With the turn of Realism and Symbolism replacing Romanticism in response to its dominance and adaptation by nationalist causes, over the next hundred years the idea of the sublime laid dormant within fine arts.
The ideas resurfaced with the advent of modernist thinking. Some exploited the language, such as totalitarian regimes, which used the ability to overawe to control and manipulate, Simon Morley citing Albert Speer’s cathedrals of light choreography at the Nuremburg rallies as such an example. (2010b: 19)
The ideas were taken by artists later grouped as the Abstract Expressionists, who saw the sublime state in a less manipulative fashion, as a transcendent emotion, capable of revealing truths about the human condition and more complex feelings.
Rather than using imagery from the natural sublime as the romantics did, abstraction allowed the paintings to confront the viewer in the same powerful way as nature, becoming the spectacle itself, rather than depicting it. Werner Haftmann wrote on Mark Rothko’s paintings being linked to Friedrich’s: “Absorbed in the study of a very large painting (of Rothko’s), C. D. Friedrich’s painting Monk by the sea came to mind. But I was now the monk and was looking into the great breadth of an enormous, breathing space, stirred by the dark light.” (Baumann, 1971: vi)
This interpretation of the painting as an event would no doubt delighted Rothko, famously commenting “I don’t want my paintings to be of an experience, I want them to be an experience”. Peter Selz recognised the experiential qualities of the piece, writing how “these paintings are meant to be seen, they absorb, they envelop the viewer. We are no longer looking at a painting as we did in the nineteenth century; we are meant to enter it, to sink into its atmosphere of mist and light or to draw it around us like a coat-or skin.” (Mackie, 1989: 196)
Whilst separating the way in which the viewer must examine a painting from the twentieth century, describing with the comforting language of drawing something close, accustomed to the person, the familiar language of Romantic paintings, of mist and light, is still present. Rothko was not the only artist whose work can draw familiarities to other Romantic paintings. The action paintings of Jackson Pollock, splashed spontaneously across the canvas, in a feral, layered fashion are dynamic, passionate and above all, alive. (See above). Pollock noted the aims of his paintings to contain “organic intensity, energy and motion made visible.” (Mackie, 1989,: 144) As mentioned earlier, these are all qualities present in Turner’s paintings. In Rain, Steam and Speed (Below), similar wild strokes swirl around the entire canvas, with no fixed focal point, creating the same sense of uncontrolled chaos.
Barnett Newman painted huge colour field paintings, struck through with single lines. Scale was placed of upmost importance within his work, as he separated scale and size from each other, describing the need to create “total space”, by using the entire canvas in order to provoke transcendence, rather than have a fixed point of reference which thee person can look to. (See below) Instead, the entire painting emits energy, staring at the viewer with great intensity. The entire canvas was treated as equally important, allowing for a far stretching expanse to step beyond the boundaries of the painting.
Newman was particularly impressed by the Romantic painting Raft of Medusa, by Théodore Géricault (below) enthusiastically commenting on the work:
“Fantastic! The scale is marvellous. You can feel the immensity of the event rather than the scale of the canvas. Great! Wild painting! The space does engulf one.” (Mackie, 1989: 153)
From this talk of the immensity of the event overriding the scale of the work, Newman makes the psychical dimensions of the painting unnoticeable, as the space within the painting overrides the need for physical limitations. This evokes earlier romantic thought on how the sublime feeling of being overawed can be found equally in the universe as it can “in a blade of grass”.
However, Newman did paint enormous canvasses, in terms of dimension, so the painting could have far more power, due to being large in both scale and size. Rothko, another user of big canvases wrote:
“I paint very large pictures…The reason I paint them…is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside of your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command.” (Mackie, 1989: 203)
The surrendering of control that Rothko wished to provoke again mirrors the sublime moment’s overriding power, where the viewer is passive spectator to the events in front of him. (Below)
James Turrell, like the abstract expressionists, wanted to envelop the viewer in his installations, which appear as enormous voids of light, physical versions of the colour field paintings of Newman. Rudolph Arnheim writes how “light is one of the most revealing elements of life, it is the most spectacular experience of the senses.” (Herbert, 1998:196) His works often have a sense of boundlessness, with lighting so even that the viewer becomes unsure of dimensions, caught between impossible boundaries. His work Gansfeld (2001) (first image below) is a rectangular void, lit entirely with even blue, evoking Yves Klien’s IKB 191 (second image below) in both colour and effect. Klien wanted to remove the tension of opposing colours with his custom resin colours that filled canvases, wanting to create the void which Turrell has realised. The compete environment of this particular installation induces boundlessness and intensity, allowing for entry into the work of the abstract impressionists as a tangible reality rather than a cerebral experience.
Morisaw Balka’s installation How it is (2009) (below) shares similarities to Turrell’s Gansfeld, but rather than using light, Balka uses the lack of it to create the boundless space. The work is a large shipping container, accessible only at one end. The darkness quickly surrounds the viewer the deeper they go into the literal void, until they unexpectedly find the back of the container. In the darkness, no dimensions are visible. If the viewer turns, a dim light serves as a vague point of reference, but the expanse is impenetrable, a negative of Turrell’s work, but with the same sublime provocation.
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