Nature as a subject

Nature as a subject had a comeback in the second part of the twentieth century, and it has intensified in the last decade to virtually becoming a fashion. It is high time to consider what this development has brought, and thus whether it may continue. In the first place, one must also question in what respect we are talking about a comeback of nature. This assumes that nature in art has lost – at least for the time being – its traditional and well-established position. When one asks this question, one first encounters the astonishing and by

no means understandable fact that art had a practically essential relationship to nature for the longest period of European cultural development. Superficially, one may thus express that art has always – that means since the cave paintings at Lascaux – allowed the forms of nature to be reproduced, that it was oriented toward nature as the paradigm of beauty, respectively, it owed its existence to the beautiful character of nature. However, this relationship has only been understood more deeply during the period where it became questionable, meaning since the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. It was then expressively formulated that art is mimesis, an imitative representation of nature. Kant most impressively formulated this view in his Kritik der Urteilskraft (§ 45), where he writes that for art to be beautiful, it must be like nature. Simultaneously, this sentence is a transition to a greater depth in the relationship of art and nature, as found in the genius-aesthetic of the Romantic period. Thereafter, artistic endeavor itself is understood as nature’s effect in and through the genius. This background must be made clear to understand why one of the maxims

with which modern art has appeared since Baudelaire was a withdrawal from nature. Making art autonomous was not only a social process, through which art was differentiated as a social subsystem with its own problem generation and its own controlling rules, it was also a turning away from nature as a paradigm of artistic creation. Making art autonomous was surmounting the maxim of mimesis: after which the artist saw himself as a creator, yes, as an inventor, and when as a genius, then not as a natural power, but as an aware and reflective artist. This did not mean that the forms of nature disappeared

from art, but that they were understood to be material, freely available for the artist’s use, as a stock of significances taken and used by art, making any reference to concrete nature no longer necessary. Moreover, one should not forget that this essential feature of modern art presented from the beginning a counter movement, which then practically fostered an explicit turning toward nature. Thus the Barbizon School, which was contemporaneous with the period of Baudelaire’s creativity, is just as much concerned with the development of natural ornamentation in Art Nouveau as with the radical denial of any ornament, which Adolf Loos anticipated in the modernity of Bauhaus.