Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the essential role that landscape plays in American painting, similar to how sex and psychoanalysis influence American literature.
Robert Hughes compares the significance of landscape in American painting to the themes of sex and psychoanalysis in the American novel. This analogy suggests that just as these complex and often taboo subjects shape the narrative and character development in literature, the depiction of landscape is crucial in capturing the essence of American identity and experience in visual art.
In practice
During an art lecture, this quote can be used to spark a discussion about the importance of landscape in visual storytelling.
Essentially, perspective is a form of abstraction. It simplifies the relationship between eye, brain and object. It is an ideal view, imagined as being seen by a one-eyed, motionless person who is clearly detached from what he sees. It makes a God of the spectator, who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges, the Unmoved Onlooker.
It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920's is that they they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naivete that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot.
Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius.
What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?
What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it's a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can't separate persona from psyche; you just can't do it.
Movies would be like a broad painted canvas... or a mystical process which cannot really be explained, like, 'What is electricity?' Along with the images that go on the screen, there's a corridor of dialogue that can happen through motion pictures, whether you're aware of it or not.
Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.
The dream of reason produces monsters. Imagination deserted by reason creates impossible, useless thoughts. United with reason, imagination is the mother of all art and the source of all its beauty.
I like books that are fat and full.
Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor.
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