Apocalypse Now: On Heinrich von Kleist, Caspar David Friedrich, and the Emergence of Abstract Art

Abstract

All art is an abstraction from reality, from cave paintings to naturalist depictions of the perceptual world. However, not all art is an abstraction in service of reality. While some artworks provoke onlookers to reflect upon the discrepancy between artistic representation and reality, others tend to lead observers to forget it. Some works of art also seem to solicit later observers to notice abstract moments where contemporaries did not, and vice versa. Thus, to ascribe "the" discovery or invention of abstract art to any specific artwork or artist would be problematic. 1 Nevertheless, examining how onlookers of a given artwork have perceived its abstract moments remains quite fascinating and relevant to our understanding of not only art, but also literature. Written documents of critics, connoisseurs, and philosophers form a history in their own right, many histories even, of reflections about abstraction in art, each of which entails specific registers of description for abstraction. This essay will feature one such written reflection and the distinct form of abstraction it engenders. The choice of this particular reflection is neither arbitrary nor unfounded. Though written before Kandinsky, it belongs to one of the multiple lineages of abstraction in the visual arts that will lead to and beyond Kandinsky, as well as those other artists who initially realized the promise of nineteenth-century literary imaginings of abstract art in the twentieth century. Yet this unpainted, originary moment of abstract art did arise in response to an artwork, one which, though a portrayal of reality, presented reality in a manner so abstracted that it provoked a conceptual shift in one critical viewer. The artwork is Caspar David Friedrich's Der Mönch am Meer, and its critical viewer was Heinrich von Kleist.Indeed, this early imagining of abstract art finds expression through narrative form in Kleist's commentary from 1810, "Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft." 2 Kleist's short prose piece is perhaps the most famous reaction to a controversial artwork that created a stir because of its audacious flouting of tradition and convention. For all its inherent radicality and despite its departure from mimetic representation, Der Mönch am Meer as painted by Friedrich does not constitute a

Burke's “sensitive” sublime rooted in brain and body versus Kant's transcendental concept in the German Romantic discourse

“…3 3 The text was followed by six short dialogues, a sort of ironic report of the comments made by the audience during the exhibition. For the text's genesis and von Kleist's rewriting of Brentano and von Arnim's original contribution, see Begemann (1990), Seeba (2003), and Meyertholen (2013). …”