Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME
always has a limiting effect upon the spirit, and it is only from form that true
aesthetic freedom can be looked for.” 76 To say this is to abandon the claims of
Lessing and Burke for the superiority of poetry over painting, but only by abandoning
the “feminine” nature of the visual arts, as clearly defined images of
beautiful bodies, as in Delacroix’s claim that painting and music are “above
thought” and hence superior to literature precisely “through their very vagueness.”
77 By freeing itself from clarity of image, and moving in the direction of
“abstraction,” painting moves in the direction of sublimity, or masculinity.
The goals of art—literary and visual—were radically reformulated in the later
nineteenth century, with the rise of Realism. At this time, music continued to be
the home of the Romanticism into which the ideal of sublimity had metamorphosed.
Music took the place of poetry as the exemplary art; as Carl Dahlhaus
says, “music increased its influence because it was almost alone in bearing the
burden of providing an alternative to the realities of the world following the
Industrial Revolution.” 78 Central to at least one important line of the modernist
painting of the twentieth century has been a tendency in this art too for the
demands of mimesis to be overwhelmed by the reduction of the image to the
elements of line, pictorial space, and color. Such versions of modernism identify
so-called content, as in Lessing, with literature, while inverting Lessing’s critique
of history painting to make so-called form a carrier of spiritual truth, free to represent
universal structures of meaning and expression. The body of nature is
abandoned as inessential; the spirit or soul of nature is identified with the artist’s
creative act (think of Jackson Pollock’s pronouncement, “I am nature”).
Barnett Newman is notable for explicitly calling on the categories of the beautiful
and the sublime for the statement of a modernist program:
The failure of European art to achieve the sublime is due to [the] blind
desire to exist inside the reality of sensation (the object world) and to
build an art within the framework of pure plasticity (the Greek ideal of
beauty) . . . In other words, modern art, caught without a sublime content,
was incapable of creating a new sublime image . . . [S]ome of us
. . . are finding the answer, by completely denying that art has any connection
with the problem of beauty . . . We are reasserting man’s
natural desire for the exalted.
It is hardly surprising that Newman, seeking an ancestry for his art in that of the
original inhabitants of the American Northwest, finds it in “an abstract symbolic
76 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, tr. E. M. Wilkenson and L. A. Willoughby
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 155.
77 The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, tr. Walter Pach (New York: Grove, 1961), p. 61.
78 Carl Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1980), p. 8.
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