Autumn is perhaps the season art most easily risks turning into a cliché: an orange woodland, a red leaf, an avenue carpeted in yellow are enough to make an image instantly recognisable and, for that very reason, almost already seen. In Italy, moreover, few words have done as much to shape the collective imagination of autumn as Ungaretti’s: “We are as / in autumn / on the trees / the leaves.” Since Soldati, the autumn leaf seems to have become almost inextricably bound to the idea of precariousness, of falling, of life on the verge of ending, reinforcing an association so powerful that, over time, it has become almost obsessive.
Yet art — contemporary art in particular — has undertaken a more interesting operation: it has dismantled the iconography of autumn, gradually separating the season from its most obvious symbols. Autumn survives instead as light, atmosphere, matter, ripening, memory, falling; not so much something to be represented as something that happens to things. It is a threshold season, in which what is still present has already begun to change: perhaps the question is no longer how to represent autumn, but what remains of autumn once we take the leaves away.
Sabino Maria Frassà, 19 September 2026
Cover: WOLFGANG TILLMANS (B. 1968) Last Still Life, New York.
In Japanese Red Maple in October (1986), Lois Dodd seems to begin with the most conventional image imaginable: a red maple in October. Yet she immediately removes it from the tradition of landscape painting by placing a window before us. Its mullions divide the image, transforming what lies outside into almost abstract fields of red and green. The work belongs to a series of window paintings, and the light of the maple, filtered through this grid, seems almost to enter the domestic space. Autumn is no longer simply the tree: it is the different quality of light that the tree produces around itself. Even in White Water (1998), where the season is not declared in the title, a few touches of yellow, the white water and the dark verticals of the trunks are enough to make the landscape seem constructed around the perception of time changing.
Japanese Red Maple in October (1986), Lois Dodd
White Water (1998)
This is a decisive shift, because it allows autumn to leave the woods and enter the city. In Saul Leiter’s photographs, the urban world is often viewed through something: wet glass, a windscreen, a shop window, rain or a reflective surface. There is no need to establish that every individual image was taken in autumn to understand how useful this visual language can be in describing it. A red umbrella, a yellow taxi, a figure losing definition behind misted glass can entirely replace the tree. The season becomes atmosphere. The city itself seems to change its physical state: contours dissolve, surfaces overlap, colour emerges from grey, and the lower light suddenly makes visible what in summer we might barely have noticed. Urban autumn can therefore exist without a single fallen leaf.
Saul Leiter, Red Umbrella, c. 1955
David Hockney, too, retains the woodland, but turns it above all into an instrument for measuring time. In Woldgate Woods, 24, 25 and 26 October 2006, the date enters directly into the title: three consecutive days for a single large image composed of six canvases. The work belongs to a group of nine monumental paintings of the same view, observed as the seasons change. Autumn, then, is not simply a matter of the colours of the woods: it is the transformation of the landscape itself before the eyes of someone who continues to look at it. Hockney returns to the same place because what appears to remain identical never truly does: light, colour and vegetation change, and with them, perception. If Dodd allows autumn to enter through a window, Hockney seems to turn the entire painting into a window onto time.
Woldgate Woods, 24, 25 and 26 October 2006. Sotheby’s, New York, 17 November 2016
With Anselm Kiefer, almost the opposite occurs: the forest returns, but it can no longer be regarded simply as nature. In Autumn Forest (1970) — the title under which the work is catalogued by the Metropolitan Museum of Art — bare trees appear near the Rhine; the museum notes how Kiefer uses landscape to activate cultural memory and how the Rhine carries specific associations with German history and nationalism. Here autumn definitively loses its decorative innocence. Nature shedding its leaves becomes the place where memory and history accumulate. Not everything that returns cyclically returns unchanged: leaves grow back, while what human beings have done continues to alter the way we look at that same landscape.
Nils-Udo also uses the leaf as material, but to temporarily redraw natural space. In Feuille d’Érable Sycomore (1978), yellow leaves are arranged around tree trunks, creating a horizontal band that visually traverses the woodland. Autumn is no longer merely something that happens to the landscape: it becomes the material through which the landscape itself is temporarily rewritten.
Andy Goldsworthy, Red Leaves Laid Around a Hole, 1991
Andy Goldsworthy takes this a step further: he no longer represents autumn; he uses it. Leaves are not a subject to be painted, but material available only in a particular place and at a particular moment. Yellow Elm Leaves Laid Over a River Rock, made at Scaur Water on 15 October 1991, or the red maple leaves held together by water in Japan in November of the same year, carry the date, place and conditions of the experience within their very material description. This matters: the work could not be identical six months later. Red and yellow are not colours selected from the artist’s palette, but colours temporarily produced by nature. And the photograph that remains documents something that, by its very constitution, must disappear. Ephemerality is no longer represented symbolically: it actually happens to the work.
Nils-Udo, Feuille d’Érable Sycomore, 1978
Different, yet equally radical, is the operation carried out by herman de vries. In Leaves Collected on 27 of October in the Glasgraben (1977), even the date enters the title: the leaves are gathered, removed from their environment and arranged on the surface. They are neither represented nor transformed into something else: they are simultaneously natural matter and the record of a precise moment. Autumn becomes almost an archive, a way of collecting time before that which makes it visible disappears.
It is precisely at this point that the leaf can also make the opposite journey: escaping ephemerality and becoming a permanent image.
Forever Ginkgo, Graziella Bettinardi
In Forever Ginkgo by Graziella Bettinardi, the ginkgo is isolated and, through the title itself, placed within a dimension paradoxically opposed to that of the leaf destined to fall: forever. More radical still is the shift into matter in the sculptures of Kuno Vollet, where the ginkgo’s characteristic fan-shaped leaves are translated into gilded brass and fixed to stone. The fragile, temporary form of the leaf thus becomes metal, gold, sculpture: what should fall is made permanent. Autumn can therefore also be told through this contradiction: preserving what nature has programmed to disappear.
Golden Ginkgo, Kuno Vollet
But to stop at falling would be to tell only half the story of autumn. The other half is ripening. This is where the still life acquires a surprising contemporary relevance. Pumpkins, pomegranates, ripe fruit, flowers beginning to wilt, leaves brought indoors: what belonged to growth during the summer is now harvested, arranged and consumed. In contemporary still life, autumn can therefore enter a room without any need to show the landscape. And when fruit is joined by everyday objects, remnants, even cigarette butts, the still life loses any trace of idealisation: ripeness and consumption, fullness and waste coexist on the same surface. Autumn is not only what dies: it is also what has finally ripened.
It is precisely here that Wolfgang Tillmans — whose work appears on the cover — becomes important. His photography allows the season to survive within the everyday fragment: a table, food, a window, a plant, an apparently insignificant situation. In works such as Tomatoes(2003), significantly associated with the theme of autumn in public collections, or the more explicit Beginning of Autumn, Teufelsee (2023) — the title is documented in exactly this form, for a 15.2 × 10.2 cm chromogenic print — there is no longer any need to construct a grand allegory of the season. Autumn can be a minimal perceptual condition: the moment when we realise that something in our surroundings has just changed.
Dodd retains the tree but transforms it into light; Hockney turns the landscape into a measure of time; Leiter allows nature almost to disappear and transfers the season into the atmosphere of the city; Kiefer charges the landscape with memory; Goldsworthy replaces representation with matter destined to disintegrate; de vries collects and archives what the season allows to fall; Bettinardi and Vollet, by contrast, explore the possibility of retaining the leaf and making it permanent; still life shifts attention from falling to ripening; Tillmans finally arrives at the fragment, at a season that can be recognised in an almost insignificant detail.
Contemporary art has therefore not erased the iconography of autumn: it has dismantled it in order to understand what it contained. It has taken the red of the leaves and turned it into light; the leaf and turned it into matter, or rescued it from its own ephemerality; the forest and turned it into memory; the harvest and turned it into time; the rain and turned it into the city. Freed from the need to resemble itself, autumn reveals something more complex than the melancholy of an ending. It is the moment when ripening and dissolution become indistinguishable, when something reaches its fullness precisely as it begins to disappear. Freed from the cliché that for centuries made it instantly recognisable, autumn thus returns to what it has always been: not the representation of an ending, but the experience of transformation.
Tomatoes, Wolfgang Tillmans, courtesy Maureen Paley, London. Image credit: Dundee Art Galleries and Museums Collection (Dundee City Council)
