Painting the Sublime

Transgressing Boundaries in the Production and Reception of Pictures

Herausgegeben von Reinold Schmücker und Philipp Theisohn. Bandherausgeber: Johannes Grave, Sonja Scherbaum und Arno Schubbach

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Around 1800, artists began to challenge the certainties of visual perception by employing new aesthetic means such as fog and steam, which obscured the subject matter. This interest in the relationship between seeing and not seeing coincided with the emergence of the aesthetic category of the sublime and with contemporary debates on sensory perception. The aesthetics of blindness becomes particularly evident in Ossianic landscapes, where opacity functioned as a central pictorial motif. Given that the sublime was largely tied to poetry in philosophical discourse, this paper transfers the notion of this aesthetic category to pictorial art and examines evocations of the sublime by analyzing selected Ossianic artworks by J. M. W. Turner, John Sell Cotman, and Thomas Girtin. I ultimately argue that the discourse on blindness, along with the attempt to visualize the absence of sight, contributed to the development of new artistic strategies for representing the sublime in the visual arts.
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One of the defining expressions of the sublime in J. M. W. Turner’s work lies in his sustained engagement with the processes and meaning of history. The present paper argues that Turner’s distinctive late pictorial manner can be interpreted as expressing the ruptures and uncertainties that characterized the historical imagination of his time. It responded to a momentary perception of the historical field as unbounded and ultimately unrepresentable, before professional historians introduced more structured frameworks of interpretation in the second half of the nineteenth century. It also reflected a growing recognition of the disjunction between human temporalities and deep time against a backdrop of geological theories that suggested that the age of the earth much exceeded biblical chronologies. The paper focuses on the way these developments inform a conception of the ›historical sublime‹ that is specific to Turner, with a more specific emphasis on his late Venice paintings, which impart a disquieting view of history in which the human element is mostly transient, if not irrelevant.
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From Panoramas and Géricault’s »Horrid Facts« to Turner, »the magician« and »the simulated« Parthenon Sculptures
The essay traces the early history of a phenomenon with a long career—the emergence of an acute sensitivity towards the real as a unique tool for the reenergization of images and viewers. Starting from the middle of the eighteenth century, this appetite for ever stronger reality effects pushed discussions about the unique force of details to the forefront of visual practices and criticism. Such discussions did not only underline the extreme vitality of great numbers and profusion of details. They also developed firmly dynamic frameworks within which antithetical orders of detail opposed one another in single or various artworks and artistic styles, producing unusual levels and kinds of sensory intensity stressed by contemporaries. I suggest that Burke’s theory of the sublime is the earliest instance of this singular synergy, which I have thus called the sublime real. Through a series of art historical benchmarks—from Joseph Wright of Derby and panoramas to the Parthenon sculptures and Turner—this essay explores the opposite yet increasingly forceful models of processing and distributing details to reanimate the reality of viewing, as inextricable part of antinomian modernity and its contradictory art tactics.
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Nature is central to all the major treatises on the sublime, yet one aspect is curiously absent: animals. Encounters with dangerous animals can produce some of the most intense and unsettling experiences of the sublime, marked by deep cognitive and existential confusion. However, the animal sublime, has rarely been theorized as such. This article asks when it first emerged in art and aesthetics and why it came to full expression around 1800. It presents two episodes in the history of the animal sublime in the visual arts to throw some light on its much-increased presence around 1800. The first part considers the works of Rubens, because he transformed the depiction of animal combat, and was a huge influence on subsequent depictions of savage animals, but also because of his explorations of the borders between humans and other animals in his depictions of satyrs and Bacchus. They make something visible of the implicit drivers of the animal sublime, which operate largely outside, beyond, or in parallel to, artistic theory. In the second part, I will turn to developments around 1800 to argue that the renewal of theories of the sublime by Kant and his successors did not address the animal sublime because it concentrated on human, cognitive, and metaphysical self-preservation. Instead, I argue that the emergence of an animal sublime is due to developments in the life sciences, and was created by artists, not artistic theory or aesthetics.
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Painting the »rough« and »grandiose« Landscapes of Norway from Germany (1820s–1860s)
During the 19th century, several dozen painters trained in Germany turned away from the traditional trip to Italy and travelled to Norway instead. The Hardangerfjord and Sognefjord were their main destinations. Focusing on landscape painters such as Louis Gurlitt (trained in Hamburg and Copenhagen), Hans Fredrik Gude, and Georg Saal (both trained in Düsseldorf), we demonstrate how the idea of the sublime North was reshaped by the experience of the Norwegian landscapes and challenged by how these landscapes were received. The prejudiced yet striking words written by August Strindberg and the German art historian Richard Muther about the »grandiose« landscape paintings of the 1830s and 1840s force us to reconsider them. The effects of scale, panoramic views and the virtuosity of the brush then emerge as some of the resources that enabled Gurlitt, Gude and Saal to recast their experience of the Norwegian landscape in the dimensions of an easel painting, even if it meant abandoning the most anticipated mechanisms of the sublime.
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Sprachphilosophische Bemerkungen zu Klemperers LTI, Kapitel XIII
This paper comments on Victor Klemperer’s LTI, chapter XIII. First, the book is situated in an ensemble of simultaneously published works that were formative for the pre‑Federal-Republic »Aufarbeitung« of the Nazi past (thesis 1). Second, it is shown that Klemperer’s tripartite chapter on names in LTI lays out the general tendency of the Nazi ideologization of language in detail. Chapter XIII thus concludes with a remarkable punch line in which Klemperer’s onomasiological analysis ironically and tragically coincides with his personal testimony (thesis 2). Third, Klemperer’s rather unsystematic, phenomenon-oriented analysis of both proper and local names is supplemented by a necessary logical-semantic, linguistic-pragmatic, linguistic-anthropological and linguistic-theological perspective. It is argued for the thesis that LTI-ideologization of language, as described in detail by Klemperer, deliberately exploits the linguistic »magic« and illocutionary force of individual names and collective singulars. This seems also the reason why it was able to develop such a strong linguistic aftermath in everyday German language (thesis 3). The article concludes with a brief survey of past and present discussions on the possible proper names for the »event« of the murder of the European Jews itself. It regards the undecidedness between proper name and namelessness as not an inappropriate expression of the historical events for which the metonymical names »Auschwitz«, »Holocaust«, »Shoah«, and »Churban« stand (thesis 4).
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Ein fruchtbarer Ansatz für die deutschsprachige Musikwissenschaft?
For over 30 years, an interdisciplinary discourse has existed under the umbrella term ›trauma studies‹, in which traces of psychological trauma in literature and the arts are uncovered and analysed. In the Anglo-American research area, trauma studies have also long been practised in musicology—but it has not yet gained comparable attention in the German-speaking academic context. This article provides an overview of the development of medical-psychological psychotraumatology and the closely related field of trauma studies in subjects with a cultural studies orientation, before exploring the potential and limitations of trauma studies as a new research paradigm and finally outlining possible areas of application in musicology.
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