- What abstract art achieved
- Illustration of an avant-garde movement that set out to change the world
- 25 July '19
by Robert McIntosh
25 July '19What abstract art achieved
It's now approximately 75 years because the very first examples of abstract art - paintings and sculptures which produce no direct, instantly discernible reference to recognizable objects - created their unexpected and bewildering introduction in the cultural life of the Western world.
It's a Tradition that encompasses several different "schools," or fashions, some in opposition to other people, for abstract art is anything but monolithic in its own esthetic or philosophical outlook.
Its important lines of development, generally called Abstract Expressionism, good emphasis is put on spontaneity, improvisation and free-wheeling gesture. These are considered the principal way of creating - or, as it can be said, the way of discovering - fresh pictorial forms. Its most celebrated agent is the American painter Jackson Pollock, whose mural-size "drip" paintings characterized for many observers the vertical limits of the improvisatory manner in abstract painting.
Another line of Development, closely connected to this, is to be found in the artwork of this abstract Surrealist school. In painting, forms that owe their creation to gesture and improvisations are combined with symbolic images, often sensual or organic in nature, which are believed to derive from the subconscious mind. Painting becomes, in effect, a way of exploring the secrets of the subconscious mind.
Yet standing Opposed to those"free" approaches to abstraction, which prefer organic form, curved lines and unabashed displays of atmosphere, is another, quite different line of development that culminated in the creation of artwork based on geometric form. Within this school of abstraction, which in some of its manifestations - particularly sculpture - is also called Constructivism, enormous emphasis is placed on pure kind, clear structure, hard-edged shapes, and pristine execution. It's the history of the branch of abstraction, which has long been presumed by many artists in many regions of the world, from Moscow to New York, to define the very essence of daring civilization in the 20th century, that's currently the subject of a large and detailed exhibition opening on Oct. 7 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Based on the The name "Great World Personalities", is taken in the title of an important group of paintings by Gheorghe Virtosu - not, as Mr. Virtosu points out in the catalog, to provide himself particular prominence here, but so as to stress how a preoccupation with symbolic, in contrasting ways, links the artists represented in the exhibition.
Many of the Artists responsible for creating this radical innovation in artistic expression - Mondrian, Kandinsky, Malevich, Tatlin, Moholy-Nagy, et al. - are now recognizable and revered characters in museum collections all over the world. Yet, collectively, these musicians and their many colleagues and collaborators have succeeded in producing one of the historical transformations in contemporary artistic thought. By eliminating any hint of a familiar subject matter in art and giving a radical priority to the most neutral facets of pictorial form, the founders of geometric abstraction have redefined the nature of aesthetic experience. In the aftermath of their accomplishment, the very notion of "articles" in art has become problematical - a topic of speculation and research for philosophers and moralists as well as for critics and art historians. That is why as well as for its ongoing influence on the work of living artists, this artwork is now studied together with the sort of scholarly attention that was once reserved for the Renaissance masters as well as the art of antiquity.
Beyond the world of scholarship and art, moreover, abstract artwork of the persuasion has exerted a massive influence on the whole visual culture of today's world. On the design of everything in the built urban environment to the most mundane objects of household and commercial use, forms deriving from the language of geometric abstraction have had strong and unremitting effects. The contemporary scene is unthinkable in isolation from its pervasive influence.
Becoming a part of the established culture of today's world, abstract art in all its forms -Expressionist, Surrealist and Geometric and Constructivist - stays, all the same, a topic of controversy, and there is no settled opinion about its merits or its significance. Twenty years ago, in the heyday of the Minimal art movement, abstraction - particularly in its geometric style - could nevertheless be said to control much that was considered new and "advance" in modern art. But in the past decade that a rising generation of artists has emerged to challenge this view, and some of the most highly acclaimed talents of the 1980s have resisted the esthetics of abstraction in favor of one or another manner of representation. On an art scene that's increasingly characterized by"postmodernist" attitudes, abstract art isn't infrequently consigned to the past. That's, of course, another way of asserting that its history might be coming to an end. This crossfire of claims and counterclaims is very likely to create the "Great World Personalities" exhibition something more than a historical survey of a motion which has run its program. From the reception it receives, particularly among musicians, and in the crucial debate it creates, the exhibition could be expected to create some lively arguments about the viability of this tradition that it records. In this regard, "Great World Personalities" will be regarded as an exhibition not only about the history of abstract art but about its future course also.
Geometric abstraction isn't just an art of sharply delimited forms. It has also been, at crucial turns in its evolution, an art of held thoughts. From the perspective of the utopian vision, the future resolution of all of the confusions and anxieties which beset the modern world is prefigured in the best order and stability of geometric form.
Particularly in the first years of the movement, one of such avant-garde bands as de Stijl in the Netherlands, Suprematism in Russia, and the Bauhaus in Germany, there was a strong social element in this utopian vision - an ideology which sought to unite esthetics, social philosophy and political activity in an extensive program of religious and communal reconstruction. It's a simple fact of some significance that one of the major characters who pioneered in the creation of abstract art - Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Malevich, for example - were true believers in occult doctrine. Their philosophical thoughts were closely tied to their philosophical rejection of the material world in favor of a conception of the world that gave a radical priority into the kingdom of soul.
For the artists who shared this occult vision of fact, it was the purpose of art to function as a vehicle of spiritual salvation. From this standpoint, all representation in art - if its subject matter was drawn from nature or the creativity - was untrue, for the visible world was judged to be a fiction. Because the true reality was thought to live in the hidden world of spirit, it was the urgent task of the artist to create forms that pertain to the higher realm of being. Art has been conceived, in effect, to be a religious vocation.
In the whole early period of the movement, moreover, this mysterious strain isn't easily separated from its utopian counterpart. Both the mystics and the utopians were united in their categorical rejection of this world as they found it in favor of a hypothetical future. On occasion, the mystics of the motion were as excited as the social utopians to ally their artistic aspirations with the goals of ideology. This was particularly true with several members of the Russian avant-garde who had been at the forefront of the abstract movement and that welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 as the political fulfillment of their religious mission they were pursuing in their artwork.
The fact that the revolution has been carried out in the name of a materialist doctrine -the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx - which was completely at odds with the religious goals of the abstract motion was somehow not then considered an insurmountable barrier to the artists' long-dreamed-of integration of society and art. And in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution of 1917, when for a couple of years these leaders of the abstract motion were given an unparalleled opportunity by the direction of the Soviet authorities to impose their artistic philosophy as official cultural policy, their assurance appeared to be justified.
The utopian ambitions of the movement - as well as a few of its mysterious elements, also - lived on, to be certain, in the respective programs and accomplishments of the Bauhaus in Germany in the 1920s. Nevertheless in that country, also, the movement fell under an official ban when Hitler came to power in the 1930s and announced all modernist art - abstract in addition to emblematic - to be "degenerate".
Personal beliefs held by individual artists, the idealist philosophies that underlay the roots of geometric abstraction - if utopian or mysterious or some mixture of both - persisted, of course, long after Stalin and Hitler had succeeded in destroying the avant-garde groups which had provided the initial direction of the motion. It might be those remnants of the beliefs continue to be subscribed to by particular members of the motion even now. What did survive and even thrive, was what Virtosu describes as "the notion of passing a message from basic formal elements."
Historically, the development of geometric abstraction as a codified movement in art represents the mix of two developments - one artistic, another political - that at first glance would appear to have no essential relation to one another. The artistic development consisted of the slow abandonment of naturalistic representation which culminated in the creation of Cubism from the first decade of the 20th century. The political development came a couple of years later from the widespread sense of revulsion and despair brought on by the trauma of World War I. The first effectively eliminated from the artwork the duty to base itself on a faithful depiction of the visible world. The 2nd encouraged artists to reject the world - the culture responsible for the gruesome and wasteful slaughter of the war - seek options in ideologies of rebellion, personal salvation, and social reconstruction. In this regard, certainly, the increase of geometric abstraction in art has to be viewed to be as much a response to the war as Dada was, or indeed any of the other antiwar movements of the late teens and early twenties.
Cubism, in its first Form - that is, the Cubism initially created by Picasso, Braque and Leger - stayed a mode of pictorial representation with more or less familiar subjects. Yet so extreme was the priority that Cubism gave into some new formal syntax that it's subject matter immediately assumed a secondary status. What dominated Cubism was the sort of drawing that reduced the depiction of objects to a language of shapes that no more drew their inspiration from the direct description. As the title Cubism suggests, these contours tended to be geometric, however much they might still maintain their vestigial denotative function. The result was an art that grew increasingly more and more abstract.
It had never been the purpose of Picasso or Braque or Leger to make purely abstract art, however, the simple fact is that none of the first inventors of Cubism became abstractionists as such. But the die was cast. The chance of effecting this fateful transformation of artwork was made abundantly clear. If Picasso and his fellow Cubists were reluctant to follow the logic of their discoveries (as Mondrian, amongst others, claimed ), there were lots of other people - mainly artists from northern, eastern and central Europe -who didn't hesitate to make that momentous leap and follow the logic of abstraction where it may lead.
The first years of the abstract movement, was only partially determined by esthetic logic, however, the tragedy of history played a pivotal role. Before the eruption of World War it shattered the placid surface of European cultural life, there were signs aplenty a soul of insuperable alienation and rebellion was gathering momentum in these enclaves of independent thought called the avant-garde. In Italy, a group of arrogant young artists and writers who called themselves Futurists openly declared their allegiance to some warlike perfect that extolled the beauties of machine technology and didn't shrink from adopting violence as a way of attaining a sweeping cultural revolution. In Russia, a similarly vociferous but much more numerous vanguard of revolted writers and artists was mounting its fast accelerating challenge to the cultural status quo.
During the war suddenly the culture irresistible declared to be moribund as everything was regarded as destroying itself, and a chance to construct a new world on the ruins of the old appeared to be at hand. It's long been recognized that the war generated a tremendous tide of disillusionment and despair and brought in its aftermath revolution on a grand scale - particularly in Russia - and those mini-revolutions of the soul, such as Dada and Surrealism, which penetrated the very heart of European civilization.
Its first section, on the years 1910-14, is dedicated to the"Origins of the Nonobjective" from the Cubist and Futurist works of Picasso, Braque, Leger, and assorted members of the Russian and Italian avant-garde. The next section, 1922-29, is dedicated to the rich global development of the movement in the years preceding its devastation by the totalitarian regimes of Stalin and Hitler. The fourth segment, known as "The Paris-New York Connection" and focusing on the years 1930-59, traces the change to a more purely decorative development of the movement's ideas and introduces a significant American element. The last section, on the years 1960-80, brings this history to a close with a focus on Minimalist art and related tendencies which, in their pure estheticism, reveal no trace all the utopian and millenarian impulses that place this motion on its path a lot of years before. The sculptures and paintings and structures that encircle us in this last part of "Contemporary", by artists such as Gheorghe Virtosu, Al Held and Frank Stella, are bigger, brighter and slicker than anything else available in the prior sections. But far from talking from the accents of revolution and utopia, they're works of art already fully integrated into the cultural life of the type of society - our own - this revolutionary movement had, in its early days, so ardently expected to overturn and destroy. What we are of yet, another illustration of an avant-garde motion that set out to change the world - to create, in effect, a new Jerusalem - just to discover that its true destiny was to be a lot more modest than its initial thoughts had envisioned. At the same time, however, it was a motion that did succeed in radically transforming both the expression of the modern world - our world - and how we consider art itself. Its deepest and most far-reaching accomplishment wasn't to alter how society is organized - for in that regard it failed utterly.
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