In the master's thesis, we are focusing on Barnett Newman's essays – his reflections on the art – and on his paintings, with an emphasis on the sublime. How we understand the concept of the sublime in the light of Newman's writings and how we interpret it based on the selected artworks are two of the central research interests.
Firstly, we consider the concept of the sublime separately, in chronological order. We start in antiquity with the first mentioning of the concept in the treaties On the Sublime. We then continue with two theories from the eighteenth century which significantly influenced the understanding and (later) interpretation of the concept – Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and Immanuel Kant's Analytics of the Sublime (The Critique of Judgment, 1790). This is followed by a discussion of Newman's 1948 short essay The Sublime Is Now, which stimulated interest in relation to a specific type of post-war American abstraction and prompted one art historian to coin a term 'abstract sublime'. The essay Sublime Is Now is placed in the context of its creation, both culturally and historically, as well as within the artist's theoretical oeuvre from that period. In the essay, we can discern the artist’s justification of the kind of art he and his narrow circle of abstract expressionists create. Newman operates in the field of modernism; he promotes the abstract artistic expression and attributes a great importance to the question of the subject matter, which is what distinguishes their art from others’ art (for example, from the European abstract art, as the author interprets it), meanwhile declaring, 'the sublime is now'.
The essays and other forms of Newman's writings on art were created in parallel with intense artistic research in the medium of painting. The second part of the thesis is thus dedicated to painting and is also chronologically ordered. The first chapter is devoted to Newman's early artistic practice, from the sheer beginnings up to the painting Onement I, with which Newman found his own expression that he had been intensively searching for until then. We will devote a separate chapter to this ground-breaking artwork. The last chapter is dedicated to Newman's monumental Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950–1951), created two years after the publication of the essay The Sublime Is Now, which scholars often interpret in relation to the sublime. Both highlighted paintings represent the key to understanding Newman's painting expression in general. They enable phenomenological readings of paintings (focused on the viewer's perception), which, in the case of Newman's large format canvases, most convincingly approach the sublime.
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