Dresden, 1808; Caspar David Friedrich is in his studio. Seated on a simple wooden chair, nothing surrounds him but the vast canvas before him, a small palette, and the walls of his studio, entirely bare, save for the tall windows overlooking the gray waters of the Elbe River. No distraction impedes Friedrich from journeying to the valleys of his memory and letting the winding paths guide his hand across the canvas.

After two years of this unusual, borderline monastic process, he completes a projection of his spiritual landscape upon flax linen. What Friedrich did not know when he completed “The Monk by the Sea” was that nearly two centuries later, in 1969, a painter of an entirely different era and culture would create a similar work; not in basic terms such as size and color, but in the endeavor to go beyond rationality, evoking the infinite nature of the human essence all in the simple confines of a canvas.

The turn of the 19th century presented a deeply unsettling conflict to many European thinkers of the era, for the new Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution brought a lifeless approach to everyday life. Society seemed to be hardening with the emergence of scientific reasoning and academic rationalism, straying away from the natural world and the beauty of life.

An artistic group that later came to be known as the Romantics thus arose in rebellion against this new existence devoid of meaning, rejecting the aristocratic norms of society and bringing a sincere sense of soul and spirit to culture. Romanticism focused on three things: firstly, the inward self, championing raw emotion and human expression; second, the vastness of nature and its insurmountable presence; and finally, the idea of the “sublime,” or the aesthetic experience of sheer terror, awe, and spiritual infinity as a reaction to the aforementioned commanding power of nature. 

Painted from 1808 to 1810, “The Monk by the Sea” is considered to be one of Friedrich’s masterpieces. The composition is quite minimalistic: across the nearly six-foot-tall canvas, there are only three things to describe: the man, the sea, and the sky.

At the bottom, the viewer’s eye is drawn to a tiny figure standing on a dune of pale sand strewn with windblown grasses, the mounds of sand gently rising and falling around him. The landmass comprises the lowest fifth of the canvas. Shrouded by dark drapery, the figure’s garments are reminiscent of liturgical clothing, alluding to the air of consecration which hangs over the painting. The figure has his weight shifted to one leg in a contemplative pose. He solemnly rests his chin upon his hand, gazing out at the sea that lies beyond him.

The waters are an abyssal black expanse that nearly envelops the figure visually. As the viewer’s eye travels up the canvas, a looming presence of cold gray—fog, mist, clouds, or perhaps a combination—swallows the sea, rendering the horizon line of the painting, or where the sea meets the sky, unclear. Moreover, the whitecaps over the lulling waves subtly shimmer on the water, denoting that the sea indeed extends beyond the haze.

Further up, a subtle contrast emerges where the paint’s dark and cool tone warms to a pleasant pale yellow in the middle of the sky, as sunlight seeps into the deep azure atmosphere behind the dark clouds.

The only thing keeping the infinite bounds of the sea and the heavens at bay is the minuscule figure and meager land anchoring the composition in reality. It is evident that Friedrich intended to capture the immensely devastating presence of nature in this peculiarly empty composition, something which was unprecedented in European art history—no other era saw any painting with such interminable empty space taking up most of the canvas.

This emotional experience would have been inadequately expressed by any other means. It is imperative that the overwhelming sensation Friedrich aimed to evoke was found in the solitary airs of the subject matter, for anything more rational would have been disloyal to the Romantic pursuit of the truly sublime—that being the insignificance of man compared to nature, the commanding spiritual presence that guided so many artists in their devotion.

These very techniques can be described, in their own sense, as an early method of abstraction. Two hundred years of war, technology, and societal progress after Friedrich’s painting, we observe an Abstract Expressionist who channeled very similar ideas into his work, yet bid farewell to the figurative anchors that Friedrich used to keep at least part of his paintings in the earthly realm. This artist transitioned to a different reckoning with existence: a state of total non-objectivity.

Mark Rothko is among the most well-known figures of Abstract Expressionism, a post-World War II movement focused on the absolute abstraction of form and color to express broad emotions and experiences. At first glance, Rothko seems to have nothing to do with Caspar David Friedrich. Like the Romantics during the Industrial Revolution, Rothko lived through one of the greatest societal changes in recent history: World War II. Rothko moved away from his pre-war style, rich in figurative subjects; instead, he pursued the belief, motivated by the horrors of the war, that worldly things could not properly capture the immense grief of human suffering and the human spirit. 

Rothko’s later paintings, all untitled, are characterized by monumental “color fields” and hazy suggestions of brushstrokes and canvas, entirely abandoning recognizable shapes or depictions of conceivable concepts. Even the edges of the works become unclear, and the viewer is trapped in the overwhelming presence of the worlds Rothko relentlessly creates. In fact, many of these canvases were greater than eight feet in length, completely enveloping the viewer’s field of vision. The mere experience of being in a room with a Rothko painting is indescribable; many have noted a staggering reaction to the works, both emotionally and physically, and many find them to be entrancing or meditative. These experiences reflect Rothko’s ambition to pursue the idea of the sublime in his own way. 

Rothko separated himself from many of his contemporaries. He saw his art as an attempt to spiritually transcend the world, rather than a meager exploration of color relationships in a rational manner. He famously claimed in 1956 that his goal was to capture human emotions: “tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions… if you are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point.”

(Readers interested in viewing a Rothko work live can see his 1969 work “Untitled” on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.)

“Untitled” (1969) is an acrylic painting measuring seven and a half feet by nearly six feet, a formidable presence when confronted. The top two-thirds of the canvas are an intense ivory black with soft brown undertones. Large brushstrokes defining the artist’s hand are fiercely dispersed throughout this section, evoking a sense of urgency and dread in their blistering gestures.

Below, a blurry line where the black meets a cold medium gray leads into the lower third, with haphazard fragments of this lighter area seemingly bleeding a translucent and unsettling pale shade of brown. Rothko often used these thin layers of color to add another physical dimension to the paintings, further blurring the lines between sections, and instilling emotions like uncertainty and sorrow in ghosts of color and brushstrokes. The two sections are surrounded by an unstable white border; however, the paint from both sections seeps into the white, rejecting the frame that tries to shackle its subjects.

Rothko does not use any tangible symbolism or associations to make a comment on anything at all. Rather, the substance of the painting itself aims to capture something irrational; in fact, the sublime.

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