Air

Albrecht Altdorfer’s History cycle: Alexanderschlacht (Battle of Issus) 1529 is a textbook example of Weltlandschaft . The painting restages a popular tale from antiquity, the battle between Alexander the Great and the King of Persia, Darius III, set against the huge empire over which Alexander would eventually rule. Thousands of figures swarm in the bottom third of the image; behind them stands the ancient city of Issus located on the southern coast of modern-day Turkey, then the deep blue bays of the Mediterranean Sea and the island of Cyprus. In this blue beyond, the left landmass represents South- West Asia, marked by the Tower of Babel, and the land on the right shows North Africa, indicated by the seven openings of the Nile River. The two continents meet at Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Behind this land bridge, the Red Sea, far paler than the Mediterranean waters, touches the Earth’s curving horizon. Altdorfer’s horizon line pinches mountains and sky together, like two sheets of paper held by a bulldog clip. In the top third of the painting, this sheet of sky miraculously opens in three sections to reveal the Moon, the Sun and a floating tablet inscribed with a brief description of the battle. The foamy atmosphere is, quite literally, a metaphysical realm — ‘meta’ denoting a position behind or beyond — in that it sits behind the physical world. If the world grounds Alexander’s triumph, then what grounds this world but infinite air? While not all artistic traditions put air in the background, many do situate it in some kind of out-of-world space. During the period of northern Europe’s fascination with Weltlandschaft , the Yamato-e painting style predominated in Japan. Viewed from a bird’s‑eye perspective, the eighteenth-century Tosa School’s Eight-fold screen: Scenes from Genji Monogatari (Tale of Genji) glides over courts, weaving from room to room, between gardens and interiors, each vignette broken up by the interruption of a misty cloud. Yamato-e paintings are striking for their absences. Here, the air frames the image not by providing a ground but a lens. Like looking through a spyglass, we observe snapshots in a drama, which rupture from the haze and suddenly come into focus. The atmosphere is perhaps of even greater metaphysical importance in classical Japanese painting because we can’t strictly see the air itself. What we can see is that which the air allows us to see, what it deems important enough to unveil. All else lies beneath the fog. Partially inspired by the Japanese aesthetic, early modernists also brought air to the front of the image. Grey slips across the canvas in James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Sea and Rain 1865, coating the scene in chalky bands of sky and water. Unlike the Yamato-e vignettes, Whistler’s air doesn’t frame the scene, but muffles it, dampening the distinctions between sand, ocean and sky. Strangely, even the tidal pool in the foreground seems vaporous, as it rises to absorb the figure who apparently stands within it. Here, fog infects the elements that would normally stabilise an image, upsetting the typical cues to the depth of the scene, in terms of what is crystallised in the foreground and what fades into the background. As the literary historian Steven Connor writes: ‘Rather than picking things out of the background, haze is a bringing forward of the background itself, as an infigurable, defiguring figure without ground’. 1 Whistler’s figure on the beach is lost within this metastasised background, as the painted environment consumes them. Tosa School / Eight-fold screen: Scenes from Genji Monogatari (Tale of Genji) 18th century / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (opposite) James Abbott McNeill Whistler / Sea and Rain 1865 / Collection: University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, Michigan 1 Steven Connor, The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal , Reaktion Books, London, 2010, p.190. 49 48 Prevailing currents: Towards an atmospheric imaginary in art Prevailing currents: Towards an atmospheric imaginary in art