Sublime or Ridiculous? Turner and the Problem of the Historical Figure

B] ERTRAND RUSSELL, in his magisterial survey of the history of Western thought, did not find much room for aesthetic theory. He dismissed even so formidable a mind as Kant's on that subject with a few contemptuous generalizations: Like everybody else at that time, he wrote a treatise on the sublime and the beautiful. Night is sublime, day is beautiful; the sea is sublime, the land is beautiful; man is sublime, woman is beautiful; and so on.l It is hard to believe that numbers of highly serious historians since Russell have found much in the subject of the sublime not only to discuss but to become very heated about-almost as heated, apparently, as their eighteenth-century counterparts. The strength of people's feelings on this recondite matter was revealed to me when, five years ago, I organized an exhibition on the subject of Turner and the Sublime.2 Conceived as a vehicle for displaying some of Turner's most impressive works on paper within the framework of a single idea that was central to his art, it also took as a premise the rather more modern realization that the sublime cannot be defined in terms of a few restrictive rules but may, indeed, mean very much whatever we choose it to mean. Sublime means everything that is most elevated; perfect, that which is most complete, most finished3-thus Delacroix in 1857; but I did not abandon the eighteenth-century idea to that extent. I sought only a flexible basis on which to deal with a wide range of images that seemed to me to embody a degree of grandeur consciously sought for expressive ends; but I deliberately availed myself of the breadth and vagueness of the term to make some arbitrary categorizations which would, I felt, illuminate the works and their relationship to the sublime, even if those categories did not adhere strictly to conventional terminology. What emerged in response to the exhibition, however, was that even the most basic of eighteenth-century categories are misunderstood today; and, what is more, that certain aspects of Turner's output, despite his acknowledged greatness, are so unfashionable as to be considered unfit for serious discussion. I was castigated for

Art · Art history · Literature · Ridiculous · Sublime · Historical Art and Culture Studies · History

• "Uncouth Shapes" and sublime human forms of Wordsworth's The Prelude in the ligh of Berdyaev's personalistic philosophy of freedom

  Elena Haltrin Khalturina•2002

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