Air

This essay surveys how air has been variously imagined, experienced and understood by artists across some 500 years of predominantly Western art history. Rather than an exhaustive account, it adopts a more meteorological approach: observing the ‘weather’ of air’s representation in ways that identify its prevailing and subsiding currents and model its fluctuating dynamics. The collected examples trace what we conceive as a gradual conjuring — or bringing forth — of air. From its origins at the ‘back’ of the painted image, air suffused the foreground in the atmospheric mists of early Modernism, then materialised into objecthood with dadaist trappings of air, and has finally come full circle to envelop the viewer in immersive contemporary installations. Air is now conceptualised as something we inhabit, and which inhabits us, a permeable membrane that mediates, at all levels, our experience of the world. In mapping the emergence of an atmospheric imaginary in art, this short history looks for clearings in the clouds, moments of illumination that collectively serve as a barometric measure of the aerial imagination — illustrating how, in wanting to understand our world, we have turned to the air around us. For much of European art history, air belonged at the back of the painting. With the arrival of pictorial perspective in the fifteenth century, atmosphere was not so much an object in the image as it was its fixing: a final plane of blue in front of which all characters, structures and divine happenings were presented. This airy ‘beyond’ is perhaps best encapsulated in the sixteenth-century German and Netherlandish tradition of Weltlandschaft , or ‘world landscape’, which took an impossibly elevated viewpoint to reveal mountain ranges, oceans, countries and even entire empires all mashed in behind the key characters of the scene. In what now seems akin to contemporary globalism, the whole world (or at least a selective amalgamation) forms the backdrop to the episode unfolding on centre stage. Leonardo da Vinci / A deluge (details) c.1517–18 / Collection: Royal Collection Trust, UK (opposite) Albrecht Altdorfer / History cycle: Alexanderschlacht (Battle of Issus) 1529 / Collection: Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Germany 47 46 Prevailing currents: Towards an atmospheric imaginary in art Prevailing currents: Towards an atmospheric imaginary in art