One of its major expressions, in fact, was the painting of sublime landscapes.ДЄ case in point is the dwarfing intensity of Gordale Scar, a natural wonder of Yorkshire and a goal of many Romantic tourists. As imprecise and irrational as the feelings it tried to name, the Sublime could be extended to art as well as nature. For them and for their contemporaries, the Sublime provided a flexible semantic container for the murky Romantic experiences of awe, terror, boundlessness and divinity that began to rupture the decorous confines of earlier esthetic systems. Originating with Longinus, the Sublime was fervently explored in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and recurs constantly in the esthetics of such writers as Burke, Reynolds, Kant, Diderot and Delacroix. During the Romantic Movement, MooreвЂ™s response to Niagra would have been called an experience of the вЂњSublime,вЂќ an esthetic category that suddenly acquires fresh relevance in the face of the most astonishing summits of pictorial heresy attained in America in the last fifteen years.Д¬aspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, c. MooreвЂ™s bafflement before a unique spectacle, his need to abandon measurable reason for mystical empathy, are the very ingredients of the mid-twentieth century spectatorвЂ™s вЂњreligious experienceвЂќ before a work of Still.

Oh! Bring the atheist here, and he cannot return an atheist! I pity the man who can coldly sit down to write a description of the ineffable wonders much more do I pity him who can submit them to the admeasurement of gallons and yardsвЂ¦ We must have new combinations of language to describe the Fall of Niagra. Here all its awful sublimities rushed forward upon meвЂ¦ My whole heart and soul ascended towards the Divinity in a swell of devout admiration, which I never before experienced. We arrived at the New Ladder and descended to the bottom. I felt as if approaching the very residence of the Deity the tears started in my eyes and I remained, for moments after we had lost sight of the scene, in that delicious absorption which pious enthusiasm alone cannot produce. His experience, as quoted in a letter to his mother, July 24, 1804, similarly beggared prosaic responses: A century and a half ago, the Irish Romantic poet, Thomas Moore, also made a pilgrimage to the Buffalo area, except that his goal was Niagra Falls. вЂњItвЂ™s like a religious experience!вЂќ With such words, a pilgrim I met in Buffalo last winter attempted to describe his unfamiliar sensations before the awesome phenomenon created by seventy-two Clyfford Stills at the Albright Art Gallery. How some of the most heretical concepts of modern American abstract painting relate to the visionary nature-painting of a century ago As Newman wrote in 1948, the sublime is now. If Rosenblum, who died in 2006, ever wrote another edition of the book, itвЂ™s not too hard to imagine that the book would have been updated to include artists like Dan Flavin, Anselm Kiefer, and Bill Viola. The article is something like the prequel to RosenblumвЂ™s 1975 book Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition, which traces the sublime as it changed from Friedrich to Rothko. In honor of вЂњCritique of Reason,вЂќ a survey of Romantic art at the Yale University Art Gallery, and an exhibition of Barnett NewmanвЂ™s late work at the Menil Collection, we turn back to RosenblumвЂ™s article, titled вЂњThe Abstract SublimeвЂќ for the way the Abstract Expressionists evoked the sublime without any of FriedrichвЂ™s figuration. RosenblumвЂ™s thesis was that it continued to that very year with the work of the Abstract Expressionists, who revived an interest in lifeвЂ™s biggest mysteries. Turner, Vincent van Gogh) here and there. But before 1961, it was thought that the sublime had mostly ended with Romanticism, with a few outliers (J.M.W. First theorized by Longinus and then revived during the 18th-century Enlightenment in Europe by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the sublime first wound its way into art with 19th-century German Romantic painting-most notably in the large, nearly abstract landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich.

In the February 1961 issue of ARTnews Robert Rosenblum tackled theВ tradition of the sublime, looking at artВ that instillsВ feelings of fear and awe inВ viewers, overwhelming the senses.

Sublime art