The Place of the Sublime in American Art from Thomas Cole to Robert Smithson

In the history of American art is there something identifiable as the sublime? If so, is it based solely on received ideas, from Longinus through Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, and referential only to landscape representation? The dissertation argues otherwise and looks at work by Thomas Cole, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Robert Smithson. It addresses the issue through the thought of Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Edward Casey and Lyotard and on twentieth-century writings in art criticism and art history that bear on these artists and their relation to the sublime. My thesis is that until quite recently the sublime was understood in a conventional way and the related work of these artists was seen through that tradition. Since the late 1970s, however, the sublime has been rethought as a tension between presentation and representation and, as such, it takes place in or at the artwork. In key pieces by these painters and sculptor this post-aesthetic understanding can be seen as an American contribution to the history of art and the sublime.