Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME
female sublime. Gun in one hand, tricolor in the other, her bare breasts demonstrating
her continued sexual presence, she appears at the barricade not as
destroyer of order but as incarnation of a new order in which the bourgeois and
laboring classes will create a common destiny. Republican men here stand with
her, not against her. Perhaps it is not just the difference between France and
Britain but the actuality of revolution—the picture was made in 1830—that
saved her from restriction to sublime widowhood and allowed her the sexuality
of the “woman of the people” crowned as Liberty in 1789. 74
But of course the new order was a chimera, and this image had no immediate
successor. It might be said to have reappeared in the late 1960s, in the form of
the heroine of Third World revolutionary struggle—Asian, African, or Native
American—with a rifle in her hand or on her back. Its provenance in modernizing
movements suggest what might be called its early nineteenth-century
nature—and also the centrality of gender issues to social transformation. Here
again the difficulty of imagining the feminine sublime in terms other than those
of uneasy compromise between masculine attributes and rejection of the patriarchal
order is further testimony to the gendered character of the categories of
beautiful and sublime.
Abstraction and the sublime
In 1805 Goethe could still write, “To make the transition from the world of letters,
and even from the highest manifestations of words and language, namely
poetry and rhetoric, to the visual arts, is difficult and well-nigh impossible: for
between them lies an enormous gulf which only a special natural aptitude can
bridge.” 75 On the other hand, in 1795 Schiller demanded that “the plastic arts
. . . must become sheer form,” though only because “it is an inevitable and natural
consequence of their approach to perfection that the various arts, without
any displacement of their objective frontiers, tend to become ever more like each
other in their effect upon the psyche.” In any and every art, “subject-matter . . .
74 See the related mythology sketched by Victor Hugo, reporting the June Days of 1848 in his
Choses Vues:
At that moment a young woman appeared on the crest of the barricade, a young
woman, beautiful, disheveled, terrifying. This woman, who was a public whore,
pulled her dress up to the waist and cried to the guardsmen, in that dreadful brothel
language that one is always obliged to translate: “Cowards! Fire, if you dare, at the
belly of a woman!” . . . It’s a hideous thing, this heroism of abjection, when all that
weakness contains of strength bursts out.
Victor Hugo, Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1955) vol. 31, pp. 361–6; cit. Neil Hertz,
“Medusa’s head: male hysteria under political pressure,” Representations 4 (1983), p. 29
75 J. W. von Goethe, “Winckelmann,” tr. H. B. Nisbet, in Nisbet, German Aesthetic and Literary
Criticism, p. 243.
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