The Sublime in Rothko, Newman and Still
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THE SUBLIME IN ROTHKO, NEWMAN AND STILL Cliff Getty McMahon A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of St Andrews 1998 Full metadata for this item is available in St Andrews Research Repository at: http://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/ Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10023/11002 This item is protected by original copyright The Sublime in Rothko, Newman, and Still Cliff Getty McMahon Ph.D. Art History 11115197 I, Cliff Getty McMahon, hereby certify that this thesis, which is approximately 90,000 words in length, has been written by me, that it is a record of work carried out by me and that it has not been submitted in any previous application for a higher degree. Date: 2 1/4/4",\..._. /q17- Signature of Candidate: I was admitted as a research student under Ordinance No. 12 in October 1993 and as a candidate for the degree of Ph.D. in September, 1993; the higher study for which this is a record was carried out in the University of St.. Andrews between October 1992 and September 1995.. 1 1 Date: d-1 J fl Signature of Candidate: In submitting this thesis to the University of St. Andrews I understand that I am giving permission for it to be made available for use in accordance with the regulations of the University Library for the time being in force, subject to any copyright vested in the work not being affected thereby. I also understand that the title and abstract will be published, and that a copy of the work may be made and supplied to any bona fide library of research worker. Date: 0114 JA.44. 'I et "1-. Signature of Candidate: I hereby certify that the candidate has fulfilled the conditions appropriate for the degree of Ph.D. in the University of St. Andrews and that the candidate is qualified to submit this thesis in application for that degree. Date: %2 igq -7- Signature of Supervisor: THE SUBLIME IN ROTHKO, NEWMAN, AND STILL McMahon, Cliff Getty, Ph.D. University of St. Andrews, 1998. 318 pp. An important body of literature has accumulated (both primary and secondary sources) which necessitates that Rothko, Newman, and Still be placed in the tradition of the sublime. In attempting this task, a background is established by a detailed summary of classical theory of the sublime in Longinus, Burke, Kant, and Nietzsche, followed by detailed summaries of major recent sublimicist theory by Weiskel, Crowther, Lyotard, and Ferguson. Also, key ideas of Sartre and Jung are treated in order to round out the proper ideational context for a sublimicist analysis of these three painters. From this foundation, a working theory of the sublime is developed. Next, the painters' crucial theoretic statements are analyzed for their relevance to the sublime, and their programs and specific works are characterized in relation to theory of the sublime, and in relation to their treatments in criticism. The last two chapters treat two crucial contexts in which Rothko, Newman, and Still are situated: the historically accumulated American tradition of the sublime in art and literature; and the general European context of modernism and postmodernism. Throughout the study, it is argued that various kinds of transcendence validate a set of various major modes of the sublime: the ideational, religious, moral, Burkean-Gothic, Kantian, Nietzschean, romantic, existential, Jungian-mythic, ontological, noble, and the sublime of light/color, along with negative modes such as the comic, the ironic, the counter, the mock, and the merely rhetorical. It is argued, finally, that sublimicism will continue to be attractive for conservative, moderate, and radical points of view, that theory of the sublime has on-going power and validity into the future, and that between positive and negative modes, the positive will probably continue to dominate. Preface I wish to record my deep appreciaton for the officers of the University of St. Andrews who gave me the opportunity to come from Kentucky to pursue the research doctorate in Scotland. I also wish to thank Dr. Paul Crowther for his most kind and most intelligent direction of my studies, for opening to me the great richness and value of the concept of the sublime, and for encouraging me to investigate the sublimicist vision at the heart of American abstract expressionism. I wish, too, to thank Dr. Matthew Rampley for his valuable suggestions which improved the content, focus, and wording of my study, and to thank similarly my St. Andrews committee. I wish also to add thanks to my parents, William Eugene McMahon and Dorothy Phipps McMahon, for their strong support and encouragement. And I wish to record my gratitude to Dawn Waddel, who watched over my progress and helped me in many ways. CONTENTS Preface Introduction 1 Part One: Background Theorists of the Sublime 1.Four Seminal Theorists of the Sublime 12 2. Four Recent Theorists of the Sublime 48 3. Indirect Sublimicism in Sartre and Jung 78 Part Two: The Sublime in Rothko, Newman, and Still 4. The Sublime in Rothko 98 5. The Sublime in Newman 141 6. The Sublime in Still 184 Part Three: American and European Contexts for Rothko, Newman, and Still 7. The Tradition of the American Literary and Painterly Sublime 217 8. A Comment on Modernism and Postmodernism as Contexts 232 Conclusion 247 Notes 254 Bibliography 304 Introduction There are good reasons to attempt a detailed study of the sublime in Rothko, Newman, and Still. In 1961 Robert Rosenblum, fourteen years before completing his Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition, published a brief essay entitled "The abstract sublime," in which he claimed that Rothko, Newman, Still, and Pollock were inheritors of the traditions of the sublime as established by Longinus, Burke, Reynolds, Kant, Diderot, and Delacroix, and that in the early nineteenth century, "the Sublime provided a flexible semantic container for the murky new Romantic experiences of awe, terror, boundlessness and divinity."1 Of a Rothko painting Rosenblum declares: "Like the mystic trinity of sky, water and earth that, in Friedrich and Turner, appears to emanate from an unseen source, the floating, horizontal tiers of veiled light in the Rothko seem to conceal a total remote presence that we can only intuit and never fully grasp. These infinite, glowing voids carry us beyond reason to the sublime."2 Rosenblum observes that painters may approach the sublime through either a calm and static mode or a turbulent dynamic mode; that the scale of large paintings can contribute to the sublime effect; that Newman sought a horizon orientation suggesting infinity; that Newman's Viz Hemicus Sublimis puts us before a terrifying yet exhilarating void; that a new myth concept is in the air because the large canvases of Newman, Still, Rothko, and Pollock "might well be interpreted as a post-World-Wax-II myth of Genesis"; and that now, the sublime subjects of the romantic era are given a new treatment "today, such supernatural experiences are conveyed through the abstract medium of paint alone."3 Rosenblum concludes, "In its heroic search for a private myth to embody the sublime power of the supernatural, the art of Still, Rothko, Pollock and 2 Newman should remind us once more that the disturbing heritage of the Romantics has not yet been exhausted."4 These directions opened by Rosenblum are indeed crucial for understanding the abstract expressionists, and a strong tradition has developed to group Rothko, Newman, and Still into a set, leaving out Pollock partly due to closer personal relations between the three, and due also to Pollock's having moved away from abstraction in his late works. Two years after Rosenblum's article, Lawrence Alloway published in 1963 his more incisive treatment, "The American Sublime," focused on Rothko, Newman, and Still and the abstract style they all developed in the late forties. Alloway properly observes that Newman's ideograph concept applied to all three painters, necessitating that any mythical content would now have to be some kind of "deposit of myth" on the minimal abstract forms (which were no longer signs) whose meanings could best be approached "with the aesthetics of the sublime." Alloway treats Newman's essay of 1948 "The Sublime is Now," probably the central text demanding that Rothko, Newman, and Still be connected to theory of the sublime. We know that in preparing his statement, Newman reviewed the concept of the sublime in Longinus, Burke, and Kant, using their differentiation between the sublime and the beautiful to support his claim that the abstract expressionists had set aside beauty to seek the exaltation of sublime subjects, as they also set aside memory, nostalgia, and older myths to reach a contemporary base in which the content of a new mythical treatment was to be the existential self, with its contemporary feelings.5 Alloway correctly observes that several features of Burke's theory of the sublime (such as the value of strong emotion, dark colors, terror, great size, voids, and silence) should be connected to the three painters, but beyond any specific correspondences to the eighteenth century was the deeper relation—the "sublime as powerful domination, sublime as absolute emotion, sublime as exaltation." Alloway adds, again shrewdly, that the new American sublime will see the artist himself as hero in a new moral drama seriously instrumental, will reflect humanized values, will produce minimal abstract works as a total unity rather than a collection of parts, all this in search of sublime presences that are unknown, shrouded in mystery, making each painting "the image of a higher, hidden reality." Alloway further recognizes that in this 3 abstract American sublime light and color will be agencies for sublime content in the manner of "Neo-Platonic and medieval mystics," and that Rothko may have been influenced by Bonnard's use of strong light, redirecting the light toward the sublime by using "veils" for the mystery, as recommended by the Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola.