What Hegel Would Have Said About Monet
By T. J. Clark
November 11, 2018

“The landscape thinks itself in me!” Miserable anthropomorphism! “To Mind alone … is it given to impress the stamp of its own infinity and free return into itself upon its external manifestation.” “The existence of the world becomes for Self-consciousness its own truth and presence; it is certain of experiencing only itself therein.” Hiker’s sentimentality! In Cézanne, thank G**—in Monet, in Seurat, in Pissarro, in all French painting at its best—the landscape un-thinks “Me” in it!

Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Kreidefelsen auf Rügen (Chalk Cliffs at Rügen), 1818.
Oil on canvas, 90 x 70 cm.
Kunst Museum Winterthur, Oskar Reinhart Foundation.

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on November 15th, 2018