Volume 49, Number 13 · August 15, 2002
O Beautiful for Spacious Skies
By John Updike
American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820–1880
Catalog of the exhibition by Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer
an exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, June 17–August 25, 2002.
Princeton University Press, 284 pp., $49.95
The splendid show American Sublime, which originated at London's Tate Museum and will travel from summer in Philadelphia to autumn in Minneapolis, raises, with its article-free title, the question, Why does one hear often of the American Sublime but never of, say, the French or Chinese Sublime? The very word, from Latin meaning 'under the lintel'—i.e., as high as one can go in a constructed opening, just under the upper limit—is a roomy and aspiring one, with precise senses in chemistry and psychiatry having to do with the vaporization of solids and the taming of instinctual desires. In philosophy, too, it is subject to close definition, we learn from Andrew Wilton's authoritative catalog essay 'The Sublime in the Old World and the New.' Critical minds of the eighteenth century distinguished the Sublime from the merely Beautiful: 'Addison, for instance, found it natural to refer to the Sublime of Homer and the Beautiful of Virgil.' The Alps, one supposes, were sublime and the verdant landscapes of England's home counties merely beautiful.
Review, 4643 words
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