Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective is a collection of essays that came out of a symposium held at Princeton University dedicated to the Princeton University Art Museum’s exhibition, Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment, organized in 2018–19 by Karl Kusserow and Alan Braddock. The catalog accompanying that exhibition and Braddock’s other editorial venture with Christoph Irmscher, A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (2009), form two major anchor points in the field of ecocritical art history, to which Picture Ecology is a ready addition. While these previous volumes focused on the art of the United States, Picture Ecology importantly includes contributions whose subjects reach more broadly both geographically and temporally. The fifteen essays, arranged roughly chronologically, address early modern through contemporary topics from Europe, the Americas, and East and South Asia. Many of the text’s authors are now well-established figures in the field, and their contributions to this volume build upon their earlier work.

In the introduction, Kusserow offers a broad definition of ecocriticism as “an analysis of cultural artifacts [that] . . . attends to environmental conditions and history and to considerations of ecology” (12). As indicated by this introduction, the contributions vary widely in their approach to ecological art history, from studies of representations of nature to considerations of the ecological histories of materials, to more theoretical meditations on the study of art and ecology. However, Kusserow also stresses a theme that cuts across volume: connectedness. As in Darwin’s metaphor of the “entangled bank,” many essays engage with the relatedness of all things, both human and nonhuman, and the importance of addressing social, economic, and political concerns in ecocritical practice.

The majority of the contributions center around how the visual arts have manifested and shaped historical understandings of the natural world and how these histories inform contemporary views on ecology. For example, De-nin D. Lee complicates contemporary Chinese artists’ appropriation of earlier landscape painting traditions. Contemporary artists Yao Lu, Yang Yongliang, and Xu Bing all borrow from Song dynasty landscape painting traditions. In their work, however, the pristine landscapes of the past are infected with signs of present-day industrialization and consumerism. Lee asks if this presents an easy dichotomy between the premodern world as an Edenic myth and the fallen present. In reality, Chinese farmers and politicians have been altering their surroundings to suit human needs in both large and small ways for millennia, most visible in projects like the Great Wall and Grand Canal. Lee proposes other cultural models that promote a relationship of exchange between the natural world and human endeavor.

Finis Dunaway also considers polyvocality in his essay on Lenny Kohm’s touring multimedia slideshow presentation The Last Great Wilderness (1988), a grassroots endeavor to promote protections for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Continuing his study of popular environmentalist images and their power to shape discourse (see his book Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images, 2015), Dunaway strays from traditional readings of environmentalist materials to foreground the role of Kohm’s Indigenous Gwich’in collaborators, who educated him about the region and their lifeways and accompanied him on his tours of The Last Great Wilderness (1988). Kohm’s inclusion of the native presence in his depictions of the ANWR challenged popular conceptions of the region as a barren wasteland ripe for exploitation by energy-hungry American enterprises.

A unique aspect of ecocritical art historical scholarship that surfaces in the collection is an attentiveness to materials, particularly the ecological histories of materials within artistic representation. Monica Dominguez Torres’s contribution, for example, examines the importance of pearls (and their painted representation) in 16th-century Spain as symbols of its divine mission to oversee the territories of the New World. Simultaneous to this growing symbolic import, Torres tracks the Spanish Crown’s ambivalent attempts to regulate oyster harvesting in the New World as oysters came under pressure from overharvesting and the destruction of their habitats. Sugata Ray examines how the traffic in a different kind of luxury commodity appears in art of Mughal India—the American turkey. Ray looks to Mansur’s 1612 depiction of the animal in the watercolor Turkey Cock and its unique lack of compositional grounding. Rather than revealing a debt to European natural history illustrations that divorce plant and animal subjects from their contexts, Ray attributes this lack of grounding to the overall foreignness of the turkey in India and the artist’s inability to incorporate it into existing symbolic or mythical lexicons of interspecies relations.  

Finally, some essays provoke more abstract thinking about looking at art ecologically. Andrew Patrizio offers some key takeaways from his 2019 book, The Ecological Eye, and in particular his concept of “extreme attention.” This form of looking maps out a new approach to the practice of art history that is embodied, contextual, and intersectional. Other essays within the volume offer examples of how this might be undertaken. Gregory Levine’s essay, for example, considers how the making of Japanese tree-icons, images of Buddha carved directly into the bark of living trees, “suggest, then, an image-making world that inhabits and coexists with living nonhuman species, involving more than one type of body” (145). This exchange between an artist and their subject also appears in Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart’s study of two lesser-known late-19th-century painters of seascapes: American William Trost Richards and French artist Élodie La Villette. The authors argue that both presented heightened presence and involvement with the landscapes they depicted. In choosing not to depict locales frequented by tourists or scenes ripe with the drama of a shipwreck, their works represent a sustained engagement and quotidian intimacy with the sea.

In one of the strongest essays in the collection, Greg Thomas builds upon his groundbreaking model of ecocritical art historical scholarship on the work of romantic painter Théodore Rousseau (Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France: The Landscapes of Théodore Rousseau, 2000) to consider the ecological philosophy present in the landscapes of realist painter Gustave Courbet. Thomas argues that, based on his grounding in positivist philosophy, Courbet presented the human figures in his work as embedded within the material world. His landscapes eschewed narrative, symbolism, and even movement in favor of pure materiality. Most striking is Thomas’s argument that, when no human figure is present, the viewer of Courbet’s landscapes is prompted to " . . . imagine being with the landscape, or perhaps being the landscape itself" (199). This and other essays exemplify a scholarly consideration of connectedness.

In concluding his introduction to the volume, Kusserow asked each contributor to state briefly why they do ecocritical art history. Their responses varied widely but all brought the reader back to the unique place of ecocritical art historical scholarship. The stakes of this work are nothing less than the future survival of humanity on this planet. Despite this, there is a dearth of ecocritical art historical writing relative to other humanistic fields like history and literature. This text further cements the necessity of incorporating ecocritical perspectives into the study of art and the promise of bringing visual material into larger ecocritical narratives. One hopes that the succinct entries will lead to further in-depth studies in this field.