View of Schunnemunk Mt.

Description

This view represents Shumnemunk Mountain, a prominent landscape feature near Mangold’s home in Washingtonville, New York, along the Hudson River. The atmospheric nightfall scene distantly evokes the great romantic Hudson River School tradition in nineteenth-century American art, while also alluding to the elusive noctural effects of the seminal nineteenth-century painter, James McNeill Whistler. But the trompe-l’oeil (fool the eye) masking tape that defines the limits of Mangold’s landscape introduces another level of illusion and reflects concerns of the 1980s— issues of artistic process and framing. Masking tape is often used to help an artist decide the format of a composition and alludes to the artificiality of the limits imposed by an artist in representing nature.

This lithograph was printed using several aluminum plates for different areas and layers of the design. To create the illusion of the tape, the artist drew on real tape with grease crayon and pressed the tape’s drawn-on surface against the plate. Mangold used red and yellow ink to suggest the lights of distant dwellings—the only references to human life.