scholarly journals Spiritual ascent and the sublime in the abstract art of Kandinsky and Reinhardt

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-159
Author(s):  
Una Popovic
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
Abstract Painting ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Arts

This paper is about the possible relation between aesthetic experience of the sublime, as presented in On Sublime by Pseudo-Longinus, and aesthetic experience of abstract art according to W. Kandinsky and A. Reinhardt. The analysis confirms the complementarity of Pseudo-Loninus?s description of the sublime and the idea of spiritual ascent provoked by the arts, which is characteristic for both of these painters. The analysis of their writings also points towards the necessary relation between abstract painting and spiritual ascent. In the final section of the paper, this idea is taken over as an impulse for reconsidering of the aesthetical category of the sublime. Finally, resulting conclusion leads towards the legitimizing of the (new) revitalization of the sublime, on the grounds of the impulses coming from the arts.

The New Reality in Art and Science

1969 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 385-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. M. Hafner
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Public Attitude ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
Free Expression ◽  
Abstract Painting ◽  
The Real ◽  
Conventional View ◽  
Modern School ◽  
The Arts

We are often told, and it is easy to believe, that the images of abstract art are not drawn from the real world. In the most conventional view of the modern school, abstract painting is a search for free expression of the artist's own vision. The non-representational painter works as he pleases and is pleased by little that he sees. A humorous drawing in a sophisticated magazine shows a studio full of wild canvases, with the artist gazing through the window at a magnificent sunset. He says to a friend, ‘Yes, old man, I admit that it's beautiful. Sometimes I'm sorry it's not the sort of thing I do.’ Authority for the establishment of a public attitude that makes such a joke possible is to be found in the writings of many critics and in the words of artists themselves. Harold Rosenberg: ‘The big moment [in art] came when it was decided to paint—just to paint. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from value, political, aesthetic, moral.’ André Malraux: ‘What then was painting becoming, now that it no longer imitated or transfigured? Simply—painting.’ Sheldon Cheney: ‘I cannot do better, in trying to help you to an understanding of modernism, than to point out the devastating effect the realistic movement had on the arts as a whole.‘ Piet Mondrian: ‘In order that art … should not represent relations with the natural aspect of things, the law of the denaturalization of matter is of fundamental importance.’ Clive Bell: ‘Creating a work of art is so tremendous a business that it leaves no leisure for catching likenesses.’ Kasimir Malevich: ‘From the supremist point of view, the appearances of natural objects are in themselves meaningless. … The representation of an object … is something that has nothing to do with art.’ Laurence Binyon, in 1911: ‘The theory that art is, above all things, imitative and representative, no longer holds the field with thinking minds.’ Ortega y Gasset: ‘Painting completely reversed its function and, instead of putting us within what is outside, endeavored to pour out upon the canvas what is within: ideal invented objects.’

Schopenhauer and the Paradox of the Sublime

2020 ◽  
pp. 237-255
Author(s):  
Bart Vandenabeele
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Aesthetic Object ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
The Aesthetic

Schopenhauer explores the paradoxical nature of the aesthetic experience of the sublime in a richer way than his predecessors did by rightfully emphasizing the prominent role of the aesthetic object and the ultimately affirmative character of the pleasurable experience it offers. Unlike Kant, Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the sublime does not appeal to the superiority of human reason over nature but affirms the ultimately “superhuman” unity of the world, of which the human being is merely a puny fragment. The author focuses on Schopenhauer’s treatment of the experience of the sublime in nature and argues that Schopenhauer makes two distinct attempts to resolve the paradox of the sublime and that Schopenhauer’s second attempt, which has been neglected in the literature, establishes the sublime as a viable aesthetic concept with profound significance.

What the Climber Saw: Strauss's Alpensinfonie and the Romantic Tradition of Nature Representation

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
David Larkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Emotional Reactions ◽  
Tone Poem ◽  
Peak Response ◽  
Landscape Features ◽  
Musical Compositions ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
The Relationship

Initially criticized for its naïve representation of landscape features, Strauss's Alpensinfonie (1915) has in recent years been reinterpreted by scholars as a deliberate challenge to metaphysics, a late outgrowth of the composer's fascination with Nietzsche. As a consequence, the relationship between Strauss's tone poem and earlier artworks remains underexplored. Strauss in fact relied heavily on long-established tropes of representing mountain scenes, and when this work is situated against a backdrop of similarly themed Romantic paintings, literature, travelogues and musical compositions, many points of resemblance emerge. In this article, I focus on how human responses to mountains are portrayed within artworks. Romantic-era reactions were by no means univocal: mountains elicited overtly religious exhalations, atheistic refutations of all supernatural connections, pantheistic nature-worship, and also artworks which engaged with nature purely in an immanent fashion. Strauss uses a range of strategies to distinguish the climber from the changing scenery he traverses. The ascent in the first half of Eine Alpensinfonie focuses on a virtuoso rendition of landscape in sound, interleaved with suggestions as to the emotional reactions of the protagonist. This immanent perspective on nature would accord well with Strauss's declared atheism. In the climber's response to the sublime experience of the peak, however, I argue that there are marked similarities to the pantheistic divinization of nature such as was espoused by the likes of Goethe, whom Strauss admired enormously. And while Strauss's was an avowedly godless perspective, I will argue in the final section of the article that he casts the climber's post-peak response to the sublime encounter in a parareligious light that again has romantic precedents. There are intimations of romantic transcendence in the latter part of the work, even if these evaporate as the tone poem, and the entire nineteenth-century German instrumental tradition it concludes, fades away into silence.

scholarly journals Foruroligende etik i Heinrich von Kleists »Michael Kohlhaas«

2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (106) ◽  
pp. 70-95
Author(s):  
Maria Jørgsen
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Central Place ◽  
The Self ◽  
Kantian Ethics ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Louis Xvi ◽  
Kant's Ethics

Disquieting Ethics in »Michael Kohlhaas« by Heinrich von Kleist:This article argues that the concept of evil takes a central place in the exploration of the Kantian ethics in Heinrich von Kleist’s novella »Michael Kohlhaas«.Maria Jørgensen argues that not only is the famous duty to which Kohlhaas finds himself obliged conceived in accordance with Kant’s ethics of duty, but also the description of Kohlhaas’ subjectivity in general is constructed by means of Kantian terms. Kleist’s text makes use of concepts such as duty, freedom, pathology, universality and the sublime in order to construct Kohlhaas as an inherently decentered subject. Furthermore Jørgensen argues that the emptying of the concept of the Good in Kantian ethics surfaces in Kleist’s novella as a hitherto unnoticed tendency to a certain tautologisation in Kohlhaas’ qualitative judgments.In the final section of the article the evil act in »Michael Kohlhaas« as an act of freedom, »Aktus der Freiheit«, is investigated with a departure in the Kantian concept of diabolical evil in Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft. If Kohlhaas’ first attempt to act ethically is contaminated by the self-interest which sticks to his initial duty to secure redress for the wrongs done to him and his fellow citizens by the Junker von Tronka, his last act of refusing to negotiate with the Elector of Saxony functions as a purely ethical act in Kantian terms. Kohlhaas’ act can be seen as an ethical act as it neglects the subject’s pathology, which according to Kant can only be done by an act of reason. Furthermore the act is in keeping with the criteria which Kant, according to Alenka Zupančič, delivers in the famous footnote on the execution of Louis XVI in Metaphysik der Sitten: The act is characterized by being purely formal, it arises from a maxim, and it is first of all an act of freedom. This article thus argues that »Michael Kohlhaas« evidently contains a fulfilled ethical act in Kantian terms, but that this act must be found in quite another place than previously assumed.

Empathy and Interdisciplinarity

2017 ◽  
pp. 91-124
Author(s):  
Anne Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Critical Point ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Third Culture ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Two Cultures

This chapter asks how, in the context of the medical humanities, we might productively think across disciplinary domains and boundaries. It draws on Ian McEwan’s Saturday as a focus for positioning the question of interdisciplinarity within a specifically British context. The first section, ‘The two cultures’, surveys the ‘two cultures’ debate and its legacy and discusses the appearance of Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Dover Beach’ at a critical point of the novel. In the second section, ‘A third culture?’, the focus turns to McEwan’s engagement with popular science discourses and argues that it underpins a discernible conservatism in his work. The final section, ‘An unbounded view’, reads Saturday against the grain to argue that, in McEwan’s treatment of dementia a more positive, open-ended model for thinking across the arts and sciences might be seen to emerge.

The American Pastoral and the Conquest of Space

Terraforming ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 56-97
Author(s):  
Chris Pak
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Agricultural Production ◽  
Final Section ◽  
American South ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
Moral Systems ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
The American South

This chapter analyses the American Pastoral in the first terraforming boom of the 1950s. Referencing Ernest J. Yanarella’s discussion of terraforming in The Cross, the Plow and the Skyline: Contemporary Science Fiction and the Ecological Imagination, this chapter begins with the image of the pioneer farmer that attracted westward expansion and its obverse, the portrayal of dystopian societies where the promise of the pastoral is co-opted. This section recalls the “Garden of the Chattel” image of American colonialism, in which pastoral themes sublimate and so conceal the historic fact of slavery that underlay agricultural production in the American South. The final section considers the propensity to extend human moral systems to aliens and how the pastoral and elements of the sublime converge to offer counter-narratives highlighting the ecological devastation caused by the human expansion into space.

The Philosophical Enquiry, theories of the sublime and the sister arts tradition

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hélène Ibata
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Verbal Representation ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Sister Arts ◽  
Isolated Point

This first chapter emphasises what Burke’s Enquiry owes to the existing discourse on the sublime (to Longinus and Addison in particular), in order to highlight its innovations, more specifically its aesthetically stimulating irrationalism and sensualism. It then focuses on Burke’s unique distinction between visual and verbal representation, his rejection of their common mimetic basis, and his argument that only the non-mimetic, suggestive medium of the verbal arts, language, may impart the sublime. At a time when parallels between the arts prevailed, this was an isolated point of view, which introduced a new paragone situation, and a challenge to visual artists. The end of the chapter examines a number of competing theories of the sublime that were compatible with painting, which makes it possible to enhance the specificity of the Enquiry and the paradox of its appeal to visual artists.

The Cognitive Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience

2021 ◽  
pp. 36-40
Author(s):  
Marcos Nadal ◽  
Marcus Pearce
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Cognitive Neuroscience ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Biological Mechanisms ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Scientific Disciplines ◽  
Aims And Scope

In the paper discussed in this chapter, the authors aimed to develop a consensus conceptual framework for neuroaesthetics. They wanted to present a joint vision of what they believed neuroaesthetics was about. The authors aspired to outline the fields’ aims and scope in a way that would accommodate most researchers, to answer some of the criticisms that had been leveled at the field, and to show how much the field could contribute to scientific disciplines, like psychology and neuroscience, and to humanist disciplines, like philosophy, the arts, and anthropology. One of the main points made was the importance of distinguishing between a cognitive neuroscience of aesthetics concerned with the biological mechanisms involved in aesthetic experience of all sorts of domains (not just art) and a cognitive neuroscience of art, which investigates the biological mechanisms involved in creating and appreciating art (not just aesthetically).

Mondrian, Piet (1872–1944)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Jones
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The World ◽  
Geometric Abstraction ◽  
Early Influence ◽  
De Stijl ◽  
Made In

The Dutch artist Piet Mondrian was one of the pioneers of abstract art, producing some of the most radical painting of the 20th century. The early influence of Cubism led him to adopt a semi-abstract linear style, as in the paintings of trees and buildings he made in Paris and Holland over 1912–1914. During the inter-war years, Mondrian developed an esoteric theory of art and an austere style of geometric abstraction he called Neo-Plasticism. In this work, for which he is best known, Mondrian abandoned all reference to nature and aimed to express a higher reality beyond the world of appearances. He reduced his painting to basic elements and their interplay: black horizontal and vertical lines, planes of primary colors, grey and white as exemplified in Composition C (III) with Red, Yellow and Blue from 1935. His final paintings, made in America in the early 1940s, are characterized by vibrant grids animated by small colored squares reflecting an interest in the syncopated rhythms of popular music and urban life. Mondrian was also a consummate draughtsman, prolific writer and member of the influential De Stijl [The Style] group, which sought to reform the arts and society.

Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West by C. Stephen Jaeger (review)

Arthuriana ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-76
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen
Keyword(s):  
The West ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Arts
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