Shima Of Moss and Sand. - Individual exposure
When the influential American historian Robert Rosenblum published a series of lectures, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition, published in English in 1975, his ideas caused quite a stir. For a start, they created a narrative of modern art that was not centred on Paris. Furthermore, he spoke of the sublime at a time when Minimalism and the formalist discourses that underpinned it were having great success: painting, it was said at the time, was nothing more than an indicator of its physical characteristics, and at this point, it was no longer possible for it to evolve further. Artists such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, however, had made this abundantly clear, a short time earlier, by describing the semantic ambitions of their colour fields, while also being explicit about the nature of their work, which they considered tragic. Agnes Martin and Ad Reinhardt held similar views and were wrongly regarded as proto-Minimalists, as if the spiritual aspect of their work was irrelevant. At that time, we insist, there was talk of the death of painting. Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, unexpectedly, new generations of painters believed that abstraction was still an ideal way of addressing metaphysical, aesthetic, moral, spiritual and sociopolitical issues. Among these painters, some such as Sean Scully, Juan Uslé and Per Kirkeby are considered successors of that tradition that Rosenblum referred to as “of the north.”
