Jason Gaiger, Barnett Newman and the Evocation of the Sublime  Speaker: Jason Gaiger, Lecturer in Art History at The Open University.In an important essay, 'The Sublime is Now', written in 1948, Barnett Newman rejected the search for beauty in favour of 'man's natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relation to the absolute emotions'. Whilst acknowledging that he lived in an age that lacked suitable myths and legends, he claimed that a new presentation of the sublime could be achieved without employing the traditional devices of Western painting, or what he termed 'the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth.' In this talk Jason Gaiger consides the relation of Newman's work to the philosophical tradition of the sublime.Further ReadingBarnett Newman 'The Sublime is Now', first published in Tiger's Eye, Vol. 1, No.6, December 1948, most readily accessible in Harrison and Wood, eds. Art in Theory, pp. 572-4.Longinus, On the Sublime, transl. W.H. Fyfe, Cambridge Mass./London: LOEB Classical Library, 1995, especially section 35.Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), especially Part II (A good modern edition is edited by Adam Phillips, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement (1790), sections 23-29. (The best modern translation is by Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1987).