Mark Bassin

Between realism and the ‘New Right’: geopolitics in Germany in the 1990s

This essay explores the connections between geopolitics and political conservatism. The introductory argument is that geopolitics historically has been appealing and useful for two very different expressions of conservatism: one which aims to preserve the political geography of the existing international status quo and one which seeks to transcend it and establish a new international order. Through an examination of the ‘renaissance’ of a conservative geopolitics in Germany, the essay considers how this particular pattern is reproduced in the present day. Although this conservative geopolitics operates for the most part at the fringes of political discourses in Germany, it does have a more specific significance for nationalist-conservative perspectives and those of the ‘New Right’, both in Germany and elsewhere.

‘I object to rain that is cheerless’: landscape art and the Stalinist aesthetic imagination

This essay considers discourses around nature and landscape in the Soviet art criticism of the Stalin period. Rather than being a genre that was neglected or in some way subordinated to the themes of industrial construction and socialist transformation, the depiction of nature was a major preoccupation of Socialist Realism. Indeed, it became progressively stronger as the Stalinist period developed from the 1930s to the early 1950s. There was a common belief that the most important Soviet political and social values could be conveyed through the imagery of the natural landscape, and there was much discussion in the literature as to how the ideological messages could best be articulated. An examination of this discourse reveals, however, that the semantic potentials of landscape art ran in very different directions. Thus while Stalinist art was eminently successful in ‘politicizing’ the representation of the natural world, it was manifestly unable to remove the ambiguous and even contradictory nature of the messages that resulted.

Landscape and identity in Russian and Soviet art: an introduction

tainly in the natural order of these things that a ‘newer’ cultural geography already hovers somewhere on the disciplinary horizon, waiting for a propitious moment to reveal its existence and lay its claim to the mantle of scholarly innovation and the charisma of the cutting edge. This observation is not intended cynically, but rather to suggest that what is important at the end of the day is not the novelty of the epithet but rather the quality of the intellectual insight that goes along with it. And in this regard, we should appreciate that the legacy of the ‘new’ cultural geography is going to endure far longer than the term itself. For if ‘classical’ cultural geography taught us to examine a material landscape shaped by the social, economic and cultural forces of the inhabiting groups, and if ‘humanistic’ cultural geography went on to explore how such material landscapes were perceived and interpreted at a subjective cognitive level, then the ‘new’ cultural geography has opened our eyes critically to landscape as an act of representation. The epistemological readujstment here is appreciable, for we can consider landscape as representation only by directing our attention onto the agency responsible for the representing, an agency which routinely seeks to arrange natural imagery and manipulate an iconography for its own particular purposes. Political ideologies can act as such agencies, and terms such as ‘Tory landscapes’, ‘fascist landscapes’ and so on have become a part of our vocabulary; but better studied and more evocative is the representation of nature as part of the elaboration and articulation of social identities, most commonly expressed as national identities. The implicitly instrumental quality of landscape representation vis-à-vis the larger identity project should not obscure its vital significance, for a vast range of examples points to the unique effectiveness of landscape imagery in presenting visions of the nation.

Book Review: The landscape of Stalinism: the art and ideology of Soviet space

‘cruising the streets of our cities isn’t what it used to be’ (p. 162). Again, this is disengaged from what comes before: ‘change’ is equated with cyberspace. Sure, the internet has reconfigured sexual geographies, but what about the changing nature of the city itself? For Turner, the ‘modern city’ remains almost static over 150 years. But the city is an organic entity that changes over time / London 1885 isn’t London 2005. To map those differences would also allow us to trace how the ways we walk the city / the stories we tell about our backward glances / have themselves changed over time. That’s my challenge.

Book Review: Imagining nations:

distinctive dimension to modern sensibility in French landscape painting at a time of far-reaching agricultural change. Martin’s art formed part of a new kind of cultural negotiation between city and country, past and present, and most significantly between conservatism and progressivism in early twentieth-century France. In Chapter 7 we turn to the subject of Fauve painting. James D. Herbert argues that the Fauves sought to capture the power of unfamiliar landscapes as a precursor to the touristic gaze and the development of modern variants on the search for the sublime in nature. In the final essay David Cottington tackles the relationship between Cubism and landscape art, arguing that we need to develop a more nuanced understanding of the different strands of social and political thought which influenced the development of Cubism in pre-First World War France. Above all, artists such as Henri le Fauconnier and Albert Gleizes sought to integrate landscape art into a celebration of modernity which shattered the classical motifs inherited from the past. This rich and stimulating collection of essays works on two distinct levels. At one level it provides a series of close readings of French landscape art during a crucial juncture in the history of European modernity. At another level, it raises key questions surrounding the ideological significance of landscape art and cultural representations of nature as politically ambiguous responses to regional and national transformations in relations between nature and society. The editor is quick to acknowledge that the very idea of landscape as a distinctive aesthetic genre works against the grain of much recent scholarship. The materialist strand running through this collection is clearly at odds with most postmodern or post-structuralist approaches to cultural criticism. Yet a consideration of the concrete circumstances in which art is produced and consumed must play a vital role in any critical reading of ‘material landscapes’. The particular value of this collection lies in its subtle and multi-faceted extension to our existing knowledge of the relations between landscape art and the development of French modernism.

Book Reviews : An archetypal Constable: national identity and the geography of nostalgia. By P. Bishop. London, Athlone. 1995. x + 248 pp. £42 cloth. ISBN 0 485 11415 1:

creation of explosions or the production of electric sparks on people suspended from ropes, accompanied by rhetorical claims disavowing allegiance to any particular theoretical school, obscured the unseemly disputes among experts of the day that would not have persuaded polite French society of the eighteenth century of scientists’ claims to universal truths. Despite Sutton’s subtitle, those looking for a feminist analysis of science in this time period will not find one developed thematically here. He is well versed in and sympathetic to existing feminist discussions of Cartesian philosophy and French salon culture, and he does not ignore the role and influence of women in this story; however, gender is not the centrepiece of his analysis. If there is anything gendered about this, it is his attempt to reject the view which he associates explicitly with late Enlightenment rhetoric which depicts science as a playing-field with winners and losers. This is illustrated, for example, in his description of the different rhetorical forms of Emile du Chatelet’s and Voltaire’s popularizations of Newtonian science. Taken as a contextualized history of seventeenthand eighteenth-century French science, however, Sutton’s work is well argued and involving.

Book reviews : Pallot, J. and Shaw, D.J.B. 1990: Landscape and settlement in Romanov Russia. Oxford : Claren don, 336 pp. £35.00 cloth. ISBN: 0 19 823246 2

an informal housing sector in parallel to the capitalist mode. Chapter 3 analyses the specificity of the postwar economic ’miracle’ in Greece. This is seen as having been exploitative of the urban proletariat, accompanied by the rise in the primacy of Athens, the widening of the distinction between the formal and informal sectors but stressing that the latter was productive rather than parasitic. A rdsum6 of the political evolution and the growth of labour movements is described and some international comparisons are made. Chapter 4 deals with the period 1950-67 and is