GODFREY BARKER’S INTRODUCTION TO SUSAN SWARTZ’ BELGRAVIA CATALOGUE

Susan Swartz is a talented American painter of nature. What, I ask challengingly, is left to say about landscape in the 21st century? Landscape is not dead as an art subject in 2012. But it is surely close to exhausted. Mere imitation of nature went over to the camera around 1860. Paint has continued to imagine, fantasise and brilliantly lie--but landscape? The sublime, the picturesque, Impressionism, Expressionism, Romanticism, flattened perspectives, three dimensions, Turner, Monet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Kandinsky, Richter, Hockney and Glenn Brown, it has all been done — hasn’t it?