Nature of Abstract Art Total Abstraction Nature of Abstract Art by Meyer Shapiro

Before there was an art of abstract painting, it say in his Political Economy of Art, in calling for the was already widely believed that the value of a preservation of medieval and Renaissance works that picture was a matter of colors and shapes alone. “in Europe alone, pure and precious ancient art Music and architecture were constantly held up to exists, for there is none in America, none in Asia, painters as examples of a pure art which did not have none in Africa.” What was once considered mon- to imitate objects but derived its effects from strous, now became pure form and pure expression, elements peculiar to itself. But such ideas could not the aesthetic evidence that in art feeling and thought be readily accepted, since no one had yet seen a are prior to the represented world. The art of the painting made up of colors and shapes, representing whole world was now available on a single unhistori- nothing. If pictures of the objects around us were cal and universal plane as a panorama of the formal- often judged according to qualities of form alone, it izing energies of man. was obvious that in doing so one was distorting or reducing the pictures; you could not arrive at these These two aspects of abstract painting, the paintings simply by manipulating forms. And in so far exclusion of natural forms and the unhistorical as the objects to which these forms belonged were universalizing of the qualities of art, have a crucial often particular individuals and places, real or importance for the general theory of art. Just as the mythical figures, bearing the evident marks of a time, discovery of non-Euclidian geometry gave a powerful the pretension that art was above history through impetus to the view that mathematics was inde- pen- the creative energy or personality of the artist was dent of experience, so abstract painting cut at the not entirely clear. In abstract art, however, the roots of the classic ideas of artistic imitation. The pretended autonomy and absoluteness of the analogy of mathematics was in fact present to the aesthetic emerged in a concrete form. Here, finally, minds of the apologists of abstract art; they have was an art of painting in which only aesthetic ele- often referred to non- Euclidian geometry in defense ments seem to be present. of their own position, and have even suggested an historical connection between them. Abstract art had therefore the value of a practical demonstration. In these new paintings the Today the abstractionists and their Surrealist very processes of designing and inventing seemed to offspring are more and more concerned with objects have been brought on to the canvas; the pure form and the older claims of abstract art have lost the once masked by an extraneous content was liberated original force of insurgent convictions. Painters who and could now be directly perceived. Painters who do had once upheld this art as the logical goal of the not practice this art have welcomed it on just this entire history of forms have refuted themselves in ground, that it strengthened their conviction of the returning to the impure natural forms. The demands absoluteness of the aesthetic and provided them a for liberty in art are no longer directed against a discipline in pure design. Their attitude toward past fettering tradition of nature; the aesthetic of abstrac- art was also completely changed. The new styles tion has itself become a brake on new movements. accustomed painters to the vision of colors and Not that abstract art is dead, as its philistine enemies shapes as disengaged from objects and created an have been announcing for over twenty years; it is still immense confraternity of works of art, cutting across practiced by some of the finest painters and sculp- the barriers of time and place. They made it possible tors in Europe, whose work shows a freshness and to enjoy the remotest arts, those in which the assurance that are lacking in the newest realistic art. represented objects were no longer intelligible, even The conception of a possible field of “pure art”— the drawings of children and madmen, and especially whatever its value— will not die so soon, though it primitive arts with drastically distorted figures, which may take on forms different from those of the last had been regarded as artless curios even by insist- thirty years; and very likely the art that follows in the ently aesthetic critics. Before this time Ruskin could countries which have known abstraction will be

13 Issue 20 / October 2013 Nature of Abstract Art Total Abstraction affected by it. The ideas underlying abstract art have This explanation, which is common in the penetrated deeply into all artistic theory, even of studios and is defended by some writers in the name their original opponents; the language of absolutes of the autonomy of art, is only one instance of a and pure sources of art, whether of feeling, reason, wider view that embraces every field of culture and intuition or the sub-conscious mind, appears in the even economy and politics. At its ordinary level the very schools which renounce abstraction. “Objective” theory of exhaustion and reaction reduces history to painters strive for “pure objectivity,” for the object the pattern of popular ideas on changes in fashion. given in its “essence” and completeness, without People grow tired of one color and choose an respect to a viewpoint, and the Surrealists derive opposite; one season the skirts are long, and then by their images from pure thought, freed from the reaction they are short. In the same way the present perversions of reason and everyday experience. Very return to objects in painting is explained as the result little is written today—sympathetic to modern art— of the exhaustion of abstract art. All the possibilities which does not employ this language of absolutes. of the latter having been explored by Picasso and Mondrian, there is little left for the younger artists In this article I shall take as my point of depar- but to take up the painting of objects. ture Barr‘s recent book1 , the best, I think, that we have in English on the movements now grouped as The notion that each new style is due to a abstract art. It has the special interest of combining a reaction against a preceding is especially plausible to discussion of general questions about the nature of modern artists, whose work is so often a response to this art, its aesthetic theories, its causes, and even another work, who consider their art a free projec- the relation to political movements, with a detailed, tion of an irreducible personal feeling, but must form matter-of-fact account of the different styles. But their style in competition against others, with the although Barr sets out to describe rather than to obsessing sense of the originality of their work as a defend or to criticize abstract art, he seems to accept mark of its sincerity. Besides, the creators of new its theories on their face value in his historical forms in the last century had almost always to fight exposition and in certain random judgments. In against those who practiced the old; and several of places he speaks of this art as independent of histori- the historical styles were formed in conscious cal conditions, as realizing the underlying order of opposition to another manner-Renaissance against nature and as an art of pure form without content. Gothic, Baroque against Mannerism, Neo-classic against Rococo, etc. Hence if the book is largely an account of historical movements, Barr‘s conception of abstract The antithetic form of a change does not art remains essentially unhistorical. He gives us, it is permit us, however, to judge a new art as a sheer true, the dates of every stage in the various move- reaction or as the inevitable response to the spend- ments, as if to enable us to plot a curve, or to follow ing of all the resources of the old. No more than the the emergence of the art year by year, but no con- succession of war and peace implies that war is due nection is drawn between the art and the conditions to an inherent reaction against peace and peace to a of the moment. He excludes as irrelevant to its reaction against war. The energies required for the history the nature of the society in which it arose, reaction, which sometimes has a drastic and invigor- except as an incidental obstructing or accelerating ating effect on art, are lost sight of in such an atmospheric factor. The history of modern art is account; it is impossible to explain by it the particular presented as an internal, immanent process among direction and force of the new movement, its specific the artists; abstract art arises because, as the author moment, region and goals. The theory of immanent says, representational art had been exhausted. Out exhaustion and reaction is inadequate not only of boredom with “painting facts,” the artists turned because it reduces human activity to a simple to abstract art as a pure aesthetic activity. “By a mechanical movement, like a bouncing ball, but common and powerful impulse they were driven to because in neglecting the sources of energy and the abandon the imitation of natural appearance” just as condition of the field, it does not even do justice to the artists of the fifteenth century “were moved by a its own limited mechanical conception. The opposite- passion for imitating nature.” The modern change, ness of a reaction is often an artificial matter, more however, was “the logical and inevitable conclusion evident in the polemics between schools or in the toward which art was moving. schemas of formalistic historians than in the actual historical change. To supply a motor force to this physical history of styles (which pretends to be

14 Issue 20 / October 2013 Nature of Abstract Art Total Abstraction antimechanical), they are reduced to a myth of the toward simplified natural forms, others toward their perpetual alternating motion of generations, each complete decomposition; both are sometimes reacting against its parents and therefore repeating described as historical reactions against Impression- the motions of its grandparents, according to the ism, one restoring the objects that Impressionism “grandfather principle” of certain German historians dissolved, the other restoring the independent of art. And a final goal, an unexplained but inevitable imaginative activity that Impressionism sacrificed to trend, a destiny rooted in the race or the spirit of the the imitation of nature. culture or the inherent nature of the art, has to be smuggled in to explain the large unity of a develop- Actually, in the 1880‘s there were several ment that embraces so many reacting generations. aspects of Impressionism which could be the starting The immanent purpose steers the reaction when an points of new tendencies and goals of reaction. For art seems to veer off the main path because of an classicist painters the weakness of Impressionism lay overweighted or foreign element. Yet how many arts in its unclarity, its destruction of definite linear we know in which the extreme of some quality forms; it is in this sense that Renoir turned for a time persists for centuries without provoking the correc- from Impressionism to Ingres. But for other artists at tive reaction. The “decay” of classical art has been the same moment Impressionism was too casual and attributed by the English critic, Fry, to its excessive unmethodical; these, the neo- Impressionists, cult of the human body, but this “decay” evidently preserved the Impressionist colorism, carrying it even lasted for hundreds of years until the moment was further in an unclassical sense, but also in a more ripe for the Christian reaction. But even this Christian constructive and calculated way. For still others, art, according to the same writer, was for two Impressionism was too photographic, too imper- centuries indistinguishable from the pagan. sonal; these, the symbolists and their followers, required an emphatic sentiment and aesthetic The broad reaction against an existing art is activism in the work. There were finally artists for possible only on the ground of its inadequacy to whom Impressionism was too unorganized, and their artists with new values and new ways of seeing. But reaction underscored a schematic arrangement. reaction in this internal, antithetic sense, far from Common to most of these movements after Impres- being an inherent and universal property of culture, sionism was the absolutizing of the artist‘s state of occurs only under impelling historical conditions. For mind or sensibility as prior to and above objects. If we see that ancient arts, like the Egyptian, the work the Impressionists reduced things to the artist‘s of anonymous craftsmen, persist for thousands of sensations, their successors reduced them further to years with relatively little change, provoking few projections or constructions of his feelings and reactions to the established style; others grow slowly moods, or to “essences” grasped in a tense intuition. and steadily in a single direction, and still others, in the course of numerous changes, foreign intrusions The historical fact is that the reaction against and reactions preserve a common traditional charac- Impressionism came in the 1800s before some of its ter. From the mechanical theories of exhaustion, most original possibilities had been realized. The boredom and reaction we could never explain why painting of series of chromatic variations of a single the reaction occurred when it did. On the other motif (the Haystacks, the Cathedral) dates from the hand, the banal divisions of the great historical styles 1890‘s; and the Water Lilies, with their remarkable in literature and art correspond to the momentous spatial forms, related in some ways to contemporary divisions in the history of society. If we consider an abstract art, belong to the twentieth century. The art that is near us in time and is still widely practiced, effective reaction against Impressionism took place like Impressionism, we see how empty is the explana- only at a certain moment in its history and chiefly in tion of the subsequent arts by reaction. From a France, though Impressionism was fairly widespread logical viewpoint the antithesis to Impressionism in Europe by the end of the century. In the 1880s, depends on how Impressionism is defined. Whereas when Impressionism was beginning to be accepted the later schools attacked the Impressionists as mere officially, there were already several groups of young photographers of sunshine, the contemporaries of artists in France to whom it was uncongenial. The Impressionism abused it for its monstrous unreality. history of art is not, however, a history of single The Impressionists were in fact the first painters of willful reactions, every new artist taking a stand whom it was charged that their works made as little opposite the last, painting brightly if the other sense right side up as upside down. The movements painted dully, flattening if the other modelled, and after Impressionism take different directions, some distorting if the other was literal. The reactions were

15 Issue 20 / October 2013 Nature of Abstract Art Total Abstraction deeply motivated in the experience of the art- ists, in dom for an enlightened bourgeois detached from the a changing world with which they had to come to official beliefs of his class. In enjoying realistic terms and which shaped their practice and ideas in pictures of his surroundings as a spectacle of traffic specific ways. and changing atmospheres, the cultivated rentier was experiencing in its phenomenal aspect that mobility The tragic lives of Gauguin and Van Gogh, of the environment, the market and of industry to their estrangement from society, which so pro- which he owed his income and his freedom. And in foundly colored their art, were no automatic reac- the new Impressionist techniques which broke things tions to Impressionism or the consequences of up into finely discriminated points of color, as well as Peruvian or Northern blood. In Gauguin‘s circle were in the “accidental” momentary vision, he found, in a other artists who had abandoned a bourgeois career degree hitherto unknown in art, conditions of in their maturity or who had attempted suicide. For a sensibility closely related to those of the urban young man of the middle class to wish to live by art promenader and the refined consumer of luxury mean a different thing in 1885 than in 1860. By 1885 goods. only artists had freedom and integrity, but often they had nothing else. The very existence of Impression- As the contexts of bourgeois sociability shifted ism which transformed nature into a private, unfor- from community, family and church to commercial- malized field for sensitive vision, shifting with the ized or privately improvised forms—the streets, the spectator, made painting an ideal domain of free- cafes and resorts—the resulting consciousness of dom; it attracted many who were tied unhappily to individual freedom involved more and more an middle class jobs and moral standards, now increas- estrangement from older ties; and those imaginative ingly problematic and stultifying with the advance of members of the middle class who accepted the monopoly capitalism. But Impressionism in isolating norms of freedom, but lacked the economic means the sensibility as a more or less personal, but dispas- to attain them, were spiritually torn by a sense of sionate and still outwardly directed, organ of fugitive helpless isolation in an anonymous indifferent mass. distinctions in distant dissolving clouds, water and By 1880 the enjoying individual becomes rare in sunlight, could no longer suffice for men who had Impressionist art; only the private spectacle of nature staked everything on impulse and whose resolution is left. And in neo-Impressionism, which restores and to become artists was a poignant and in some ways even monumentalizes the figures, the social group demoralizing break with good society. With an breaks up into isolated spectators, who do not almost moral fervor they transformed Impressionism communicate with each other, or consists of mechan- into an art of vehement expression, of emphatic, ically repeated dances submitted to a preordained brilliant, magnified, obsessing objects, or adjusted its movement with little spontaneity. coloring and surface pattern to dreams of a season- less exotic world of idyllic freedom. The French artists of the 1880s and 1890s who attacked Impressionism for its lack of structure Early Impressionism, too, had a moral aspect. often expressed demands for salvation, for order and In its unconventionalized, unregulated vision, in its fixed objects of belief, foreign to the Impressionists discovery of a constantly changing phenomenal as a group. The title of Gauguin‘s picture—”Where do outdoor world of which the shapes depended on the we come from? What are we? Where are we going?”— momentary position of the casual or mobile specta- with its interrogative form, is typical of this state of tor, there was an implicit criticism of symbolic social mind. But since the artists did not know the underly- and domestic formalities, or at least a norm opposed ing economic and social causes of their own disorder to these. It is remarkable how many pictures we have and moral insecurity, they could envisage new in early Impressionism of informal and spontaneous stabilizing forms only as quasi-religious beliefs or as a sociability, of breakfasts, picnics, promenades, revival of some primitive or highly ordered traditional boating trips, holidays and vacation travel. These society with organs for a collective spiritual life. This urban idylls not only present the objective forms of is reflected in their taste for medieval and primitive bourgeois recreation in the 1860s and 1870s; they art, their conversions to Catholicism and later to also reflect in the very choice of subjects and in the “integral nationalism.” The colonies of artists formed new aesthetic devices the conception of art as solely at this period, Van Gogh‘s project of a communal life a field of individual enjoyment, without reference to for artists, are examples of this groping to reconsti- ideas and motives, and they presuppose the cultiva- tute the pervasive human sociability that capitalism tion of these pleasures as the highest field of free- had destroyed. Even their theories of “composition”

16 Issue 20 / October 2013 Nature of Abstract Art Total Abstraction

-a traditional concept abandoned by the Impression- which are shared today by thousands who in one way ists-are related to their social views, for they conceive or another have experienced the same conflicts as of composition as an assembly of objects bound these artists. together by a principle of order emanating, on the one hand, from the eternal nature of art, on the The logical opposition of realistic and abstract other, from the state of mind of the artist, but in art by which Barr explains the more recent change both instances requiring a “deformation” of the rests on two assumptions about the nature of objects. Some of them wanted a canvas to be like a painting, common in writing on abstract art: that church, to possess a hierarchy of forms, stationed representation is a passive mirroring of things and objects, a prescribed harmony, preordained paths of therefore essentially non-artistic, and that abstract vision, all issuing, however, from the artist‘s feeling. In art, on the other hand, is a purely aesthetic activity, recreating the elements of community in their art unconditioned by objects and based on its own they usually selected inert objects, or active objects eternal laws. The abstract painter denounces repre- without meaningful interaction except as colors and sentation of the outer world a … echanical process of lines. the eye and the hand in which the artist‘s feelings and imagination have little part. Or in a Platonic These problems are posed to some extent, manner he opposes to the representation of objects, though solved differently, even in the work of Seurat, as a rendering of the surface aspect of nature, the whose relation to the economic development was in practice of abstract design as a discovery of the many ways distinct from that of the painters of the “essence” or underlying mathematical order of Symbolist and Synthetist groups. Instead of rebelling things. He assumes further that the mind is most against the moral consequences of capitalism he completely itself when it is independent of external attached himself like a contented engineer to its objects. If he, nevertheless, values certain works of progressive technical side and accepted the popular older naturalistic art, he sees in them only independ- forms of lower class recreation and commercialized ent formal constructions; he overlooks the imagina- entertainment as the subjects of a monumentalized tive aspect of the devices for transposing the space of art. From the current conceptions of technology he experience on to the space of the canvas, and the drew the norms of a methodical procedure in immense, historically developed, capacity to hold the painting, bringing Impressionism up to date in the world in mind. He abstracts the artistic qualities from light of the latest findings of science. the represented objects and their meanings, and looks on these as unavoidable impurities, imposed There were, of course, other kinds of painting historical elements with which the artist was bur- in France beside those described. But a detailed dened and in spite of which he finally achieved his investigation of the movement of art would show, I underlying, personal abstract expression. These views think, that these, too, and even the conservative, arc thoroughly one-sided and rest on a mistaken idea academic painting were affected by the changed of what a representation is. There is no passive, conditions of the time. The reactions against Impres- “photographic” representation in the sense sionism, far from being inherent in the nature of art, described; the scientific elements of representation issued from the responses that artists as artists made in older artperspective, anatomy, light-and-shade-are to the broader situation in which they found them- ordering principles and expressive means as well as selves, but which they themselves had not produced. devices of rendering. All renderings of objects, no If the tendencies of the arts after Impressionism matter how exact they seem, even photographs, toward an extreme subjectivism and abstraction are proceed from values, methods and viewpoints which already evident in Impressionism, it is because the somehow shape the image and often determine its isolation of the individual and of the higher forms of contents. On the other hand, there is no “pure art,” culture from their older social supports, the renewed unconditioned by experience; all fantasy and formal ideological oppositions of mind and nature, individ- construction, even the random scribbling of the ual and society, proceed from social and economic hand, are shaped by experience and by nonaesthetic causes which already existed before Impressionism concerns. This is clear enough from the example of and which arc even sharper today. It is, in fact, a part the Impressionists mentioned above. They could be of the popular attraction of Van Gogh and Gauguin seen as both photographic and fantastic, according that their work incorporates (and with a far greater to the viewpoint of the observer. Even their motifs of energy and formal coherence than the works of nature were denounced as meaningless beside the other artists) evident longings, tensions and values evident content of romantic and classicist art. In

17 Issue 20 / October 2013 Nature of Abstract Art Total Abstraction regarding representation as a facsimile of nature, the aspects of the form in such a work already possess abstract artist has taken over the error of vulgar qualities conditioned by the modes of seeing objects nineteenth century criticism, which judged painting and designing representations, not to mention the by an extremely narrow criterion of reality, inapplica- content and the emotional attitudes of the painter. ble even to the realistic painting which it accepted. If an older taste said, how exactly like the object, how Then the abstractionist Kandinsky was trying beautiful!-the modern abstractionist says, how to create an art expressing mood, a great deal of exactly like the object, how ugly! The two are not conservative, academic painting was essentially just completely opposed, however, in their premises, and that. But the academic painter, following older will appear to be related if compared with the taste traditions of romantic art, preserved the objects of religious arts with a supernatural content. Both which provoked the mood; if he wished to express a realism and abstraction affirm the sovereignty of the mood inspired by a landscape, he painted the land- artist‘s mind, the first, in the capacity to recreate the scape itself. Kandinsky, on the other hand, wished to world minutely in a narrow, intimate field by series of find an entirely imaginative equivalent of the mood; abstract calculations of perspective and gradation of he would not go beyond the state of mind and a color, the other in the capacity to impose new forms series of expressive colors and shapes, independent on nature, to manipulate the abstracted elements of of things. The mood in the second case is very line and color freely, or to create shapes correspond- different from the first mood. A mood which is ing to subtle states of mind. But as little as a work is partly identified with the conditioning object, a guaranteed aesthetically by its resemblance to mood dominated by clear images of detailed objects nature, so little is it guaranteed by its abstractness or and situations, and capable of being revived and com- “purity.” Nature and abstract forms are both materi- municated to others through these images, is differ- als for art, and the choice of one or the other flows ent in feeling tone, in relation to self-consciousness, from historically changing interests. attentiveness and potential activity, from a mood that is independent of an awareness of fixed, external Barr believes that painting is impoverished by objects, but sustained by a random flow of private the exclusion of the outer world from pictures, losing and incommunicable associations. Kandinsky looks a whole range of sentimental, sexual, religious and upon the mood as wholly a function of his personal- social values. But he supposes in turn that the ity or a special faculty of his spirit; and he selects aesthetic values arc then available in a pure form. He colors and patterns which have for him the strongest does not sec, however, that the latter arc changed correspondence to his state of mind, precisely rather than purified by this exclusion, just as the kind because they are not tied sensibly to objects but of verbal pattern in writing designed mainly for emerge freely from his excited fantasy. They are the verbal pattern differs from the verbal pattern in concrete evidences, projected from within, of the more meaningful prose. Various forms, qualities of internality of his mood, its independence of the space, color, light, scale, modelling and movement, outer world. Yet the external objects that underlie which depend on the appreciation of aspects of the mood may re-emerge in the abstraction in a nature and human life, disappear from painting; and masked or distorted form. The most responsive spec- similarly the aesthetic of abstract art discovers new tator is then the individual who is similarly concerned qualities and relationships which arc congenial to the with himself and who finds in such pictures not only minds that practice such an exclusion. Far from the counterpart of his own tension, but a final creating an absolute form, each type of abstract art, discharge of obsessing feelings. as of naturalistic art, gives a special but temporary importance to some element, whether color, surface, In renouncing or drastically distorting natural outline or arabesque, or to some formal method. The shapes the abstract painter makes a judgment of the converse of Barr‘s argument, that by clothing a pure external world. He says that such and such aspects of form with a meaningful dress this form becomes experience are alien to art and to the higher realities more accessible or palatable, like logic or mathemat- of form; he disqualifies them from art. But by this ics presented through concrete examples, rests on very act the mind‘s view of itself and of its art, the the same misconception. Just as narrative prose is intimate contexts of this repudiation of objects, not simply a story added to a preexisting, pure prose become directing factors in art. Then personality, form that can be disengaged from the sense of the feeling and formal sensibility are absolutized, the words, so a representation is not a natural form values that underlie or that follow today from such added to an abstract design. Even the schematic attitudes suggest new formal problems, just as the

18 Issue 20 / October 2013 Nature of Abstract Art Total Abstraction secular interests of the later middle ages made a child or a madman, it is not because he is childish or possible a whole series of new formal types of space mad. He has come to value as qualities related to his and the human figure. The qualities of cryptic own goals of imaginative freedom the passionless improvisation, the microscopic intimacy of textures, spontaneity and technical insouciance of the child, points and lines, the impulsively scribbled forms, the who creates for himself alone, without the pressure mechanical precision in constructing irreducible, of adult responsibility and practical adjustments. And incommensurable fields, the thousand and one similarly, the resemblance to psychopathic art, which ingenious formal devices of dissolution, punctuation, is only approximate and usually independent of a immateriality and incompleteness, which affirm the conscious imitation, rests on their common freedom abstract artist‘s active sovereignty over objects, these of fantasy, uncontrolled by reference to an external and many other sides of modern art are discovered physical and social world. By his very practice of experimentally by painters who seek freedom abstract art, in which forms are improvised and outside of nature and society and consciously negate deliberately distorted or obscured, the painter opens the formal aspects of perception—like the connected- the field to the suggestions of his repressed interior ness of shape and color or the discontinuity of object life. But the painter‘s manipulation of his fantasy and surroundings—that enter into the practical must differ from the child‘s or psychopath‘s in so far relations of man in nature. We can judge more as the act of designing is his chief occupation and the readily the burden of contemporary experience that conscious source of his human worth; it acquires a imposes such forms by comparing them with the burden of energy, a sustained pathos and firmness of abstract devices in Renaissance art, especially the execution foreign to the others. systems of perspective and the canons of proportion, which are today misunderstood as merely imitative The attitude to primitive art is in this respect means. In the Renaissance the development of linear very significant. The nineteenth century, with its perspective was intimately tied to the exploration of realistic art, its rationalism and curiosity about the world and the renewal of physical and geographi- production, materials and techniques often appreci- cal science. Just as for the aggressive members of the ated primitive ornament, but considered primitive burgher class a realistic knowledge of the geographi- representation monstrous. It was as little acceptable cal world and communications entailed the ordering to an enlightened mind as the fetishism or magic of spatial connections in a reliable system, so the which these images sometimes served. Abstract artists strove to realize in their own imaginative field, painters, on the other hand, have been relatively cyan within the limits of a traditional religious indifferent to the primitive geometrical styles of content. The most appropriate and stimulating forms ornament. The distinctness of motifs, the emblem- of spatial order, with the extensiveness, traversability atic schemes, the dear order of patterns, the direct and regulation valued by their class. And similarly, as submission to handicraft and utility, are foreign to this same burgher class, emerging from a Christian modern art. But in the distorted, fantastic figures feudal society, began to assert the priority of sensual some groups of modern artists found an intimate and natural to ascetic and supernatural goods, and kinship with their own work; unlike the ordering idealized the human body as the real locus of values- devices of ornament which were tied to the practical enjoying images of the powerful or beautiful nude making of things, the forms of these figures seemed human being as the real man or woman, without sign to have been shaped by a ruling fantasy, independent of rank or submission to authority-so the artists of nature and utility, and directed by obsessive derived from this valuation of the human being feelings. The highest praise of their own work is to artistic ideals of energy and massiveness of form describe it in the language of magic and fetishism. which they embodied in robust, active or potentially active, human figures. And even the canons of This new responsiveness to primitive art was proportion, which seem to submit the human form evidently more than aesthetic; a whole complex of to a mysticism of number, create purely secular longings, moral values and broad conceptions of life standards of perfection; for through these canons were fulfilled in it. If colonial imperialism made these the norms of humanity become physical and measur- primitive objects physically accessible, they could able, therefore at the same time sensual and intellec- have little aesthetic interest until the new formal tual, in contrast to the older medieval disjunction of conceptions arose. But these formal conceptions body and mind. could be relevant to primitive art only when charged with the new valuations of the instinctive, the If today an abstract painter seems to draw like natural, the mythical as the essentially human, which

19 Issue 20 / October 2013 Nature of Abstract Art Total Abstraction affected even the description of primitive art. The hensive and long-prepared, too closely related to older ethnologists, who had investigated the materi- similar movements in literature and philosophy, als and tribal contexts of primitive imagery, usually which have quite other technical conditions, and ignored the subjective and aesthetic side in its finally, too varied according to time and place, to be creation; in discovering the latter the modern critics considered a self-contained development issuing by a with an equal one-sidedness relied on feeling to kind of internal logic directly from aesthetic prob- penetrate these arts. The very fact that they were lems … ears within itself at almost every point the the arts of primitive peoples without a recorded mark of the changing material and psychological history now made them all the more attractive. They conditions surrounding modern culture. The avowals acquired the special prestige of the timeless and of artists-several of which are cited in Barr‘s work instinctive, on the level of spontaneous animal -show that the step to abstraction was accompanied activity, self-contained, unreflective, private, without by great tension and emotional excitement. The dates and signatures, without origins or conse- painters justify themselves by ethical and metaphysi- quences except in the emotions. A devaluation of cal standpoints, or in defense of their art attack the history, civilized society and external nature lay preceding style as the counterpart of a detested behind the new passion for primitive art. Time social or moral position. Not the processes of ceased to be an historical dimension; it became an imitating nature were exhausted, but the valuation of internal psychological moment, and the whole mess nature itself had changed. The philosophy of art was of material ties, the nightmare of a determining also a philosophy of life. world, the disquieting sense of the present as a dense historical point to which the individual was fatefully 1. The Russian painter Malevich, the founder bound—these were automatically transcended in of “Suprematism,” has described his new art in thought by the conception of an instinctive, elemen- revealing terms. “By Suprematism I mean the tal art above time. By a remarkable process the arts supremacy of pure feeling or sensation in the picto- of subjugated backward peoples, discovered by rial arts … In the year 1913 in my desperate struggle Europeans in conquering the world, became aes- to free art from the ballast of the objective world I thetic norms to those who renounced it. The imperi- fled to the form of the Square and exhibited a alist expansion was accompanied at home by a picture which was nothing more or less than a black profound cultural pessimism in which the arts of the square upon a white ground … It was no empty savage victims were elevated above the traditions of square which I had exhibited but rather the experi- Europe. The colonies became places to flee to as well ence of objectlessness” (Barr, pp. 122-23). Later in as to exploit. 1918 he painted in Moscow a series called White on White, including a white square on a white surface. In The new respect for primitive art was progres- their purity these paintings seemed to parallel the sive, however, in that the cultures of savages and efforts of mathematicians to reduce all mathematics other backward peoples were now regarded as to arithmetic and arithmetic to logic. But there is a human cultures, and a high creativeness, far from burden of feeling underlying this “geometrical” art, being a prerogative of the advanced societies of the which may be judged from the related paintings with West, was attributed to all human groups. But this the titles Sensation of Metallic Sounds, Feeling of Flight, insight was accompanied not only by a flight from the Feeling of Infinite Space. Even in the work labeled advanced society, but also by an indifference to just Composition we can see how the formal character of those material conditions which were brutally the abstraction rests on the desire to isolate and destroying the primitive peoples or converting them externalize in a concrete fashion subjective, profes- into submissive, cultureless slaves. Further, the sional elements of the older practice of painting, a preservation of certain forms of native culture in the desire that issues in turn from the conflicts and interest of imperialist power could be supported in insecurity of the artist and his conception of art as an the name of the new artistic attitudes by those who absolutely private realm. Barr analyzes a composition thought themselves entirely free from political of two squares (Fig. 1. Kasimir Malevich, Black Square interest. To say then that abstract painting is simply a & Red Square, 1915), as a “study in equivalents: the reaction against the exhausted imitation of nature, or red square, smaller but more intense in color and that it is the discovery of an absolute or pure field of more active in its diagonal axis, holds its own against form is to overlook the positive character of the art, the black square which is larger but negative in color its underlying energies and sources of movement. and static in position.” Although he characterizes this Besides, the movement of abstract art is too compre- kind of painting as pure abstraction to distinguish it

20 Issue 20 / October 2013 Nature of Abstract Art Total Abstraction from geometrical designs which are ultimately painters to whom they are pure, unspoiled artists, derived from some representation, he overlooks the creating from instinct or a native sensibility. In the relation of this painting to a work by Malevich light of this analysis we can hardly accept Barr‘s reproduced in his book—Woman With Water Pails, account of Malevich‘s step to abstraction: “Malevich dating from 1912 (Fig. 2 Kazimir Malevich, Woman suddenly foresaw the logical and inevitable conclu- with Water Pails: Dynamic Arrangement, 1912-13). The sion towards which European art was moving” and peasant woman, designed in Cubist style, balances drew a black square on a white ground. two pails hanging from a rod across her shoulders. Here the preoccupation with balance as a basic 2. In his book Über das Geistige in der Kunst, aesthetic principle governing the relations of two published in 1912, the painter Kandinsky, one of the counterpart units is embodied in an “elemental” first to create completely abstract pictures, speaks genre subject; the objects balanced arc not human, constantly of inner necessity as alone determining but suspended, non-organic elements, unarticulated the choice of elements, just as inner freedom, he tells forms. Although the human theme is merely allusive us, is the sole criterion in ethics. He does not say that and veiled by the Cubist procedure, the choice of the representation has been exhausted, but that the motif of the peasant woman with the water pails material world is illusory and foreign to the spirit; his betrays a sexual interest and the emotional context art is a rebellion against the ”materialism” of modern of the artist‘s tendency toward his particular style of society, in which he includes science and the socialist abstraction. movement. “When religion, science and morality (the last through the strong hand of Nietzsche) are The importance of the subjective conditions of shaken, and when the outer supports threaten to fall, the artist‘s work in the formation of abstract styles man turns his gaze away from the external and may be verified in the corresponding relationship towards himself.” In his own time he respects, as between Cubist and pre-Cubist art. Picasso, just interests parallel to his own and similarly motivated, before Cubism, represented melancholy circus occultism, theosophy, the cult of the primitive and acrobats, harlequins, actors, musicians, beggars, experiments of synesthesia. Colored audition is usually at home on the fringes of society, or rehears- important to him because perception is then blurred ing among themselves, as bohemian artists detached and localized in the perceiver rather than identified from the stage of public performance. He shows in with an external source. His more aesthetic com- one picture two acrobats balancing themselves, the ments are usually of a piece with these attitudes. one mature and massive, squared in body, seated “The green, yellow, red tree in the meadow is only … firmly on a cubic mass of stone shaped like his own n accidental materialized form of the tree which we figure; the young girl, slender, an outlined, unmod- feel in ourselves when we hear the word tree.” And in elled form, balancing herself unstably on tiptoes on a describing one of his first abstract pictures he says: spherical stone (Fig. 3 Pablo Picasso, Acrobat on a Ball, “This entire description is chiefly an analysis of the 1905). The experience of balance vital to the acrobat, picture which I have painted rather subconsciously in his very life, is assimilated here to the subjective a state of strong inner tension. So intensively do I feel experience of the artist, an expert performer con- the necessity of some of the forms that I remember cerned with the adjustment of lines and masses as having given loud-voiced directions to myself, as the essence of his art-a formalized personal activity for instance: ‘But the corners must be heavy’. The that estranges him from society and to which he observer must learn to look at the picture as a gives up his life. Between this art and Cubism, where graphic representation of a mood and not as a the figure finally disappears, giving way to small representation of objects” (Barr, p. 66). More geometrical elements formed from musical instru- recently he has written: “Today a point sometimes ments, drinking vessels, playing-cards and other says more in a painting than a human figure … Man artificial objects of manipulation, there is a phase of has developed a new faculty which permits him to go Negroid figures in which the human physiognomy is beneath the skin of nature and touch its essence, its patterned on primitive or savage faces and the body content … The painter needs discreet, silent, almost reduced to an impersonal nudity of harsh, drastic insignificant objects … How silent is an apple beside lines. This figure-type is not taken from life, not even Laocoon. A circle is even more silent” (Cahiers d‘Art, from the margins of society, but from art; this time, vol. VI, 1931, p. 351). however, from the art of a tribal, isolated people, regarded everywhere as inferior and valued only as exotic spectacles or entertainers, except by the 3. I will now quote a third avowal of artists

21 Issue 20 / October 2013 Nature of Abstract Art Total Abstraction tending toward abstraction, hut this time of aggres- identified by its defenders and critics with a matter- sive artists, the Italian Futurists who can hardly be of-fact sensualism. The enemics of La Mettrie, the charged with the desire to escape from the world. “It author of Man the Machine, were pleased to point out is from Italy that we launch … ur manifesto of revolu- that he died of over-eating. More significant, how- tionary and incendiary violence with which we found ever, is the fact that in recent times the advanced today il Futurismo … Exalt every kind of originality, of industrial countries with the most developed tech- boldness, of extreme violence … Take and glorify the nologies, the United States and England, did not orig- life of today, incessantly and tumultuously trans- inate styles of mechanical abstraction; they are also formed by the triumphs of science … A speeding the most backward in functionalist abstraction of automobile is more beautiful than the Victory of forms in architecture. On the other hand, the Samothrace” (Barr, p. 54). development of such arts takes place in Russia, Italy, Holland and France, and only later in Germany. Barr, who overlooks the moral, ideological Hence the explanation of the arts as a reflection of aspect in Malevich and Kandinsky, cannot help existing machines is certainly inadequate. It could not observing in the Italian movement relations to explain, above all, the differences in “machine-styles” Bergson, Nietzsche and even to fascism; and in from place to place at a moment when technology analyzing the forms of Futurist art he tries to show has an international character. In Detroit, the murals they embody the qualities asserted in the manifestos. of machines by Rivera are realistic images of the But if Futurism has an obvious ideological aspect, it is factory as a world operated by workers; in Paris Leger not a pure abstract art for Barr. It is “near-abstrac- decomposes the elements of machines into Cubist tion,” for it refers overtly to a world outside the abstractions or assimilates living things to the typical canvas and still retains elements of representation. rigid shapes of machines; the Dadaists improvise a Yet the forms of “pure” abstract art, which seem to whimsical burlesque with robots or reconstructed be entirely without trace of representation or men; in Holland the Neo-Plasticists construct their escapist morbidity—the Neo-Plasticist works of works of quasiarchitectural units; in Germany the Mondrian and the later designs of the Constructivists Constructivist-Suprematist forms ape the drawings and Suprematists—are apparently influenced in their and models of the machine designer, rather than the material aspect, as textures and shapes, and in their machines themselves. And the Futurists, in distinc- expressive qualities of precision. impersonal finish tion from all these, try to recapture the phenomenal and neatness (and even in subtler informalities of aspect of moving mechanisms, of energy and speed. design), by the current conceptions and norms of the machine. Neither Futurism nor the “purer” mechani- These differences are not simply a matter of cal abstract forms can be explained, however, as a different local artistic traditions operating on a simple reflection of existing technology. Although common modern material. For if this were the case, machines have existed since ancient times and have we should expect a Mondrian in Italy, the country of had a central place in production in some countries Renaissance tradition of clarified forms, and the for over a century, this art is peculiar to the last Futurists in Holland and England, the pioneer lands twenty-five years. In the middle of the 19th century of Impressionism. A similar criticism would apply to when the machines were already hailed as the great the corresponding derivation of abstraction in art works of modern art, superior to the paintings of the from the abstract nature of modern finance, in which time, the taste of progressive industrialists was bits of paper control capital and all human transac- towards a realistic art, and Proudhon could celebrate tions assume the form of operations on numbers and as the real modern works the pictures of Courbet titles. Here again we observe that the United States and the newest machines. Not even the personal and England, with the most highly developed finan- preoccupation with machines necessarily leads by cial capitalism, are among the last countries to itself to a style of mechanical abstract forms; the produce abstract art. Mechanical abstract forms arise inventors Alexander Nasmyth, Robert Fulton and in modern art not because modern production is Samuel Morse were fairly naturalistic painters, like mechanical, but because of the values assigned to the Leonardo, one of the fathers of modern technology. human being and the machine in the ideologies The French art of the period of mechanistic philoso- projected by the conflicting interests and situation in phy, the 17th century, was dominated by idealized society, which vary from country to country. Thus naturalistic human forms. And the conception of the modern conception of man as a machine is more man as a machine current in France during the economic than biological in its accent. It refers to the predominance of the unmechanical rococo style was human robot rather than to the human animal, and

22 Issue 20 / October 2013 Nature of Abstract Art Total Abstraction suggests an efficient control of the costly move- artists exasperated by their own merely traditional ments of the body, a submission to some external and secondary status, their mediocre outlook in a purpose indifferent to the individual-unlike the older backward provincial Italy. They were devoted to mechanistic views which concerned the passions, machines not so much as instruments of production explained them by internal mechanical forces, and but as sources of mobility in modern life. While the sometimes deduced an ethics of pleasure, utility and perception of industrial processes led the workers, self-interest. who participated in them directly, toward a radical social philosophy, the artists, who were detached Barr recognizes the importance of local from production, like the petit bourgeoisie, could conditions when he attributes the deviations of one know these processes abstractly or phenomenally, in of the Futurists to his Parisian experience. But he their products and outward appearance, in the form makes no effort to explain why this art should of traffic, automobiles, railroads, and new cities and emerge in Italy rather than elsewhere. The Italian in the tempo of urban life, rather than in their social writers have described it as a reaction against the causes. The Futurists thus came to idealize move- traditionalism and sleepiness of Italy during the rule ment as such, and they conceived this movement or of Umberto, and in doing so have overlooked the generalized mobility mainly as mechanical phenom- positive sources of this reaction and its effects on ena in which the forms of objects are blurred or Italian life. The backwardness was most intensely felt destroyed. The dynamism of an auto, centrifugal to be a contradiction and became a provoking issue motion, the dog in movement (with twenty legs), the towards 1910 and then mainly in the North, which autobus, the evolution of forms in space, the had recently experienced the most rapid industrial armored train in battle, the dance hall-these were development. At this moment Italian capitalism was typical subjects of Futurist art. The field of the preparing the imperialist war in Tripoli. Italy, poor in canvas was charged with radiating lines, symbolic resources yet competing with world empires, graphs of pervading force, colliding and interpene- urgently required expansion to attain the levels of trating objects. Whereas in Impressionism the the older capitalist countries. The belated growth of mobility was a spectacle for relaxed enjoyment, in industry, founded on exploitation of the peasantry, Futurism it is urgent and violent, a precursor of war. had intensified the disparities of culture, called into being a strong proletariat, and promoted imperialist Several of the Futurist devices, and the larger adventures. There arose at this time, in response to idea of abstract and interpenetrating forms, the economic growth of the country and the rapid undoubtedly come from Cubism. But, significantly, changes in the older historical environment, philoso- the Italians found Cubism too aestheticized and phies of process and utility-a militant pragmatism of intellectual, lacking a principle of movement; they an emphatic antitraditionalist character. Sections of could accept, however, the Cubist dissolution of the middle class which had acquired new functions stable, clearly bounded forms. This had a direct and modern urban interests accepted the new ideological value, though essentially an aesthetic conditions as progressive and “modern,” and were device, for the stable and clear were identified with often the loudest in denouncing Italian backwardness the older Italian art as well as with the past as such. and calling for an up-to-date, nationally conscious Italy. The attack of the intellectuals against the Outside Italy, and especially after the World provincial aristocratic traditions was in keeping with War, the qualities of the machine as a rigid con- the interest of the dominant class; they elevated structed object, and the qualities of its products and technical progress, aggressive individuality and the of the engineer‘s design suggested various forms to relativism of values into theories favorable to imperi- painters, and even the larger expressive character of alist expansion, obscuring the contradictory results their work. The older categories of art were trans- of the latter and the conflicts between classes by lated into the language of modern technology; the abstract ideological oppositions of the old and the essential was identified with the efficient, the unit modern or the past and the future. Since the national with the standardized element, texture with new consciousness of Italy had rested for generations on materials, representation with photography, drawing her museums, her old cities and artistic inheritance, with the ruled or mechanically traced line, color with the modernizing of the country entailed a cultural the flat coat of paint, and design with the model or conflict, which assumed its sharpest form among the the instructing plan. The painters thus tied their artists. Machines as the most advanced instruments useless archaic activity to the most advanced and of modern production had a special attraction for imposing forms of modern production; and precisely

23 Issue 20 / October 2013 Nature of Abstract Art Total Abstraction because technology was conceived abstractly as an During the crisis the mechanical abstract styles have independent force with its own inner conditions, and become secondary. They influence very few young the designing engineer as the real maker of the artists, or they tend toward what Barr calls “biomor- modern world, the step from their earlier Expression- phic abstraction,” of a violent or nervous calligraphy, ist, Cubist or Suprematist abstraction to the more or with amoeboid forms, a soft, low-grade matter technological style was not a great one. (Even pulsing in an empty space. An antirationalist style, Kandinsky and Malevich changed during the 1920s Surrealism, which had issued from the Dadaist art of under the influence of these conceptions.) the 1917-23 period, becomes predominant and In applying their methods of design to archi- beside it arise new romantic styles, with pessimistic tecture, printing, the theatre and the industrial arts imagery of empty spaces, bones, grotesque beings, they remained abstract artists. They often looked abandoned buildings and catastrophic earth forma- upon their work as the aesthetic counterpart of the tions. abstract calculations of the engineer and the scien- tist. If they admitted an alternative art of fantasy-in some ways formally related to their own-it was Notes merely as a residual field of freedom or as a hygienic 1 Alfred J. Barr, Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art relaxation from the rigors of their own efficiency. (New York 1936). 248 pages. 223 illustrations. It was Unlike the Futurists, whose conception of progress published by the Museum of Modern Art as the was blindly insurgent, they wished to reconstruct guide and catalogue of its great exhibition held in the culture through the logic of sober technique and spring of 1936. design; and in this wish they considered themselves the indispensable aesthetic prophets of a new order in life. Some of them supported the Bolshevik “Nature of Abstract Art” was firstly published in Marxist revolution, many more collaborated with the social- Quarterly 1, no. 1, January-March 1937, pp. 77-98. democratic and liberal architects of Germany and http://abstractpossible.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/ Holland. Their conception of technology as a norm in 04/Nature-of-Abstract-Art-Schapiro-i.pdf art was largely conditioned, on the one hand, by the stringent rationalization of indus- try in post-war Europe in the drive to reduce costs and widen the market as the only hope of a strangling capitalism threatened by American domination, and, on the other hand, by the reformist illusion, which was especially widespread in the brief period of post-war prosperity during this economic impasse, that the technological advance, in raising the living standards of the people, in lowering the costs of housing and other necessities, would resolve the conflict of classes, or at any rate form in the technicians habits of efficient, economic planning, conducive to a peaceful transition to socialism. Architecture or Revolution! That was in fact a slogan of Le Corbusier, the architect, painter and editor of the magazine L‘Esprit Nouveau. With the approach of the crisis of the 1930s critics like Elie Faure called on painters to abandon their art and become engineers; and architects, in America as well as Europe, sensitive to the increasing economic pressure, though ignorant of its causes, identified architecture with engineering, denying the architect an aesthetic function. In these extreme views, which were shared by reformists of technocratic tendency, we can see the debacle of the optimistic machine ideologies in modern culture. As production is curtailed and living standards reduced, art is renounced in the name of technical progress.

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