Gabriel Klasmer

It is the most famous painting of a dying animal in art history. With red string wrapped around its horns, the goat staggers across a white, encrusted desert, bestrewn with skulls, bones and detritus. The full moon is highlit against the lurid sunset and reflects in the undrinkable, saline water. Holman Hunt's Scapegoat of 1855 shows the goat annually chosen in Jerusalem to ‘make an atonement with him [the Lord], and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness … And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited.'(Leviticus 16.10, 22) Old, awkward words: expiated, ostracised, cast out. The Talmud, as Hunt knew, explained that this ‘wilderness' was in fact a cliff twelve miles out of Jerusalem from which the goat was hurled. But Hunt was compelled to paint the desert on the edge of the Dead Sea, the site of Sodom and Gomorrah, towns blasted by Jehovah for their inhabitants' unnatural practices, and where Lot's wife, looking back at their destruction despite his prohibition, had been turned to a pillar of salt.

What compelled Hunt to go to the desert? What compulsion makes us fascinated by the very notion of the desert? What compels Gabriel Klasmer to go down to the Dead Sea, the most inhospitable site in Israel? Why do we feel exhilarated in films like 'Lawrence of Arabia' or David Lynch's 'Dune' when the camera pans across a vast, empty, sandy waste? We imagine both a horror and a romance in the desert. When we think of the desert, we think of endless lines of sand-dunes through which a string of camels wend their way. The nearest thing we have to a desert in England is the sand-dunes at Studland Beach, where Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant once frolicked and where now gay men pose naked atop each dune. It is a little wild, a little beyond normal landscape, a little outside normal morality, but it is hardly scary, and it scarcely seems a site for a meditation on the vanity of human life. But it nevertheless gives a hint of what a desert can be: an emptiness, a wilderness, a place without vegetation, where one cannot subsist easily. It is a place without signposts.

The history of landscape painting has been, on the contrary, largely a history of greenery, a history of habitation, a history of places that people visit and that are given names: the forest of Barbizon, the Hudson River, the Lake District. Above all, it has been about the history of that mythical place we first called home, the Garden of Eden where, ‘grew every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food'. (Genesis 2.9) There is no home in the desert.

It is easy to make a distinction between the ideal landscapes of the Italian Renaissance or Claude Lorraine's harmonious, bucolic compositions of the Romana Campagna, where nymphs and swains sport and frolic, and that later history, from Dürer onwards, of paintings of actual topographical places: the Danube valley, Monte Sainte Victoire, Dedham, the Rigi. But they are all essentially of that same thing: home, or in extremis of some sublime mountain perceived from a little, safe patch of home. But in the desert, we are enclosed by its barrenness, its unhomeliness. In the desert, we are always, by implication, lost. It is the other landscape, an anti-landscape. If normally a landscape painting is a picture of nature as we would like it to be, or as we would imagine it, any painting of the desert is of that other that haunts us: a landscape without people or buildings or horticulture.

We are compelled to paint the landscape in part because it seems to hold, or so we want to believe, some truth. Hunt, like David Wilkie and others, had gone to the Holy Land believing that some truth about the birth of Christianity would be revealed to them there. In the nineteenth century, the Holy Land was no cake walk: Hunt's companion Sedden was to die of dysentery, Wilkie was likewise to die, and that later pilgrim Richard Dadd driven to incurable madness at least in part by sunstroke. In the Victorian period, this drive for truth, to show the landscape as the face of God, crystallises as a desperate attempt at exact realism. But this drive to the ‘realistic' is paradoxically also profoundly nostalgic because it occurs just at the time of greatest urbanisation: when intelligent and ambitious men began to have city jobs rather than properties in the country. Realism in landscape painting is a lament for a lost pastoral life that one's parents or grandparents may have lived but one's own generation did not: at its height – Impressionism – it is that most nostalgic thing: tourist art, an art of the weekend visit to the country. Klassmer's paintings have none of this: they are like the desert itself – distanced, abstracted. They are about thinking about the landscape rather than longing for it.

We are also compelled to paint the landscape because it is in a way an open book: a most suitable area for painterly, formal experiment – witness Picasso and Braque in their Cubist mode. Klasmer's paintings, too, are highly considered technically. Because the landscape does not move or speak back, we can focus on how we make our representation, but, though modernist criticism has tended to ignore this, the landscape remains ideologically loaded. We cannot see a landscape without thinking of refuge and prospect: of places to rest and look out. A picture of the landscape always extends the invitation for us to enter and walk there. However distanced, even with Gerhard Richter's or Vija Celmins's photographically derived landscapes, this invitation is always there. It opens the window.

But if, as Lyotard claimed in The Postmodern Condition, the data bank has replaced nature as the source of truth, why do we continue to go there? Why do we still need paintings of it? Because it gives us a sense of space, a sense of being in the world? Because the act of making a painting, or seeing the making of a painting, re-asserts the material, phenomenological experience of being in the physical world? And why the desert? Because, sensing a matching emptiness or purity within ourselves, we know this is the fate of landscape?

There is a sense in the Bible and elsewhere that the desert is a cursed landscape – it is not as it should be. It is desolate. It is a land that has been literally deserted, a wilderness that has been forsaken by God and man. A place of death, of light and colour so virulent as to revolt. A desert is a place where people do not belong, and yet … We are fascinated by the inhabitants of the uninhabitable: Bedouin, the Fremen of Dune. This is the paradox of the desert: it is an inhospitable place that nevertheless calls us to it. John the Baptist and the Essenes, and later, Christ, withdrew to the wilderness to meditate. The early fathers fled to the desert to escape a world of sin and temptation, as witnessed by the monasteries that still exist in the Sinai desert. We go to the desert for the clarity of light and to clear our minds.

If we look at the great English novels featuring the desert, for example, Patrick White's Voss and Cormac McCarthy's recent The Road, we see that the desert per se is rarely described: it is just there, always there, like an insidious, lurking presence. Perhaps like a state of mind if not of grace. It is impervious to humanity, if not downright resistant. ‘It has been shown that deserts prefer to resist history and develop along their own lines', a patron remarks to the German Voss, who plans to cross the Australian desert. It cannot be measured and controlled: ‘It was as if the whole landscape had been thrown up into great earthworks defending the distance.' Yet undescribed, the desert takes possession of him as he journeys until he dies in ‘some desert place, a perfect abstraction'. As a spiritual journey, Voss's is a bitter-sweet one, where any glimpse of redemption could be but a mirage.

McCarthy's desert is hellish: a world where all plant life has been poisoned and grey dust clogs the air, rendering colourless the landscape of a United States that has lost all place names and signposts. Only a few pilgrims and a handful of cannibals roam this bleakness. Yet for all the pessimism that clogs the pages like a turgid miasma – ‘out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.' – there is a sense of this being purgative, a civilisation stripped down to core experience; life is now only essentials.

Klasmer goes to the Dead Sea because it is one of the few parts of Israel that has not been gouged, churned up and remade for intensive agriculture and habitation. It is the least politicised part of the Israeli landscape: no wall snakes through it – there is no barbed wire here. (Though, as he himself points out, mid-way across the Sea is an invisible border to Jordan, a country he may not cross to.) Nowadays, he summers on Crete or the southern Aegean islands, landscapes of rock and dried earth, but which are not so obviously politicised as those of Israel. It is the rigour and nakedness of these near-desert landscapes that attracts him. For him, deserts are generic: a condition not a sign-posted and specific place

In one of his paintings of the Dead Sea, three pylons march across the Salt flats – but they seem more remnants of civilisation than stand-ins for figures, trapped by the timelessness of the desert. In another, we see the valley through which we drive from Jerusalem down to the Sea, all cliff and grassless plain. These paintings are imbued with a sombre beauty, partly because of their lack of colour (so different from Hunt's pyrotechnics) and partly because, as always, he paints with a soft and gentle touch.

‘Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all'… we drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past.

Austere but beautiful with their feathery, muted greys, these paintings are of an inhospitable landscape that yet contains within it some lingering scent of that emptiness we crave, that necessary otherness.

© Tony Godfrey 2007