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| Max Liebermann (German) Boy and girl on a village street ca. 1897 pastel Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
"Any discussion concerning nature and art is bound to be shot through with moral implications. Once a student told me that "nature is anything that is not manmade." For that student, man was outside the natural order of things. In Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy (1908) we are told that Byzantine and Egyptian art were created out of a psychological need to escape nature, and that since the Renaissance our understanding of such art has been clouded by an undue confidence in nature. Worringer locates his "concept" of abstraction outside the sensuous anthropomorphic pantheism of Renaissance humanism. "The primal artistic impulse," says Worringer, "has nothing to do with the renderings of nature."
– from Collected Writings by Robert Smithson (1996)
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| Théo van Rysselberghe (Belgian) Entrance to the Port of Volendam ca. 1896 oil of canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Théo van Rysselberghe (Belgian) Mansur Gate in Meknes, Morocco 1887 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch (Dutch) Back garden at the Kazernestraat, The Hague ca. 1890 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Vincent van Gogh (Dutch) Les Vessenots in Auvers 1890 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Maurice Prendergast (American) The Race Track (Piazza Siena, Borghese Gardens, Rome) 1898 watercolor Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Edvard Munch (Norwegian) Bay with boat and house 1881 oil on cardboard Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Edvard Munch (Norwegian) Evening 1888 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Winslow Homer (American) Waverly Oaks 1864 oil on paper, mounted on panel Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
"In the silence of the forest certain events are unaccommodated and cannot be placed in time. Being like this they both disconcert and entice the observer's imagination: for they are like another creature's experience of duration. We feel them occurring, we feel their presence, yet we cannot confront them, for they are occurring for us somewhere between past, present and future. ... To make sense of what I'm suggesting it is necessary to reject the notion of time that began in Europe during the eighteenth century and is closely linked with the positivism and linear accountability of modern capitalism: the notion that a single time, which is unilinear, regular, abstract and irreversible, carries everything. All other cultures have proposed a coexistence of various times surrounded in some way by the timeless."
– from Into the Woods by John Berger (2006)
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| Eugène Boudin (French) Figures on the beach, Trouville 1869 oil on panel Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Henri Matisse (French) Canal du Midi 1898 oil on panel Museo-Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Jozef Israëls (Dutch) Fisher girl on dune-top overlooking the sea ca. 1900 oil on panel Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| James McDougal Hart (American) Summer in the Catskills ca. 1865 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Johann Barthold Jongkind (Dutch) Towpath near Overschie 1865 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
I am grateful for the excellent reproductions from Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.