Meaning of the Natural the Human the Supernatural and the Sublime and Their Place in the Arts
Beginnings
Boileau and Longinus - On the Sublime (1674)
The concept of the sublime tin be traced every bit far back every bit the Italian Renaissance. Masaccio and Andrea Mantegna's representations of Christ dead and dying, also as Raphael's drawings and studies of skulls, remind us of the inevitability of death and the unknown - primal themes of the sublime. Painter and theorist Jonathan Richardson wrote extensively virtually the sublime and its example in Michelangelo and the Baroque painter Anthony van Dyck in his An Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715).
Simply it was not until the Romantic menstruation that the sublime as an aesthetic concept actually took concord beyond Europe. It began with the French writer Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux'south 17th-century translation of Peri Hypsous (On The Sublime), a work of literary criticism past the Greek Longinus dating back to the 1st century CE. Hither, Longinus argues that the orator should strive to inspire passion and motility his listener non just to persuade him. Concerned mostly with linguistic communication, Longinus does write briefly about the visual sublime in both nature and human-made objects; not bad size and multifariousness can induce the feeling of the sublime in his estimation. In his own treatise on aesthetics, Boileau wrote of the sublime, "The sublime is not strictly speaking something which is proven or demonstrated, simply a marvel, which seizes i, strikes ane, and makes one feel."
The Romantic Sublime and A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Cute, by Edmund Burke (1757)
In 1757, the philosopher Edmund Burke wrote the first major work on the sublime, in which he sought to scientifically investigate human passions. As a philosophical Empiricist, Burke grounded his argument in sensory experience, and he walks through various feelings, including the pleasurable, the cute, and the sublime. For Shush, pleasure was non equally strong a feeling equally pain, and he proposed that the sublime, which he understood to exist our strongest passion, was rooted in fear, particularly the terror brought on by the fear of death. Burke wrote, "The passion caused past the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate virtually powerfully is astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some caste of horror."
Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790)
Similarly, German philosopher Immanuel Kant explored the individual's response to the sublime, placing the origin of the experience within the human being psyche. In his Critique of Judgment. Kant proposed two types of sublimity: the mathematical and the dynamical. With the mathematical sublime, one is faced with the magnitude of nature, and one'southward imagination cannot adequately embrace the vastness. Kant argues, though, that our faculty of reason kicks in and allows usa to comprehend the sense of infinity earlier us; the feeling of the mathematical sublime, then, is the feeling of reason's superiority over nature and our imagination. The dynamical sublime is also a feeling of reason'south superiority to nature, but via a unlike avenue. Kant explained, "[T]he irresistibility of [nature'southward] ability certainly makes us, considered as natural beings, recognize our physical powerlessness, but at the same time it reveals a chapters for judging ourselves as independent of nature and a superiority over nature...whereby the humanity in our person remains undemeaned even though the man must submit to that rule." In both experiences of the sublime, Kant wrote of an "agitation" that ane feels; it makes the soul experience shaken, every bit opposed to the calm feeling engendered by a work of dazzler. The sublime also causes a feeling of displeasure, as Kant explained, "arising from the inadequacy of imagination in the artful estimation of magnitude to attain to its estimation of reason...." Kant's notions of the sublime were not much taken upwardly past philosophers, but they held great importance for later literature and aesthetic theory.
The European Romantics
According to art historian Beat Wyss, Kant'south sublime, which rests on our relation with nature and our rational response to it, was translated into German Romanticism as a form of "art religion." Here, was the dawn of an era in which "the ego and the world diverged". Romantic artists would frequently use their experiences of nature or natural events to convey the feel of the sublime. Kant's countryman, Caspar David Friedrich's paintings of mist, fog, and darkness sought to capture an experience of the infinite, creating an overwhelming sense of emptiness. Friedrich's images of lone figures against powerful and dramatic skies had a wide-reaching influence and made him an icon of Romantic Painting. In French republic effectually the aforementioned time, Eugène Delacroix and Théodore Géricault explored the sublime through violent and horrific subjects such every bit suicide, massacres, shipwrecks, and guillotined heads. Their paintings were ofttimes massive in scale, enveloped the viewer, and the frequent presence of a cacophony of varied details overwhelmed the viewer's senses.
British Landscape Painting and French Barbizon Schoolhouse
As travelers headed into wilderness such equally the French and Swiss Alps, the Snowdonia mountains, and other natural regions to experience the sublime, British Mural painters responded to the want for thrill and awe. John Constable presented dramatic English landscapes that were designed to evoke awe and wonder in the viewer while his contemporary and rival J. M. W. Turner produced powerful seascapes, views of the Thames river, and captivating skies that explored the ephemerality of man'southward efforts in the face of nature. Indeed Turner has been widely recognized as 1 of the most successful of Romantic painters in capturing the aesthetic of the sublime as outlined by Burke and Kant.
In France, a more middle-of-the-route approach was explored by the Barbizon School, which included Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, and Jean-François Millet. These painters sought to convey a sense of serenity, or what was termed the "contemplative sublime," in landscape painting. Here artists turned to nature painting as an antidote to the ills of modern industrialization, rather than as a powerful investigation into the human being condition.
The Hudson River School
Inspired past Turner and his contemporaries, artists such equally Thomas Moran and Thomas Cole found the sublime in the untouched lands of N America, including in the Yosemite Valley, the Thousand Canyon, the Rocky Mountains, and reflected it on vast canvases that expressed scale and splendor. Artists wanted to produce piece of work that translated the awe, terror, boundlessness, and divinity experienced at these dramatic spots that many Americans had not seen in person. Many of the artists who came to exist known equally the Hudson River Schoolhouse (named subsequently the houses many of them built on the river in upstate New York) worked in the Studio Building on New York's West Tenth Street, the first such artists' space of the fourth dimension in the city. After traveling the country and the countryside and experiencing the richness of the American mural, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church, and afterward Asher B. Durand, explored notions of the sublime at a time during due west expansion, and their painted visions came to define what America looked similar in the minds of many of its E Coast citizenry.
In the 1870s and 1890s, pioneering photographers were employed by the authorities and private companies to capture images of the Western landscape, including Yosemite and Yellowstone. The photographs taken of Yosemite by Carleton Watkins influenced the U.S. Congress to make it a national park. Afterward photographers such as Minor White and Ansel Adams continued the legacy of dramatic landscape photography that captured the imaginations of Americans.
The Death of the Sublime
By 1886 the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared the Sublime "out of date" and Victorian artists returned to beauty as their muse. By the turn of the century, the United states of america had moved on as well, falling in love instead with French Impressionism and modernism. Adding to its demise as an influential aesthetic theory, notions of the sublime were exploited by totalitarian regimes in the 1930s. Caspar David Friedrich'due south work was co-opted past the Nazis and twisted into an exemplar of German nationalism. Hitler's chief builder Albert Speer created Cathedrals of Light. In the absence of a concrete stadium, Speer beamed 152 anti-aircraft searchlights into the night sky to class a wall of vertical lights around the audiences of the Nuremberg rallies. The effect was dazzling and footage was subsequently documented in Nazi propaganda films. The overtly political use of the sublime fabricated subsequent artists reluctant to engage the artful theory in their works.
The Historic period of Abstruse Expressionism
After World State of war Ii, artists again began to explore sublime feelings of transcendence and exaltation as a fashion to recuperate from the war'due south atrocities. The Abstruse Expressionists in Due north America and Europe'southward innovative Yves Klein, the sculpture of Alberto Giacometti, and the poems and paintings of Henri Michaux all re-engaged the topic.
In his 1948 essay "The Sublime is Now," Barnett Newman swore off the European artists' interest in beauty and argued that artists needed to create transcendent works that would induce a spiritual experience. He wrote, "We are reasserting man's natural desire for the exalted." Fellow artists Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still also wanted to evoke a quasi-religious transcendent experience in those viewing their works.
The eminent art historian Robert Rosenblum caused a stir when he coined the term the "abstruse sublime" in reference to modern American painting. He used it to describe a sense of vastness and confinement conveyed by works of Abstract Expressionists, relating them back to their ancestors in Romantic painting. He developed the ideas in his influential book Modernistic Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (1975). Writing in 1961, Rosenblum said, "In its heroic search for a private myth to embody the sublime power of the supernatural, the fine art of Still, Rothko, Pollock and Newman should remind usa in one case more that the agonizing heritage of the Romantics has not yet been exhausted."
Concepts and Styles
Organized religion and Transcendence
The sublime and the religious have been linked as far back Roman times, and writers praised Renaissance artists that moved the viewer across an everyday appreciation of religious works. Jonathan Richardson described Raphael's Sistine Chapel tapestries equally the about sublime examples of art, while he also paid tribute to the "holy Dove with a vast Heaven where are innumerable angels adoring, rejoicing" in Federico Zuccaro's The Annunciation with Prophets and Music-making Angels (1572). The vastness and terror of nature explored by Romantic painters oft had religious undertones - for example, Caspar David Friedrich painted monks and funereal scenes and was greatly influenced in his thinking by a Lutheran minister.
Early 20th-century art took the sublime in a new direction, as artists experimented with brainchild to provide an experience of transcendence. Kazimir Malevich famously hung his Blackness Foursquare (1913) in the corner of the room when it was first displayed. As this was traditionally the site of the orthodox icon in a Russian habitation, Malevich suggested the blackness square equally a godlike presence. Although kept hidden away for many years, the Swedish Hilma af Klint produced a huge body of abstract piece of work, known as The Paintings for the Temple, which she hoped would provide an experience of enlightenment for those who viewed them.
Later, Abstruse Expressionists would endeavor to evoke a spiritual feeling through their work. Robert Rosenblum, writing in 1961, described a fan admiring Clyfford Still works at New York's Albright Art Gallery. "It's like a religious experience!" he told Rosenblum. As well, Marker Rothko and Barnett Newman's Color Field Paintings attempted to create a quasi-religious feeling for a post-religious earth.
Nature
Nature was a key motif for the sublime in Romantic fine art; misty skies, tempestuous seas, vast gulfs and valleys, and dramatic mount scenes were depicted on big-calibration canvases to accept the viewer's jiff away. The natural world, for Burke, was the well-nigh sublime of objects, and James Ward's Gordale Scar (1812-fourteen) attempts to interpret the sublimity of nature by presenting a dramatic view of limestone rocks cutting through the majestic mural of Yorkshire (in U.k.) prepare confronting a nighttime and ominous heaven.
The burgeoning popularity of the sublime in nature inspired Thomas Moran, who travelled across the Atlantic Bounding main and shared what he had learned with his American contemporaries in the Hudson River School where depth, space, and drama became the order of the day. In France, the painters of the Barbizon School Jules Dupré (inspired past Lawman) and Theodore Rousseau used nature to explore themes such every bit the insignificance of humanity and the transience of life, which went on to inform Impressionism.
The theme manifested itself in the 21st century as nature morphed from the field of study to the medium, and the American West - previously depicted as a dangerous frontier - became the site of World Fine art. Michael Heizer's Double Negative (1969) evokes feelings of awe and dread as two vast trenches measuring 1,500 feet long, 50 anxiety deep, and 30 feet wide (so large they can be seen as dark shadows in Google Map'southward satellite imagery) are cut into the earth dwarfing the viewer. Likewise, Nancy Holt'south Lord's day Tunnels (1973-76), in the Utah desert aim to connect the viewer with the cosmos, highlighting human insignificance while simultaneously and paradoxically elevating them. The work comprises iv concrete tunnels, drilled with holes to blueprint the constellations of Draco, Perseus, Columbia, and Capricorn in a bid to bring the sky to globe. Holt said she wanted to examine "the human perception of time and space, earth and sky".
Terror and Death
Sublime art is meant to shake the viewer, to instill fear, and remind them of their ain fragile bloodshed. Burke wrote about a "terrible sublimity" linked to notions of death, powerlessness, and annihilation and in doing so, like Longinus, likened it to the vast, uncontrollable, unknowable ocean. Artists such as Turner and Claude Joseph Vernet translated this in their depictions of shipwrecks, which pose non just fright of death but the fear of the unknown presented by drowning.
Burke linked pain with death, explaining, "what generally makes pain itself, if I may say so, more painful, is that information technology is considered as an emissary of this king of terrors." Such terror is seen in Eugène Delacroix and Théodore Géricault's gory and visceral works. That tradition manifested itself throughout the 20th century as well, in the works of Paul Cezanne's The Iii Skulls (1900), Pablo Picasso'south Guernica (1937) and Frida Kahlo's Girl with Death Mask (1938).
Contemporary artists have explored the terrible sublime in explorations of recent political events and their effects on our individual and commonage psyche, while art critic Thomas McEvilley predicted at the turn of the century that "the culminating developments of capitalist globalization would be the terror-sublime of the side by side 50 years".
Engineering science and Modernity
At the turn of the century, artists began looking at the way changes in manufacture affected the human experience. New York's waterways became a discipline for the Ashcan School and artists such as George Bellows, Robert Henri, Reginald Marsh, and Georgia O'Keeffe painted bridges, cranes and ocean liners. In Europe, the technological sublime was explored by the Italian Futurists, such every bit Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Umberto Boccioni, who used science and mechanics to unsettle the viewer and turn down tradition and the past. More than recently, cultural historian David Nye, in American Technological Sublime (1994) proposed that the admiration of the natural sublime, as experienced in dramatic landscapes, was replaced past the sublime of the factory, aviation, state of war mechanism, and the sublime of the computer.
More recently, artist Simon Morley has situated the contemporary sublime inside the feel of modern life and its relation to scientific discipline and technology as it hurtles into the unknown. He connects awe and wonder with terror, writing, "The sublime feel is fundamentally transformative, about the relationship between disorder and society, and the disruptions of the stable coordinates of time and infinite. Something rushes in and we are profoundly altered." In this context, artists including Anish Kapoor, Damien Hirst, Bill Viola, and Hiroshi Sugimoto examine the cocky and the role of the artist within the dizzying context of mass media and vertiginous technological advance.
Postmodernism and Conceptual Fine art
Conceptual artists accept played with the notion of fear in a contemporary test of the sublime. Anish Kapoor's Marsyas (2002) comprised vast sculptures that took up the entire Turbine Room at the Tate Modern, towering over viewers in a way that as the curators explicate "permeate physical and psychological space." The structures were made of PVC to expect like human skin and threatened to swallow up the viewer, like giant mouths.
Ecology artists such as Betty Beaumont and Agnes Denes meanwhile use the outdoor space to highlight the damage we are doing to the world, and therefore not just the death of the individual simply the death of humankind as a whole, and Andreas Gursky's photographs meanwhile look to Kant's mathematical sublime, as he presents complex and boundless images that dwarf and confuse the viewer with repeated perspectives.
The sublime has always been used as a vehicle to brand sense of (or communicate a failure to grasp) earth events, and this is no different in a contemporary context. Julie Mehretu refers to the September 11 attacks in her abstract canvas Dispersion (2002). As creative person Julian Bell explains, "Her melodramas of swooping vectors and nested graphemes, with their bravura, baroque complexity, seem to picture the dynamics of the age on a very large and general calibration." And Luc Tuymans's All the same Life of the same year was presented in reaction to the attacks on the United states of america. The work depicted a fruit bowl on a vast canvass, representing an accented nothingness and a monument to this inadequacy of language. Equally Simon Morley suggested, "In response to unimaginable horror, Luc Tuymans offers the sublime. A gaping magnitude of impotency, which neither words nor paintings could ever limited."
Farther Developments
In the 1980s, French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard ushered in a new wave of postmodern sublimity, exploring notions of pleasance and hurting, neurosis and masochism. Lyotard's 2 influential essays "Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime" (1982) and "The Sublime and the Avant-garde" (1984) reignited the field of study in public discussion and saw exhibitions that brought the argue back to the viewing public.
Lyotard looked back to Burke and into the present 24-hour interval, focusing on the dominance of temporality in creative debate; he reframed Barnett Newman's phrase "The Sublime is Now," suggesting that "now" is, in fact, a moment of nothingness. He wrote, "The avant-garde task is to undo spiritual assumptions regarding time. The sense of the sublime is the name of the dismantling." Current thinking has as well explored the notion of temporality in the sublime and asks how fine art can stretch or destabilize it. Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson talks about the subjectivity of fourth dimension and the "length of now."
Notions of fearfulness and wonder have proven to be every bit irresistible to contemporary artists every bit they were to the Romantics. In 2018, the Chaos and Awe: Painting for the 21st Century exhibition at Tennessee'due south Frist Gallery presented works from artists grappling with the destabilizing effects of such 21st-century forces as globalism, mass migration, radical ideologies, and complex technologies. Curator Marker Scala said, "Many people today are feeling feet and helplessness. People are struggling to adapt to a period of instability and dramatic shifts in meaning." Through the works of Franz Ackermann, Wangechi Mutu, Ellen Gallagher, and Matthew Ritchie, Scala explored the precariousness of the contemporary world and how people answer to it.
Source: https://www.theartstory.org/definition/the-sublime-in-art/history-and-concepts/