LOOKING THROUGH LIDLESS EYES

Abstract

The German painter Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea (1808–10), a picture that has played an important role in accounts of the prehistory of twentieth-century abstract art, is significant among other reasons because it bravely refused painting’s narrative vocation and in so doing radicalized the optics characteristic of the contemporary aesthetics of the sublime. Friedrich’s contemporary, the novelist and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist, intuited precisely this in his scintillating comments on the painting at the time it appeared. Invoking the shocking idea that looking at The Monk by the Sea is like seeing through eyes whose lids have been cut off, he recognized that Friedrich had transformed the canvas into the locus not so much of narration and signification as of sensation. This article leans on the terms devised by Gilles Deleuze to explain the paintings of Francis Bacon in order to explore the seminal shift in the relationship between spectator and composition that Friedrich’s canvas dramatizes with such compelling power.

Keywords:

• Caspar David Friedrich
• Heinrich von Kleist
• Gilles Deleuze
• sensation
• the sublime
• Enlightenment vision

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

I am extremely grateful to the anonymous referees of an earlier draft of this essay for their constructive criticisms of it.

1 Bacon himself admired Deleuze’s writing on him deeply: “It’s as if this guy was watching over my shoulder while I was painting!” – see Dosse 448.

2 The publisher Karl Friedrich Frommann, who saw the painting in Friedrich’s studio, insisted that at that point it was a night scene, lightened by both a crescent moon and the morning star; and Helmut Börsch-Supan has noted that the picture surface confirms this: “the present pale tones were painted over a much darker blue which is still visible in the sky area at the upper edge and on the horizon” – see Börsch-Supan 82.

3 Vaughan, in his account of Romantic irony, has for his part claimed that The Monk by the Sea is “the expression of more contemporary [i.e., early nineteenth-century] concerns” in so far as “it emphasizes that the picture, despite its visionary aspirations, i[s] nevertheless no more than a picture” (“Landscape” 187).

4 The phrase “without form and void” is from Genesis 1.2.

5 Vaughan points to the continuities between Friedrich and Munch, who lived in Berlin in the early 1890s, at the very time when interest in the Romantic painter was being revived as a result of the Norwegian art historian Andreas Aubert’s research. In this connection, he cites Munch’s remark, suggestive of just this domain of “spiritual corporality” I have invoked, that “nature is not only what is visible to the eye – it also shows the inner images of the soul – the images on the reverse side of the eyes.” This statement recalls Friedrich’s famous advice to a painter to “close your bodily eye so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye” (German Romantic Painting 68, 239).

6 The reference in this paragraph to Žižek’s suggestive comments on Munch and Van Gogh as, in effect, an abstract site of affective intensities, which has a good deal in common with Deleuze’s concept of the virtual, should not, of course, obscure the difference, in a broader context, between the former’s philosophical precepts and those of the latter. For Žižek’s Lacanian critique of Deleuze, whose “transcendental empiricism” he resists, not least because of its official anti-Hegelianism, which he claims conceals an unofficial affinity with Hegelianism, see Organs without Bodies; and, more recently as well as far more briefly, Disparities 327–28. See also, for a useful summary assessment, Sinnerbrink 62–87.

7 See also Schmied: “Often there is no middleground [in Friedrich’s paintings], and the eye, when it leaves the familiar foreground, is directly confronted with an immeasurable depth into which it has no sense of being able to penetrate” (31).

8 Here, I adapt and so displace Deleuze’s description of Bacon’s animal humans or human animals whose “bones are like a trapeze apparatus (the carcass) upon which the flesh is the acrobat” (Francis Bacon 23).

9 On Friedrich’s Rückenfiguren, see Fried 11–49.

10 It is noticeable that Fried doesn’t refer to Monk by the Sea in his reading of Friedrich.

11 The Escort’s intriguing rejoinder to the Lady, which was disregarded by Kleist, suggests that the sea was also thinking of “[Louis-Sébastien] Mercier’s Bonnet de Nuit and [Gotthilf Heinrich von] Schubert’s Glimpses of Nature’s Night-Side.” This dialogue thus communicates with impressive economy the cultural hinterland that shadows Friedrich’s seascape. In the cosmopolitan context sketched by the Lady and her Escort, The Monk by the Sea represents a characteristic late Romantic meditation on the night, at least in so far as the night is concentrated or distilled in the strip of ominous, stormy water between the sand and the sky. Its mood is consistent with the poems of Novalis as well as the plays and short stories of Kleist himself.

12 Kleist, who is often paired with Artaud and Kafka, plays a persistent and important role in A Thousand Plateaus: “Many things in modern art come from Kleist. Goethe and Hegel are old men next to Kleist” (393).

13 It seems possible to speculate that Kleist derived the traumatic image of lidless eyes in part from the public lectures that his acquaintance Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert delivered, in Dresden during the winter of 1807–08, on “Die Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft” (The Dark Side of the Natural Sciences), for in the thirteenth of these, Schubert discussed hypnotic and somnambulistic states in detail. For this and related contexts, see Huff 31–70.

14 Huff characterizes Kleist’s “violent misreading” of The Monk by the Sea in terms of “his distortion of its content from a depiction of deep religiosity to a veritable manifesto of agnosticism” (123).

15 Deleuze and Guattari do not offer specific examples; but see, for instance, the eponymous Amazonian’s fit in Scene 9 of Kleist’s Penthesilia 63–64.