What happened to landscape painting? Its decline in status is even more surprising given the current moral, scientific, and political preoccupation with the environment. One might think that scenes of nature – central to our culture for centuries – would still have a role to play now, having done so much to cultivate our appreciation of the environment in the first place.

In a sense, however, landscape never went away: It was just transformed into something unrecognizable, and has begun to emerge again in surprising places. The rise and fall of landscape painting tells an interesting story about art’s relationship to the outside world over the last two centuries, and the ways the genre might be resurfacing today suggest just how unsettled our own relationship to nature has become.

@ Boston Globe