Radical Landscapes review – ‘Is loving green fields really wicked?’

Tate Liverpool
It has some fabulous works, from a canal by Constable to a gnarled old tree by Tacita Dean, but this show’s radical v conservative thesis gets caught in the brambles – and the climate section is catastrophic

Poor John Constable. What did he ever do except go out in the fields and paint? For that apparently harmless pursuit, it seems Tate Liverpool cannot forgive him. Its attempt to define a “radical” British landscape art keeps kicking Constable as a convenient shorthand for the “conservative” landscape tradition it rejects.

His painting Flatford Mill (Scene on a Navigable River) is shown near a looped clip from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. If you can shut out this insulting reduction of Berger to an intrusive soundbite, you have to contend with a lengthy wall text that tells us Constable’s “idealised image of nature and rural life” creates an idyll “in contrast to the reality for workers of the time”.

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