Is romanticism the natural condition of art? Wassily Kandinsky thought so. "It is no part of my programme," he wrote, "to paint with tears, and I really don't care for sweets, but romanticism goes far, far beyond tears. The meaning, the content of art is romanticism, and it is our fault if we mistake a temporal phenomenon for the whole notion."
Go to Tate Modern, and romanticism is the elephant in the room that everybody knows is there but no one wants to acknowledge. For almost half a year, its cavernous turbine hall was transformed into a setting sun seen through mist. It was as if one were looking at a Caspar David Friedrich painting in quotation marks. The man responsible, a fastidious Dane called Olafur Eliasson, told me: "I want to expose the way we see things as a constructed model. And to ask how we then operate, having understood that it is constructed."
Eliasson's favoured media may be the elements of nature, but what he comes confusingly close to saying is that nature does not exist. Or, more subtly, that nature is indistinguishable from you, this city, or this museum. "My interest," he told me, "is not first to make an experience and then to deconstruct it, but to create an experience which has a certain transparency or self-reflexiveness built into it." Why? "Because I think this makes the experience stronger."
This is the condition of romanticism today. It wants strong experience, but it feels the world to be so mediated by commerce, and smothered in clich?, that it can barely bring itself to look up at the sun. It is an endgame scenario in which the main actor, the feeling individual, is twitching on the floor like a hooked fish, hoping against hope that some serious thinking might rescue the situation.
The 20th century produced two totally different philosophies of art. In one, the ideals of romanticism were concentrated and intensified, as in the sublime-chasing work of Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. In another, artists lined up to mock and deflate the romantic impulse. The work of artists from Marcel Duchamp to Paul McCarthy and the Chapman brothers constitutes one long guffaw in the face of romanticism.
But of course, to think too long on the implications of such artists' work is to have the abyss yawn at one's feet. So perhaps Kandinsky was right. Perhaps romanticism really is the underlying condition of art. In which case Donald Judd, whose work is the subject of a captivating exhibition upstairs at Tate Modern, becomes a terrifically interesting case. Judd has always been seen as one of the leading exponents of minimalism, although he himself hated the term. I think of him as a minimalist with luxurious instincts. It is clear, despite the rigour of his thinking and the asceticism of his rectilinear sculptures, that he was deeply romantic.
Judd's luxurious instincts are brought to the fore in the Tate Modern exhibition, which was curated by Nicholas Serota, Tate's director. Colour, rhythm, even atmosphere were all attended to by Judd with utter devotion and a nervy, bliss-craving sensitivity. There is no way you can get through this exhibition of hard-edged boxes without feeling caressed and seduced. It is a wonderful paradox. Minimalism has been the longest running and most influential of modern movements. So what does this tell us about the state of romanticism?
As with minimalist music, the ostensible objectivity of minimalist art tends to lead the way into intensely subjective, emotional experience. So it is as if an overriding policy of saying as little as possible is the only way today to hold on to true romantic impulses. Before it was revealed, Olafur Eliasson told me his turbine hall project would be "the most minimal project so far." His proposition seemed to be that romanticism can survive only when it is made aware of itself. Judd's work seems to second that: minimalism, more than any other style of art, induces in the individual spectator an intense self-consciousness and a matching sensitivity to his surroundings. But minimalism brings something else into the equation, something to do with time.
Kenneth Clark once said that one can't enjoy a pure aesthetic sensation for longer than you can enjoy the smell of an orange - which is to say romantic experience, including romantic love, is but a brief flare-up in time. But Donald Judd has done more than most 20th-century artists to change this, to pull aesthetic experience into the realm of everyday duration (one reason his work has had such lasting influence on interior and furniture design). In this sense, his work feels like an attempt to answer a problem articulated by Eliasson's compatriot, S?ren Kierkegaard, who wrote: "Romantic love can be portrayed very well in the moment; marital love cannot."
After a spartan and cerebral couple of decades, we are beginning to see more artists indulge their luxurious instincts. The new romanticism is learning from both the heroically committed "marital" love of Judd's minimalism and the disabused self-consciousness of Eliasson. Put this way, it's a depressing prospect - like watching an endless display of distant fireworks through a rainy kitchen window. But it's a start.
