The Abstract Sublime: Rothko, Newman, and the Infinite
Introduction
Artists have long turned to nature to capture the feeling of the sublime—those moments of awe, terror, and transcendence in the face of something vast and unknowable. Towering mountains, avalanches, or stormy seas served as visual metaphors for this concept, instilling both awe and wonder in the viewer (Morley, 2010).
But what happens when artists abandon representation? Can we still experience the sublime without any reference to the physical world?
In the mid-20th century, a new art movement emerged. One that did not depict the physical world like before, yet still evoked a sense of boundlessness. In 1961, American art historian Robert Rosenblum coined the term ‘abstract sublime.’ He used it to describe the feelings of vastness and solitude achieved by Abstract Expressionist painters.
In this blog, we’ll explore how the abstract sublime can be seen in Abstract Expressionism. We'll focus on Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman’s use of colour, scale, and space to overwhelm the viewer with an experience that transcends the material world.
Table of Contents
Introduction
From Romantic Landscapes to Abstract Fields
Abstract Expressionism: A New Language for the Sublime
Mark Rothko: The Sublime in Colour and Emotion
Scale, Colour, and Immersion
Untitled (Red), 1956: The Luminous Sublime
No. 14, 1960: Darkness and the Infinite
The Sublime in Colour and Thought
Barnett Newman
The Sublime Beyond Representation
Onement I: The Birth of the ‘Zip’
Vir Heroicus Sublimis: Immensity and Encounter
Frustration and Limits
The Sublime is Now
Conclusion: The Abstract Sublime and the Limits of Perception
Reference List
From Romantic Landscapes to Abstract Fields
The concept of the sublime has deep roots in European philosophy. Thinkers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant explored the dual sensation of awe and fear in the face of something greater than ourselves, something vast and unknowable.
For Romantic painters, the sublime was often tied to nature. Caspar David Friedrich’s lone wanderers, dwarfed in boundless landscapes, invite us to contemplate the infinite. J.M.W. Turner’s chaotic seascapes captured the untameable natural world, making the viewer feel small and insignificant.
As contemporary culture developed into the 20th century, the visual language began to shift. Artists moved away from direct depictions of nature and instead experimented with abstraction. So, this begs the question:
Can the sublime exist beyond representation—beyond form itself?
This idea would become apparent in the work of the Abstract Expressionists, who sought to create a new kind of visual experience. One that was vast, immersive, and emotional, but untethered from the physical world.
Abstract Expressionism: A New Language for the Sublime
In response to a changing world, Abstract Expressionism emerged in the 1940s with a group of artists largely based in New York City. The fallout of World War II and the anxieties of the Cold War, an increased exposure to avant-garde European art, and the rise of existentialist thought all contributed to the art movement (The Museum of Modern Art, n.d.).
Unlike the Romantic painters before them, they broke away from conventional techniques and subject matter. Instead, they looked inwards, creating massive-scale artworks that reflected their personal psyches.
Influenced by Jungian psychology, they explored the idea of a universal, subconscious experience and expressed this through abstraction (Paul, 2004).
As a group, these artists valued process, emphasising spontaneity and intuitive mark-making in their work. Within the movement, two broad approaches emerged:
Action Painting: Artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning threw, dripped, and smeared paint across the canvas through gestural impulse.
Colour Field Painting: Artists like Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman used expansive fields of colour to elicit a contemplative response in the viewer. (Tate, 2017).
While their work appears devoid of any real-world referent, they stressed:
“There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is critical.” - Gottlieb, Rothko, and Newman (Paul, 2004).
But what made their paintings feel so vast, so overwhelming, so boundless?
In the next sections, we’ll explore how Rothko and Newman’s works are perhaps the strongest evidence of an abstract sublime—a sublime experience that doesn’t rely on mountains or storms but transcends the material world, provoking a profound emotional and even spiritual response.
Mark Rothko: The Sublime in Colour and Emotion
Stripping away traditional representation, Rothko immerses the viewer in fields of colour that evoke a sense of the infinite. His non-representational paintings leave the viewer in a sense of obscurity, echoing Kant’s idea that while beauty has boundaries, the sublime is found in the boundless (Rosenblum, 2010).
For Rothko, colours and shapes were never the subjects of his paintings. They were the means through which he expressed “basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on." (Guggenheim, n.d.).
His paintings do not depict landscapes or figures yet engulf the viewer in profound emotional experiences. Through scale, colour, and form, Rothko dissolves physical boundaries, creating a sensation that transcends the material world. His work is not to be seen but to be entered.
Rothko’s paintings are not just immersive but disruptive. His colour fields, with their dissolving edges and fluctuating depths, create a tension that begs for interpretation. We search for structure as the forms resist definition. This frustration forces us to confront something beyond comprehension.
His later, darker works push this idea even further. While his luminous reds and oranges might offer a meditative infinity, his black and grey paintings pull the viewer into an existential abyss. The sublime is no longer exalting but is a suffocating void that mirrors Newman’s confrontation with the unknown.
So, what happens when a painting no longer depicts the world but instead engulfs us in pure feeling?
Scale, Colour, and Immersion
Rothko’s huge canvases and his instruction that they should be viewed from 18 inches (The Museum of Modern Art, 2024) were a deliberate choice to overwhelm and envelop the viewer, making the experience immersive rather than observational.
His paintings were often several feet in dimension. He explained that he painted on such a large scale, not for grandeur but to be “intimate and human”. He believed that to paint a small picture would be to place the viewer outside of the experience, whereas with a large painting, “you are in it” (Guggenheim, n.d.).
His technique of layering and blurring the edges of his colour fields results in an ambiguity of form, making his paintings feel infinite and unfixed. Burke recognised that representational painting, such as the vast landscapes of Romantic painters, is limited in its power to evoke the sublime because it offers recognisable forms that tether us to reality (Lyotard, 2010).
In contrast, Rothko’s stripping away of form removes those reference points, drawing the viewer deeper into the painting as an experience. His paintings do not depict vastness; they enact it, absorbing the viewer into an emotional void that defies containment.
Perhaps, by stripping form entirely, Rothko brings us closer to the sublime. His paintings surprise and bewilder the viewer, evoking awe and fear through their sheer emotional weight.
Untitled (Red), 1956: The Luminous Sublime
One of Rothko’s brighter works, Untitled (Red), 1956, is over 4 feet wide and almost 7 feet tall. It presents a vertical composition with an upper expanse of carmine red, a transitional band of soft pink, and a lower segment of intense orange.
Untitled (Red), 1956, Mark Rothko. Oil on canvas. 210 × 125 cm.
The layered pigments create an illusion of depth; as the edges dissolve, the surface radiates a warm glow. At the bottom of the composition, a subtle but luminous golden hue seems to push through. In the centre, a pale white horizon creeps forward.
The painting holds a stillness that surrounds the viewer within the immersive effects of light and space. The result is an experience that is at once expansive yet intimate and meditative.
Rothko replaces the rugged landscapes of the Romantic painters with lacunary voids, allowing the viewer to experience transcendence free from the constraints of recognition.
The painting does not provide a focal point but instead seems to hover at the edge of perception. It is not a depiction of something sublime; rather, it enacts the sublime as an unfolding sensation.
While Rothko’s later works are more often associated with melancholy, Untitled (Red), 1956 evokes something more uplifting: a moment of quiet infinity.
No. 14, 1960: Darkness and the Infinite
In contrast, No. 14, 1960 is evocative of the darker, more consuming aspects of the sublime.
No. 14, 1960, 1960, Mark Rothko. Oil on canvas. 291 × 268 cm.
A large expanse of vibrating orange-red seems to swell forward, luminous and intriguing. It sits atop a deep blue that pushes outwards toward the edges like the ebb and flow of a wave landing and retreating.
Compared to Untitled (Red), 1956, No. 14, 1960 feels more threatening. The more ominous contrasting colours create an unsettling duality that, at once, pulls the viewer in and pushes them away. The voids of colour evoke a sense of an engulfing darkness.
Rothko’s exploration of the sublime in his darker works is not just about transcendence but about confronting the void. No. 14, 1960 does not only immerse us—it threatens to consume us.
The sense of vastness here is suffocating rather than liberating, mirroring the way the Romantics captured the terrifying power of nature in their stormy seas and towering cliffs.
Reflecting on his father’s work, Christopher Rothko says,
“My father always occupied himself with the most essential and universal of questions, ultimately helping us seek with him the meaning of human existence through his artwork” (Middleton, 2023).
This search for meaning is embedded in paintings like No. 14, 1960, which present not just a visual experience but an existential one.
The Sublime in Colour and Thought
In Rothko’s paintings, we see the abstract sublime as expansive and consuming. Internalising the concept, he makes emotion itself the vast, unknowable force, and we experience it as an emotional and psychological encounter.
Standing before the canvas, we are left to navigate its depth. What do these colours mean to me? What emotions do they stir? Why does the space feel so infinite, so uncertain?
And perhaps, in this moment of questioning, we have already stepped into the sublime.
Barnett Newman and the Abstract Sublime: Confronting the Unknown
The Sublime Beyond Representation
Barnett Newman’s paintings present a sublime that resists recognition and interpretation.
Like Rothko and the Abstract Expressionists, Newman removes any reference to the external world, leaving the viewer with a direct confrontation of something vast and unknowable. His work does not depict the sublime—it enacts it.
For Newman, painting was not about representation but revelation. He saw his work as forms of thought; expressions of the universal experience of existence and individuality (Kedmey, 2017).
Onement I: The Birth of the ‘Zip’
In Onement I (1948), Newman discovered his artistic language. A single vertical line (which he later called the ‘zip’) cuts through the field of colour (The Museum of Modern Art, 2017).
Onement I, 1948, Barnett Newman. Oil and masking tape on canvas. 69 x 41 cm.
Although simple in form, the zip is a presence in itself. It separates the canvas yet unites its halves. This motif would evolve in his following works, namely Vir Heroicus Sublimis, where his zips become thresholds that we must psychologically cross.
Vir Heroicus Sublimis: Immensity and Encounter
At 144 square feet, Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-51) is an entirely overwhelming expanse of colour. A boundless field of intense red stretches beyond the viewer’s peripheral vision, split asymmetrically by vertical zips.
Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-51, Barnett Newman. Oil on canvas. 242 × 542 cm.
Some zips are prominent, while others sink into the crimson field. Where Rothko’s colour fields soften and dissolve, Newman’s hold their shape. These zips act as dividing lines but also as points of encounter, creating a more structured engagement with space.
Romantic painters depicted humanity’s smallness in comparison to nature’s grandeur, positioning the viewer as an observer. Newman eliminates this distance. With no recognisable referent, it is just the viewer and the painting, here and now.
In this way, the work is an event—an encounter in which the viewer must find their own presence.
Frustration and Limits
Critics have dismissed Vir Heroicus Sublimis, arguing that it forgets the traditional markers of the sublime as found in Romantic paintings (Kuspit, 2021). With no reference to nature’s overwhelming power – no mountains, storms, or natural disasters - Kuspit sees a void, a failure to evoke true sublimity.
But what if this frustration is evidence of the painting’s success?
The sublime, as Lyotard reminds us, cannot be experienced when we are distracted by form. It is sensed in “anything in art that challenges our capacity to understand and fills us with wonder” (Morley, 2010).
Newman’s work resists the lineage of his predecessors. Without familiar reference points, we reach a limit in comprehension. In that moment, we encounter a discomfort of the unknown that Kant described as “a negative experience of limits” (Morley, 2010).
But the sublime does not come from this frustration. True sublimity occurs with the next step: the act of rationalisation, where we transform our sense of limitation into expansion (Morley, 2010).
If we stand before Vir Heroicus Sublimis and find ourselves searching for meaning in its immensity and ambiguity, then we are already engaging in this process.
Whether we admire or remain bewildered by the painting is beside the point. The fact that it compels thought and refuses to be passively consumed suggests it is not failing at sublimity but enacting it in its purest, most abstract form.
The Sublime is Now
Newman articulated his vision of the sublime in his essay The Sublime is Now. His goal was to create a painting that itself is an event—an experience of revelation.
“The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.” (Newman, 2010).
This is the essence of Newman’s abstract sublime. It does not offer an easy path to understanding, nor rely on external narratives. It asks: are we willing to confront its obscurity, and in doing so, confront ourselves?
Conclusion: The Abstract Sublime and the Limits of Perception
Traditional depictions of the sublime relied on the vastness of nature to evoke awe and insignificance. Abstract Expressionism stripped away these references, leaving us with not just artworks but experiences. Rothko and Newman, in their own ways, create encounters that resist easy interpretation.
Rothko dissolves form, immersing us in the infinite. Newman asserts form, confronting us with thresholds of perception. Both refuse to let the viewer remain passive, forcing us to think upon the limits of our understanding. Rothko drowns us in emotional depth, while Newman’s zips demand intellectual reasoning.
The abstract sublime is not about what we see but how we think and feel in response. Rothko and Newman’s paintings are not objects to be understood; they are events to be experienced. Whether through the depth of dissolving colour fields, or the immediacy of a vertical zip, we are forced to confront something beyond words—a vastness that eludes definition yet demands contemplation.
In this way, abstraction does not limit the sublime; it might just be its purest expression yet.
Reference list
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The Museum of Modern Art (n.d.). Abstract Expressionism | MoMA. [online] The Museum of Modern Art. Available at: https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/abstract-expressionism/a-distinctly-american-style [Accessed 26 Feb. 2025].
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