1999, including works by such greats as Claude Monet, Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable and J.M.W. Turner.

The exhibit was curated by Tim Barringer, the Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, and Oliver Fairclough, Keeper of Art at Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales.

Dietrich met Barringer in 2011, when the professor came to the University of Utah to deliver the College of Humanities' annual Gordon B. Hinckley Lecture. Dietrich showed Barringer around UMFA's collections, and during the tour Barringer asked, "Have you ever been to Wales? … We're doing this amazing exhibition with the National Museum Wales."

UMFA is one of four museums in the United States to land this exhibit, and the only one in the West. Dietrich said her museum is an appropriate place for the show, both because many of Utah's founders trace their roots back to the British Isles and because "we here in Utah are pretty obsessed with our landscape."

So are the British, according to Luke Kelly, UMFA's curator of antiquities and the person in charge of fitting the exhibit into the museum's main gallery.

On a pre-opening walk-through of the exhibit, Kelly noted the changes that time and technology have brought to landscape art, both in content and execution.

The exhibit leads off with an example of a classic landscape: "Landscape With St. Philip Baptizing the Eunuch," a 1678 work by Claude Gellée, Le Lorrain. "He is the idealized imagined landscape, full of light and what John Constable called 'the calm sunshine of the heart,' " Kelly said. The green trees and luminous skies more closely resemble Italy than the deserts of Gaza, where St. Philip proselytized.

It was this classic ideal that, a century later, the British painter Richard Wilson told his students to emulate. Wilson took his own advice, plopping a Welsh castle into an Italianate setting in his painting "Dinas Bran Castle, near Llangollen," in the early 1770s.

The generation of painters that followed Wilson, Turner and Constable among them, "are artists who fundamentally shaped what a landscape painting is and can be," Dietrich said.

The exhibit includes six works (two oils and four watercolors) by Turner, considered the foremost British painter of his age, as well as an oil by Constable, Turner's rival. (This is the first time works by Turner or Constable have been displayed in Utah, Dietrich said.) There also is a watercolor by Thomas Girtin, who might have eclipsed both men if he hadn't died in 1802 at age 27. Kelly quoted Turner, who said, "If Tom had lived, I would have starved."

While Turner worked in glowing light, Constable, Kelly said, "is really interested in the more detailed depiction of the English landscape." He depicted the British sky as it was, gray and cloudy, rather than the golden tones of their classical predecessors.

Turner, Kelly said, also embraced a product of the Industrial Revolution: artificial pigments. The new paints, which came in pig bladders or metal tubes, "allowed a whole new freedom for artists," Kelly said. The old guard was not convinced. "Richard Wilson, when he was told in the late 1700s that there was a new artificial pigment being invented, he remarked, 'There was too many colors already,' " Kelly said.

Another 19th-century technological advance threatened to supplant landscape painting: photography. One wall of the exhibit features early photography, from the 1840s to 1860s. Because of the laborious chemistry involved and the slow shutter speeds, photographers often turned to landscapes because they aren't likely to move.

Painters found photography to be a useful tool, Kelly said. They could take a photo of something they wanted to paint, then go back to the studio to create a finished work.

"Early photography, for all it offered, was still very limited," Kelly said. "You couldn't capture the rushing river or specific things the Impressionists were going out to do, trying to capture what you could see with the mind's eye."

As the Industrial Revolution revved up, and more people moved into cities, the subject matter shifted from the agrarian to the urban. Those gray clouds darkened with coal smoke, as in Lionel Walden's "Steelworks, Cardiff, at Night" (1895-97), a huge red-and-black work that dominates one end of UMFA's large gallery space.

One artist who embraced London's industrialization was the French Impressionist Claude Monet. A refugee from the Franco-Prussian War, Monet first arrived in London in 1870 — and the exhibit includes one of his few works from that visit, "The Pool of London" (1871), a depiction of boats docking at London's busy port.

The exhibit's other Monet, "Charing Cross Bridge" (1902), is a panorama of the Thames, when London was enveloped in a "pea-souper," the dense fog that was as much man-made pollution as nature's work.

"He fell in love with the city and with the fog that reviled many artists [but] he embraced," Kelly said of Monet, whose muted colors make the boats in the Thames and the buildings on the banks, including Parliament, barely distinguishable.

As the exhibit moves into the 20th century, Kelly said the artists often reflect on the old masters.

For example, Graham Sutherland's abstract "Road at Porthclais with Setting Sun" (1975), depicting the disc of the sun setting in a murky sky, is influenced by the 19th-century works of Samuel Palmer — who, in turn, was influenced by Turner. British members of the Land Art movement, like Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, would walk around the countryside, stacking or moving stones and photographing the results, in an homage of sorts to Turner and Constable, who would embark on walking tours of the English countryside to gather imagery and inspiration.

"As these changes are occurring," Kelly said, "these artists are always looking back for inspiration, and going forward and imbuing it with what is going on in their current art movement. … These artists are talking, and are constantly inspired by one another."

spmeans@sltrib.com

Twitter: @moviecricket

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Green pastures and gray skies

A touring exhibit, "The British Passion for Landscape: Masterpieces from National Museum Wales."

Where • Utah Museum of Fine Arts, 410 Campus Center Drive, University of Utah campus, Salt Lake City.

When • Opens to the public Saturday through Dec. 13.

Admission • $14 for adults, $12 for seniors and youth (6 to 18), free for UMFA members, children 5 and younger, University of Utah students, staff and faculty, Utah public college students and military families.

Discounts • Free admission on the first Wednesday and third Saturday of the month (part of the Salt Lake County Zoo, Arts and Parks Program); $5 admission every Wednesday after 5 p.m.

Complimentary exhibit • "Constructing the Utah Landscape," an educational exhibit adjacent to the British show, featuring interactive elements and works from UMFA's permanent collection, including works by Douglas V. Snow, LeConte Stewart and Maynard Dixon.

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UMFA exhibit events

Events tied to "The British Passion for Landscapes: Masterpieces From National Museum Wales," at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts:

Thursday • Premiere Gala, ticketed event.

Friday • UMFA members-only preview, free for UMFA members from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (and 20 percent discount at the Museum Store on Friday and Saturday).

Wednesday, Sept. 2, 7 p.m. • Chamber Music Series concert.

Saturday, Sept. 19, 1 to 4 p.m. • Third Saturday for Families: Make a Cyanometer.

Wednesday, Sept. 30, 7 p.m. • Free screening of Mike Leigh's film "Mr. Turner," a 2014 biopic of J.M.W. Turner, presented with the Utah Film Center. ($5 admission to exhibit after 5 p.m.)

Wednesday, Oct. 14, 4 to 7 p.m. • Free open house for teachers, education students and their families.

Thursday, Oct. 22, 7 p.m. • Curator talk with Tim Barringer, co-curator of the touring exhibit. (Free museum admission after 5 p.m.)

Wednesday, Nov. 4, 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. • Evening for Educators, free admission for teachers.