Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images (review)

Kant marks a boundary line, an “abyss,” in the words of Philip Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, with regard to the construction of the modern subject that divides it with the past. (René Wellek and Jane K. Brown might also have been evoked.) Kant’s conception of the mind forecloses the possibility of a direct experience of the thing-in-self or absolute certainty about God or the real order of the world. Writers and artists responding to Kant are compelled to account for the limits of vision and the active role of the imagination in the construction and representation of the world. Brad Prager, author of a book on filmmaker Werner Herzog (Wallflower, 2007) and the co-editor of a volume on visual studies and the Holocaust (Camden House, 2008), applies Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy to visual aesthetics in German romanticism. Specifically, Prager looks at a selection of romantic painters and novelists writing or referring to the visual arts, and how each implies a model of perceptual aesthetics that conceives the outside world as an imaginative construction of our own making. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Prager integrates philosophy, literature, and the visual arts to lay out a model of romanticism as “a system against systems” (227), an open ended discourse that speaks to the modern and post-modern.

Prager begins with a discussion of Lessing’s Laocoön, both as it stands in relation to the classicism of Winckelmann, and as it expresses a conception of art that contrasts with the romantics. For Lessing there is a distinction between the plastic and verbal arts related to the former’s inability to capture the dynamic character of experience. Lessing nevertheless sees fixity in the object that makes it independent of the mind. The romantics, by contrast, do not grant such a generic distinction. For them the ideas that represent the verbal and those that represent the visual both occur in the same field of the imagination, and so are indistinguishable from each other.

Prager next turns to Wackenroder’s fictional Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders and Tieck’s Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen. While the former sympathizes with classicism, the aesthetic value of the friar derives from the divine inspiration of the artist, not the formal qualities of the art. The “real” work is a “phantasm” created by revelation, the material object disappearing under the gaze of the religious beholder. Looking at this from the secular side, Tieck’s Franz Sternbald develops these themes; the phantasm becomes a sign for the unattainable ideal. In this way, Prager argues, Franz Sternbald can also be read as an anti-Bildungsroman in which the growth of the artist remains unfulfilled. He extends this theme in the next chapter, in his discussion of the Clemens Brentano’s Godwi. Drawing on Paul de Man’s notion of allegory, the Künstlerroman is perceived as an anti-Bildungsroman, predicated on a system that keeps deferring meaning.

The next two chapters focus on the visual arts, in particular the aesthetics of the sublime in the paintings of Casper David Friedrich and Joseph Anton Koch, and the symbolism of color and light in those of Philipp Otto Runge. Underlying all of these is a shift away from historical painting to the landscape, coupled with complex shift in the relationship between the subject and nature. Friedrich’s play with the rules of perspective creates images that evoke the sublime by creating a disconcerting realm that cannot be perceived in nature or encompassed in time and space. The work of art becomes a gesture toward what cannot be depicted or reconciled into a total vision. By contrast, while Koch’s “heroic” landscapes of vast mountain-scapes appeal to Kant’s mathematical sublime, his fidelity to perspective reaffirms a totalizing vision that can be controlled by the subject. Developing a system of colors informed by the mysticism of Jacob Böhme, Runge develops an aesthetics in which the divine is represented through the medium of light. God is the source of all...