In his book White Writing, JM Coetzee remarks: ''[T]hough they bring in Cubism and Futurism in highly original ways to suggest lines of force and tension in nature, JH Pierneef's scenes of empty plains, blank mountains, and towering skies ... have had few imitators outside the realm of kitsch, probably because of their tendency to heroise the landscape." Probably for the same reason, now, close to 30 years after Coetzee wrote this, Pierneef imitators tend to be satirists and subverters. Wilhelm van Rensburg, curator of JH Pierneef: A Space for Landscape, includes some of them in the exhibition, albeit downstairs in a separate room from the Pierneef works. Far from detracting from Pierneef's legacy, they make as good a justification as any for Van Rensburg's argument that it is time to reassess his work.Some of these parodies from the 1980s and 1990s had genuine critical bite, attacking Pierneef's ahistorical depiction of the landscape and the founding myths of Afrikaner nationalism they were used to prop up. But those from the past decade merely deploy the same idea: send up Pierneef's style and then try to reveal the obscured history in the "empty" landscape. Given what's upstairs, they soon start to look passé."There hasn't been a proper Pierneef exhibition since 1982," says Van Rensburg. The sensationalism surrounding the high prices Pierneef works fetch (one went for nearly R12-million last year) does little to encourage real critical engagement with his work.A Space for Landscape is an attempt to recomplicate Pierneef, taking in the sweep of his formal experimentation - from San rock art to pointillism and cubism - and reintroducing historical complexity to the way that we see him.Van Rensburg points out, for example, that by the time Pierneef was painting his most famous landscapes they represented nostalgia about the land more than a will to real ownership. By then, many Afrikaners had lost their land and been forced into the cities after the Boer War and the Great Depression. Van Rensburg notes that Pierneef was adopted by the Nationalist government late in the 1960s, rather than in his own lifetime. There is also a strong attempt in the catalogue to contextualise Pierneef's work globally with reference to painters in Canada and New Zealand working at the same time.Van Rensburg would certainly like to place greater emphasis on Pierneef's formal innovation, although he is careful not to do so at the expense of historical context.The exhibition shows a broader, deeper version of Pierneef than the caricature in the popular imagination. There's no doubt that Pierneef became South Africa's definitive landscape painter, making South Africa look for the first time like South Africa rather than an alien landscape depicted in a European style. Pierneef is also one of the last examples of Romanticism in the service of a nationalist myth. When that works, the results can be sublime (in the Romantic sense) and when it fails, kitsch.Ultimately, the central criticisms of Pierneef's work will probably stand, but so will his artistic achievement and originality. He's certainly harder to caricature after a turn around this exhibition.JH Pierneef: A Space for Landscape is at the Standard Bank Gallery until September 12...