Why This New Art Trend Feels So Familiar

0:01Different artists touch on that in different ways that we'll talk about some. It's, you know, maybe the idea of like a post-human world where animals and magical figures exist. In others, it's maybe a world where there's a lot of like ecological disaster. I'm Kate Brown and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

0:29In art, the pastoral has long been a vision of nature as a sanctuary. Think of Arcadian meadows and idyllic countrysides and all the picturesque places untouched by time that you can see at storied museums like the Met and the Louvre. But today in the art world, a new strain of pastoral painting is taking root. My sharp-eyed colleague Katie White noticed that a cohort of contemporary artists have been engaging with pastoral scenes, but using new stakes. Katie has called this movement the parapastoral, and in a recent piece, she explained how this trend in art is not an escape into the calm countryside per se, but rather a charged and tentative walk through ambiguous terrain.

1:06Here, as she describes it, beauty, politics, history, and even danger coexist. Katie joins me on the podcast to take a look at the history of pastoral art and this unsettling presence of the parapastoral, exploring what's fueling the genre's resurgence and how artists are reimagining natural landscapes for our current times. Hey Katie, so great to have you on The Art Angle today. How are you doing? I'm doing well. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, me too. You wrote such a great piece on pastoral painting, and there's so much to talk about, so I'm excited to get into it. I would say to start, maybe we could talk about when you started to notice pastoral re-emerging as a theme in contemporary art.

1:49Sure. So I think it's been happening for the past few years, maybe the past five years. We've noticed it over the last few art fair cycles. I'm not the only one on our team who noticed it. And maybe we had a takeaway like, okay, there's a lot of landscape painting out there, but we haven't really been able to make sense of it. And then two years ago, I interviewed the Los Angeles artist, Emma Webster, who makes these eerie landscape paintings, which are large oil paintings of like a darkened woods. It's very spooky feeling. and her process incorporates VR and scenography. And in talking to her, I sort of got the seed of this idea for the parapastoral.

2:33So para in the sense being paranormal, like an alternative world. So that's where it first began to sprout. It's true. We were talking about landscape painting because it did sort of emerge after figurative art as a major trend. But I think you really tapped into what the undercurrent themes are in it. And I'm excited to get into it today. But maybe you could locate it alongside other emergent trends, because it's not really the only art form or aesthetic that we've been seeing that sort of started to idealize the countryside, right? You mentioned in your piece, you know, these virtual trends like cottagecore and tradwife influencing.

3:10I think that the parapestoral lives among these in a very kind of disruptive way. So cottagecore has been around the longest. I think it even goes back to kind of the end of the blog world where, you know, you have kind of these visions of women, you know, baking pies. It's very, I imagine like a hobbit lifestyle, like a very doily, very quaint. and then trad wife influencers is obviously something that's like a phenomenon really of now where it's just women on social media kind of embracing this aesthetic of the quote-unquote traditional wife but not really a suburban wife a rural kind of farm wife and there's these sort of ideas of like homesteading that go along with it and having a whole kind of brood of children the most famous example of this is probably ballerina farm that there's been some big articles on where there's this woman, Hannah Nealman, who has eight children and runs this farm.

4:13And then even this is not like relegated just to women. I think like even in the contemporary culture of diets, like ancestral diets, people obsessed with paleo diets, like it's this obsession with protein, oddly, I think all goes hand in hand with this, like a nostalgic kind of fantastical view of the past. And I think like the important thing that I just want to say is it's like, it's not entirely new. Like I think of like Marie Antoinette, she had her little Chateau Petit Trianon on the grounds of Versailles where she would kind of cosplay as a dairy maid. So I think that there's like a historical precedent for this.

4:53It's all fantasy, right? Because real rural women living like a hundred years ago weren't broadcasting their existence through a cell phone. So there's a bit of farce and definitely a bit of staging to all of it. Right. Nor were they like having the easiest lives either. Yeah. It's interesting also some of these trends that you just mentioned, they emerged online, you know, around the pandemic, right? Where I feel like there was this desire to return to nature and the sort of ruralization, again, aesthetic kind of became really popular during lockdown. Yeah. And I think that ties into kind of a lot of bigger, darker ideas about like suspicion of medicine, suspicion of the government, this idea of kind of like the homesteader doing things for themselves and homeschooling even, like just a mistrust of kind of like the world of institution and institution is the city, right?

5:49Like these are like ancient ideas that the countryside is pure and innocent and that the city is sinful and corrupt. But the thing that I always am most fascinated by is that these are urban ideas. Like it's an urban fantasy of the rural life, you know, so it's not of the rural experience itself necessarily. Yeah. It's interesting as soon as you scratch under the surface of these pretty scenes that there's something so political about them. And we'll talk more about that down the line, I expect. I'm curious, because you mentioned at the top that we were noticing this at art fairs and at exhibitions and the like, could you maybe track it alongside some other recent trends?

6:28There's been, you know, a rise and maybe a fall of figuration and then still life painting. It seems like we're sort of been cycling through art history in a very specific way. I think that there is also just like a lot of intersection between these. We'll talk about this, especially as I talk about this artist, Samantha Joy Grofe, who I had interviewed in the past and then included in this article. And she's really at this intersection of figuration and pastoral, parapastoral, where she inserts women from her rural Pennsylvania community into these kind of eerie nighttime landscapes. So I think that there are like actual intersections between some of these trends.

7:07And I also think, you know, there's like an argument to be made that it's kind of like the TikTok-ification of art where there are these like micro trends that emerge. And I think that maybe there is some substance to that in some cases. But this has been something that's been happening like over the course of years and kind of like slowly burbling up. I think that we're just like at a very strange moment and sort of artists in the past, they look further into the past to try to find dialogue and kind of pull the past into the present. And so I think that as we're kind of culturally struggling to find our footing, there's a lot of kind of desire to situate or anchor ourselves in sort of different moments of art history.

7:54So maybe let's give a definition of what the parapastoral is. You, you know, describe in the piece a countryside that is neither nostalgic nor safe, but charged with ambiguity and intent, which I just loved that. Could you expand a bit on what we're talking about here? I think that the language of the parapastoral, you have visualizations of rural landscapes, right? Like that's still in keeping with the language of the pastoral, whereas kind of like the fantasy of the pastoral of centuries ago was maybe more idealizing. This is sort of more uncanny. So it's not giving up fantasy. Like, I wouldn't say that like the parapastoral is a correction to the pastoral.

8:37Like, it's not journalistic. It's not trying to like necessarily be realist. It's taking this language of fantasy based in a rural environment based in rural landscape, that kind of like visual iconography and kind of twisting it to a different end, which is maybe what's happening. The fantasy here is not our reality today. It's something that could be, it could be the future. It could be like a very disquieting future. And I think, yeah, different artists touch on that in different ways that we'll talk about some. It's, you know, maybe the idea of like a post-human world where animals and magical figures exist.

9:17In others, it's maybe a world where there's a lot of like ecological disaster, where a beautiful landscape is something of total fantasy, no longer exists. So I think that there's a lot of different ways that they're playing with the idea. Yeah, it's so fascinating that what looks completely realistic and often artists are trying to render as realistic is actually totally grounded in fantasy. And it's sort of, from my understanding, from what I read in your article, always been that way. So maybe Let's dive into the history of pastoral art. As I learned from your piece, you know, it stems back to early civilization era.

9:51It seems to me as soon as humans began to separate themselves from nature in civilization, they started to long to return to it and romanticize it, right? Yeah. So pastoral, right? Pastoral, the word pastoral comes from pasture. So it's very related to this first herding of livestock. Shepherds are the recurrent figure in pastoral landscapes. and I think what's really interesting is that yes it originated in literature poetry which is the same for many art movements of the past it kind of has like a history in language first but I did not realize how far back it went which is the first example that we know of of kind of this like longing for a lost golden age is the Greek ancient poet Hesiod's poem works and days which is from 700 BCE.

10:42So it's like thousands and thousands of years ago, we're already kind of mourning a past that we couldn't hang on to. And a lot of the kind of language that visually emerges and also in poetry is kind of like mythical Arcadia. It's an imaginary place based on kind of real landscapes in Greece, which was home to the god of Pan and Hermes. And so Arcadia has been the model for this unspoiled wilderness in visual arts. And I think really, though there are kind of touches here and there of pastoral going back to ancient times in visual culture, it's during the Renaissance that it really kind of like finds its language that like we know of as today, what we think of as the pastoral.

11:29And so what happens in the Renaissance? Like, what does that look like then? The example that is kind of the prototype is Titian's pastoral concert. The landscape is kind of like these rolling green hills. You can see kind of like a little village in the background. And there is a group of four figures that you can see that make up the kind of center of the composition. And it's two men who are wearing the contemporary dress of the Renaissance. One has a lute, they're playing music, these kind of red, very opulent outfits. I would imagine a troubadour, you know, and then two women who are nude and don't really look real.

12:12They don't look like they're of the time. They seem like they're plucked out of the myth and thrown into context with these two men. And one of the women's faces is totally turned away. And so a painting like this is a painting that would have been purchased by someone very wealthy and probably would have just been displayed in like an urban environment. It's like an urban fantasy of the rural life. It's a projection. An interesting kind of touchstone is that Manet's famous painting, Luncheon on the Grass, which was like kind of a very scandalizing painting in the 1800s, is a direct response to Titian's pastoral concert.

12:51But in Manet's painting, one of the nude women, the woman who turns away in Titian's painting, she looks out in Manet's painting and she looks directly at the viewer and she's very frank and kind of real looking in a way that really upset people. Like this is like a real woman, not a mythical woman. So I think that's kind of like the language that you get there. And there is a lot of overlapping of the passive female body and the landscape in pastoral art that we can talk about later and how kind of contemporary artists are toying with that.

13:28and it's also like a very allegorical painting right I mean the whole painting sort of represents a harmony with nature and I'm not sure that the artist Emma Webster directly is speaking about that but one thing that really stuck out to me when you spoke to her was that she talked about this idea of the pro-past and that there's a sort of conservative undertone to a lot of these pastoral paintings with respect to women and how they're depicted you just touched on. Could you speak a bit about what Webster was touching on with that? Yeah, so Emma Webster is really interesting. She gave me a lot of kind of windows into this idea of the parapastoral, which she said basically she was studying the work of Claude Lorraine, who's this French painter, 17th century, who was painting these very like idyllic scenes of trees and things like that.

14:15And she had like a breakthrough moment where she was like, oh, this isn't real landscape. This isn't like painted on plain air. This isn't a painter out in nature. It's a stage setting to make a point. It's all kind of in service to an allegory, whether it's harmony with nature, whether it's, you know, innocence and youth, something like that. It's just there to serve the allegory. It's not there to kind of like have its own narrative strength. I think a lot of what she has done in her paintings, which are like made with VR that are kind of very eerie, uncanny, is that she like kind of disrupts this kind of nostalgic view of the past.

14:56I think that definitely the pastoral has a very conservative, you could say, definitely nostalgic tenor. And I think that's like a big part of our culture right now is like a valorizing of like a fantastical past. And it ties into really dark ideas of nationalism purity, who's foreign, who's native. When you get under the kind of pretty picture, it's quite dark at times. I think that she kind of takes this language that's been used to certain ends and twists it, kind of is like, how can you kind of take back this language of the landscape per se? Because in her paintings, there are no figures.

15:35And that is in and of itself quite political, right? I was also looking at the paintings of Albert Bierstadt, who made these images of Yosemite National Park. And this idea of kind of creating wildness that doesn't have any people in it. I mean, that's something that Kent Monkman talked about on a recent podcast that we did with him, where he actually painted in people into some of these, you know, romantic images of the West, as if there was nobody there except for the white settlers who were painting them, these images, right? Yeah, for sure. And I think that that is a big part of the history of the pastoral is that it takes out what was really there.

16:13It's not a real rendering, it's a projection. And I think, you know, if you look at Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Cole, all of these kind of paintings, maybe you'll see in the distance some tiny, you know, Native American figure, but it's very much like, oh, this is just kind of like an isolated, untouched ground kind of waiting for discovery. Whereas I think Emma's world is maybe a place where people can no longer exist, where like we've taken ourselves out of the landscape through any number of ecological disasters probably. So yeah, I think that there is kind of like this strange tension between human presence and connection to the landscape.

16:57And there's two kind of British artists, George Wilson and Sholto Blissett, who talk about the kind of relationship between like people, landscape, ownership that I think is interesting. So this touches on a few things like the Anthropocene, post-humanism, but then also like the idea of land domination and class, right? So these contemporary artists are playing with all of those aspects, but especially land domination and class has been present in pastoral art for a long time, right? Yeah. So it was interesting to talk to different artists. It's very much like artists in the UK and in the US that I see doing this.

17:31And I think that is pretty specific. And these two young British artists I mentioned, Sholto Blissett, who has shown with Alexander Berggrunnen, and then this young woman artist, George Wilson, who was like in a group show at Hauser & Worth over this past spring. They respond particularly to the history of the pastoral landscape in the context of England. So Blissett's work. It's like very airtight vistas, no people, and you kind of see these monuments, maybe like a tower or a column. They're very pristine and very creepy. Like, it's hard to explain why they come off as so creepy, but it's interesting.

18:09He like has a degree in geography and he had said in a 2020 interview that during these kind of studies of geography, he was made aware of, this is a quote, made aware of the falseness of the romantic division between humans and nature. indeed the very construction of quote unquote nature, unquote. So he's kind of like asking people to consider like what the real world consequences of this separation, very arbitrary separation between nature and people is. Like nature is something that you can control, something that you can exploit. And he has another great quote that I'm going to read, which is, my paintings aren't pictures of landscapes.

18:46They are paintings of the history of landscape paintings, a mirror held up to our damaging assumptions inherited from that history. which I think is really interesting. And then this artist, George Wilson, in speaking to her, she was telling me that the genre of landscape was popularized by the landed gentry who were commissioning paintings of their estates, like depopulated estates. So in the late 1700s to the early 1800s in England, there had been land that was like held in common by the population and people could farm that land to feed themselves. And that land was like privatized. And so the idea of these landscapes were like rich people who had removed people from the land.

19:28And so it's like a view out their window of like a place where people have literally been removed. She had a quote, The history of painting the countryside in England is intrinsically tied to wealth and a fetishized curated vision of the lands. And I thought that was just really great. And her work tries to offer an alternative world where there's like magical creatures rather than humans and kind of this more ancient mythic understanding of the land and our relationship to it. You touched on this in your piece, but I was looking at this painting after I read about it, this great painting by Gainsborough of Mr.

20:02and Mrs. Andrews. It's a painting of Mr. Andrew and his wife. And then there's like a blank space where their baby was supposed to go in her lap. And then in the background, there is his land. And it was described as like a triple portrait. It's just a picture of his assets, basically, which is very unsettling. And also kind of kind of gets to the next question that I have, which is about how figures come into these paintings. You mentioned this with the Manet work. There's often something erotic and also women tend to be painted into these landscapes in very unsettling ways. Could you speak a bit about how figures have emerged and how the eroticism merged into landscape painting and how artists are subverting that today?

20:42I think one interesting kind of precedent for this like erotic in the pastoral art is the front Rococo artist Jean-Antoine Watteau, who I've talked to you about. I really think he's a super interesting artist. And so he kind of like created these frothy worlds of seduction of like the young aristocrats, the well-to-do kids of his age. And they were called like Fête Galant. So it's like these scenes where young people would kind of be in wooded parks and kind of engaged in these flirtations or whatever. And Watteau is a really interesting artist because he is also pretty disruptive. Like it's not always clear what's going on is like pleasant, you know?

21:23And I think that he's one of these first artists that sort of like really enmeshes this erotic quality into the landscape. And a lot of the artists I talked to for this article mentioned him, which I thought was interesting. One artist, this artist, Jay Carino, who recently had a show at Yosemite Milo in New York. He creates like idyllic scenes, but he like inserts gay men into these landscapes. And he often draws pretty directly, like the paintings will be named after either America and pastoral paintings, and he fills them with like queer male bodies. So in that sense, it's subversive, but it also does kind of touch on the history of, you know, gay experience where people would have to kind of like leave and have these kind of like interactions outside of the view of history.

22:14But there's something threatening to the paintings too, like the idea that it could collapse quite quickly. And he talked a little bit about that when I interviewed him, just that there is like a sense of threat that this could collapse at any moment. And then Samantha Joy Grofe, I mentioned her, but she paints women from her rural community in Pennsylvania, often women who are Mennonite, which is the tradition that she was raised amongst. The basis of her paintings are photographs she takes at night in the woods. Like these women are out there in these kind of very uncomfortable environments, you know, getting mosquito bites, getting cold.

22:52And the way that she paints them can be kind of like quite erotic, but also as though they were kind of undergoing some sort of divine intervention. Like it's creepy. It's like, are you being possessed is like God talking through you. And she uses this language in an interesting way where in talking to her, she's saying like, okay, I'm actually from this environment. Like the experiences of the landscape to these women in my paintings is not something imaginary. They like live in this land and that it's not always so pretty, you know, that there are really dark things that happen there. It's funny because even those images, sometimes like the relationships between the women can be like very ambiguous.

23:35It can kind of border on like sexual. So I think there's a lot of kind of toying with that imagery. And yes, and one other artist I talked to, Vera Ilyatova, she is from Russia and she moved to the U.S., New York as a teenager. And it's these kind of like spaces that exist between worlds where it's women in these landscapes and maybe you'll see some like Soviet towers in the background. And for her, it's kind of like this place of imagination, like a women caught between worlds, both like imagining kind of the fantasy of the United States as something magical and then getting here and realizing, okay, like, this is not exactly what I thought it was either.

24:17It's really fascinating stuff. Yeah, her paintings are very haunting, as are Joy Groff's. What I've sort of taken away from this is that pastoral painting tends to crop up when society is going through some major turning point. It seems to be a way of using the pastoral to talk about a society in transition. And that's a time where people start to really like yearn for the past, maybe, however realistic their envisions of the past are. I'm curious, does that resonate? Why do you think that this is having such a resurgence right now with collectors and viewers? I think that it is many reasons. I think that for sure people are trying to make sense of the lands.

24:59Like I think people are trying to make sense of the human relationship to our world. Obviously the climate crisis has a lot to do with this. And I think that people feel frightened. And so I think that in these times of disruption, there is, yes, a longing for the past, but there's also people who are trying to make sense of the present by looking into the past and seeing if there's like anything we can learn or any kind of like connections that can be made. Can't say I understand why collectors are interested in it. They definitely are. Like we noticed that on Artnet 2023 and 2024 price database searches, Emma Webster was one of the artists with the highest upticks and Shalto Blissett was also one of the artists with the highest upticks.

25:46So people are really interested in their work and have been having some record auction prices as well. So there's definitely a fascination with it. I couldn't really say what's appealing to collectors about it because it is pretty strange and odd stuff, but it seems to be the case. It's maybe also that it can function on two levels at once. Like these are both really beautiful contemplative paintings, but then that they also have this secret language underneath them, which I think, you know, your piece really taps into in defining this parapastoral kind of sentiment. They really have like this open language.

26:20So it's fascinating. Well, thank you so much, Katie. It's been great to chat through this. And I hope everyone will also go read your article because it's a fascinating deep dive into art history and also these future gazing artists. In a way, the parapestoral is also just looking to the future as well. Yeah, it definitely is. I think that that's like the interesting thing about it. It's like looking to the past, but also looking to the future. It was great talking to you, Kate. Always love talking through these ideas with you. Thanks so much, Katie. That's it for this week's episode. If you like what you heard, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts.

26:52Also, take a moment to rate and review us. It will help other listeners discover what we're doing. The Art Angle is produced by Sonia Manalili with contributions from myself, Ben Davis, Carolyn Goldstein, and Naomi Rae. Thanks for listening and see you next week.