February Art: ice
For some reason I recently got obsessed with the Titanic, trying to look beyond the morality tale of lost souls and industrial hubris into insurance claims, artworks, and telegraph systems, but always returning to human failings. Probably it was teaching Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ which puts together in grand irony not man against nature, which might be too easy (no people are mentioned in the poem) but some deeper working out of circumstances, the ‘far and dissociate’ making of two objects destined to meet.
To the horror of his contemporaries, who spoke of ‘the power of the tremendous ice mountains having something sublime, but also a somewhat frightening boldness’, Eismeer (1823) by Caspar David Friedrich also eliminates the human, leaving a desolate depiction of what Hardy’s poem calls a ‘Shape of Ice’. It is this shape, the sharpness of its texture that catches the eye and chills the spine, so it is a while maybe before you notice the mast, the hull of a ship, or read a sometime title ‘Die verunglückte Hoffnung’, the failed or aborted hope. This too is a monument to human vanity: nothing is unsinkable. But then almost nothing is unpaintable, as in the midst of his despair the artist discovers, finding an ascending order of browns and greens and misty blues, something from which to seek ice-white oblivion.
thebicyclops 