1 - Image and Knowledge

Summary

IN THE ESSAY “RUYSDAEL ALS DICHTER” (1816; Ruisdael as Poet), Johann Wolfgang Goethe argues that Jacob van Ruisdael's images seem to move, and in fact to enact a narrative. Goethe notes that the seventeenth-century painter's technique is impeccable, but the essay focuses on Ruisdael “as a thinking artist, even as a poet” (als denkenden Künstler, ja als Dichter). “Ruysdael als Dichter” implicitly disputes the conclusions of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Laokoon (1766; Laocoon), which states that painting and sculpture can only imitate plots or narratives, not convey them. Ruisdael, counters Goethe, indeed can portray movement through time in his painting: his Waterfall (1665–70; fig. 1.1) depicts nothing less than the “successively inhabited world” (sukzessiv bewohnte Welt).

Goethe acknowledges Ruisdael's influence on the famous romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). But for Goethe, while Ruisdael's painting exemplifies “expression” (Ausdruckskunst), Friedrich's work represents an excess of “imagination” (Einbildung). Ruisdael's expressionism beautifully represents motion, and thus creates a kind of poetics of the image. But Friedrich's imagination goes too far, breaking established rules of perspective and proportion, and is an example of the kind of romanticism Goethe disparages for its focus on decay, ruin, and fragmentation—a romanticism that depicts primarily “negations of life” (Negationen des Lebens).

However, the ability to make images seem to move and tell a story, while predating the nineteenth century, does have proto-romantic aspects. While Goethe emphatically criticizes romantic painting, his Ruisdael essay identifies a set of problems that eventually become part of romantic discourses on art, the power of the image, and the significance of spectatorship. These discourses explicitly acknowledge the position of the viewer of art as a unique, communicative, but ultimately unknowable knower who exists in dynamic (moving) relation to the objects depicted. That is, for the philosophers and artists of the romantic constellation described in the introductory chapter, images explicitly communicate our knowledge of not-knowing, in part because our position is ever-changing, and in part because the images we view are in motion as well. This focus on not knowing implicitly guides our vision toward the future rather than encouraging nostalgia for the murky past. At the same time, romantic thinking about the image always involves turning back to ourselves, to an awareness of ourselves as spectators.