Early Autumn 

Eyvind Earle made this painting, Early Autumn, using a silkscreen technique. This image shows a hyper-stylized forest, a place of idealized natural beauty divorced from any specific geographical location. Earle’s commercial work for Walt Disney Studios might be relevant here, as it evokes the unreal, artificial landscapes of animated film. The highly controlled use of color and geometric forms—the near-perfect spheres of the trees, for example—makes this less a scene taken from life than a constructed fantasy. This print was made at a moment when anxieties about environmental degradation were becoming increasingly urgent, in the decades after World War II. It can be understood, perhaps, as a nostalgic vision of an unspoiled landscape, untouched by industry or other forms of social and economic development. To better understand this artwork, it would be useful to look at other examples of landscape painting made at the time, and to consider how ideas of environmentalism influenced American art and culture in the postwar era.