"It seams we may best be able to inhabit a place when we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there."

Alain de Botton, The art of travel                              with kind permission from the author

Romanticism, Art or Kitsch?

Leta Peer's "Berge" (Mountains), small format paintings on approximately two cm thick wooden panels with gilded edges, have been made since 1999 after photographs of mountain peaks in Engadine, the artist's home region.

With these paintings, a comparison very quickly arises with the romantic landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, for instance, especially his often cited Kreuz im Gebirge (Mountain Cross), the so-called Tetschener Altar, 1807/08. One might over hastily accuse Peer of slipping into a vapid reception of Romanticism - which is a direction in art that modernism has long regarded as a suspicious concoction of nature enthusiasm, religious mumblings and die-hard Germanism. Yet even Friedrich's pictures are nothing less than what his epigones wanted to see in them and made them into: what they show is precisely not the desired harmony between man and nature, not man's sense of being at home in the world that surrounds him. What they show instead is "... appropriated and exploited nature (as an) aesthetic landscape..." and thus consequently at a greatest possible and impassable distance1 , a fact that denigrators as well as devotees have often glibly overlooked, the latter in order to be able to claim Friedrich's paintings for their own ends.2

Then again, it is typical for the way Peer works that she takes recourse to a model that is so implicated, that she reflects on the utilization in her picture concept without denying being affected herself: the small format of the painting is namely as much in contrast to the sublime mountain peaks as the gilded frame, which additionally enhances the objectness of the painting and makes it radiate out into the space.

In this way, Leta Peer's small format paintings become a touchstone for our own relationships to terms and phenomena such as "home" and "nature", the meanings of which were long considered certain: art can hardly achieve anything better than that.

Heinz Stahlhut, art historian Basel
(Catalogue text from "Der Berg", edited by Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg 1999)

1 Inge Fleischer et al.: Friedrich in seiner Zeit - Das Problem der Entzweiung, in: Caspar David Friedrich und die deutsche Nachwelt, Ed. Werner Hofmann, Frankfurt / M. 1974, p. 17-27, p. 21.
2 Saul Friedländer: Kitsch und Tod. Der Widerschein des Nazismus, Munich 1986, p. 23, then also characterizes kitsch with Broch and Calinescu as a banalized form of Romanticism.