Posted inArt

Lights On: Doug Wheeler’s Luminous Landscape

The dream of a completely immersive visual experience haunts modern art. The most famous example in painting, Monet’s Waterlilies installation, dedicated in Paris’s Orangerie in 1927, has behind it a rich history of popular entertainment: the panorama, invented in the late eighteenth century and a mass entertainment medium in nineteenth-century Paris; similar productions elsewhere include the immense Civil War cycloramas produced in the U.S. before 1900.