The Abstraction of Landscape

The Abstraction of Landscape: From Northern Romanticism to Abstract Expressionism examines the transformation of landscape painting from

the nineteenth-century Romantic vision of nature to the abstract visual languages of the twentieth century. The publication traces how landscape gradually shifts from a representational genre toward a field of formal, emotional, and conceptual exploration.

Beginning with Northern Romanticism, where nature functions as an expression of inner states, the sublime, and the infinite, the book follows the progressive dissolution of perspective, spatial depth, and motif. Color, rhythm, and structure increasingly replace descriptive detail, and landscape is no longer treated as an external subject but as a site of perception and artistic reflection.

Through a series of scholarly essays and a rich selection of illustrations, the volume situates this development within a broader art-historical context. It reveals how the landscape tradition provided a foundation for modernist experimentation and abstraction, linking Romantic sensibility to the emergence of Abstract Expressionism and related movements.