La Bellesa

580

The lndividual and the Social
üi

chronic, and hitherto justified,, pessimism about the prospects of American art, and hope for much more rhan we dared hope for in the past. It is not be--vond possibilit-v that the cubist tradition may enjo¡, a new efflorescence in this country. Meanwhile the fact remains that it is in decline at the moment.

ll

Barnett Newrnan (1905-1970) 'TheSublirne is Now'

Newman here echoes the conclusron of the previous text. His essay is symptomatic of the American painters' desire to distinguish their work from European forms of abstract art. For all their apparent social marginality, the American avant-garde artists saw themselves as historically and geographically situated in such a manner that the initiative for the development of modernurino* lay with them. Originally published inTiger's Eye,uol' 1, no. 6,

December 1948, pp. 51-3.

The invention of beauty by the Greeks, that is,, their postulate of beauty as an ideal, has been the bugbear of European art and European aesthetic philosophies. Man's natural desire in the arts to express his relation to the Absolute became identified and confused with the absolutisms of perfecrcreations - rvith the fetish of quality - so that the European artist has been continually involved in the moral struggle between notions of beauty and the desire for sublimitv. The confusion can be seen sharplv in Longinus, who despite his knorvledge of nonGrecian art, could not extricate himself from his platonic attitudes concerning beautv, from the problem of value,, so that to him the feeling ofexaltation became s.Ynonvmous with the perfect staremenr - an objective rhetoric. But the confusion continu.ed on in Kant,, with his theor-v of transcendent perception, that the phenomenon is more than phenomenon; and with Hegel, who built a theory of beauty, in rvhich the sublime is at the bottom of a structure of kinds of beautyr, thus creating a range of hierarchies in a set of relationshipsto reality that is completell' formal. (Only Edmund Burke insisted on a

separation. Even though it is an unsophisticated and primitive one, it is a clear one and it would be interesting to knorv how closelv the Surrealists were influenced by it. To me Burke reads like a Surrealist manual.) The confusion in philosophv is but the reflection of the struggle that makes up the histor.v of the plasticarts. To us todav there is no doubt that Greek art is an insistence that the sense of exaltation is to be found in perfect form, that exaltation is the same as ideal sensibitity, in contrast, for example, with the Gothic or Baroque, in which the sublime consists of a desire to destroy form; where form can be formless. The climax in this struggle betw-een beautv and the sublime can best beexamined inside the Renaissance and the reaction later against the Renaissance that is known as modern art. In the Renaissance the revival of the ideals of Greek beauty' set the artists the task of rephrasing an accepted Christ legend in terms of absolute beaut--v as against the original Gothic ecstacv over the legend's evocation of the Absolute. And the Renaissance artists dressed up the traditionalecstacv in an even older tradition - that

of eloquent nuditv or rich velvet. It rvas no idle quip that moved Michelangelo to call himself a sculptor rather than a painter, for he knerv that onlf in his sculpture could the desire for the grand srarement of Christian sublimitv be reached. He could despise with eood reason the beautv-cults rvho felt the Christ drama on a stage of rich velvets andur Jo

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