Environmental Aesthetics: Crossing Divides and Breaking Ground

9. Landscapes of the Environmental Imagination

Irene Klaver sketches the rise of what she calls “environmental imagination”, with special attention to the work of two modern painters, Georgia O’Keeffe and Anselm Kiefer. Klaver sketches a conceptual framework of the environmental imagination through the work of philosophers and social theorists, as Benedict Anderson, Edward Said, Arjun Appadurai, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who all developed a notion of the imagination beyond the mental faculties of the individual. She shows how from the perspective of an environmental imagination an unexpected commonality emerges between two so radically different painters as Georgia O’Keeffe and Anselm Kiefer.