The Sublime
This four-week course was led by Matthew Morgan, Director of Turner’s House and covered the philosophy of the Sublime and how that is seen through 18th century landscape and contemporary art. I always forget that the meaning of Sublime has changed over the years and originally is about the beauty that comes from something which induces fear and awe.
This was a wide-ranging subject and Morgan cleverly used Caspar-David Friedrich’s “Wander above the Sea of Fog” from 1818, shown here, as a punctuation point in most of the lectures as well as the current Kehinde Wiley exhibition which includes a contemporary response to that work. We compared the earlier period when that sense of awe came with a sense of God and the spiritual to contemporary art where we still see the Sublime but science has replaced the divine as the source of awe.
We also talked about how the Sublime can be used to consider contemporary issues both now and in history. I particularly liked the section on Thomas and William Daniell, artists who travelled to India in the 18th century and whose work reflects colonial ideals of the time. A lot of the contemporary work we looked at reflected ideas of climate change as the source of fear.
It was a nice touch to have two guest speakers. Simon Morley, artist and an author of a book on the subject, clearly outlined different sources of the fear and awe in Sublime contemporary art and Key Jo Lee, from the Cleveland Museum of Art, the role of black figures in the Sublime.
This course has left me with lots of ideas to explore and new ways of thinking about contemporary art. With hindsight I would have liked a bit more on the 18th century and the techniques used represent some of the vast landscapes we looked at.
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