Landscape in the European tradition seems a tired old genre. One can easily feel, however mistakenly, that all the main moves have been played out, which may account for some recent attempts to revive the public's interest in landscape with a few ill-judged doses of exoticism. The National Gallery sought to freshen things up over summer with an exhibition of little-known landscapes from Russia, while the National Maritime Museum has played the exotic card by showing the paintings of William Hodges. Hodges went to the south Pacific with Captain Cook in the 1770s, and his views of Tahiti make an interesting pendant to the "Gauguin-Tahiti" exhibition that drew huge crowds in Paris late last year.
A hundred years separate Hodges and Gauguin, and their paintings could not look more different. But the really interesting question is: do they look much like Tahiti? Critics like Jonathan Jones and Waldemar Januszczak (who has been to Tahiti) are right when they suggest that Hodges's Tahiti looks more like Claude's Italy - with some local totems, a dramatic volcano and a few palm trees tossed in - than the island itself.
"A writer is a person who writes about countries which do not exist," observed the Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom. "Or about countries which do exist, but which they furnish with mountains that do not exist." That's all very well if you're Dutch and crave a bit of altitude, but artists in the landscape tradition are more often judged by criteria of truthfulness - and in particular, by their ability to get to grips with the particular visual conditions of the territory they are painting.
If the basic pictorial concerns of landscape painting are the depiction of distance and natural light, then Hodges, like the Russian "Wanderers," fails the test, for his light is not the natural light of the south Pacific, but rather, an artificial Mediterranean light. In the same way, the Russians, modelling themselves on esteemed predecessors from Claude to Corot, imposed a quality of light and atmosphere cobbled together from the Roman campagna and the forests of Fontainebleau.
We picture the world through a shifting veil of conventions about seeing, and about vision itself - which is to say the meanings we attach to seeing. Since the 18th century, and particularly since 19th-century romanticism, a lot of those conventions have revolved around our sense of certain landscapes as exotic, providing an imaginative ballast to the domesticated land of our homes. Thus a great deal of conceptual nonsense was foisted on to territories western artists knew little about. Gauguin's boldness with colour, his yearning to be unconventional, allowed him to escape many of the clichés of the European landscape tradition and to reproduce on canvas a truer sense of Tahiti's bright light and saturated colours. But he, like Hodges, also imposed all sorts of ideas on to Tahiti which did not really obtain, from Christian mythology to fantasies of an erotic arcadia, reminding us that to see the world unmediated is impossible.
In the seemingly limitless new landscape of Australia, which Captain Cook discovered in 1770, artists were extremely slow in getting to grips with the bright, blinding quality of the light, preferring to use the land before them as a raw ingredient in paintings that served as confused, occasionally dramatic but more often maudlin pinings for Europe. It wasn't until Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton, fresh from belated exposure to impressionism in Europe, returned to Australia to paint the landscape outside Melbourne that Australian art really started getting to grips with the unique quality of light and the idiosyncratic flora and fauna.
In the second half of the 20th century, Australian artists like Fred Williams developed a visual syntax of extraordinary richness for these idiosyncrasies. Williams responded like no one before him to the the scraggliness of the ubiquitous eucalyptus and the harsh light with its distant heat-shimmer. I believe that Williams and a number of his contemporaries and successors - Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, John Olsen, Frank Hodgkinson, Rosalie Gascoigne, and Joe Furlonger - together constitute the most compelling landscape tradition in the 20th century. But the great Aboriginal painters who emerged in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s - Rover Thomas, Mick Namarari, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Gloria Petyarre, Emily Kngwarreye and the bark painter John Mawurndjul - have added to this tradition in a way that tells us more, not just about what we see but the meaning of seeing.
These artists, who deserve to be better known internationally, gave us new ways of thinking about landscape. Drawing on a complex web of traditions, they developed beautiful and poetic new visual languages with which to portray man's ambivalent relation to the land. And they lent hitherto unarticulated subtleties to our sense of placement within the landscape. The Aboriginal tradition, grounded as it is in spiritual customs far removed from the western tradition, does not differentiate "domestic" land from "wild nature," or time from place. Aboriginal art has its own complicated, "impure" history and its own conventions. But the best of it reminds us that, while it can take a long time to "unlearn" visual conventions and see landscape with fresh eyes, one can, in another sense, have seen it with fresh eyes all along.
