New Grounds for Dutch Landscape uses an experimental, site-specific method to demonstrate how 17th century painters Jan van Goyen, Jacob van Ruisdael, and Meindert Hobbema did not so much represent the newly made landscape of Holland as re-enact, through their painterly factures, its reclamation and ongoing threats to its stability: from flooding and drainage to abrasion and erosion. These low-level dramas of recalcitrant matter allowed the Dutch to develop an ongoing temporality at odds with history painting’s decisive instant and a vocabulary of substance that wrested meaning away from humanist landscape painting’s expressive figures.

Lytle Shaw’s books include Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie, The Moiré Effect, Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics, and Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research. His museum catalog publications include essays on Robert Smithson, Gerard Byrne, Zoe Leonard and the Royal Art Lodge. Shaw is professor of English at New York University and a contributing editor for Cabinet magazine.