The Painted Valley, Artists Along Alberta's Bow River, 1845-2000.

Armstrong, C. and H.V. Nelles 2007. Calgary, AB: University of Calgary Press, 200 pages, ISBN 978-1-55238-207-3 (paper), CDN $54.95 (paper).

Landscape in its pure unadulterated form is not man made but is interpreted and understood through the culture of its time. Landscape has, for much of its history, been seen as the background for the subject matter of a painting and not the subject itself. It lacks the narrative interpretive possibilities of the figurative tradition that informs much of Western painting and therefore its subject is more difficult and elusive to nail down.

While many painters as diverse as Brugal and Titian onward have incorporated landscape as an important element in their art, it remained a vehicle to create mood and inform the symbolic narrative of the figurative drama painted. It is only in the early nineteenth century with painters such as Constable and Turner that landscape becomes the subject and not the backdrop in the popular imagination. It is then interesting that the informative teachers of painting who first instructed in Alberta were British artists: A. C. Leighton, H. G. Glyde, and W. J. Phillips trained in the British naturalistic landscape tradition. All three artists were conservative in their response to modernism, but they were tireless artists/educators with significant skill in their discipline and uniquely able by their training to respond to the new landscape around them. It is too easy to dismiss their artistic work as reactionary or out of date; however, this is to miss their contribution. At a time when most modernist painting had turned away from the observed object, they brought with them an ability to see landscape as a subject in its own right.

It is then landscape as subject matter with all its complexities that is the focus of The Painted Valley, Artists Along Alberta's Bow River, 1845--2000 and the artists who struggled to find and develop a pictorial vocabulary to represent this challenging area of prairie, foothill, mountains and river valley. Initially, the authors of The Painted Valley began this project with the intent "to use the art to see the river." Instead they had "come to use the river to see the art" (p. 4). It is a remarkable journey that encompasses not only how artists over time have interpreted the river valley but also how the cultural prism of the day determined how they perceived and represented it. Within this microcosm, the larger drama of the history, the beginning of Albertan art schools and the efforts of the artists and artist educators who contributed to the development of Western landscape painting is played out over the past 150 years.

The book introduces us to the topography and the geography of the river and how it has been and is being altered by man made projects. It then follows a chronological but overlapping look at five periods: the "imperial topographers", "whose task was to observe and describe the landscape"; "the railway builders," who promoted the west through romantic paintings of the "sublime and picturesque" (p. 28); the late stylistic influence of impressionism; the influence of the naturalist English artists who arrived in Alberta by 1930; and the influence of abstraction, modernism and after. Linking all these periods together is the topography of the river valley. It is the central motif, and yet it is interpreted in widely differently ways. Many of these artists came from Europe while others were born in Canada. The artists all observed the fact of the landscape before them. Most chose to depict the valley untouched without human inhabitation but all were conditioned to see the landscape from their own cultural construct. In particular, the book goes to significant length to understand the challenges faced by the artists in dealing with such demanding subject matter using the conventions of European painting and the difficulties faced in the development of a stylistic vocabulary that could give voice to their connection with this dramatic and varied landscape.

The Painted Valley is a significant contribution to the documentation of the history of Western Canadian Landscape. It is beautifully illustrated with carefully selected examples of paintings that inform the text. The authors, Christopher Armstrong and H.V. Nelles, are environmental historians and they bring a fresh perspective and original approach to the development of Western Canadian representational landscape painting. By focusing on the river valley they have created a cohesive narrative that is both art history and cultural history of the people who painted along the bow valley, their personal struggles both economic and artistic and the development of a regional voice. This struggle for voice may well be a never-ending search born of place, situation and disposition, for each generation views the problem of landscape and its representation in a different way.

Reviewed by Graham Fowler, Department of Art and Art History, University of Saskatchewan

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