Turner and Morandi at the Met in N.Y.

Two versions of the sublime:
Turner and Morandi at the Met

ROBERT ZALLER

Two shows at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, one just arriving and the other about to leave, provide a fascinating illustration of the modern history of the sublime in art.

What's the sublime? My Webster's defines it as "tending to inspire awe, usually because of elevated quality (as of beauty, nobility, or grandeur) or transcendent excellence." That is, it is a human response to experience, whether presented by nature or manmade. The Webster scholiast hedges his bets, saying that the triggering stimulus "usually" possesses the qualities (subjective and contestable enough in themselves) that elicit the awestruck response. All that really means is that we're willing to impute these qualities to the stimulus; whether they're actually present, and what they finally represent, is left in the clouds.

We have plenty of testimony about the sublime in ancient literature. Adam and Eve experience it when the angel comes to drive them from paradise; Moses gets it even more at first hand when God appears in the burning bush, and Job when God decides to answer his petty concerns in person. And Greek tragedy, according to Aristotle, was meant to inspire catharsis through pity and terror.

The LSD generation looked in a bottle

But it wasn't until the Roman critic Longinus identified the sublime as a general category of experience that it began to acquire a cultural pedigree. Edmund Burke discussed it in a seminal essay in the mid-18th Century, and Immanuel Kant took the subject up in Germany— whose denizens, as Goethe had observed, seemed particularly susceptible to its effects.

Medieval mystics, of course, had turned the experience of Godhood into a deliberate quest, with ascetic exercises designed to stimulate the search. Their modern counterparts of the LSD generation presumably hoped to find something similar in a bottle. But the sublime encounter was by its nature an unexpected one; the element of the unforeseen, of being overtaken and (in Joyce Cary's phrase) "surprised by joy," was critical.

But could one cultivate the sublime, for example, by exposing oneself to imposing landscapes? Could one actually stimulate it by representing such landscapes pictorially— a secondhand version that could nonetheless in some respects improve on an untidy and unpredictable original?

There is in fact a tradition of sublime representation, some of it in medieval art (annunciation scenes would be a typical genre). But I would trace the modern tradition back to the 16th-Century Mannerists, particularly El Greco. By the age of the Baroque, sublime scenes were a commonplace, and they became the signature trope of Romanticism.

To inspire sensations of beauty

No one worked this trope harder than the Englishman Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), who, with his German contemporary Caspar David Friedrich, was the quintessential painter of the sublime. Turner meant not only to represent or evoke the sublime for viewers of his work, but also to directly provoke sublime experiences in them— to awe and overwhelm them by the force of his art. Not nature, but Turner himself, was to "inspire" sensations of beauty, nobility, and grandeur.

Turner traveled to scenic locales across England, Scotland, Wales, Switzerland, Germany and Italy, making sketches that he took home to rework into finished canvases in his studio, often years later. This was quite the opposite of Romantic immediacy, with its plein-air art. For Turner, the sublime was a matter of observation, reduction, and reconstruction— in short, of science, and it comes as no surprise that he was greatly interested in Goethe's theory of optics. It was also a matter of production and packaging, for the sublime was already an object of consumption, and Turner very cannily worked his corner of his trade.

The difference between Turner and any other careerist was genius. As the Met's big show— the largest ever of Turner on this side of the Atlantic— makes clear, he did indeed produce dazzling effects, some of them unsurpassed to the present day. Turner's contemporaries were often simply stumped by them, as the wildly disparate reaction to his work during his lifetime suggests. His utterly revolutionary late work— in which, like Goya, he seemed finally to be painting for no eye but his own— was dismissed by one critic as "the fruits of a diseased eye and reckless hand." But another comment on his 1843 watercolor of The Pass of St. Gotthard— a well-worked site of the sublime that Turner had painted before— came a lot closer to his intention: "Stones, road, and bridge are all here, but the mountains, compared with Turner's colossal conception, look pigmy and poor."

As this observation suggests, nature was already becoming less the source than the pretext for the sublime. One of the Met exhibition's scholarly strengths is the space it devotes to Turner's representations of the historical sublime— battle pieces such as Trafalgar and Waterloo, depictions of doomed empires such as Carthage, and the two works (both in the Philadelphia Museum of Art) depicting the fire that burned the Houses of Parliament in 1834. Only the first of these is on exhibit, but it's flanked by the series of sketches that Turner did for them, and which are more powerful and provocative (at least to my eye) than the finished canvases.

Morandi, the anti-Turner

The very notion of an historical sublime suggests that man has exceeded nature, and that he is more impressive to himself than any mere cosmos can be. Under such circumstances, we may well ask whether the concept of the sublime has any further relevance. The show of Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) that has just moved into the Met's Lehman wing offers not so much an answer to this question as a riposte.

Morandi was the anti-Turner; he never ventured far beyond his native Bologna, and, indifferent to reputation, he confined himself to a small circle of friends. His preferred subject was still life; he never approached the sea (Turner's great interest) and he almost never painted the human form. His landscapes are essentially projections of the still lifes, flat and, to the casual eye, unprepossessing, with a subtle but restricted, earth-toned palette.

Early in his career, Morandi sometimes used fluted and exotically shaped bottles and, in the early 1940s, seashells. But in his last decade he confined himself rigorously to the most ordinary jugs, bottles, bowls and boxes. Even these began gradually to dissolve into luminous swatches of color; and in the watercolors he painted at the very end of his life, outline too disappears, as if whittled down by an ever-encroaching space.

Making perceptual sense of existence

All of this might seem to have little to do with Turner's heroic sublimity (though the engulfing spatiality of his late works suggests something similar), but I would argue that Morandi's doggedly modest and self-effacing art represents a way of reinstating the sublime as a sense of the mystery that enfolds us, and the difficulty posed not only by the humblest representation but by the very idea that we can construe an object world at all, and make the least perceptual sense of existence.

The major tradition of the modern pictorial sublime expresses itself, of course, in Abstract Expressionism, with its programmatic renunciation of objects in favor of the artist's unfettered sensibility. I think it's significant that Morandi never gave up on the object, and never stopped interrogating the deeply puzzling idea that things exist.

In explaining his own refusal to accept abstraction, Morandi commented: "I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see." To give body to this abstraction, to attend not to nature's grand spectacles but to its quotidian miracle, may be the true adventure of the sublime.