Q. How are the narratives of these landscape paintings similar and how are they different?

A. The painting above is by Bob Ross, the longtime host of the PBS series, The Joy of Painting. It is an enjoyable, though sentimental and highly idealized, landscape painting. The painting below is by the master painter, Albert Bierstadt, and despite the fact that it is painted with significantly more skill and technique, it too is of an idealized landscape. Unlike Ross’ painting, which is intended to communicate a simple message about beauty and tranquility, Bierstadt’s aim was to make the American landscape appear as majestic and grand as those found in European landscape paintings. It is a work of landscape propaganda, if you will.

The landscape tradition is incredibly rich and there are an infinite variety of ways that artists can interpret a landscape. Your skill as a viewer will be tested to understand message when you look at landscapes. When they are truly good, they are more than pretty pictures.

The landscape photographs of Wang Jiuliang, of expanding Beijing landfills, constitute a new, more modern approach to the landscape tradition. As environmental degradation continues at an alarming pace, landscapes can no longer really be idealized as they once were. They are now mostly about loss.