From Transcendence To The Mockery Of The Sublime?
Mark Rothko, Francis Bacon, and Damien Hirst
In America in the 1960s, the critic Robert Rosenblum, in his influential essay The Abstract Sublime (1961), made explicit the connections between the religious imperatives of Romanticism and the transcendental aspirations of abstract expressionism.
Drawing a comparison between paintings by the Romantic painters Caspar David Friedrich and J.M.W. Turner and the abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, Rosenblum claimed in his brilliant essay that,
‘…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; we can only submit to them in an act of faith and let ourselves be absorbed into their radiant depths’.
Following a detailed discussion of Newman, Rosenblum announces that while in ‘the Romantic era, the sublimities of nature gave proof of the divine’ in the mid-twentieth century ‘such supernatural experiences are conveyed through the abstract medium of paint alone’.
Even today there is an air of priestly reverence that still surrounds and permeates the paintings of Mark Rothko and the impression of the artist as, in essence, a…
