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Kaila Howell // Embodiment in the Landscape Project of Philipp Otto Runge (Working title)

During the first decade of the eighteenth century, Philipp Otto Runge devised a novel and deeply religious theory and practice of painting he termed landscape. Realized most fully in his Times of Day cycle, Runge’s landscape project was at base a metaphysical one. It entrusted the work of art with the task of probing the ultimate nature of reality, while solidifying an analogy between reality conceived as a process of creation and the creative process of the work of art. 

Drawing heavily on Runge’s influence by the sixteenth-century theosopher Jacob Boehme, my dissertation explores the crucial role that embodiment plays in the artist’s landscape metaphysics. It is organized into three parts roughly divided between Runge’s concern with line and his concern with color.

Schwarz-weißes Foto eines Gemäldes. Eine Frau hält ein kleines Kind im ArmIn part one, I show how Runge mobilizes line as an instrument of incarnation. A mediator between eternity and finitude—spontaneity and order—, Runge’s line embodies the paradox of the Christian logos. As such, it is the basis for a unique expressivism by which the artistic line, as Word, hypostasizes the creative will to manifestation.

Part two argues that, for Runge, the process of incarnation ultimately depends on the maternal, as Christ’s assumption of human form was made possible through his birth by Mary. Largely figured as a womb, the maternal serves as the matrix for Runge’s image-making process: a process in which conception is treated as reflection. Runge’s unique emphasis on mirroring owes largely to the influence of Boehme’s peculiar understanding of Sophia, or Divine Wisdom.

Part three recasts the issue of mirroring through Runge’s largely abstract theory of color. What Runge calls a ‘mirror of light,’ color assumes a role partly analogous to that of Sophia, as it mirrors the divine trinity. In his writings on color, geometry becomes the primary vehicle through which Runge unpacks color as a reflection of unity in multiplicity.

[Caption: Philipp Otto Runge. The Mother at the Source. 1804, Oil on Canvas, 62.5 x 78.1 cm. Destroyed in Munich Glass Palace fire of 1931. (Photo reproduced in: Thomas Lange. Das bildnerische Denken Philipp Otto Runges. Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2010.)]

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