Art of the Sublime: The Awesome Beauty of the American West

The concept of the sublime has a long history in Aesthetics and philosophical inquiry more broadly. Though it has waned in prominence over time, from its height in the Romantic period to its fall from favor by the end of the 19th century, it has undergone a resurgence over the last few decades. Unlike the historical interpretation of the sublime as a manifestation of the awesome might of nature or the divine, in its modern resurrection, the sublime is often abstracted and anthropized to make sense of the current technological, political, and social state of affairs.

To understand this notion of the sublime and how its meaning has shifted from Romantic associations of natural grandeur to an understanding of the contemporary sublime, we’ll take a look at two artists working in different time periods and with different mediums but with a common subject – the American West. The first, Albert Bierstadt, might seem like a more obvious candidate for this study, as his landscape paintings are associated with Romanticism and the Hudson River School – the sublime being central to both movements. David Maisel, on the other hand, is a contemporary landscape photographer, whose aerial shots capture abstract, surreal views of radically human-altered environments. Despite the obvious differences in instrument and technique, a sublime quality is often apparent in the works of both artists.

American sublime

In the case of Albert Bierstadt, this quality is contemplative, scenic, and overall pleasing to the eye. Best known for his sweeping vistas of the American West, Bierstadt began his career painting in the Hudson Valley and New England area before setting out on his first expedition to the Rocky Mountains in 1859. Bierstadt would return west in 1863 to California and Yosemite – his first of many voyages to the remote California reaches. The landscapes which he painted largely from sketches in his New York studio are grand in scale and scene, with idyllic scenes of wildlife set in panoramic vistas under soaring open skies.

The tiny Haggin Museum in Stockton, California, houses an impressive twelve of these paintings and was, in fact, my introduction to Bierstadt. Though familiar with the better-known Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church, I had not previously come across Bierstadt in reading about the Hudson River School artists. At the Haggin Bierstadt’s works hang in a gallery alongside other large-scale landscapes in the Hudson River and Barbizon School styles. Wandering through the gallery and taking in all the picturesque but formulaic scenes of dramatic bluffs and moody forests, I was stopped in my tracks by Bierstadt’s Sunset in Yosemite Valley. This was not out of anything exceptionally striking in the subject matter or the quality of the work – though both fine – but from a marked difference in Bierstadt’s treatment of the scene.

One of these is not like the other

That scene, a commanding view of a river running through Yosemite Valley, is almost identical to two of Bierstadt’s other paintings in the gallery space, Yosemite Valley and Looking Up Yosemite Valley. While the placement of cliffs, water, and trees remains largely the same across all three paintings, the difference between them is that Sunset in Yosemite Valley depicts the valley as the sun is beginning to set behind the cliffs. The effect, especially after having viewed the other two landscapes first, is quite dramatic.

As the sun disappears behind the sheer rockface, it bathes the valley in deep pink and purple light, glinting off the river and setting the outline of trees in sharp contrast. A brooding sky of thick storm clouds heightens the effect of climatic drama. The scene is undeniably beautiful to behold, yet it is tinged with a feeling of ominous portending. There is an apparent impending danger in the low sun blazing and the clouds gathering to unleash something cataclysmic. Gazing upon Sunset in Yosemite Valley, I felt certain that it was Bierstadt’s intent to capture the sublime in this painting.

Aerial abstracts

If Bierstadt’s work is characteristic of the Hudson River School’s ambition to depict “awful grandeur” through large-scale panoramic landscapes and “transcendental sublimity” through transportive- and suspense-generating climatic effects, Maisel’s images are, at face value, perhaps the antithesis of this. In his series Black Maps and The Mining Project, Maisel explores sites across the western United States that have been radically transformed by open pit mining and other human interventions. While Maisel also makes use of large-scale formats, rather than shooting wide landscapes that are readily discernible, his images are often zoomed in on a particular site or geologic feature and may not be easily recognizable for what they are. In this way, the subject of the photograph is concealed through the obfuscation of perspective and scale. This abstraction, coupled with the highly-saturated and surreal quality of the images, elicits an emotional response of awe, apprehension, and even fear. Natasha Egan, Executive Director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago, explains how Maisel’s work conjures the sublime in an essay in Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime:

“Maisel’s photographs of cyanide-leaching fields, tailing ponds, vast open pits—the results of a mining industry in the western United States that has permanently scarred and reshaped countless terrains—are simultaneously seductive, beautiful, repulsive, and terrifying. Strikingly vivid colors luminescing from the earth’s surface in unconventional compositions combine to make immediately captivating pictures. The ambiguity of what is depicted, and the apparent toxicity suggested by the saturated colors pervading these colossal human-made sites, however, leave one with an overall sense of alarm.”

Notions of danger, dread, and death have always been part of the concept of the sublime, for it presents us with the vastness and fathomlessness of the world while reminding us of our finitude and fragility and our inability to control events, down to our very lives and deaths. For Romantic artists, the sublime manifested in themes of religion and transcendence as well as in nature, as we have seen with Bierstadt and his contemporaries. For postmodern and conceptual artists working today, the sublime is often wrapped up with the notion of fear as it relates to technology and modernity. In this way sublime art calls upon feelings of dread and terror to highlight or critique the current political, social, environmental, or technological state of the world. Egan cites Maisel’s 1989 photograph The Mining Project (Butte, Montana 6) as an example of this, stating that it appears:

“like a Romantic landscape, with a horizon line and billowing purple storm clouds closing in on the break of sunlight—not unlike a mid-nineteenth-century Hudson River School painting depicting an awe-inspiring scene of uninhabited American wilderness. However, in this case, Maisel’s photograph is a bird’s-eye view of the base of an abandoned mine in Butte, Montana, where the purple-looking clouds are, in fact, a pool of thirty billion gallons of toxic water, polluted with heavy metals like copper, zinc, and iron… There are no visual clues that give away the scale of the pool and surrounding terrain, which makes the work abstract in a way Mark Rothko may have appreciated.”

Twenty-first century probs

The perverse awe that Maisel’s brilliant chromatic pools of polluted water elicit is a kind of “toxic sublime.” The term encapsulates the effect that Maisel and other environmental artists work to achieve through their art in directing the viewer to reflect on the complex, often exploitative relationship that humans have with the planet. In examining Black Maps and The Mining Project, we at first might feel wonder at the luminous colors and configurations of excavated earth, alongside an amazement at the scale of human-wrought change, but this is quickly followed by alarm and anxiety at the realization of the immensity of destruction. While critics point to Maisel’s and similar abstract work as promoting a detached and aestheticized view of environmental degradation, with the appropriate level of context to accompany them, these images can have the power to engage the viewer and begin a dialogue about the issues they depict.

Maisel’s haunting, lurid photos of scarred and toxic terrains might seem like a far cry from the scenic panoramas of the same lands that Bierstadt was painting 150 years ago. Bierstadt’s landscapes depict a pristine and untouched American West that called to the restless and adventurous spirit, beckoning exploration. Maisel’s photographs bear the eventual fruits of these expeditions – a West ravaged by human industry and exploitation. But these works also hold in common their ability to produce an aesthetic experience in the viewer that allows us to explore our understanding of and relationship to nature. The fearsome beauty of Bierstadt’s paintings evoke awe and dread of nature’s might, and Maisel’s images elicit similar feelings of wonder and fear at the far-reaching and devastating effects that human activity has had on the planet. In allowing us to confront these emotions, sublime art can help us better understand and appreciate the terrible beauty of the planet and to forge a way forward to maintain its awesome splendor.