Sublime Abstraction Organized by Heather James Fine Art Palm Desert, California November 25, 2017 – May 31, 2018
SUBLIME ABSTRACTION By Hayden Hunt
Painting becomes sublime when the artist transcends his personal anguish, when he projects in the midst of a shrieking world an expression of living and its end that is silent and ordered. Robert Motherwell
Heather James Fine Art is pleased to present Sublime Abstraction, an exhibition that explores enduring artistic concerns with the transcendent and the ineffable, the awe-inspiring and the exalted. While the concept of the sublime originated in antiquity, the term provides us with a useful vocabulary to describe the awe and wonder experienced when abstract works of art truly move us. Though the paintings and sculptures shown here differ significantly in subject matter, style, and technique, together they present us with questions about both the nature of art and the nature of the universe by transcending the materials from which they were made. These works of art have the power to excite, to inspire, to transform their viewers through the visual language of abstraction and the simple act of viewing. The concept of “the sublime” emerged in the first century texts of the
Greco-Roman rhetorician Longinus, whose text “On the Sublime” was first published in translation in 1554. Longinus describes the sublime as a feeling which comes in response to the work of great writers and poets who possess “a certain loftiness and excellence of language” that “does not convince the reason of the reader, but takes him out of himself.” When we are exposed to the sublime, Longinus argues, our reaction is not governed by logic; it acts upon us as an “imperious and irresistible force” that strikes us with the “vividness of a lightning-flash.” Though Longinus’s description of the sublime and critiques of his work circulated around Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was the work of two writers, Edmund Burke (1729-1797) and Emmanuel Kant (17241804), who imbued the concept of the sublime with its modern resonance. While Longinus saw Homer and Sappho’s poetry as inciting sublime feelings, Burke and Kant extended their use of the term beyond rhetoric and into the field of aesthetics. Their treatises created a vocabulary for describing all kinds of experiences as “sublime.” During an era of European exploration and conquest, the concept of sublimity was used to describe experiences that resulted from observing the wonders of the natural world — tall mountains, vast expanses of untamed wilderness, or
stormy seas. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) proposes a dichotomy between beauty and the sublime. An object which is beautiful possesses one of seven sensible qualities: smallness, smoothness, variety in the parts, “not angular, but melted” organic forms, delicacy of form, cleanness, and if the colors are glaring they must be diversified. The sublime, on the other hand, refers to something which is obscure and not easily sensible; it is a response to that which causes fear and terror, activating our natural sense of self-preservation. Though beauty is characterized by its small size and ephemeral nature, the sublime is powerful, massive, and unintelligible by human standards of reason. When we fear being overcome by something greater than ourselves, we experience true sublimity. In selecting specific artwork for this exhibition, we chose paintings and sculptures that, in terms of their style or subject matter, illustrate theoretical tenets of the sublime through the language of abstraction. Hans Hofmann (1880-1960), the German-born American artist, is represented by seven paintings that capture — through abstraction — the forceful qualities of nature that Burke describes as key elements of the sublime experience. Up the Dune (1940) is a multicolor
Hans Hofmann (1880-1960) Up the Dune, 1940 Oil on board, 20 x 24 in. Private Collection, North Carolina
J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, 1812 Oil on canvas, 57 ½ x 93 ½ in. Tate Gallery, London
abstraction ranging in hue from fiery yellows and reds to luscious shades of green and blue. Though Hofmann’s abstract style represents an avant garde approach to the genre of landscape painting, Up the Dune falls within a well-established tradition of painting sublime landscapes that emerged in the nineteenth century. In England, picturesque views of the countryside by artists like John Constable (1776-1837) were succeeded by frightening images of turbulent seascapes by the likes of J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), whose work, while denounced during his lifetime, is now seen as a precursor to abstract painting. Hofmann’s brushstrokes in Up the Dune imply a sense of upward movement and turbulence that call to mind the upswept stormy skies found in Turner’s Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps. With its meandering composition punctuated by abstract linear forms, Hofmann conjures a landscape that is anything but serene. However, it is through this abstracted perspective that the chaotic forces of nature become truly manifest, and we as viewers experience them for their sublime potential. Like Burke, Emmanuel Kant also distinguishes between beauty and the sublime in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764) and his later Critique of Judgement (1790), though he disagrees with his argument that either
quality can be understood using empirical means. Beauty and sublimity cause us pleasure, Kant argues, but of different kinds. A sun-strewn meadow is a joyous sight, while a towering snow-covered mountain scraping against the edge of the sky fills us with trepidation. Kant succinctly differentiates between them: “The sublime moves, the beautiful charms.” Often, the sublime is evoked by formless objects and a sense of boundlessness, something “which excites us, without any reasoning about it, but in the mere apprehension of it.” Kant advises his readers that nature is not in itself sublime. Rather, the sublime is the feeling that such an object evokes within us — feelings of melancholy, dread, or quiet wonder. New China #1 (1972) by Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) appears like an otherworldly sunset made up of vibrant expanses of modulating color. Her technique of staining raw, unprimed canvas produces soft, delicate gradations of color appearing like washes of water over a sandy beach. The end result is ultimately dictated by natural forces that guide the paint’s movement across and into the weave of the canvas fibers. While the subject of this work remains open to interpretation, the sweeping expanse of undiluted paint resting at the bottom of the canvas creates the illusion of a foreground populated by the forms of mountains. It is
Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) New China #1, 1972 Acrylic on canvas 10 x 16 1/4 in. Private Collection, Washington, D.C.
typical for Frankenthaler’s abstractions to embody the vague impression of specific organic objects, whether or not such associations are substantiated by the work’s title. The horizontal orientation of New China #1 evokes the panoramic format of landscape painting, as well as its sublime connotations. While nature provided nineteenth century artists with a visual lexicon capable of evoking feelings of the sublime, the development of geometric abstraction in the early twentieth century possessed similarly lofty goals through entirely different means. As John Golding argues in Paths to the Absolute, early abstractionists such as Kazmir Malevich (1878-1935) and Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) sought to develop a style of art which was ultimately a product of their search for a transcendental subject matter in painting.
Their abandonment of representational imagery, and the reduction of painting to its fundamental elements — line, color, and form — provided inspiration to countless artists that proceeded them. Untitled (Blue Purple Painting) (1952) by Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967) is executed in rich shades of ultramarine blue which seem to radiate from the canvas’s smooth and matte surface Though distinct, the shades of blue challenge the limits of our perception. It is only through a period of observation that the work’s underlying structure becomes clear, manifesting itself in the form of an “I” surrounded by bands of blue on either side. In his own writings on abstract art, Reinhardt wrote of creating a work that “does not reflect its surroundings — a pure, abstract, nonobjective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting — an object that is self-conscious (no unconsciousness) ideal, transcendent, aware of no thing but art.” With its nearly monochromatic composition, Untitled (Blue Purple Painting) Reinhardt asks us to view the work not quickly, but contemplatively. Untitled (White, Black, Blue Light) (2000) by Mary Corse (b. 1945) prompts a more metaphysical reading than that suggested by Reinhardt’s painting, despite its similarly minimal geometric composition. Composed of five
vertical bands of color, glass microspheres embedded in the center section of the canvas absorb and reflect the surrounding light and reflect it back with extraordinary vibrancy. Repositioning oneself in front of the canvas causes a flurry of rainbowcolored light to shimmer in all directions. As Corse explained of her work in a 2015 interview:
Peter Bradley Starmaker I, 1971 acrylic on canvas, 96 x 67 in. Collection of Heather James Fine Art
Mary Corse Untitled (White, Black, Blue Light), 2000 glass microspheres in acrylic on canvas Private Collection, California
For me, a work enters the realm of art when it makes me feel and know the reality of my human state in its essence — an abstract perceptual experience beyond thought. I’m interested in a painting that is about itself, that is not political, that is not a cartoon, nothing interesting — just a pure perceptual experience of the moment, the experience before the idea.
The forces of light at play in Corse’s work epitomize a key aspect of the sublime experience: that it comes in response to one’s encounter with immaterial forces of nature, when our ability to rationally understand them is at odds with the faculties of human perception. Though Corse has executed Untitled (White, Black, Blue Light) on a two-dimensional surface, the work harnesses the evanescent quality of light — often glowing more brightly than stars on the darkest night. Perhaps not surprisingly, there are many ways that the concept of sublimity relates to space and cosmology. Boundlessness and an utter immensity of scale, described by Kant as key characteristics of sublime objects, can undoubtedly be
discussed using astronomical terms which relate to the incomprehensible vastness of the universe. Starmaker I (1972) by the American artist Peter Bradley uses abstraction and the work’s lyrical title to imbue it with cosmological consequence. The painting is built, layer-upon-layer, with spots of acrylic paint coalescing into the form of a nebular cloud. Bradley’s method of applying paint with a spray gun results in an effect that is reminiscent of those achieved by Pointillist painters such as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, whose dots and patterns of color build a unified composition. The work’s tremendous size results in an overwhelming visual effect commensurate with its stellar subject matter, alluding to the ineffable forces of nature that lead to sublimity. The sublime connotations of the celestial are not limited to the feelings aroused by the non-terrestrial. Three abstractions by Hans Hofmann — Nocturne (1950), Evening (1958), and Falling Darkness (1959) — were selected for this exhibition because of their association with nighttime and darkness. Darkness is described by Kant as fundamentally sublime. He is unequivocal in this characterization: “Night is sublime. Day is beautiful.” Further, Kant writes, that while shining light “stimulates busy fervor and a feeling of gaiety,” it is darkness which brings a sense of calm and, sometimes,
Hans Hofmann Nocturne, 1950 oil on panel, 19 ¾ x 16 in. Private Collection, Washington, D.C.
an air of mystery, or fear of the unknown. Nocturne, a thickly painted work on panel from 1950, features areas of thoroughlymixed paint as well as touches of undiluted pigment that glow radiantly amidst the cacophony of coloration. Hofmann imbued this abstraction with a poetic title, calling to mind the lyrical nighttime works of James Abbott McNeil Whistler, who, quite antithetically to Hofmann, spoke of creating paintings so delicate in coloration that they appear “like breath on the surface of a pane of glass.” Evening and Falling Darkness feature energetic brushstrokes that evoke the feeling of early
evening before plunging into the darkness of night. Kant specifically describes the sublime connotations of this moment, writing: “Temperaments that possess a feeling of the sublime are drawn gradually, by the quiet stillness of a summer evening as the shimmering light of the stars breaks through the brown shadows of night and the lonely moon rises into view, into high feelings of friendship, of disdain for the world, of eternity.” Nighttime provides opportunities for introspection and to contemplate the wonders of the universe, which are consequently sublime. In 1948, the American artist Barnett Newman published an essay titled “The Sublime is Now” which boldly proclaimed that his work and the works of his colleagues (who became principal artists in the movement now known as Abstract Expressionism) had succeeded in achieving what had only been an ideal for their European counterparts: the creation of a truly sublime image. It is through abstraction, Newman argues, that art can fulfill “man’s natural desire for the exalted” with images “whose reality is self-evident” and need only be understood in terms of the emotions they produce within us. One of the most important contributions made by “The Sublime is Now” results from the dialogue Newman creates between postwar abstraction and the concept of sublimity. Though abstract art has manifested itself in
countless ways since the initial publication of Newman’s essay, questions relating to its transcendental powers continue to be of paramount concern to artists working in the present day. Blood Cinema (2000) by Anish Kapoor illustrates a fundamental characteristic of the sublime object — magnitude — perhaps to a far greater extent than any other painting or sculpture featured in Sublime Abstraction. Weighing nearly four thousand pounds and spanning over six and a half feet in diameter, Kapoor’s work is a monumental object capable of inciting a sublime experience. Kant writes, “A great height is just as sublime as a great depth, except that the latter is accompanied with the sensation of shuddering, the former with one of wonder.” Burke similarly describes “greatness of dimension” as “a powerful cause of the sublime,” as it has a striking effect that fills us with fear or wonder. Looking upon Kapoor’s work, one’s reflection does not appear as it would in a mirror. Instead, the viewer’s perspective is warped, distorted, and projected in ethereal shades of red. A convex mirror is set within the sculpture’s internal structure, which results in different visual effects when it is viewed from either side. Kant locates the sublime within formless objects and those that suggest some sense of boundlessness. Blood Cinema presents
boundlessness that is three dimensional and, as a result, cannot be viewed in its totality from any one angle. The work simultaneously explores questions of space, structure, and perception, as well as more metaphysical polarities such as presence and absence, inward and outward, visible and invisible, and light and dark. It is the viewer’s presence which activates these relationships. Kapoor’s sculpture reminds us that the sublime experience is ultimately an individualistic one, for it could not exist without the viewer’s participation. Kant argued that it is incorrect for us to call any particular object sublime, suggesting that “no sensible form can contain the sublime” and instead that sublimity is to be found within one’s own mind. Accepting such a proposition, the works of art in this exhibition are not sublime in themselves; rather, we might understand them as evoking sublime experiences simply by looking at them. Though the concept of sublimity emerged in theoretical writing nearly two thousand years ago, the term provides us with a helpful semantic container to describe the awe and wonder evoked by our encounters with abstract works of art. The paintings and sculptures in Sublime Abstraction represent a diverse group of artists in the years during and immediately after World War II, a period marked by major upheavals in both
society and the field of aesthetics. Though they range from surrealistic dreamscapes to massive contemporary sculptures composed of fiberglass and steel, together they illustrate an enduring artistic belief in the transformative nature of abstraction.
Anish Kapoor Blood Cinema, 2000 acrylic and steel, 77 ¼ x 77 ¼ x 18 ¾ in. Private Collection, Europe
ARTISTS
MARY ABBOTT (b. 1921) Presence 
 c. 1970 oil on canvas 46 x 87 in.
WILLIAM BAZIOTES (1912-1963)
Whirlwind 1957 oil and graphite on canvas 60 x 72 1/4 in.

PETER BRADLEY (b. 1940) Starmaker I 
 1972 acrylic on canvas 96 x 67 x 2 1/4 in.
ALEXANDER CALDER (1898-1976)
Untitled 1947
 oil on canvas 7 3/4 x 29 in.
MARY CORSE (b. 1945)
Untitled (White, Black, Blue Light) 2000 glass microspheres in acrylic on canvas 44 x 44 in.
WOJCIECH FANGOR (1922-2016) #29 1963
 oil on canvas 39 1/2 x 39 1/2 in.
WOJCIECH FANGOR (1922-2016)
#3 1963
 oil on canvas 64 x 51 in.
SAM FRANCIS (1923-1994)
Untitled (SFM82-014) 1982 oil paint, powdered pigment, and ink on handmade paper 29 ½ x 24 in.
HELEN FRANKENTHALER (1928-2011) Orange Balloon 1960
 oil on canvas 12 x 23 1/8 in.
HELEN FRANKENTHALER (1928-2011) New China #1 1972 acrylic on canvas 10 x 16 1/4 in.
MICHAEL GOLDBERG (1924-2007) Untitled 1951-1952 oil on canvas 60 x 64 in.
HANS HOFMANN (1880-1966) The Chair 1940 oil on panel 13 ½ x 11 ¾ in.
HANS HOFMANN (1880-1966) Up the Dune 1940
 oil on board 20 x 24 in.
HANS HOFMANN (1880-1966)
Untitled 1945 gouache on paper 18 ½ x 24 in.
HANS HOFMANN (1880-1966)
Nocturne 1950
 oil on panel 19 3/4 x 16 in.
HANS HOFMANN (1880-1966) Evening 1958 oil on panel 17 ¾ x 16 1/8 in.
HANS HOFMANN (1880-1966) Falling Darkness 1959 oil on panel 10 ¾ x 12 ¾ in.
HANS HOFMANN (1880-1966)
Improvisation No. II 1959
 oil on board 12 x 16 in.
PAUL JENKINS (1923-2012) Phenomena Silver Sinister 1962
 acrylic on canvas 76 5/8 x 59 1/4 in.
ANISH KAPOOR (b. 1954)
Blood Cinema 2000 acrylic and steel 77 1/4 x 77 1/4 x 18 3/4 in.
MORRIS LOUIS (1912-1962) Sub-Marine 1948
 oil on canvas 22 1/4 x 35 1/2 in.
MORRIS LOUIS (1912-1962)
Water Hyacinths 1949 acrylic resin on canvas 12 x 16 in.
MORRIS LOUIS (1912-1962)
Untitled (Water Hyacinths) c. 1949 acrylic resin on canvas 16 x 20 in.
MORRIS LOUIS (1912-1962) Charred Journal: Firewritten III 1951
 acrylic resin (magna) on canvas 36 x 30 in.
ED MOSES (b. 1926)
B/W 2012
 acrylic on canvas 96 x 60 in.
ROBERT MOTHERWELL (1915-1991) Untitled (Open) 1971 acrylic and graphite on canvas board 15 1/2 x 19 3/4 in.
ROBERT NATKIN (1930-2010) Untitled 1971
 acrylic on canvas 60 x 60 in.
NORMAN ROCKWELL (1894-1978)
Study for “The Connoisseur” 1962 oil on canvas 24 x 24 in.
JACK ROTH (1927-2004) What’s Diane Got 1979 acrylic on canvas 66 x 16 in. each
PAT STEIR (b. 1940)
Day Light Waterfall 2000
 oil on canvas 74 x 36 in.
THEODOROS STAMOS (1922-1997) Infinity Field Jerusalem Series IV 1984 oil on canvas 60 x 50 1/8 in.
ESTEBAN VICENTE (1903-2001)
Collage, Black on White 1957
 collage on paper 20 x 20 in.
MICHAEL CORRINE WEST (1908-1991) Gento Niese 1978 oil on canvas 76 ¼ x 49 ½ in.
NORMAN ZAMMITT (1931-2007)
North Wall 1978 oil on canvas 76 ¼ x 49 ½ in.
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