In recent months a multi-voiced discussion has opened on the death of art criticism which would be the corollary of the death of contemporary art or its cause. A collection of essays, edited by Vincenzo Trione (Armi Impropere, Johan & Levi) following a conference attended by the best voices of our times, reawakens the nostalgia of the great critics of the past such as Roberto Longhi, Lionello Venturi, Francesco Arcangeli , Cesare Brandi and, going back to more recent years, Emilio Villa, Filippo Menna, Germano Celant. However, it is a booklet also published by Johan & Levi, the only Italian publishing house dedicated to art criticism, which sharpens the feeling of the end of times since in a few pages the best, unthinkable today, of twentieth-century reflection on the crucial theme of the sublime. The volume (The abstract sublime, pages 114 euro 20) is in fact an invention of Pietro Conte, professor of Aesthetics at the State University of Milan, of whom we remember an interesting study on hyperrealism (Quodlibet 2014), which does not only introduces the vexed question, beautiful vs sublime, starting from a skirmish between Erwin Panofsky and Barnett Newman, but also collects and translates the texts, practically unpublished in Italy, by Robert Rosenblum, Max Imdahl, Jean-François Lyotard, Gottfried Boehm, Arthur Danto, scholars who, between 1960 and 2000, specifically analyzed some of Newman’s paintings: in particular Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-1951) now in the collection at the Moma in New York, and Who’s afraid III (1967) exhibited at Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Barnett Newman in one of his writings from 1948, in which, obviously, Longinus, Burke and Kant were cited, had theorized the pursuit of the sublime as the supreme goal of the artist. Newman decisively denied that art should deal with the question of beauty, indeed the desire to destroy beauty characterized the modern; instead it was necessary to concentrate on the idea of the sublime. Modern European art, even the avant-garde, even abstractionism, incapable of cutting ties with the Renaissance, had not been able, according to him, to get rid of the burden of beauty and it was therefore up to the Americans, in particular the abstractionists , free from the legacies of continental culture and the obsession with images, to definitively complete this sort of emancipation. To do this, in the years following this germinal intuition, Newman would paint a series of large canvases with a specific intent.
Let’s make a quick aside: there is no need to dwell on the founding beauty-sublime dichotomy that has innervated Western art since its inception. On the one hand there is the ideal of beauty that art pursues, as Wilhelm Worringer would explain, when the artist and the civilization of which he is part are in a happy concomitance with reality. Beauty would, ultimately, be an adaequatio rei et intellectus. The sublime is different, a feeling that emanates from man’s inadequacy towards the surrounding world, that is, understanding of his own finiteness in relation to the eternal, and which Burke defines as delightfull horror: a delightful horror, a pleasure mixed with suffering, which it comes when we watch a shipwreck from the shore, feeling, or rather imagining feeling, the terror of those on the ship, but being safe on the beach and not really in danger, we can enjoy the show. Kant in the Critique of Judgment writes that «the beauty of nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in limitation; the sublime, on the other hand, can also be found in a shapeless object, insofar as in it, or caused by it, an unlimitedness is represented”; and again «in beauty, reason and sensitivity agree, and it is only by virtue of this agreement that beauty attracts us. In the sublime, however, reason and sensitivity do not agree, and it is precisely this contrast that captures our soul». It could therefore be deduced that figuration refers to beauty, as a composite of forms, while abstraction, as deformity, to the sublime; the first comforts us, the second shocks and amazes us; the first is pleasant, the second terrible; the first generates a placid feeling, the second an exhilarating pathos.
Given this, let’s ask ourselves how Newman believes he can achieve the sublime? First of all by painting large canvases, over five meters wide and two meters high. Second, forcing the viewer to observe them up close and not, as would seem logical, from afar, essentially proposing a multifocal, anti-compositional all-over, obtained not through the disorienting interweaving of lines, à la Pollock, but rather through colour: the field iconic expands thanks to color and transforms into a totality. Third, by spreading the red color so that it is perceived in itself, in its fullness and energy, and not as a medium towards something else, so that the user is absorbed by the chromatic phenomenon, by its unsettling continuum.
These three elements (size, limitlessness, colour) prevent the eye from fully grasping the work which becomes elusive, the spectator is shipwrecked in the color without any possibility of grip, and ends up being swallowed up and sucked into the work; and precisely this formless and immeasurable triggers the experience of the sublime which is always a feeling of loss and at the same time of elevation. But while in Romantic art, we think of the Wanderer in front of a sea of fog by Caspar David Friedrich, we can only empathize with the subjects depicted, in the case of Newman and his associates (for example Rothko) we are the wanderers and «we do not there is no mediation, no reassuring distance between us and the overwhelming power that appears before us”, it is we who can experience the negative pleasure of the sublime.
Newman, ultimately, is interested in “what to paint”, not how but what is painted, his are not images (pictures), but paintings (paintings): an image presents something other than itself, a painting instead presents itself. Anojectual painting, however, is not devoid of content, rather it makes it possible to present a content without the limits of any image. The purpose therefore of Newman’s painting consists in making us live an experience that goes beyond those we are used to: the spectator must feel that the image calls him directly into question and has him in his power. Ultimately, the user must also enjoy his own enjoyment and therefore himself, reaching the point of experiencing absolute emotion.
To conclude: if the European abstractionism of the first avant-garde had strong spiritual and theosophical (esoteric, even spiritualistic) connotations, that of American origin is more interested in transcendence: thinking of the Jewish culture from which Newman comes, perhaps one pursues the harshness of God of the Old Testament, unnameable and terrible, ultimately sublime.
