The makeup of the landscape as an inherent part of visual arts underwent an epistemic² and paradigmatic change at the beginning of the 20th century, which was originally structured in the works by artists who during modernity integrated the avant-garde movements, and those who were not part of them, yet whose works are articulated in certain ways that configure various formal Gestalt incompatible with the art of modern times³. Some examples of these revolutionary works are Depósito de agua. Horta de Ebro (The Reservoir. Horta de Ebro), 1909, by ^{Pablo Picasso} (Collection Modern Museum of Art); Graue Landschaft (Grey Landscape), 1912, by ^{Karl Schmidt-Rottluff} (Hamburger Kunsthalle); Paesaggio (Landscape), 1913, by Giorgio Morandi (Museo del Novecento); Composition 10 in Zwart Wit (Composition 10 in Black and White), 1915, by ^{Piet Mondrian} (Kröller Müller Museum); Wald Bau (Forest Construction), 1919, by ^{Paul Klee} (Museo del Novecento); Air de Paris (Air of Paris), 1919, by Marcel Duchamp (Philadelphia Museum of Art); L’espoir rapide (Swift Hope), 1927, by ^{René Magritte} (Kunsthalle), or Study for Tenayuca, 1940, by ^{Joseph Albers} (The Joseph & Anni Albers Foundation).

These works changed completely, by taking shape in the context of new theories that stopped adding knowledge to what was known about art until then; these works were more related to the idea of painting and its function of representing movements ranging from romanticism or modern painting characteristic of Edouard Manet and the Impressionists and Post-Impressionism, up to Cubism. With abstract, conceptual, and naturalistic thinking and its possible combinations, the entire visual system is transformed into works that are contrary and incompatible with those of the modern age⁴. The perception of this set of visual systems has been encrypted in this way before the gaze of those who did not cognitively accommodate themselves to the new theories of art.

However, being defined by its differentiation from the cumulative change that will henceforth build the paradigm after modernity, this non-accumulative change fundamentally requires, for its understanding, examples of the relationship between both types of movement. According to Kuhn’s structuralism: “Revolutionary change is defined in part by its difference from normal change, and normal change is, as indicated, the kind of change that results in the cumulative growth, increase, or addition of what was known before” (1996, p. 57). Normal changes, unlike the revolutionary ones, holistic, but they change parts, while the visual Gestalt remains, and it is possible to examine which part has been the normal innovation. The structural aspects of the paradigm would therefore be incomprehensible without researching the landscape of modernity and that of post-modernity⁵.

Curation, which as a research method has a solid track record, forms a warp and woof in this work with Kuhn’s structuralism. In that sense, he examines the paradigmatic of works like Atlas eclipticalis by John Cage. This is a post-modern work, whose score is paradigmatic of the first examples contrary to the theoretical model of the modern era, such as Erratum Musical, 1913, by ^{Marcel Duchamp}. The Atlas is a pentagram with unprecedented numerical notations that, according to his instructions, must use chance to create a new musical alphabet. Writing on a musical pattern had never been considered visual art, but it began to be seen as such from the Duchampian conception. In terms of structuralism according to Kuhn, in the changes of vision associated with revolutionary changes, new things are perceived where they had previously been seen (^{Kuhn, 1995, p. 176}). The artistic community articulates the paradigm in its evolution in the objectification of its work and the integration of its archives. After being created as a Duchamp document, Erratum Musical forms the John Cage archive, before being donated to the collection of the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, in New York, and informing the Philadelphia Museum of Art that, by housing, the most important French artist, is responsible for his catalog raisonné (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1989, p. 264). That said, it is worth mentioning the contribution of Walter Arensberg’s collections and the curatorship of Anne D’Harnoncourt to said museum, which would not have been consolidated without this set of collaborations.

In his lecture “Comments on Relations of Science and Art”, Thomas Kuhn thought that if the notion of paradigm could be useful for art history, it would be images and not style that would serve as paradigms ^{(1958, p. 351)}. In this sense, this research in a historical context agrees with Kuhn’s observation: the study of the collections of the national museums of North America goes through one by one the landscape works from which he bases his own theory and method on the landscape to structure the paradigm of the works of modernity and after modernity, of which landscape art, he said, is a segment.

The altered perceptions in Kuhn’s model have seemed extremely important to me in visualizing how landscape art crosses these holistic changes-which, from my point of view, happen mainly between 1907 and 1915. The knowledge of these Gestalt changes subconsciously led to restructuring my perception before works of modernity and after modernity, such as Marcel Duchamp’s Unhappy Ready-Made, 1919 (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1989, p. 288), or Gazing at the Skyline, Sky Ground, Australia, 1982, by Hamish Fulton (^{Photoplay. Works from The Chase Manhattan Collection, 1993, p. 73}). On the other hand, what makes me see the permanence of what is landscape in these works is the understanding of the component of that artistic practice in Landscape into Art (1991), the work of Kenneth Clark, who in his study that goes from Gothic to modernity affirms that exceptional sense of our being in the landscape, of our being able to proceed (visually) smoothly from foreground to distance ^{(1991, p. 32)}. This agrees with Kuhn’s model, who comments how, from the historiography of science, the scientific component is thought of in previous paradigms: “The more detailed they study, for example, Aristotle’s thermodynamics [...], the more certain they feel that those once current visions of nature were not globally considered neither less scientific nor more the product of human idiosyncrasy than the current ones” ^{(1995, p. 22)}.

During modernity and after modernity, artists in general have not stopped visualizing the landscape. On the contrary, what has ignored this creation after the change of formal Gestalt has been the avant-garde conception of art history⁶: there are specific cases of curatorship in the field of museology, or of a certain artistic community, which did not assimilate the theoretical change and perception, or paradigm, and continued to work on a 19th-century image system.

The avant-garde conception of history basically perceives landscape art in the work of the new, more naturalist avant-gardes, such as Land Art, Earth Art and Environmental Art, but not that of other artists, such as La Mia Ombra Verso l’Infinito Dalla Cima Dello Stromboli Durante L’Alba del 16 Agosto 1965 (Study F) (My Shadow Towards the Infinity of the Peak of Stromboli During Dawn), 1965-2000, by ^{Giovanni Anselmo} (Museum of Modern Art); Ten Landscapes, 1967, by ^{Roy Lichtenstein} (Museum of Modern Art); First edition for screen TV, 2012, by David Hockney (^{Hockney, 2012)}; Buchen Federal District, by Anselm Kiefer (^{Shama, 1995, p. 19}); Without Horizon 6, 1992, by ^{John Cage}, or A flor de piel (Skin Deep), 2011-2012, by ^{Doris Salcedo} (Harvard Art Museums). Although this conception of history has been the canonical basis in academic teaching on art in the last century, it is questioned not only by this research project: it was already so since the 1980s by authors such as ^{Hervé Fischer (L’Histoire de l’art est terminée, 1981)} or ^{Hans Belting (The End for the History of Art?, 1987)}.

The problem with the invisibilization of these changes is a particular type of social revolution study carried out by Thomas Kuhn, in which he discovered a similarity in relation to the innovative character of the scientific field. He analyzed how paradigmatic changes are not visible to those who are not affected by them, and how, in order to assimilate the evolution of said changes and choose between paradigms that are incompatible, institutions have to transform. Likewise, he examined how evaluation processes also depend on paradigms ^{(1995, pp. 150-151)}. That is, all the functions of the museum institution-collecting, identifying, registering, cataloging, investigating, exhibiting and educating-assimilate their own paradigmatic structure. His aim is to connect cultures that are contemporary to them or cultures that are not contemporary to them; however, when the works come from those whose paradigms are entirely different, they can be made invisible, as happens before abstract or conceptualist landscapes to scholars accustomed to painting naturalistic landscapes.

I limit this stage of this research to the three national museums of North America, since it is my geographical area: the National Museum of Art in Mexico City, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, whose typology is referring to museums or art galleries that house paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, photography, ceramics, video art, net art, installations, or specific sites, among others. Though one cannot help but think of the disparity of the comparison in terms of the antiquity of the museums, their sociocultural context or other factors, this contrast has a qualitative approach, fundamentally focused on the study of the conception of the landscape in modernity and after modernity in the field of curatorship.

The online catalogs of the collections of the national museums of North America can be analyzed under the term landscape. In this way, it is possible to access the examination of the curatorial orientation of the collections. For the purposes of this research, during 2020 I filtered the said word in the following periods: 1500-1907; 1907-1950/1960; 1950/1960-2020. These include the dates of the collections of the three national museums, regardless of their various foundation dates and considering the year 1907, when the paradigmatic change began according to this study (^{Rabadán, 2017}), and 1950, the last decade of the collection of the National Museum of Art in Mexico City. The National Gallery of Canada may be selected every 20 years, so we determined 1960 for that catalog. In any case, the analysis considers that the image of the works has been included in the online catalog record.

(Graphic: María Eugenia Rabadán Villalpando, 2020)

FIGURE 1 Graphic representation of online search results for the landscape category in the national art museums of North America. 

The National Museum of Art (Munal) in Mexico City, opened in 1981, houses a collection of more than 6,000 works of Mexican art dated between the second half of the 16th century and 1954. In order to extend academic research on the collection, since 2017 the Museum digitizes and publishes the catalog online (^{Munal, 2017}). On its website, the museum states its mission as follows: “The National Museum of Art preserves, exhibits, studies and transmits works of Mexican art produced between the second half of the 16th century and 1954, thus offering a synthetic global vision of Mexican art from this period” (MNA, 2022). On its platform, the Munal collection is eligible for disciplines, artists and registered works. The advanced search understands, among its terms, landscape, and shows 99 works, from the oldest, by Joaquín Clausell-of unknown date-, to Paisaje de Contreras Número 2 (Landscape of Contreras Number 2), 1962, by Amador Lugo Guadarrama. Without the term landscape, and only for the dates 1907-2000, it chooses other examples of landscapes, but only two of interest for this analysis: Después de la tormenta (After the Storm), 1910, by ^{Diego Rivera} (Munal); Líneas de teléfonos (Telephone Lines), ca. 1925, by ^{Tina Modotti} (Munal).

The origin of the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. dates back to 1937, when the Congress of the United States of America accepted the initiative of Andrew W. Mellon to donate works-126 paintings and 26 sculptures, according to the preliminary annotated catalog (^{Richter, 1941, p. 177})-and President Franklin D. Roosevelt to create a fund of works of art for that country. It houses in its collection an international collection of 150 000 paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, photographs, prints, drawings and Time-Based Media Art, from Byzantine art to the present. That National Gallery of Art defines its mission in these terms: “it serves the nation by welcoming all people to explore and experience art, creativity, and our shared humanity” (^{National Gallery of Art, 2020}). According to the Gallery’s online cataloging, the following categories are eligible: highlights, collection search, artist and acquired highlights, and has a blog (^{Collection, 2020}). In the collection search engine, the collection is entirely eligible by author’s last name, keywords in the title, keywords in the object information, credit line, name of provenance-the history of the owners of the works is an ongoing research and includes a study of the provenance of the works in the collection in World War II-, acquisition number, exhibition history, online editions and/or catalog raisonné. Among these options, in the “keywords in the object information”, the term landscape filters 5 794 works from 1320. The search can also be narrowed down by online images, classification, nationality, online editions, years, styles, photographic processes, locations, themes, alternate numbers. For the purposes of this research, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, I filtered landscapes in the following periods: 1320-1907: there are 3 161 works; between 1907 and 1949, 1 247; and in the period 1950-2020, 1 431 works⁷.

In the Museums Act, within the Purposes, Capabilities and Powers of the National Gallery of Canada and its affiliate, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Government of Canada defines the acquisitions policy in these words: “The purposes of the National Gallery of Canada are to develop and maintain and make known, throughout Canada and internationally, a collection of works of art, historical and contemporary, with special emphasis but not exclusive reference to Canada, and for the further knowledge, understanding and enjoyment of art generally for all Canadians” (^{Government of Canada, 1990, p. 1}). In those same purposes, the Government postulates the capacity of the museum to develop research, basic or fundamental, theory and applied research related to its purposes and museology, and to communicate the results of the research. The Gallery’s mission is stated as follows: “Through the visual arts, we create dynamic experiences that open hearts and minds and enable new ways of seeing each other and our diverse stories” (National Gallery of Canada). The National Gallery of Canada’s online records number 63,150 works from before 1700 to the present. It has a new online platform, whose filters are the name of the artist, the title of the work, access number, and recognizes the term landscape. From the result, the following filters are found: artists, media, categories, in periods of 20 years. Once the collection has been delimited to landscapes, what it is possible to choose is the temporality, and then select a link with works by artists, such as 64, from 2000 to the present; 78, from 1980 to 1999; 62, from 1960 to 1979; 102, from 1940 to 1959; 250 from 1920 to 1939, and 282 from 1900 to 1919.

Methodologically, this research aims to make visible in the formation of these collections the state of assimilation of landscape art after the paradigmatic change included in modernity and after modernity. Said museum work, manifested in its digitized transmission networks, in a printed publication or, in a face-to-face exhibition, silently alludes to the documentary techniques that underlie the construction of knowledge of the works. The former function is based on the conceptualization and visualization of the artistic community, and interpret the pieces during the identification, registration, inventory, cataloging, graphic documentation of the object⁸, and from the flow of this chain of documentation to the public dissemination of the museum collections.

The databases of museum collections, fundamental both for scientific study and for the general dissemination of knowledge, are susceptible to replication from scientific study. Curating, by its nature, is a discipline that tends not only to globalization, but, in the context of a constant miscegenation of different cultures, to be the conjunction of them. The display of their databases on the World Wide Web enhances this feature through the exchange of information. This leads us to think about the importance of carrying out cross-sectional studies on various museums, rather than on one in particular, aware of the cultural changes and the identities that each culture can preserve.

The following are not all the results, but a model of found works that, on the one hand, prove the continuity of the landscape through the different abstract, conceptual and naturalistic image systems, and, on the other hand, go beyond all kinds of possible combinations and media, even the new digital media.

In the advanced search of its website, after 1907, the National Museum of Art records Paisaje urbano (Urban Landscape), 1925, a view with a certain metaphysical abstraction, by Frida Kahlo; the cubist works with available images are Paisaje de Taxco-La aduana (Landscape of Taxco-Customs) (1933), by ^{Amador Lugo Guadarrama} (Munal), and Paisaje zapatista (Zapatista Landscape) (1915), by ^{Diego Rivera} (Munal)⁹; Paisaje nocturno (Nightscape), 1938, metaphysical, by ^{Carlos Orozco Romero} (Munal). These are the pieces cataloged until 1950 that show a change in the visual arts through the landscape¹⁰, but, as they do not have a normalization pattern according to Kuhn’s structuralism, it is not possible to see in these examples only a paradigmatic change, as we have tried before. A search for the dates 1907-1950 without the term landscape selects other examples of landscapes, such as: After the Storm, 1910, by ^{Diego Rivera} (Munal); Telephone Lines, ca. 1925, by ^{Tina Modotti} (Munal)-this photograph is of interest because, as in another work by Modotti, the horizon disappears; it is the problem posed by Malévich for the Black Square, 1915-. It is important to point out that in the collection of the National Art Museum, the only example of a change of perception in an artist in the context of landscape painting would be given in the difference in the image system of Después de la tormenta (After the Storm) and Paisaje zapatista (Zapatista Landscape), by Diego Rivera. Between both works there was in Rivera a restructuring of perception, as there was in other modern artists, such as Pablo Picasso in the portrait Gertrude Stein, 1906, and in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon), 1907. In this sense, it is worth mentioning that Riviera’s Zapatista Landscape, for example, is quite close to Juan Gris’s Ace of Clubs and Four Diamonds in the National Gallery of Art collection, so if these two works are put together, they can begin to form a theory visual on the cubist landscape in a curatorial script. James Elkins has worked the visual as an argument he intelligently theorizes, where one image explains another. It takes the idea from a work by Leo Steinberg on The Last Supper, by Leonardo, in which copies of that painting, such as engravings, paintings, etchings, photographs, intervene in the argument or theory about the mural of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in Milan; that is, these images explain the painting, for which they are recognized as intelligent theories ^{(2013, p. 32)}. In this sense, the visual perception of the sudden and complete change of Gestalt in the images of the visual arts from the beginning of the last century has been a fundamental intelligent theory to problematize this new conjecture about the landscape. The historical conception of avant-garde has not been able to see landscape in the works of North American abstract expressionism, conceptual art, arte povera, German neo-expressionism, to cite paradigmatic examples of revolutionary change, which are not Land Art, Earth Art nor Environmental Art.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington has a rich collection of postmodern landscapes, such as the following examples, including some abstract ones: Lee Mullican’s Meditations on a Landscape (1964) (1984.34.394)¹¹; Landscape (1965), by Bruce Conner; Persian Garden (1965-1966), by Helen Frankenthaler (1976.56.34); a fairly complete collection of works such as Untitled (1969), by ^{Mark Rothko} (1986.43.295); Landscape at Stanton Street (1971), by Willem de Kooning (1975.104.7); it is understandable in the landscape subcategory, even when seen from a restructured perception. It houses works that capture combinations of naturalism and abstraction, possible after the beginning of the last century, such as Moonscape (1965), by Roy Lichtenstein (1991.239.3), and Landscape of Baucis (1966), by René Magritte, or Paysage de Baucis (1994.63.5), is a work of great interest, because the title has nothing to do with the image, as was most of Magritte’s work, addressed in an essay by ^{Michel Foucault (1981)}. The articulation of these parallel paradigms through modernity and the landscape after modernity can be understood if we associate Malévich’s Black Square, 1915, and John McCracken’s Black Plank (1967), in which the horizon disappears. Haystack (1969), by Roy Lichtenstein (1985:47.113), is a paradigmatic monochrome work; Meules, fin de l’été (Mills, End of Summer), 1891, by Claude Monet, in front of which in 1896 Kandinsky discovered the color in painting and began to restructure his perception towards the disappearance of objects and, 14 years later, towards the discovery of the abstract ^{(1994, p. 363)}. It is one of the most extraordinary restructurings of perception in the history of modernity and after modernity, of which landscape art is a fraction.

The National Gallery of Canada and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography have clearly defined collection areas for Canadian and international art, contemporary art, and historical art. Within the first, they consider that of the Inuit American aborigines and the migratory movements to Canada of Asian and non-Western communities and consider the study of their origins to be relevant. The aesthetic quality and historical importance of acquisitions are regulated by the Act, and, with knowledge of the matter, the document affirms that the works must be of the highest possible nature in relation to their position within the artist’s work in the historical period and, finally, within its cultural tradition, and that the works should be recommended for their exceptional historical importance.

The National Gallery of Canada classifies his acquisitions in the Index of The Burlington Magazine (^{Volume Information, 1941}). They have sometimes been commented on by critics such as Paul Oppé, who deals, in addition to the works, with acquisition policies, as well as the importance of incorporating the work of more recent artists: Gaudier Brzeska, Eric Gill or Stanley Spencer, and not only the of the old masters ^{(1941, p. 56)}. The contemporaneity with which, in 1966, the board of directors decided to acquire Capillary Action No. 2, 1963, a landscape by James Rosenquist, is an example of such practices; or the importance of internationality in the choice of works for the study of originals by students from both sides of the Atlantic, who address the thinking of artists (1941, p. 50). Likewise, the convenience of acquiring less expensive drawings, but which cover the study areas, is mentioned.

The National Gallery of Canada’s exhibition may include work by modern and post-modern artists of international stature and with an emphasis on multiculturalism and immigrant cultures in their territory. I have already mentioned some examples, but it is possible to highlight the presence of modern landscape work by artists, for the most part, Canadian, such as Landscape, 1940, by Emily Carr; or international acquisitions, such as Lake George with Crows, 1921, by Georgia O’Keeffe; Umbrian Landscape, 1952, by Paul Strand, or current art, such as Lilies, 2000, by Gerhard Richter; Alexanderplatz, 2001, by Robin Collyer, or indigenous art, Fantasy Landscape, 2007-2008, by Shuvinai Ashoona.