CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/26/2015

Caspar Wolf and the Aesthetic Conquest of Nature

"Landscape Composition with St Beatus Cave" (undated, from the late 1700s) is reproduced from Caspar Wolf and the Aesthetic Conquest of Nature, Hatje Cantz's sophisticated new study of the eighteenth-century artist and explorer best known for his outrageous landscape paintings of the Swiss Alps. Published to accompany an exhibition at Kunstmuseum Basel, the book begins with a 1991 Michel Houellebecq quotation inspired by the work of horror pioneer H.P. Lovecraft: "Here we are at a point where the extreme acuity of sensory perception is about to propel us into a philosophical perception of the world; in other words, here we are inside poetry."