This article considers the history of the American desert as it is expressed in the visual arts. American culture seems to consider the desert essentially as a mythical or fantasized space, so that its visual history interrogates the very notion of visibility. There is a tradition, in the art history of the desert, of keeping it at a distance, considering it as eternally out of reach and out of sight. The motif of the mirage holds together this history, standing for the absence of any real encounter with the desert in American culture since it is mostly considered as a landscape or as a representation which can therefore never be fully seen or envisioned as a specific ecotope. This article studies certain artworks from this history and puts forward the links between this particular art history and transcendentalist thought. If Emerson’s philosophy was rooted in the green landscapes of New England, his thought is essential to understand the American fascination for the question of the visibility of the desert.
