Cathy's Art Diary

Comprehensive online course from the National Gallery looked at the concept of 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...