scholarly journals Apocalypse Now: On Heinrich von Kleist, Caspar David Friedrich, and the Emergence of Abstract Art

2013 ◽  
Vol 86 (4) ◽  
pp. 404-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Meyertholen
Keyword(s):  
Abstract Art ◽  
Heinrich Von Kleist ◽  
Caspar David Friedrich

Breaking the Religious Image

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Abstract Art ◽  
Positive Form ◽  
Acceptable Alternative ◽  
The Status ◽  
Caspar David Friedrich ◽  
Major Shift ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Church Art ◽  
Religious Iconography ◽  
Religious Image

The chapter provides an overview of two tendencies in the transformation of the status of religious motifs in art starting with the painting of Caspar David Friedrich and ending with Expressionism. This period was characterised by a major shift in the mutual positioning of art and religion both institutionally and aesthetically. Church art became an increasingly problematic category at the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, partly because the clergy objected to decorating churches with the unusual interpretation of religious iconography associated with modernist aesthetics. Considered from this perspective abstract art appeared as an acceptable alternative precisely as opposed to other images with unusual modernist interpretations. The absence of figurative images removes all controversies as to how religious subjects should be interpreted. Religious iconography had a continued presence within the work of numerous artists in the different movements of the historical avant-gardes. While the figurative references to religious motifs in most of the cases were quite critical in their tone (whether this was intended by the artist or not) and used as tools of criticism of the institutions of art and religion, abstract art became the medium for expression of a positive form of spirituality.

Heinrich von Kleist and the Right to War

Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-254
Author(s):  
Jan Mieszkowski
Keyword(s):  
Heinrich Von Kleist ◽  
The Right ◽  
Do So

This essay explores the conceptualization of warfare in Romanticism. The focus is on two plays by Heinrich von Kleist, Penthesilea and Prince Friedrich von Homburg. I begin by discussing Carl von Clausewitz's influential understanding of conflict and the problems that arise when he attempts to explain the interdependence of warring parties. I go on to argue that in Kleist's dramas war is a competition between different languages of authority. When no coherent paradigm of agency emerges from this contest, the right to wage war is revealed to be anything but a guarantee that one knows how to do so.

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