Looking Through Lidless Eyes
Friedrich, Kleist and the Logic of Sensation
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3774805 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Madelaine Beaumont (0000-0002-5638-6083, corresponding author), Matthew Beaumont (Department of English Literature, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 3-19 |
| Publication date | 2018-11-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Angelaki (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0969-725X • E-ISSN: 1469-2899 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/0969725x.2018.1546989 |
| OpenAlex | W2916697844 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 8 |
The German painter Caspar David Friedrich's The Monk by the Sea (1808–10), a picture that has played an important role in accounts of the prehistory of twentieth-century abstract art, is significant among other reasons because it bravely refused painting's narrative vocation and in so doing radicalized the optics characteristic of the contemporary aesthetics of the sublime. Friedrich's contemporary, the novelist and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist, intuited precisely this in his scintillating comments on the painting at the time it appeared. Invoking the shocking idea that looking at The Monk by the Sea is like seeing through eyes whose lids have been cut off, he recognized that Friedrich had transformed the canvas into the locus not so much of narration and signification as of sensation. This article leans on the terms devised by Gilles Deleuze to explain the paintings of Francis Bacon in order to explore the seminal shift in the relationship between spectator and composition that Friedrich's canvas dramatizes with such compelling power
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |