New York—The idea of the “sublime” in art has had a tortuous path up to the present. Use of the idea has come and gone, but its story could begin with the 19th century German painter Caspar David Friedrich. This painter, a product of the era of European Romanticism, is a topic this season since he is a centerpiece of “Rooms With a View,” an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
At the exhibit, a single, small Friedrich painting dominates an entire wall: a woman looking out a window, her austere room filled with an eerie green light. Hanging on the wall by itself, this painting is as lonely as the mood Friedrich often tried to create in his romantic paintings of the early 1800s.
Titled “Woman at a Window” (1822), this painting is a rare interior image produced by Friedrich. He is famous for evocative landscapes that contrast a pensive individual, often with back turned, against a panorama of nature, often awesome (terrifying, that is). One thinks of his painting of the gentleman on the alpine peak, or the sailing ship smashed by a gigantic ice flow. Placing a human being amid the vast powers of nature is what stirs the feelings of the “sublime,” a moment of awesome fear that is deeply satisfying.
“Woman at a Window” is hardly terrifying in this sense. Even so, it can evoke the sublime by showing us how the room-contained life of a person looks out on a vast, unknown world. Added to this is the drama of light, which creates a mood of foreboding or mystery.
Most of the works in this Met exhibition—31 small paintings and 26 works on paper—come from a wide array of artists in the first quarter of the 1800s, when Romanticism prevailed in the arts and letters from Germany to France and Scandinavia, even as the Napoleonic wars filled the continent with travail. Perhaps the interior of a room seemed a particularly safe haven, with a window onto an out-of-control world.
Windows have a psychological effect at any time. The window takes in the distant world. The exhibit quotes Novalis (1798), the German philosopher of Romanticism, to suggest why we like these paintings: “Everything at a distance turns to poetry.” The window lets in light, which in turn signals times and moods. For the artist, the window scene produces a “picture within a picture,” which offers clever effects. In general, the makers of these window scenes have indeed made the visual effect the entire import of the picture.
Accordingly, the titles can be hum-drum without harm, from “The Family Circle” to “In Front of the Mirror” and “Man at his Desk.” They are scenes we have all known in life, especially on days when what is seen out the window creates anticipation in us, even a bit of anxiety or mystery. Images that try to amplify this window effect seem to have begun with drawings by Friedrich. He went on to landscapes, where the “sublime” is more evident: the scene of an abbey ruin in a snowy, foggy graveyard, for example. But that has not discounted windows as a source of similar moods.
The sublime can go in and out of season, as illustrated by the reputation of Friedrich. Over the years, his works fell into disrepute along with Romanticism. His landscapes looked saccharine to the new “realism” in art. His use of Christian symbols (he was a Lutheran) made critics chafe. And when the Nazis liked him—his images of dark Germanic forests—it tarred his legacy to no end.
Of course, history passes by and artists have revivals, as Friedrich certainly has. So has the idea of the sublime, a topic taken up by the modern abstract painters in the late 1940s. The abstract minimalist painter Barnett Newman, for example, argued that Western art had been futile in trying to find “beauty” by imitating or distorting nature. The goal of art is to find the sublime, Newman said, and other artists, such as Mark Rothko, agreed that the sublime comes only in pure abstraction, the encounter with the absolute relations of color and shape on a canvas.
Not everyone agrees with Newman, of course. But at least we now have an expanding notion of the sublime. In literature, the characters in Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick found it sublime to risk death in a vast ocean hunting a giant whale. For Friedrich, it was standing helpless on an alpine peak. Fans of Rothko paintings, needing no fathomless ocean or dizzying heights, call his floating color effects on canvas no less sublime.
The sublime is something terrible that makes us feel good, or deeply alive. There is no shortage of such real-world events, such as tsunamis, to evoke the terrible and the fateful in human experience. So it is a wonderful thing that artist have tried to created the sublime on canvas, safely, with as little as a scene looking out a window.
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