For my parents, Anne and David
Contents
Introduction: Research Questions and my contribution
3
Chapter 1: Questions and definitions within abstract art. An overview and
survey
7
Chapter 2: Communicative and universal elements in Abstract Art
22
Conclusion
41
Bibliography
45
Master Thesis: History of Art, Education and Communication.
University of Utrecht, 24th September 2007
Student 0509817
Supervisor: Professor Linda Boersma
2
Introduction
Research Question and my Contribution
There has been an awful lot of literature written on abstract art in nearly 100 years or
so of its first manifestations with the field of art. Worringer in 1908 writing in Munich with
Abstraction and Empathy wrote that a work of art was essentially independent of naturalistic
appearances “ Thus the urge to abstraction stands at the beginning of every art…the urge to
abstraction is the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomenon of the
outside world…”.1 The playwright Brecht in around 1937/39 wrote in his treatises On NonObjective Painting that one should look at abstract art as being “…you have removed the
motives from your paintings. No recognisable objects appear there anymore.”2 Then you have
Schapiro at round the same time writing in The Nature of Abstract Art followed by fellow
critic Greenberg with his notions of abstract art in formalist traditions who according to
Frances Colpitt argues that with “ …Greenbergian formalism, is an account of the progressive
flattening out of illusionistic space from the 1860’s to the 1960’s.”3. In the most recent 10
years you have eloquent enquires into abstraction and abstract art by Linda Boersma, Bryony
Fer and David Ryan to name but a few expounding the dichotomy of this art form that needs
so much explaining and manifests itself in so many different guises. Even now at this
moment, anyway by 2002 “…non-representational painting has continued to exfoliate and
develop over the past ten years to the point where one would have to conclude that it is in
great shape in a subterranean sort of way.”4 So we have according to Ryan an abstract art that
could be metaphorically seen as a fine healthy baby that is still kicking and screaming vying
for attention.
Questions?
In a sense one gets the feeling that with this art that is abstract in form and truly
chameleon in character, it is new and it is very difficult for one to put a finger on its pulse as it
were and to truly describe its nature of appearance. This is truly confirmed by two artists
W. Worringer, ‘Abstraction and Empathy’, 1908 in Frascina, F., Harrison, C., Modern Art and Modernism: A
Critical Anthology, London 1982 pp. 160- 1.
2
Bertolt Brecht, ‘On Non-Objective Painting’, in Frascina, F., Harrison, C., Modern Art and Modernism: A
Critical Anthology, London 1982 p. 145.
3
F. Colpitt(Ed), Abstract Art in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge 2002, p. 158.
4
David Ryan, Talking Painting: Dialogues with Twelve Contemporary Abstract Painters
London 2002, p. 16.
1
3
from Brice Marden that “Abstraction is new, it’s in its infancy”5 echoing a similar notion is
expressed by Robert Ryman, “Abstraction is a relatively recent approach to painting. I think
abstract painting is just the beginning. All possibilities are open to it in ways we can’t
imagine.”6 This notion of the “new” and “All possibilities are open to it….” Is the starting
point of my contribution to the contentious area of Abstract art? The “possibilities” that
Ryman talks about are these a truism? Could abstract art be an art that can possibly be
construed as to be open and to communicate in a visual language in a universal way? My
contribution and main research question in this paper would be the argument that there are in
general terms the belief with abstract art on the one hand it is an art that pertains to speak a
universal language to be understood by everyone and all in sundry. However, on the other
hand if abstract art is so universal and can be understood and can be interpreted by all, why is
there so much written on the subject explaining it? Thus at the end of the day is abstract art
truly a communicative, universal and accessible visual language to be understood by us mere
mortals? As Stephen Bann asks too “ On what terms, if at all, we are impelled to ask, does
the abstract work communicate? Is the abstract artist perhaps the victim of a solipsistic
illusion if he continues to believe that his work holds meaning for the rest of the world”7
‘Victim’ or not whether it be the artist or the abstract work itself this poses an interesting
situation. We have all at certain times experienced this dilemma when visiting a museum or
exhibition, one finds one’s self reading the texts on the wall by the painting or sitting in front
of the painting reading explanatory notes and essays in the catalogues to understand what is
going on with an abstract manifestation on a wall before us.
Can one really read a painting? Do abstract works communicate in a universal language
of meaning with the marks accumulated on the canvas, the heaviness of one kind of paint to
the other, the impasto of the paint, the size of the canvas do these all together imprint on us
universal feelings, speak to us from the wall in a language that everyone can understand? It is
without doubt a temping, sobering and provoking thought. As Jeremy Gilbert- Rolfe states
“…the art world continuous to be a place in which the visual is usually an extension of the
verbal: one does not look at most contemporary art so much as one reads it…I have suggested
elsewhere that the art world’s distaste for the visual as opposed to the verbal is the function of
its fear of beauty and preference for the version of the sublime that may be assimilated to he
5
Brice Marden, 1987,quoted in F Colpitt(ed), Abstract Art in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge 2002, p. 153
Robert Ryan, 1986 in Abstract Art in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge 2002, p. 153.
7
Stephen Bann, Abstraction :Towards a New Art- Essays on the background to Abstract Art 1910 -1920,
London, 1980, p. 125.
6
4
condition of the discursive”8 So we have a situation here already expounded by Gilbert-Rolfe
that we have a fear of the visual abstract art, could it just not be visually communicative,
universal and catholic language, but abstract art needs to be written and read about to explain
it to viewer.
This is just the top of the iceberg as it were with abstract art being able to speak or not
a universal language to us all. Why do artists and their work which has been the focus of
attention from art critics, academics, museum curators to gallery owners alike, have so much
written about it, that what hangs on a wall; moreover, to make it accessible, to understand and
give an interpretation of it by others and the artists themselves? I was quite puzzled by this
paradox, so how universal is the language and the reality of abstract art really? Last year I did
a colloquium on the subject area of abstract art which looked into a lot of arguments that are
very much connected to a theoretical approach into looking at this mode of nonrepresentative art. After ploughing through 1300 pages or so one really had to think why is It
argued that music is supposed to be the most abstract universal art form and language and
maybe abstract art is not. Can it be argued that abstract art is an art that is understood on a
visual encounter and creates supposedly the same feelings and emotions with people from
different backgrounds and cultures? As Kandinsky argues with music as being universal
“With few exceptions and deviations, music has, for several centuries, been the art which
employs its resources, not in order to represent natural appearances, but as a means of
expressing the inner life of the artist.”9 Music and art have always had a tradition of cross
over especially when Peter Vergo argues that“…avant-garde artists refused characteristically,
to limit themselves to one medium. Composers like Schoenberg painted pictures: painters,
like Kandinsky and Kokoschka, wrote plays and poems…The task of all the arts was to
express a universal language (abstract or not) the ‘internal’, whether that ‘internal’ was the
artist’s own inner most thoughts and feelings…”10 For example for clarity shake lets say that
an Eskimo is supposed to understand and be able to experience the same emotions and
feelings listening on his/hers Ipod player in their igloo to that of the urbanite in Carnegie Hall,
New York listening to Schoenberg classic composition. Is this true ??? So the argument goes
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe ‘Notes on being Framed by the Surface’ (1998) produced in Ryan. D., Talking Painting:
Dialogues with Twelve Contemporary Abstract Painters, London 2002
9
Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, Munich, 1912. Quoted in Abstraction :Towards a New Art- Essays on the
background to Abstract Art 1910 -1920, London 1980 p. 41
10
Peter Vergo, Abstraction :Towards a New Art- Essays on the background to Abstract Art 1910 -1920, London
1980 p. 42
8
5
can this be the case with abstract art too as expounded by the likes of Mondrian, Gottlieb and
Rothko amongst others who claim their work truly communicated a universal and accessible
language to us all.
In this essay there are two sections. The first section is to give the reader an insight to
the various arguments and issues arising from field of abstract art; in other words to give an
introduction on the subject, to give grounding and a better perspective on the subject matter
before attempting to argue how universal is the language of abstract art. I will attempt to
extrapolate in this personal commentary on abstract art some important issues and formulate
arguments in this contentious field that have no easy definitive answers. I will discuss
different critical models in terms of a shift in the prevailing narratives of the history of
abstract art. For example the earlier universal readings which stressed abstracts art’s purity
ceding to the more nuanced accounts of pictorial space developed in post-war American
formalist modernist theory from the likes of Greenberg, Rosenberg and later Fried. I will
avoid the rendition of a long chronological survey of the development of so called abstract,
Non-Objective, Non-figurative, Non-Representative art, preferring to focus on a few areas
such as Op art and other movements, the monochrome, flatness, meanings and connotations
which the use of term Abstract instead.
The second chapter I will focus look and examine the communicative elements in
abstract art, thus conforming to the notion that this art could be a universal language and
readable to all. I will look at arguments from various sources to explain why it is or perhaps
why it is not so understandable and claims to speak a universal language. As Stephen Bann
argues “And yet there is no general agreement about the type of communication which
abstract art, in its classic or more recent manifestations, is thought to involve.”11 I will first
look at the notion of universal and universalism as a philosophical term in its own right. Then
I will look at one area of argument-the Sublime in abstract painting. This is used to explain
abstract painting, a communicative element and thus giving us more written literature to
comprehend what we as viewers are looking at. This is written in treatises and argued by
Barnett Newman and Rosenblum a like. The sublime was one area I encountered while doing
my colloquium on abstract art last year and found fascinating. I wondered why it needed to be
written about on an art that is supposed to be universal and open to all.
11
Stephen Bann, Abstraction: Towards a New Art- Essays on the background to Abstract Art 1910 -1920,
London 1980, p. 125.
6
Earlier defenders of the universal language and qualities of abstract art go back as far
as Mondrian who expressed the goal of art was a “universal beauty” with the notion that “ art
is not made for anybody and is, at the same time for everybody”12 and as Colpitt goes on to
remonstrate that the earlier defenders of abstract art as a universal language where “ The very
presumption of universalism, which characterised the first manifestations of abstract painting,
would lead to the devaluation of abstraction in its later stages….”13 So it can be argued that
abstract art in the earlier part of the century was an art that had absolute possibilities to be a
communicative element, a language that was universal and could speak to everyone that
might have the encounter with it. Does this situation have a truism attached to abstract art
today in the 21st century as the majority of critics agreed it did within the manifestos of groups
and individual artists in the early part of the twentieth century? We shall see in the proceeding
pages.
Chapter One: Questions and Definitions within
Abstract Art, An Overview and Survey.
Abstract art is now generally understood to mean an art that does not depict objects in
the natural world, but instead uses shapes and colours in a non-representational or subjective
way. Nevertheless, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe notion of non-representational or abstract art
“…deals with the possibility of presenting nothing. Literally the possibility of the
unthinkable, inasmuch as we think in words which stand for concepts which are themselves
founded in, or give birth to an awareness of, things….non-representation begins with what
other kinds of visual art seeks to leave behind or, more exactly to hold firmly in check or
under control…” 14 However some artists who are classed as abstract artists deny the label as
with Mark Rothko “I am not an abstract painter. I am not interested in the relationship
between form and colours. The only thing I care about is the expression of man's basic
emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, destiny.”15 Nevertheless, Gooding defines Rothko’s paintings as
“…absolutely abstract…having an iconic frontality, like an abstract face...” 16 Thus, this goes
Piet Mondrian, “Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art,”in Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art, p. 352
F. Colpitt(Ed), Abstract Art in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge 2002, p. 160
14
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, in F Colpitt(ed), Abstract Art in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge 2002, p.122
15
Mark Rothko, in K. Stils, P. Selz (ed.), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, A Sourcebook of
Artists’ Writings, London 1996 p.26
16
M. Gooding, Abstract Art, London 2001, pp. 72-3
12
13
7
to demonstrate the continual pin-pong match with the connotations and usages of the label
abstract.
The German artist Wols wrote in 1944 that “The abstract that permeates all things is
ungraspable. In every moment in every thing eternity is present.”17 At times the ‘ungraspable’
problematic term abstract is vested as with the term ‘modern’ as “... one of the positive
keywords of the century (or not), a verbal talisman for artists and critics alike….created in
response to the great modernist injunction ‘make it new!’”18 Nevertheless, Abstract is not
without its controversies and battles from critics, artists and Joe public alike. As Jackson
Pollock said in reference to ‘make it new’ and abstract art in general “My opinion is that new
needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of
making statements. It seems to me that the modern painter cannot not express this age, the
airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or any other past
culture. Each age finds it own technique.”19 Finally, not forgetting Ad Reinhardt the artist
who epitomizes abstract painting postulates “Art is not what is not art…Abstract art has its
own integrity, not someone else’s ‘integration’ with something else…Any combining,
mixing, adding, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing, or popularizing abstract art deprives art of its
essence.”20
In the very early 20th century, the term abstract was more often used to describe art,
such as Cubist and Futurist art, which depicts real forms in a simplified or rather reduced way,
keeping only an allusion of the original natural subject. Such paintings were often claimed to
capture something of the depicted objects' immutable intrinsic qualities rather than its external
appearance. Norbet Lynton goes as far to say that “….early abstract art often has content
specific enough to be called subject matter. There was, clearly, a turning away from the
imitation of visual appearances…but it should be seen as a positive move into exploiting the
optical, associational and symbolic power of non-representational forms and colours.”21
Others had invented terms to describe abstract art such as Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet and
critic of the avant-garde who wrote in 1912 about his artist companions who “…wish to do
Wols,’Aphorisms’, in K. Stils, P. Selz (ed.), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, A Sourcebook of
Artists’ Writings, London 1996 p.45
18
M. Gooding, Abstract Art, London 2001 p.7
19
Jackson Pollock interviewed by William Wright, 1950, in K. Stils, P. Selz (ed.), Theories and Documents of
Contemporary Art, A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, London 1996 p.22
20
Ad Reinhardt, quoted in F Colpitt(ed), Abstract Art in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge 2002, p. 63
21
Norbet Lynton, in Towards a New Art. Essays on the background to Abstract Art 1910 -1920, London,1980,
p.16
17
8
pure painting. Theirs is an entirely new plastic art. It is only at its beginnings and is not yet
abstract as it would like to be...”22 this further divorced the abstraction from reality when he
devised the concepts of “pure painting” and “pure art”: an art that would be to painting “what
music is to poetry.” Suprematism for example was used in 1915 by Kasimir Malevich to
identify his own abstract work and that of others. 23 Piet Mondrian described his own form of
abstract painting as Neo-Plasticism. Some Constructivists artists tried to change the adjective
‘abstract’ with its binary opposition to Concrete.24 Michel Tapie invented the term tashime for
a kind of painting that was created from numerous painterly brush strokes as were ‘action
painting’ and Abstract Expressionism terms freely applied to the work of American painters
of really quite different styles and at the end of the day with different intentions. David Ryan
also acknowledges that the term Abstract has been with us for a long time he argues that
“…while often causing more confusion than clarification, the term has stuck: and despite the
resulting encumbrance, artists and critics have continued its usage, more as a convenience or a
convention rather than an accurate pointer.”25 Moreover, he is very wary, prudent and
naturally guarded as to its usage, thus “If we think of its literal meaning, then it implies an
extraction of some kind, or an essentialist position, which is why so many artists are wary of it
as a tag or label.”26 Furthermore, Ryan and Colpitt both concur with each other and cite
Briony Fer position on the term abstract which makes lucid sense that one is in agreement
and one really conquers with:
“As a label, the term ‘abstract’ is on the one hand too all-inclusive: it covers a diversity of
art and different historical moments that really hold nothing in common except a refusal to
figure objects. On the other hand, ‘abstract’ is too exclusive, imagining a world of family
resemblances (geometric, biomorphic or whatever-terms originally deployed by the critics but
still pervasive), which is hermetically sealed from the world of representation around it. As a
label it will have to do, because it is a common term in common use, with its own vicissitudes
and History”27
22
Guillaume Apollinaire, 1912, quoted in M. Gooding, Abstract Art, London 2001, p. 41
Malevich published a manifesto in 1915 the Non-Objective World with ideas and notions of his abstract art.
24
Theo van Doesberg took his notion of abstract in art groups such as Cercle et Carré, Art Concret and
Abstraction-Création, which he founded in 1931. After a split with Mondrian, Carel Blotkamp cites the main
reason as being about different concepts about space and time; Van Doesburg launched a new concept for his
abstract art: Elementarism, which was characterized by the diagonal lines and rivalled with Mondrians NeoPlasticism.
25
David Ryan, Talking Painting: Dialogues with Twelve Contemporary Abstract Painters, London 2002, p.2
26
Ibid.
27
Briony Fer, ‘On Abstract Art’, London, 1997, in David Ryan, Talking Painting: Dialogues with
TwelveContemporary Abstract Painters, London 2002, p.12
23
9
Abstract art its journey to form
28
Around 1910-14, several artists including for example Picasso and Braque began to
experiment with abstraction. As Clement Greenberg concedes with these artists and cubism
“As we gaze at cubist painting of the last phase we witness the birth and death of threedimensional pictorial space.”29 They (Picasso and Braque) all had in common a desire to
question representation, however, the term abstraction and abstract art presented problems
from the outset as one has before argued. The work of Wassily Kandinsky and Kasimir
Malevich are generally seen as the first fully abstract paintings in 191130. Furthermore, of
interest here in the Netherlands, Carel Blotkamp argues as early as 1913 “…that abstract art
was, in fact, initiated in the Netherlands not by Mondrian or by any artist the De Stijl
movement but by the relatively unknown painters Jacob Bendien and Jan van Deene.” 31
Dates of when abstract art came into being is a constant ping pong match between writers on
the subject; some academics cite Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne as the founding fathers of
28
Monet, Grainstack, 1891
Clement Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, 1940, in David and Cecile Shapiro, Abstract
Expressionism: A Critical Record, Cambridge, 1990, p. 72
30
Kandinsky thought Picture with Circle 1911, (however dating this picture has lead to controversy) to be “the
first abstract painting in the world”, however, Frantisek Kupka in Paris and Arthur Dove in U.S. were
experimenting at around the same time with abstraction. Mark Rosenthal has done an excellent in depth survey
of this Question in, Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, discipline, New York, 1996.
31
C. Blotkamp, ‘Annunciation of the New Mysticism: Dutch Symbolism and Early Abstraction.’ In: The
Spiritual in Art. Abstract Painting 1890-1985, Los Angeles 1986 p.104. Jan van Deene’s Painting II, 1913, one
of the first truly abstract works can be found in the Centraal Museum, Utrecht
29
10
abstraction “Significantly, Wassily Kandinsky claimed that his development as an
abstractionist was influence in part by viewing a Monet Grainstack in 1896 and being
astonished not to recognise an object in the work.”32 Nevertheless, interestingly enough as
early as 1902 Charles Harrisson argues that Hans Schmithals Composition of that year “At a
quick glance, it might perhaps be seen as a very early work of abstract art.”33
Constructivism (1915) and De Stijl (1917) were parallel movements which took
abstraction into the three dimensions of sculpture and architecture. The Constructivists
believed that the artist's work was a revolutionary activity, to express the aspirations of the
people, using machine production, graphic and photographic means of communication. Some
of the American Abstract Expressionists are purely abstract as well, these include: Barnett
Newman, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. The first exhibition of international
tendencies in abstract art was held at M.O.M.A, New York in April 1936. According to
Alfred H. Barr, who wrote the influential catalogue for Cubism and Abstract Art
acknowledged that the term ‘abstract’ was inexact and that it is “most frequently used to
describe the more extreme effects of impulse away from nature”34 Thus, at the end of the day
as mentioned the term Abstract has come to attract controversy and distain as a word to
describe art that is by essentially by definition not figurative. A year later Meyer Schapiro
stated that the ideology behind abstract art for him “…is simply a reaction against the
exhausted imitation of nature, or that it is a discovery of an absolute or pure field of form is to
overlook the positive character of the art, its underlying energies and sources of
movement…It bares within itself at almost every point the mark of the changing material and
psychological conditions surrounding a modern culture.”35 Op Art, Minimalism and Neogeo
are the most recent idioms of abstract art. It is, at present, more likely that an artist's work is
seen as an individual entity rather than part of a movement. As Colpitt suggests this later
phase of abstraction “…for lack of a better term, I call post-modern abstraction, initiated by
Peter Hally and informed by theory rather than the traditions or painting than of
abstraction”36Other artists of this later phase of abstraction may include Sean Scully, John
McLaughlin, Callum Innes, Robert Stark, Philip Taaffe, Sherrie Levine, Shirley Kaneda and
Yuko Shiraishi. More fittingly Linda Boersma concurs that this contemporary phase of
32
Mark Rosenthal, Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline, 1996 New York,
p.260
33
Harrison, C., Francina, F., Perry., Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction, New haven and London 1993, p. 208.
34
M. Gooding, Abstract Art, London 2001, p. 9
35
M. Schapiro, ‘The Nature of Abstract Art’, 1937, pp. 201-2
36
F Colpitt in Abstract Art in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge 2002, p xvi
11
abstract art can best be best described in a appropriate and neutral manner as “…Abstract art
after modernism. ”37
Non-Objective Painting, Hilla Rebay
The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, abstract painting was opened by Solomon R.
Guggenheim and German artist Hilla Rebay, his personal curator and the museum's first
director, on East 54th Street in Manhattan in 1939. The spaces of the former car showroom
had been transformed by architect William Muschenheim under Rebay's direction. Rebay,
who was also a painter, believed passionately in abstract painting's spiritual power.
Nevertheless, the term Non-Objective is a very free translation of the German word
gegenstandslos38. It is synonym for abstract art since its introduction and popularization by
Rebay. However, Bertolt Bercht saw Non-objective painting as “…you have removed the
motifs from your paintings. No recognizable objects appear there anymore. You produce the
sweeping curve of a chair-not the chair; the red of the sky, not the burning house. You
reproduce the combination of lines and colours, not combination of things…the most
beautiful an important perceptions are composed of lines an colours…”39as for Rebay writing
in 1937 for her abstract or non-objective art “…has beauty and spirit combined…Nonobjectivity will be the religion of the future…Non-objective paintings are prophets of spiritual
life. Those who have experienced the joy they can give possess such inner wealth as can be
never lost. This is what these masterpieces in their quite absolute purity can bring to all those
who learn to feel their unearthly donation of rest, elevation, rhythm, balance and beauty.” 40
Thus, as a consequence of her beliefs she set out to create an environment for art that would
allow its metaphysical qualities to be best experienced. The museum had primarily abstract
works, including paintings by Robert Delaunay, Wassily Kandinsky, and László MoholyNagy. Quite unlike the Museum of Modern Art, whose collections and new International
Style building emphasized the relationship between Modern art and society, the Museum of
Non-Objective Painting reflected Rebay's desire to create a setting that would make visitors
37
Linda. S. Boersma in J. Brand, A. de Vries(Ed.), Neo, Utrecht, 2003, p.61
Kandinsky and other pioneering abstract painters such as Piet Mondrian did not like this translation of
gegenstandslos. They felt it evoked the negative connotation of philosophical subjectivity, whereas they wanted
to emphasize the universal and international aspects of their work. Kandinsky had used the term gegenstandslos
in earlier essays—in his 1913 autobiography, for example—to describe his goal of obscuring specific, material
objects in his paintings, but Kandinsky more often relied on the word abstrakt to indicate the direction of his
work.
39
Bertolt Bercht, ‘On Non-objective Painting’1935-39 in F. Frascina and C Harrison (ed.), Modern art and
Modernism. A Critical Anthology, New York, 1982, p.145
40
Hilla Rebay, ‘The Beauty of Non-Objectivity’ in F. Frascina and C Harrison (ed.), Modern art and
Modernism. A Critical Anthology, New York, 1982, pp. 145-148
38
12
feel as though they had entered another world. The interior walls and windows of the museum
were covered in pleated grey velour, shutting out the exterior world. Paintings were set like
altarpieces in wide, gilded frames and hung as low as a few inches from the floor, which
forced viewers to orient themselves to the artworks positions. To enhance her vision of a
temple for modern painting, Rebay played classical music on a phonograph, which echoed
throughout the museum. In 1947, the museum moved to a townhouse on Fifth Avenue. That
building was demolished when construction began in 1956 for the new museum which by that
time had been renamed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum designed by Frank Lloyd
Wright.
Wilhelm Worringer
The association of abstraction in art with meaninglessness is derived in large measure
from Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy (1908): A Contribution to the
Psychology of Style. Worringer equated abstract with angular and anti-naturalistic as known
in connection with expressionism and he had influence on British modernism, especially
Vorticism. In it he argued that there were two main kinds of art: art of "abstraction" (which
was associated with a more 'primitive' world view) and art of "empathy" (which was
associated with realism in the broadest sense of the word, and might be said to apply to
European art since the Renaissance). More simply Frances Colpitt states Worringer
“…distinguished two antithetic modes of artistic volition that drove artists either to empathy
and thus to naturalism or to abstraction.”41 Worringer was influential because he saw abstract
art (for example, Islamic art) as being in no way inferior to "realist" art, and worthy of respect
in its own right. This was critical justification for the increased use of abstraction in pre-war
European art. Art criticism from the 1940s through to the early 1970s has encouraged the
association of abstraction with non-representational. Recent scholarship, however, has
reasserted the subject in abstraction and has begun to rediscover meanings that were neglected
by these previous generations of scholars and critics. In this new work scholars are echoing
Worringer's thoughts of nearly seventy years earlier: "Now what are the psychic
presuppositions for the urge to abstraction? We must seek them in these peoples' [artists,
writers, philosophers] feeling about the world, in their psychic attitude toward the cosmos . . .
the urge to abstraction is the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired in man by the
41
F Colpitt(ed), Abstract Art in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge 2002, p. 154
13
phenomena of the outside world; in a religious respect it corresponds to a strongly
transcendental tinge to all notion."42
Action painting
Gesture abstraction is a style of abstract painting in which paint is spontaneously
dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied. The
resulting work emphasizes the physical act of painting itself. The painter would let the paint
drip onto canvases, often simply dancing around, or even standing on the canvases, and
simply letting the paint fall where the subconscious mind wills, thus letting the unconscious
part of the psyche express itself. For example, in Jackson Pollock’s paintings we can often
find cigarette stubs. When he created his paintings, he would simply allow himself to slip into
a trance in which no conscious act was to manifest itself; so if he had the instinctive impulse
to throw his cigarette to the floor, he would do it, whether a pavement was beneath his feet, or
even a canvas.43 Some critics have used the terms action painting and abstract expressionism
interchangeably. The preceding art of Kandinsky and Mondrian had attempted to detract itself
from the portrayal of objects and instead tried to tingle and tantalize the emotions of the
viewer. Action painting took this a step further, using Freud’s ideas of the subconscious as its
underling foundations. The paintings of the Action Artists were not meant to portray any
objects whatsoever and likewise were not meant to stimulate emotion. Instead they were
meant to touch the observers deep in the subconscious. Pollock defined the characteristic
approach of Rosenberg’s ‘new American painter’ who “ no longer approached his easel with
an image in his mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other
piece of material in front of him. The image would result be the of that encounter”44
The term Action painting was coined by the American critic Harold Rosenberg in
1952, and signalled a major shift in the aesthetic perspective of New York School painters
and critics. In one of the most famous statements of the twentieth century according to
Gooding, Rosenberg responds to the spontaneous act and gesture as “…the canvas began to
appear to one American painter after another as an area to act-rather than the space in which
to reproduce, redesign, analyse or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on
42
Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, in F. Frascina and C Harrison (ed.), Modern art and
Modernism. A Critical Anthology, New York, 1982, pp. 159-64
43
One can get a real feeling of gesture and action of Pollock at work after I visited a few years ago his studio in
East Hampton, Long Island, N.Y. The evidence was plain to see on his studio floor with the residue of paint that
had splashed over the canvas’s edges that once was on the floor. Naturally, one was not allowed to walk on it.
Also, Hans Namuth’s film documenting Pollock’s techniques is mesmerising to watch.
44
Harold Rosenberg, quoted in M. Gooding, Abstract Art, London 2001, p. 69
14
the canvas was not a picture but an event”.45 Abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock
and Willem de Kooning had long been outspoken in their view of a painting as an arena
within which to come to terms with the act of creation, critics sympathetic to their cause, like
Clement Greenberg, focused on their works’ objectness. To Greenberg, it was the physicality
of the paintings’ clotted and oil-caked surfaces that was the key to understanding them as
documents of the artists’ existential struggle. Rosenberg's critique shifted the emphasis from
the object to the struggle itself, with the finished painting being only the physical
manifestation, a kind of residue, of the actual work of art, which was in the act or process of
the painting’s creation. Over the next two decades, Rosenberg’s redefinition of art as an act
rather than an object, as a process rather than a product, was influential, and laid the
foundation for a number of major art movements, from Happenings and Fluxus to Conceptual
and Earth Art.
Clement Greenberg on Abstraction and flatness
He was closely associated with the institutionalisation of abstract art in the United
States. In particular he promoted the Abstract Expressionist movement and one of its leaders,
Jackson Pollock, as well as later movements such as Post-Painterly Abstraction. Greenberg
came to believe that the best avant-garde artists were emerging in America rather than
Europe. He championed Jackson Pollock as the greatest painter of his generation,
commemorating the artist's “all-over” gestural canvases for their emotional intensity. In the
1955 essay American Type Painting Greenberg promoted the work of Abstract Expressionists,
among them Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford
Still, as the next stage in Modernist art, arguing that Modernist art was moving towards
greater emphasis on the flatness of the picture plane. Stressing this flatness separated
Modernist art from the Old Masters, who considered flatness an obtrusive hurdle in painting,
and introduced a method of self-criticism that transported abstract painting from decorative
‘wallpaper patterns’ to high art. Later “Clembashers”46 would accuse Greenberg of
contrariness and rigidity.
45
Harold Rosenberg, 1952, in M. Gooding, Abstract Art, London 2001, p. 66
Through the 1960s and 1970s, Greenberg remained an influential figure on a younger generation of critics
including Michael Fried and Rosalind E. Krauss. Greenberg's antagonism to 'Postmodernist' theories and socially
engaged movements in art caused a backlash amongst both artists and art historians which came to be known as
"Clembashing."
46
15
Greenberg’s essay Abstract and Representational is a remarkably sensible account, an
acknowledging that perception of a work of art changes throughout decades, and eventually
centuries. He muses about “future connoisseurs” whom he hopes “…be able, in their
discourse, to distinguish and name more aspects of quality in the Old Masters, as well as in
abstract art, than we can. And in doing these things they may find much more common
ground between the Old Masters and abstract art than we can yet recognize.”47 Nevertheless,
he states his belief in abstract art: “In my experience- which includes Velasquez and Corot as
well as Mondrian and Pollock- tells me nonetheless that the best art of our day tends,
increasingly, to be abstract.”48 Moreover, Greenberg has a hint of cynicism and tongue in
cheek as he views abstract art “…to be a symptom of cultural, and even moral decay, while
the hope for a ‘return to nature’ gets taken for granted by those who do hope for a return to
health.”49
In the formalist tradition of art criticism, flatness is inseparable from aesthetic value,
or what Clement Greenberg defined as “quality.” This aspect of Greenberg’s doctrine has
been the most polemical in recent critical re-evaluations of his work, but nonetheless his
definition of painting’s reduction to flatness is still the most complete. Greenberg applied the
Kantian model of self-definition to support his view that each art must isolate and make
explicit that which is unique to the nature of its medium. The “irreducible essence” of
pictorial art, he wrote in his 1965 essay Modernist Painting, is the coincidence of flattened
colour with its material support: “Flatness, two-dimensionality, was the only condition
painting shared with no other art, and so Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did
to nothing else.” 50 Greenberg championed a narrow lineage of artists who insistently asserted
two-dimensionality. He credited Manet with creating the first Modernist paintings “…by
virtue of the frankness with which they declared the surfaces on which they were painted.”51
Greenberg included Paul Cézanne because the placement and shape of the flat brush marks in
his paintings recall the shape of the flat rectangle on which they were placed. Cézanne, and
the Cubists after him, also solved the passage from the contour of an object to its inhabited
space without violating the integrity of the flat continuum of the picture surface. He described
Clement Greenberg, ‘Abstract, Representational, and so forth,’1954, published in Arts Digest, (New York),
XXXlX, 3, p. 7
48
Ibid, p. 8
49
Ibid, p.6
50
Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 1965, in F. Frascina and C Harrison (ed.), Modern art and
Modernism. A Critical Anthology, New York, 1982, p.6
51
Ibid, p. 6
47
16
Piet Mondrian as the flattest of all easel painters, while he identified Jackson Pollock’s
strength as deriving from the tension inherent in the constructed, re-created flatness of the
surface. Flatness and two-dimensionality was the domain of modernist abstract painting
however for Greenberg three-dimensionality “…is the provenance of sculpture, and for the
sake of its own autonomy painting has had above all, to divest itself of everything it might
share with sculpture….to exclude the representational or the literary, that painting has made
itself abstract.”52
53
Eventually Greenberg believed that Abstract Expressionism had been “reduced to a set
of mannerisms” and looked toward a new set of artists who abandoned such elements as
subject matter, connection with the artist, and definite brush strokes. Greenberg believed this
process attained a level of purity that would reveal the truthfulness of the canvas, which
would further celebrate the two-dimensional aspects of the space (flatness). Greenberg coined
this idea Post-Painterly Abstraction to distinguish it from Abstract Expressionism, or
Painterly Abstraction, as Greenberg preferred to call it. Post-Painterly Abstraction reacted
against gestural abstraction and branched into two sects, the Hard-Edged Painters such as
Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella who explored relationships within shapes and edges, and
Colour-Field Painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, who poured diluted
paint onto the unprimed canvas to explore aspects of pure, fluid colour. The basic point about
Louis's work and that of other Colour Field painters, in contrast to most of the other new
approaches of the sixties, is that they continued a tradition of painting exemplified by Pollock,
Newman, Still, Motherwell, and Reinhardt. All of these artists were concerned with the
classic problems of pictorial space and the statement of the picture plane.
52
53
Ibid, p. 7
Beta Upsilon, acrylic on canvas by Morris Louis, 1960; in the Smithsonian Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
17
Op art construed as Abstract
54
Op art works are abstract, with many of the
better known pieces made in only black and white.
Hal Foster views Op art as “…the first mass-cultural
sign of modern abstract art in general.”55 When
viewed, the impression is given of movement, hidden
images, flashing and vibration, patterns, or
alternatively of swelling or warping. The term first
appeared in print in Time Magazine in October 1964,
though works which might now be described as Op
art had been produced for several years previously.
For example Balla’s Iridescent Interpenetration No
13 (1914), Anna Moszynska argues that “…the optical and prismatic movement of light
remained a starting of this work, but the end result shows a geometric clarity and fine honing
of colour relations that anticipate Op art of the 1960’s”56 It has been suggested that Victor
Vasarely's 1930s works such as Zebra (1938), which is made up entirely of diagonal black
and white stripes curved in a way to give a three-dimensional impression of a seated zebra,
should be considered the first works of op art. Abstraction for Vasarely then
“…examined and enlarged its compositional elements. Soon, form-colour invaded the entire
two- dimensional surface; this metamorphose led the
Painting-object, by way of architecture, to a spatial universe of polychomy.”57
In 1965, a show called The Responsive Eye, made up entirely of works of Op art, was
held in New York City. This show did a great deal to make op art prominent, and many of the
artists now considered important in this style exhibited there. Op art subsequently became
tremendously popular, and Op art images were used in a number of commercial advertising
campaigns and fashion, i.e. Mary Quant. According to Colpitt Op art “…was never treated
seriously by the critics in the 1960s, it experienced a surprising revival in the 1980s…and
54
Victor Vasarely, Zebra, 1938
Hal Foster in F Colpitt, Abstract Art in the Twentieth Century, 2002, p.109
56
A. Moszynska, Abstract Art, London 1990, p.31
57
Victor Vasarley, ‘Notes for a Manifesto’ (1955), in K. Stils, P. Selz (ed.), Theories and Documents of
Contemporary Art, A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, London 1996 p. 109
55
18
should be acknowledged for its contributions to contemporary abstraction”58 Bridget Riley is
perhaps the best known of the op artists. Taking Vasarely's lead, she made a number of
paintings consisting only of black and white lines. Rather than giving the impression of some
real-world object, however, Riley's paintings frequently give the impression of movement or
colour. Riley later produced works in full colour. Riley said of her paintings 1965 “My
paintings are, of course, concerned with generating visual sensations, but certainly not to the
exclusion of emotion. One of my aims is that these two responses shall be experienced as one
and the same.”59
60
Silent Abstract Art, the Monochrome
Although monochrome has never become dominant
and few artists have committed themselves exclusively to it, it
has never gone away. It reappears though to be a spectre
haunting high modernism. In the late 80's I went to see the
Broadway play Art in London, which employed a white
monochrome as a prop on stage to generate an argument about
aesthetics which made up the bulk of the play. The
monochrome still causes issue today as with abstract art in
general. Monotonal painting can be diverse as argued by Lucy
R. Lippard “One of the curious and interesting facts about the monotonal art is the
extraordinary variety possible within its ostensible restrictions. Each minute variation of
brushstroke, sprayed layer, or value change takes on a highly charged importance in the
context of the whole.”61 The first and clearly the best known abstract work performing as a
monochrome began in Moscow, with Kazimir Malevich's White Square on a White Field of
1918. This was a variation on or sequel to his 1913 work Black Square on a White Field, a
very important work in its own right to 20th century geometrical abstraction. As an expression
of a pure state of feeling, Malevich's painting offered a beacon of hope for abstract paintings’
spiritual potential. Malevich wrote of his work and the colour white that was so important in
his first monochromatic endeavour “I have broken the blue boundary of colour limits and
come out into white…I have beaten the lining of the coloured sky…The free white sea,
58
F Colpitt, Abstract Art in the Twentieth Century, 2002, p. xviii.
Bridget Riley, ‘Untitled statement’, C. 1965 in K. Stils, P. Selz (ed.), Theories and Documents of
Contemporary Art, A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, London 1996, p. 112
60
Mary Quant fashions, 1967, influenced by Op art.
61
Lucy R. Lippard in F Colpitt(ed), Abstract Art in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge 2002, p. 52
59
19
infinity lies before you.”62 In 1921, Alexander Rodchenko exhibited three paintings together,
each a monochrome in one of the three primary colours declaring that together they
represented the final statement that could be made in the medium and thus intended this work
to be a manifestation of ‘the Death of Painting’. While Rodchenko intended his monochromes
to be a dismantling of the typical assumptions of painting, Malevich saw his work as a
concentration on them, a kind of meditation on art's essence (‘pure feeling’).These dual
identities of monochrome painting as a vehicle for spiritual redemption and as the absolute
end of painting have ebbed and flowed throughout the century. These two approaches
articulated very early on in the monochromes history is almost a paradoxical dynamic: that
one can read a monochrome either as a flat surface (material entity or ‘painting as object’)
which represent nothing but itself, and therefore representing an ending in the evolution of
illusionism in painting (i.e. Rodchenko); or as a depiction of multidimensional (infinite)
space, a fulfilment of illusionistic painting, representing a new evolution - a new beginning in Western painting's history (Malevich).
In France during the late 1950's and early 1960's, Yves Klein investigated the
monochrome as a painting of nothingness. His ultramarine canvases were the representation
of the immaterial, the sovereign liberation of the spirit. For Klein stated in 1959 “Blue has no
dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not…All colours arouse
specific associative ideas, psychologically material or tangible, while blue suggests at most
the sea and sky, and they, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.”63 Furthermore,
Klein's investment of spiritual content in art stands in direct conflict with the more popular
notion of painting as object, the object being an end in itself. However, Lucy Lippard fires a
warning shot across bows of Klein’s monochromes as “ His work , his statements and his
general extravagance were more allied to Duchampian paradox…Many of his works were
simply gestures in the direction of novelty rather than inaugurations of a new art.”64 Painting
as an object can be seen in the work of Frank Stella, whose frequently cited statement on his
works being of non-referential intention. The presence of the painting itself was important for
Stella, and not from its capacity to signify absent events or valves. As he said in 1964, “My
painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen is there. It really is an object…All I
want to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them , is the fact that you can see the
62
Kasimir Malevich quoted in F Colpitt(ed), Abstract Art in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge 2002, p. 52
Yves Klein , lecture in 1959 at the Sorbonne, Paris, quoted in A. Moszynska, Abstract Art, London 1990, p.182
64
Lucy R. Lippard in F Colpitt(ed), Abstract Art in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge 2002, p. 55
63
20
whole idea without confusion…What you see is what you see.”65 This also encapsulates
Minimalism's adoption of a pure abstraction devoid of any spiritual or metaphysical
connotations. Minimalism emphasizes the materiality and shape of the object and denies any
sense of personal touch in the work's execution. Such strategies are evident in Hard-edge
paintings by Ellsworth Kelly and monochrome works by Robert Ryman. Kelly explores mass,
colour, and form through flatly painted shaped canvases of one colour or multiple panels in
different colours, which seem to dissolve into their surrounding space, denying the traditional
edge of a painting surface. He has made a number of monochrome paintings which utilised
shaped canvases. His work is perhaps distinct in that his abstractions were abstracted from
nature. The most complex investigation into monochrome has been undertaken by Ryman,
who, since the mid-1960’s, has diligently pursued various permutations of all-white painting,
realizing an astonishing range of expression within a seemingly limited set of criteria. Ryman
is concerned with “…the establishment and retention of the picture plane…working with
surfaces that that do not relinquish the controlled possibilities of the paint itself. He has
stripped the impasto of its gestural, emotional connotations. The canvases emphasize the fact
of painting as painting, surface as surface, paint as paint, in an inactive, unequivocal
manner.”66 Finally, on the one hand the monochrome suggests the ultimate in abstraction and
on the other “… it was capable of a more metaphysical concern with silence…Purity of
silence could imply freedom from the prison of things”67 Donald Kuspit has pointed out with
the monochrome that a certain mysticism can be associated with silent painting. The
evocation of this of spiritual experience attempts to connect the more silent aspects of the
monochromatic abstract art to the early attempts by the earlier pioneers i.e. Kandinsky and
Marc. As Wittgenstein wrote “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be
silent”.68Naturally one has not to forget to mention the important contributions of other artists
who have also with their work contributed to exploring the boundaries of the monochrome
painting like Ad Reinhardt, Piero Manzoni, Lucio Fontana’s (slashed canvases), Robert
Rauschenberg; Agnes Martin and Brice Marden who both deal with the use of the grid and
monochromatic surfaces.
65
Frank Stella in A. Moszynska, Abstract Art, London 1990, p.202
Lucy R. Lippard in F Colpitt(ed), Abstract Art in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge 2002, p. 59
67
A. Moszynska, Abstract Art, London 1990, p.182
68
Wittgenstein, ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’ 1921, quoted in M. Gooding, Abstract Art, London 2001, p. 90
66
21
69
Chapter Two: The Communicative and the
Universal Language of Abstract Art
Moving on to the main discussion in this paper after exploring the definitions, themes
and topics in abstract art the question arises-Is there a communicative and universal language
manifest in abstract art? I have used the first chapter as a vehicle in order to give as it were the
ground work to make a clearer understanding of the subject of abstract art. Abstraction is
vast, neither my humble and small contribution in the first chapter can possibly be able to
encompass it all. The fisrt chapter acts a selective look at some of the aspects of its history
and discursive ideas that exist that are abound in an attempt to delineate the basic terrain as a
discussion of a still developing subject. Is abstract art then a universal visual language?
Thus“ If abstract art actually was and is an art of the ‘painted word’ as Tom Wolf claims,
what is that word, how is it made manifest in the painting…”70 for the consumption of others
across the planet to understand, communicate feelings, ideas of the artists who approached
the canvas using abstract forms of expression. For example, lets say in the case of an abstract
69
70
Lucio Fontana, CONCETTO SPAZIALE - ATTESE- 1961-2 cm 50 x 60.
Mitcheal, W., Picture Theory, London, 1994, p. 220.
22
painting the artist’s use of the thickness of heavy-gauge linen contrasted with a thin layer of
paint spread across it, interrupted by splattered gesture of paint, is this a visual universal
language? Even abstract sculpture could be argued to communicate a universal language as
with the work of David Smith who “…chooses the abstract mode because he believed it was a
language of our time”.71 All this said one would like to look at abstract art as a key universal
language will be the core point of the arguement here in this chapter. Briefly as a subquestion, why on the other hand do we need so much text explaining the supposedly universal
language of abstract art? This can be exemplified with the writings of stalwarts of abstraction
like Barnett Newman, Clyffod Still, Rosenblum and Gilbert-Rolfe. These critics and artists
alike give us writing on explaining the “sublime elements” in abstract painting that is
supposed to be a universal language. This area I will explore at the end of this chapter.
There could be possibilities of a visual universal abstract language if we are to believe
the romantic ideas of British critic Roger Fry back in 1933. An artist through his work can
broadcast a message as a visual language, abstract or not to an audience who ideally would
have a universal understanding of it. So according to Fry “If we take an analogy from the
wireless – the artist is the transmitter, the work of art the medium and the spectator the
receiver…for the message to come through, the receiver must be more or less in tune with the
transmitter….herein lies the difficulty…many people possess only very imperfect receiving
instruments, instruments that can only respond to extremely violent emissions of a crude and
elementary kind.”72 However one might argue perhaps this could be construed as simple or
naïve on the part of Fry, this assumption demonstrates and it does accomplish a clear point,
that maybe artists’ attempts to resonate or vibrate through their art a language is interesting.
Nevertheless, the problem is as Fry remonstrates; the viewer needs to be taught to understand
the universal language of in this case abstract art. This is clearly demonstrated when the
viewer needs to be informed and educated about what he/she is looking at in this case an
abstracted gesture. For example, Mitcheal demonstrates this need to be informed by written
text when talking to his thirteen year old soon about Kasimir Malevich’s abstract painting
Painterly Realism. Boy with Knapsack- Colour Masses in the Fourth Dimension (1915) in
MOMA, New York, “Well, believe it or not, I know someone who has written seventy-five
71
Mark Rosenthal, Abstraction in the Twentieth Century:Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline, 1996 NewYork, p.285.
Roger Fry, ‘Last History as an Academic Discipline.’, cited in Harrison, C., Francina, F., Modern Art and
Modernism: A Critical Anthology, London, 1982, p.177
72
23
pages trying to explain this one painting”73 Mitcheal was referring to Charles Altieri’s
writing on above mentioned painting. This is a clear reminder to us all that at times, not all
artists took this on board and it was assumed that the viewer in the museum or where ever is
an educated and informed audience. As we know this is not always the case.
74
The British artist and husband of Barbara
Hepworth, Ben Nicholson had a conviction and
belief in an abstract art as a wide ranging
communicative tool, Nicholson states in 1941
“…abstract art is to be a potent of everyday
life… abstraction symbolised freedom and
universality to think that so far from being a
limited expression, understood by a few,
abstract art is a powerful, unlimited and
universal language. Within the means of abstract
expression there are immense possibilities and it
is a language with a power peculiar to itself.”75
So from the war time position in British society,
looking across the Atlantic to abstract works of
art there could according Nicholson be a
possibility that the use of layers of paint inextricably different from each other due to perhaps
their fluttering translucency, or of bits of paint that sit on top of the surface in order to float in
space could denote a universal meaning that can be understood? Nevertheless before we even
go on such a journey of enquiry it important that we that define what is exactly meant by the
term ‘universal’ and ‘universalism’ and then apply this to the argument to get a clearer picture
of what the discussion is then about in relation to abstract painting .
73
Mitcheal, W., Picture Theory, London, 1994, p. 225.
Kazimir Malevich. (Russian, born Ukraine. 1878-1935). Painterly Realism. Boy with Knapsack - Colour
Masses in the Fourth Dimension. 1915. Oil on canvas, 71.1 x 44.5 cm.
75
Ben Nicholson, ‘Notes on Abstract Art’ in Horizon No 22, ( Oct 1941), reproduced in Mark Rosenthal,
Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline, 1996 New York p. 278
74
24
Universal ?
Universality is the quality ascribed to in existence throughout the universe. In
philosophy, universalism is a doctrine or school in which it is claimed that universal facts can
be discovered and which is understood then as being in opposition to relativism. When used
in the context of ethics, the meaning of universal refers to that which is true for all similarly
situated individuals. So in other words we all share the same truth and language. This includes
universality of “The abstract artist who usually seeks , at least, to effect viewers and to
communicate using traditional means of visual language…an abstractionist may manipulate
formal elements to exploit conventional associations…then the use of black paint might
similarly evoke a sense of foreboding, as in certain compositions by Mark Rothko. Indeed, a
viewer might interpret other compositional elements in various abstract works as evoking any
number of themes, including anguish, eroticism, exhilaration, turbulence, vulnerability and
wonder….it maybe the case that that the artist, using entirely non-referential elements, has
created an abstract work intended to evoke a quasi-literary subject or a specific meaning.”76
So there is a chance according to Rosenthal that merely the encounter with pure colour as
with the work of the before mentioned Rothko and naturally Kandinsky could evoke in us, the
viewer, a visual catholic (board and universal) language. In logic, a proposition is said to
have universality if it can be conceived as being true in all possible contexts without creating
a contradiction. Some philosophers have referred to such propositions as universalable. Truth
is considered to be universal if it is valid in all times and places. In this case, it is seen as
eternal or as absolute. The relativist conception denies the existence of some or all universal
truths, particularly ethical ones. Usage of the word universal or universalism has various
domains of application. A universal may have instances, known as its particulars. For
example, the property red (or redness) and the relation betweenness (or being between) can
both be construed as universal. The term universality also refers to the medieval concept of
an absolute, all-encompassing morality that justified a universal secular rule by one allpowerful Holy Roman Emperor, and also justified as universal the religious rule by one allpowerful all-encompassing (hence the term catholic) church. In the 17th century, the doctrine
of universality gave way to the doctrine of raison d'état or national interest.
76
Mark Rosenthal, Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline, 1996 New York p. 3.
25
Mondrian’s and Kandinsky’s Universal Language of Abstraction
Now one has defined universal and universalism one can move onto a discussion about
some artists it is deemed successfully managed to fill the criteria of being an abstract artist
and at the same time according to critics and academics alike, successfully succeeded in
filling the role of making their art work informally and an accessible universal language. Even
“Mondrian himself explicitly characterised the artist as a kind of medium for the expression
of the Universal”77 Moszynska argues in point of Mondrian’s geometric abstract work that
“…He evolved the universal theory of universal beauty contained in abstract form….the
artist’s unswerving goal, as expressed by both in his polemic writings and in the
uncompromising nature of his art, was to pay tribute to the universal principles he believed
in…he sought to do this by harnessing as his means what he believed to be the universal
absolutes: primary colour and the orthogonal. Having found a language that best suited his
purposes, he was able to make repeated use of it”78 Thus, there appears then to be then some
truth that abstract art can be a universal language, however I might add at this point that
abstract artists of the early 20th century are associated with universal ideas and their work can
be obviously then associated with it.
Moreover, using abstract art to
communicate to our sub-consciousness
Mondrian is “…Abstract because he
seeks to transcend particularities to reach
universalising consciousness. His aim
was the direct the ‘direct creation of
universal beauty’, which arises from the
inherent relationships between forms.”79
When Kandinsky stipulated the
communicative language of abstract art
for him it needed a klang or resonance
and vibration “…that would allow true
communication between artist and
80
77
Charles Harrison, Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction, New haven and London 1993, p.199
A. Moszynska, Abstract Art, London 1990, pp. 54-5
79
Mark Rosenthal, Abstraction in the Twentieth Century:Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline, 1996 NewYork p. 270.
80
Mark Rothko, Light, Earth and Blue, 1954. According to Robert Rosenblum, in The Abstract Sublime, 1961,
p.40, this painting “…reveals affinities of vision and feeling…standing silently and contemplatively before these
huge and soundless pictures as we were looking at a sunset or a moonlit night.”
78
26
viewer”81 This could be achieved according to Kandinsky though true communication of
‘finer’ feelings and emotions for “…which we have no words”82 these feelings could be
“Through abstraction, Kandinsky envisioned that a gradual shift would be made of viewers’
sensibilities, processes of thought, and nuances of feelings…[he] believed that abstraction had
to be introduced in stages to the world, for in that way it could be gradually accepted and its
meaning understood”83 So though a klang and the vibrancy of an abstract painting there is the
possibility of a universal understanding and language created by the abstract arrangement on
the canvas.
Moving from this example of a universal language in abstract form from Mondrian and
Kandinsky we see that in America it was agued succinctly by Jewell in 1939 that American
abstract art before the out break of WWII should be a“ … world of art and abstract painting
in particular( I hope) travels a different road and tends to become more universal, approaching
finally the expression of common human experience. Here in America, with all the
intermingling of nations and races, would seem an unusual opportunity for artists to achieve a
universitality of expression.”84 So there was hope that even that American abstract art could
be construed as universal language too. Nevertheless painters of the New York school picked
this up and according to Guilbaut, Jewell recommended in his time more of a universal
approach to painting rather than the, ‘International’ approach. As early as 1943 according to
Guilbaut, Gottlieb and Rothko sponsored this universal rather than international approach in
their abstract paintings. “Universal art roots in individual experiences and for that reason may
have profound appeal to individuals anywhere. At the same time universal art would be
profoundly American, since the artist would have taken his own experience, which was of
course American.”85 And more importantly American art moved “…. first from nationalism to
internationalism and then from internationalism to universalism.”86 Rothko believed that pure
colour could communicate and produce universal “basic human emotions”. Peter Selz further
agrees “…he [Rothko] succeeded in evoking undefined yet universal meaning and
81
Ibid., p.262
Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art: and Painting in Particular’(1912) cited in Mark
Rosenthal, Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline, 1996 New York p. 262.
83
Ibid.
84
Edward Alden Jewell cited in Serge Guilbaut , How New York Stole the Idea of modern Art, Chicago and
London 1983, p.44
85
Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of modern Art, Chicago and London 1983, p. 119
86
Ibid., p 174
82
27
emotions”87 this was a notion similar to that shared by others like Kandinsky and Matisse, so
much so that Rothko it has been argued “believed that colours act directly on the soul,
evoking feelings of spiritual transcendence”88 so this then echoes almost the romantic colour
ideas of the other above artists I have mentioned. Another American artist Robert Motherwell
was one of the earliest proponents of Abstract Expressionism and is know to be one of it
major theorists as well, as a practicing artist and as with others from this group he wanted to
imbue abstract art with ethical and moral force. These are similar to French Symbolist of the
late nineteenth century who like Motherwell felt that the language of the “…abstract form is
inherently meaningful, capable of transcending cultural conventions and there uniquely
suitable for expressing the ‘universal ‘and ‘timeless’ experiences of life.”89 Motherwell did
this by painting between 1949 and 1991 the year of his death some 150 paintings that
communicated in a
visual sense the
struggle in 1939 of
the Spanish Republic
that had fallen to
fascism.
These series of
paintings subtitled
Elegies to the Spanish
Republic are given
numbers do in a
seemingly
extraordinary way
90
communicate the
struggle and horrors of war in a very limited abstract field of self-imposed parameters. He has
successfully executed in a abstract universal language black irregular and ovoid forms,
arranged most of the time on a white background with here and there patches of earthy
colours that could communicate a abstract universal language. These paintings “…convey a
sense of heroic struggle and tragic loss…conversely, through abstraction, the paintings
Stils. K., Selz. P., (ed.), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings,
London 1996, p. 212
88
Mark Rosenthal, Abstraction in the Twentieth Century:Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline, 1996 NewYork p. 284.
89
Ibid., 283
90
Robert Motherwell. Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 54. 1957-61. Oil on canvas, 178 x 229 cm.
87
28
transcend the tragedy of any historical event and become a metaphor for the modern artist’s
futile struggle against the dehumanising forces of materialism.”91 Not all artists believe in the
universal abstract elements to convey a message, some are rather cynical at the very idea of
the thought. An interview with the artist Fernando Botero, who it must be said works in a
figurative form, but has produced some interesting large sculptures that are quite abstract in
form had this to say when commenting on universal art in general “Anybody who tries from
the start to make general and universal art is making a big mistake. That is the problem with
international art today. That type of art moves just a very small group of people who, in some
way, are trying to do the same thing. But the connection is the main thing. All great art that
exists started out parochial. For example the impressionists did not paint France; they painted
some part of France; Montmartre, Montparnasse, cafe life. That was not an interpretation of
European life, but simply life on the corner… Everything has to start at the beginning, and
that beginning is completely local. It's the same thing in literature.”92 Botero says he is
influenced by the native Indian abstract forms from his home country Bolivia, but as we can
see we have problems with a universal language for him and abstraction in general. However,
an earlier form of painting that at times can be found to manifest itself in an abstract form and
thus perhaps communicates universally as a visual abstracted language is rock painting that I
have seen on journeys through Mali, Senegal and South Africa. Moreover it is agued then that
“Rock art is a classic example of a universal language in art. These first known expressions of
the sensibility and aesthetics of our distant ancestors are inscribed on rock surfaces in many
world regions. From Australia to Africa, from Asia to the Americas and Europe, our
prehistoric predecessors inscribed the places where they halted on their journeys, their shelters
and their sanctuaries with works of art which stir our feelings and our admiration. Rock art is
the only form of human cultural expression which has been practiced without interruption
from tens of thousands of years ago until the present day” 93
Language and Abstraction?
Going on now to the a brief investigation of the language of abstract art and to see if
indeed two writers whom have focused on this dilemma can give us an insight to see if
Bradford R. Collins, ‘The Fundamental Tragedy of the Elegies to the Spanish Republic, or Robert
Motherwell’s Dilemma,’ in Arts Magazine 59, no.1 (September 1984), p. 96. Quoted in Mark Rosenthal,
Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline, 1996 New York p. 283.
92
Escallon, Ana Maria ‘Speaking with Botero’, Americas, Nov/Dec96, Vol. 48, Issue 6 p, 23.
93
Extracted from: Le chemin secret des Ngarinyin du nord-ouest australien, Museum National d'Histoire
Naturelle, Paris, 1977
91
29
abstract art form can be a form of language and thus inevitably communicate with us in a
possibly universal way. This then begs the question does “…abstract work only have meaning
as a trace of the figurative which has been progressively eliminated? Such questions also raise
the more fundamental problem of the ‘language’ of abstraction.”94Two writers who have
written on the language and communicative elements in abstract art namely Mitcheal who
wrote Ut Pictura Theoria: ´Abstract Painting and Language` Picture Theory (1994) and
Stephen Bann Abstract Art- A language? (1980) explore the possibilities. There seems a
consensus especially with Mitcheal that really leads me to my second sub-question being that
if abstract art claims to be a universal language by its form presented to the viewer in various
modes and manifestations albeit referring to a non-figurative nature; then why is it we are
bombarded with theoretical, rhetorical and interpretive texts, albeit that so much writing is
needed to comprehend lets say a piece of sculpture or a painting by Robert Lewis for
example. Mitcheal succinctly says that what critics and writers actually do is to explain the
work. The language of the universal abstract for Mitcheal is outside the painting and needs to
be explained in the form of an essay or description of the visual aspects of the work, thus he
argues “ The first is simply the empirical fact that, for many modern artists, theory has been a
constitutive pre-text for their work…The other thing all these writers share is that they write
well, or persuasively, or in a style which enables the discussion of abstract paintings, often by
providing a set formulas, a language game that can be carried on. Their effect is to make the
apparent ‘wall’ or ‘grid’ between abstract art and language seem more like a screen door
through which the winds of
theoretical discourse blow
freely.”95So is this then this in
direct opposition to Rosalind
Krauss’s submission that abstract
art and “...Modern art’s will to
silence… [Its] defence against the
intrusion of speech”96 so are we to
believe that abstract art has been
97
94
Stephen Bann, Abstraction: Towards a New Art- Essays on the background to Abstract Art 1910 -1920,
London, 1980, p. 125.
95
Mitcheal, W., Picture Theory, London, 1994, p. 221.
96
Rosalind Krauss, “Grids” in The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge,
1985, p. 9, Quoted in Mitcheal, W., Picture Theory, London, 1994, p. 215.
97
Jasper Johns, Flags I, 1973
30
gagged into silence if we are to believe in Krauss’s conjectures. However, modern abstract art
relies on textual written language to access universal communication between viewer and art,
thus, Mitcheal argues his theory as does the artist writer Robert Morris that artists again rely
on “…textual accompaniments to visual art once again being produced by the artists’
themselves..”98 but this also is an objectionable stance as really this means that somehow the
visual universal language is outside the painting or no matter who produces it and when. So
much so that Mitcheal states that the visible or coded visual language in abstract works with
the likes of Mondrian or Pollock are not open to the same interpretations as the “…biblical
narratives that were made visible and immanent in the paintings of Raphael and
Michelangelo. One answer to this objection is simply that biblical narratives are not visible to
spectators who do not already know the stories form other sources”99 so this goes back to my
argument that there needs to an informed audience of connoisseurs who it is argued with
“Abstract art, then, is like all high ‘formal’ culture it is actually an aristocratic form, made by
and for a tiny elite in the cosmopolitan centres of advanced capitalistic countries”100 but this
all too Greenbergian and cynical stand point you might say in the privileging of abstract art
over other movements in the early part of the twentieth century and thus producing myths to
that affect are to be challenged! However, one can truly look at some abstract work that
perhaps speaks for itself in a universal manner. For example could I be so prosaic enough to
suggest that Jasper John’s Target and Flag series in the mid 1950’s, abstraction guised as
Pop Art could be a possible universal language in art. Pop Art in the U.S was rooted in a
materialist mass culture, the popular products of consumerism, representations of magazine
covers, and products of domestic phenomenon that have had a magic halo given to them
though being well advertised, and being expensive objects could be seen as almost
‘commodity fetishism’. So for our universal understanding and communication of certain
abstract Pop Art works they become instantly inevitably “kitsch”. Then it has been argued
thus that “kitsch” must surely be “…undeniably the first universal, imperial culture”101 So if
the kitsch imagery that has represented pop Art culture is transmuted as universal, could it
therefore be argued that the flag series of “Kitsch” icons of abstracted works by Johns from
around 1954 successfully serve as a universal abstract language. This is an interesting
thought. Do the very images of these flags that are imbued with so much history and
denotation, from McCarthyism, to the Cold War, globalisation, power, greed, the great
98
Mitcheal, W., Picture Theory, London, 1994, p. 222.
Ibid., p. 226.
100
Ibid., p. 228.
101
Ibid., p. 236.
99
31
102
American
dream and what
have you
communicate this to
us, the audience. Do
especially John’s
Flag series in an
abstract manner
with the white stars
on a blue
background with
red and white strips
going diagonally
across, speak to us
and communicate in
a universal manner?
Moreover the power of suggestion with abstract works like this is manifold as by the side of
the abstract art in a museum is mostly a label to indicate the name of the piece and artist, so
one can read the visual image better.
At times you ask why the piece cannot speak for itself. “On the one hand a picture may
happen to look like what it is not actually of. On the other, titles can have a considerable
effect on our initial responses, by suggesting what we should see a painting as or what we
might see in it.”103This label can then imbue the abstract piece with meaning and subjectivity,
like for example William de Kooning’s excellent Door to the River (1960). An abstract
painting that by naming it thus, one searches for in the abstract composition the universal
forms of “ …the door, a foreground path, a fence?..Nothing is definite in this image, all is
allusive and atmospheric; it is not a depiction of a place and its objects but a reality
reconstituted and presented in paint…paint has brought them into being as imaginable
possibilities, and only this painting could have made the possible the constructions we put
102
103
William de Kooning, Door to the River (1960)
Charles Harrison, Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction, New haven and London 1993, p.250.
32
upon it.104 So this exemplifies an argument that titles can suggest that with certain abstract
compositions a universal language of a door in this instance can be read by the viewer. A title
then can in short anchor meaning into an image, thus be read universally as the language
representing it. Charles Harrison gives us the last word in the connection between abstract art
and language be it universal or not in “…it does not follow that forms in art are like words, or
that they are ordered as words, or they are in one-to-one correspondence with given words.
They are not subject to the same kinds of grammatical rules or to the same principles of
consistency in usage, and they do not group together to form linguistic statements or
propositions…all we are saying is that art doesn’t mean in quite the same way that meaning is
conveyed in written and spoken language.”105 Lastly I would like to move on an area that has
been written a lot about to explain certain elements in abstract art, that being the sublime. I
use this as an example of the production of written texts either by critics or artists to explain
their work’s content or interpretation. This I do to demonstrate lucidly the juxtaposition with
the other argument we have looked at that abstract art is supposed to be a universal language
that is on encounter to be understood by everyone before having to read about it!
The Sublime, a manner to explain what is happening within the
associated elements in abstract painting, yet more writing to
explain a supposedly abstract universal language!
Barnett Newman stated in 1948 that “the impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy
beauty.” 106 Newman is variously described as an exemplar of high modernism, a practitioner
of the art of the sublime “…[a] master of the Abstract Sublime, Barnett Newman, explores a
realm of sublimity so perilous that it defies comparison with the even the most adventurous
Romantic exploration into sublime nature”107 he was also a precursor of Minimalism, an
existentialist, and a spiritual artist fascinated by Jewish mysticism. He wanted sublime
feelings to be communicated in his works and in order to help convey this he wrote about this
to help us in the understanding of the concept. This then leads one to suppose after all his and
other abstract works with the likes of Rothko, Still and Pollock did not perhaps speak a
universal language. However, in his influential essay, The Sublime Is Now Newman declared
104
Gooding, M., Abstract Art, London 2001, p. 76.
Charles Harrison, Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction, New haven and London 1993, p.198.
106
Barnett Newman 'The Sublime is Now', first published in Tiger's Eye, Vol. 1, No.6, December 1948, in
Harrison and Wood, eds. Art in Theory, pp. 572-4.
107
Robert Rosenblum, The Abstract Sublime, Art News, Feb 1961, in Clifford Ross, Abstract Expressionism:
Creators and Critics, New York, 1990, p. 274.
105
33
the replacement of the beautiful by the sublime to be a moving force of modernism. His large
abstract canvases present unbounded expanses of colour without form, a visual language both
of emptiness and fullness. He was inspired by the Cabbalistic idea that before God could
create the world, He had to ‘contract’ himself and leave a vacuum in which creation could
take place; Newman embraced the theme of absence as a sign of immanent presence. 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”108 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.”109 One
has to consider the relation of Newman's work to the philosophical traditions of the sublime
that I will later be exploring later in this chapter in order to understand the meaning of the
sublime.
Robert Rosenblum also wrote about the sublime and more importantly he also included
other abstract artists who he acknowledged through the visual encounter of their abstract
paintings could be an encounter with a sublime visual experience not in a figurative sense, but
through the medium of abstract painting. This he suggested was the same as what the
Romantic painters like Ward, Martin, Turner and Friedrich produced, “Indeed, a quartet of
the largest canvases by Newman, Still, Rothko and Pollock might well be interpreted as the
post-World-War-II of Genesis. During the Romantic era, the sublimities of nature gave proof
of the divine; today, such supernatural experiences are conveyed through the abstract medium
of paint alone. What used to be the pantheism has now become a kind of ‘paint-theism’.”110
What Rosenblum also proposes is the true power of an Abstract Sublime art that through the
possible medium of paint and colour alone, one could be in contact with the sublime elements
in nature. However, not wanting to sound cynical one has to read about it first, and then one
might argue, you then get a universal understanding of the abstract painting and its sublime
content!
108
Barnett Newman 'The Sublime is Now', first published in Tiger's Eye, Vol. 1, No.6, December 1948, in
Harrison and Wood, eds. Art in Theory, pp. 572-4.
109
Ibid. p. 573.
110
Robert Rosenblum, The Abstract Sublime, Art News, Feb 1961, in Clifford Ross, Abstract Expressionism:
Creators and Critics, New York, 1990, p. 276.
34
What is The Sublime?
111
To help us continue our look at the
sublime
in
the
writings
of
Newman,
Rosenblum and in order to understand what is being universally communicated, I would now
like to turn to what is meant by the concept of the sublime. The sublime originally is an
aesthetic concept of ancient lineage, modern understanding associates it mostly with the late
18th century and early 19th. Robert Rosenblum suggests that Burke, Reynolds, Kant, Diderot,
Delacroix and their immediate contemporises that “the sublime provided a flexible semantic
container for the murky new Romantic experiences of awe, terror, boundlessness and divinity
that began to rupture the decorous confines of the earlier aesthetic systems.”112However in
very general terms Rosenblums’s remarks are very apt but one has to look at the origins of the
term Sublime to perhaps make the term clearer. In current parlance, the sublime is often taken
to describe one or another sensual pleasure, as in a `sublime piece of music', a `sublime kiss',
But we do not immediately associate the sublime as used by Kant, Burke or for that matter
Newman. The term sublime itself derives from the anonymous treatise Peri Hypsous, long
thought to be have been written by Longinus, in which the rhetorical effects of the Sublime
are described in detail. Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary still reflects the old rhetorical
meaning of sublimity when he defines it as heroism, magnitude and elevation. It is interesting
to note that Johnson remarks on the etymology of the Sublime as a Noun which he defines as
the “proud or lofty stile”, that “the sublime is a Gallicism, but now is naturalized.’’ 113 He also
111
Casper David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog 1818, Oil on canvas, 94 x 74.8 cm; Kunsthalle,
Hamburg. The German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, b. Sept. 5, 1774, d. May 7, 1840, was one of
the greatest exponents in European art of the symbolic landscape. The sublime as in this example is closely
associated to the experience of God in nature, its main effect being the elevation of the soul and the feeling of
being overwhelmed by the majesty of the divine nature.
112
Robert Rosenblum, The Abstract Sublime, Art News, Feb 1961, in Clifford Ross, Abstract Expressionism:
Creators and Critics, New York, 1990, p. 274.
113
See Ashfield/De Bolle, The Sublime: A Reader in British 18th Century Aesthetic Theory, p. 111.
35
references sublime as the verb (‘to sublimate’) and the lexeme sublimity highlighting the
divine connotations off the term.
The two most famous contributors to the notion of the sublime were Edward burke
and Immanuel Kant, their theories of the sublime sprang from world-views in which what one
thought of God's relationship to man determined the very legitimacy of aesthetics as a field of
inquiry. Their treaties on the sublime were highly influential. Their reconceptionalization of
the sublime gave rise to the romantic appropriation of the concept which remained crucial for
painters of the sublime nature as Casper David Friedrich and American landscape painters’
like Thomas Moran, Fredrick
Edwin Church who in turn were influenced by Turner.
Rosenblum states the powerful effect of nature upon the human soul is like the “…response to
Niagara[falls] would have been called an experience of the Sublime…As imprecise and
irrational as the feelings it tried to name, the sublime could be extended to art as well as
nature. One of its major expressions, in fact, was the painting of sublime landscapes.”114This
then leads Rosenblum to argue that American artist like Clifford Still can conjure up sublime
abstract landscapes. For example Still’s 1957-D abstract painting can be read as “…limestone
cliffs have been translated into abstract geology…we move physically across such a picture
like a visitor to the Grand Canyon or journey to the centre of the earth. Suddenly, a wall of
black rock is split by the searing crevice of light, or a stalactite threatens to approach to a
precipice. No less than caverns and waterfalls, Still’s paintings seem the product of eons of
change; and their flaking surfaces, parched like bark or slate, almost promise that natural
process will continue, as unsusceptible to human order as the immeasurable patterns of ocean,
sky, or water.”115 These are indeed romantic descriptive notions of sublime nature in abstract
form, nevertheless it demonstrates the power tool of descriptive words to gain and interpret
sublime notions a foot hold in abstract painting such as Stills 1957-D.
114
Robert Rosenblum, The Abstract Sublime, Art News, Feb 1961, in Clifford Ross, Abstract Expressionism:
Creators and Critics, New York, 1990, p. 275.
115
Ibid., p. 277.
36
Back
to
origins
of
the
the
sublime Burke and
Kant’s theories are
highly
systematic.
Burke for example
articulates
the
sublime as a terrible
and
overwhelming
phenomenon, the
experience
of
116
the
sublime for Burke is defined by its indirect allusion to the fact of human mortality. Burke’s
reconceptualization of the sublime consisted in adding fear and terror: “whatever is fitted in
any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible,
or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source
of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of
feeling’’117 Burke’s second addition to the traditional image of the sublime as august nature
concerned the alignment of the sublime with the tragic spectacle. Finally, he contrasted the
sublime (grand, obscure, irregular) with the beautiful (small, smooth, proportionate).
Nevertheless, a second tradition of the sublime was initiated by Kant in his Critique of
Judgement of 1790. Sublime, for Kant was
“In what we usually call sublime in nature there is ... an utter lack of anything leading to
particular objective principles... the theory of the sublime [is thus] a mere appendix to our
aesthetic judging of the purposiveness of nature.” 118
Far from being a mere appendix, the experience of the sublime was, for Burke, more valuable
than the experience of the beautiful. In his own words, Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the
Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is an "examination of our passions in our
breasts." As he associates it with self-preservation, it follows that for Burke, the sublime is the
more important of the two aesthetic categories. Kant also distinguishes between mere
vastness, the “mathematical sublime’’, and the terror inducing “dynamic sublime’’. Thus in a
116
Clyfford Still 1957-D, No. 1, 1957, Oil on canvas.
Ashfield/ De Bolla, The Sublime, p. 131.
118
Immanuel Kant, The critique of Judgement, p. 90.
117
37
sense the truly sublime is so enormous that even to think it requires more than the ordinary
faculties of the senses. As Kant postulates:
“ the sublime is to be found in the object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately
involves, or else by its presence provokes a representation of the limitlessness, yet with a
super-added thought of its totality.’’119 As with Burke, an emphasis is placed on objects of an
overwhelming or terrifying nature giving thus rise to the experiences of the sublime.
Barnett Newman’s notion and interpretations of the Sublime
Barnett Newman’s 1948 before mentioned essay The Sublime is Now is a platform
where he dismisses whole heartedly Kant and suggests that it is Burke alone who articulates
and suggests the essentials of the sublime.120 He also tells us that Kant and even Hegel
confuse the sublime with beautiful and it is only Burke who can demonstrate a distinct
separation. Theoretically, Newman is concerned only really with pure ideas. The starting
point of his discussion is broadly historical and with Gothic art he contends that it is an
authentic state of sublime exaltation. This is attained through the artist’s desire to destroy
form; where indeed, ‘form can be formless’. According to Newman the liberating moment for
Gothic art is however checked by the renaissance’s insistence of the reinstatement of classical
ideas, thus it:
“set the artists the task of rephrasing an accepted Christ in terms of absolute beauty as
against the original ecstasy over the legend’s evocation of the absolute.”121
The classic ideal remained dominant for Newman until “in modern times, the
Impressionists….began the movement to destroy the established rhetoric of beauty by
the….insistence on a surface of ugly strokes.”122 So this tendency while a determining factor
in the rise of modern art gave it also negative connotations. As Newman put it: “the elements
of sublimity in the revolution we know as modern art exists in its effort and energy to escape
the pattern rather than in the realization of a new experience”. 123 However, Newman cites
Picasso’s work as perhaps rhetorically sublime in its overthrow of convention, it is the canvas
that re-interprets the world in the terms of the highly idea pictorial form. In a similar fashion
for Mondrian nature is transformed into “an absolute of perfect sensation”124 for his canvas's
119
Ibid. p. 100.
The Sublime is Now, p. 572.
121
Ibid., p.573.
122
Ibid.
123
Ibid.
124
Ibid.
120
38
manifest themselves as pure aesthetic surfaces
with in the real world. Moreover Newman
postulates in regard to Dadaist and Cubist
collage that they only succeed in:
“ ...elevating the sheet of paper...The failure of
European art to achieve the sublime is due to this
blind desire to exist inside the reality of
sensation(the objective world, whether distorted
or pure) and the blind an art within a framework
of pure plasticity (the Greek ideal of beauty,
whether that plasticity be a romantic active
surface, or a classic stable one)’’125
126
Thus Newman in his treatise has a real
gripe that modern art is only sublime in the external or rhetorical senses of perfect aesthetic
form and revolutionary exaltation. The solution for Newman then is for the artist to create art
works with sublime content. He comes to the term with the notion of the inconsistence
between his desire for a sublime art that embodies pure ideas and the ideographic association
means whereby Newman had previously attempted to manifest it in his work. His own
position is creating the sublime is thus:
“We are reasserting man’s natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship
to the absolute emotions. We do not need the absolute props an outmoded and antiquated
legend[i.e., of Christ].We are creating images whose reality is self-evident....we are feeling
ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth.....that have
been the devices of European painting. Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or
life, we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings.’’127
Did the sublime manifest itself in Newman’s painting?
There is a feeling of generality in Newman’s short paper The Sublime is Now
Nevertheless despite his philosophical training there is perhaps more sublime art than he cares
to extrapolate about, moreover he is lucid on one matter that he does find in essence baroque
125
The Sublime is Now, p.573.
Barnett Newman. Onement, I. 1948. Oil on canvas and oil on masking tape on canvas.69.2x41.2 cm
127
The Sublime is Now p. 574.
126
39
painting, Gothic architecture and Michelangelo’s sculpture to be sublime. The basic problem
that arises from Newman’s theoretical disposition lies in the fact he had to come up with a
mode of abstraction that will transcend associations with geometric beauty and to embody the
sublime in its purest form. Most critiques will agree that he succeed in his art in achieving the
sublime in his breakthrough painting of 1948 Onement 1. Newman’s rather obsessive pursuit
of the transcendent sublime leads him to develop the colour and zip format. This set him side
from his other mainstream Abstract Expressionist artists of the period. As Paul Crowther
postulates in regard to Newman achieving the sublime in his paintings, he states, “in arriving
at the paradigm structure of Onement 1 and exploiting it so extensively; Newman effectively
reduced the expression of the transcendent sublime to a formula. His theory indeed demands
this in order that the authentic subject matter, the pure idea, should be absolutely paramount.
However, by finding a formula for sublimity Newman tends to inhibit the possibility of the
complete experience of it.’’128
Onement 1 is the painting Barnett Newman regarded as his artistic breakthrough in an
abstract painting that attested to notions of the sublime. He equated its making with his own
self-creation as an artist, a notion reinforced by his assertion that he created it on his birthday,
January 29th, 1948. The masking tape, with which Newman reserved the zone for a vertical
band, as he had done in earlier paintings and drawings, remains on the canvas in Onement I. It
is covered by the red oil paint that Newman laid on with a palette knife. This zip, as Newman
would later call his motif of a vertical band, is not “zippy” at all-it is thick and irregular, made
in many starts and stops. Onement I represents the first time that the vertical band seen in
Newman's work of the previous three years wholly defines the structure of the painting,
without atmospheric imagery or separable details. Moreover, “Newman bravely abandons the
securities of the familiar pictorial geometries in favour of the risks of untested pictorial; and
like them, he produces awesomely simple mysteries that evoke the primeval movement of
creation. His very titles (Onement, The beginning, Pagan Void, Death of Euclid, Adam, Day
One) attest to this sublime intention.”129 This painting marked Newman's decisive move from
what he called a “picture” to a “painting” an indivisible whole that represented nothing but
itself, a unity suggested by the word Newman later chose for its title: Onement.
128
Paul Crowther, The Language of Twentieth-Century Art, 1997, p. 160.
Robert Rosenblum, The Abstract Sublime, Art News, Feb 1961, in Clifford Ross, Abstract Expressionism:
Creators and Critics, New York, 1990, p. 276.
129
40
130
Another painting of Newman that Rosenblum cites as a terrifying leap into the sublime
in his essay Abstract Sublime is Newman’s familiar work and its title that already refers and
anchors a universal message that being Vir Heroicus Sublimis, “man the sublime hero.”
Rosenblum states that with this painting the abstract universal message of the sublime can be
found, Rosenblum directs us there (in his writing) and “…puts us before a void of terrifying,
if exhilarating, as the artic emptiness of the tundra; and in its passionate reduction of pictorial
means to a single hue (warm red) and a single kind of structural division (vertical) for some
144 square feet, it likewise achieves a simplicity as heroic and sublime as the protagonist of
the title.”131 Thus we are to see with our eyes on the encounter sublime elements in the title
and the work at the same time, naturally with the help of Rosenblum’s most eloquent prose on
the subject.
Conclusion
I have attempted in this paper to demonstrate, define and extrapolate a number of
issues that are not so transparent with regards to the nature and the almost chameleon
character of abstract art. I started my argument with decisive and clear main question, namely
is Abstract Art: A universal language? Then I in turn went to my two sub-questions. The first
130
Barnett Newman. Vir Heroicus Sublimis. 1950-51. Oil on canvas, (242.2 x 541.7 cm). Barnett Newman called
a magazine article back in 1948 "The Sublime Is Now." The title of his most familiar painting, Vir Heroicus
Sublimus, "man the sublime hero," repeats his interest in Longinus.
131
Robert Rosenblum, The Abstract Sublime, Art News, Feb 1961, in Clifford Ross, Abstract Expressionism:
Creators and Critics, New York, 1990, p. 277.
41
being if abstract art claims to be a universal visual language, does it succeed in doing so in
being a communicative and how? Then to my second sub-question, if indeed abstract art lives
up to being a truly universal language as purported by the likes of Ben Nicholson, Kandinsky,
Mondrian and others, why ones asks ones self do we need so much do much theory,
argument, explanations and rhetoric to explain an abstract image to a wide and perceptive
audience of a so called universal visual language that is abstract, whatever form that maybe.
132
In chapter one I explored the main central arguments that have been abound in almost
the last one hundred years to argue the main stand points, descriptions and manifestation of an
art that refers to nothing outside itself or it is not supposedly figurative in any shape or form. I
have explored the writings and statements of perhaps of the pioneers of art theory and
criticism to serve as a means of orientation for the reader in the minefield that is abstract art. I
have looked at the arguments of Greenberg, Rosenblum and avoided the arguments of Fried
and Krauss in their post-modernist approach to abstract art this is in the scope of another
paper. I have looked at various movements of abstract from, Op art, Abstract Impressionism
and the New York school, the monochrome and the Russian avant-garde movement etc to
give a limited perspective on the vast area of abstract art. This all leads me back to the two
statements that were my spring board into the nature of abstract art that being by two artists
132
Jackson Pollock. Number 1A, 1948. 1948. Oil and enamel on un-primed canvas, 172.7 x 264.2 cm.
42
Brice Marden and Robert Ryman that “Abstraction is new, it’s in its infancy”133 and
“Abstraction is a relatively recent approach to painting. I think abstract painting is just the
beginning. All possibilities are open to it in ways we can’t imagine.” 134 This notion of the
“new” and “All possibilities are open to it….” was the starting point of my contribution to the
contentious area of Abstract art. Are there the possibilities in abstract art it being indeed a
communicative and universal visual art ?
The second part of my of my paper serves as the main stand point for my arguments of
analysing the theory and criticism levied at abstract art to prove rightly or wrongly that this
art indeed speaks a universal language to us all, the consumer, admirer or academic. I have
used serval writers to reason and make the arguments stand by themselves. On the one hand
there are the earlier pioneers of abstract are Kandinsky and Mondrian who claimed a
universitaily in their art. This was done through manifestos and statements by the likes of De
Stijl movement with Mondrian in the early days at the helm to Kandinsky who professed to
the spiritual nature and almost religious content of abstract art. This religious aspect in
abstract art was also picked up by Hilla Rebay one of the doyennes of abstract art in the
United States and founders of the Guggenheim museum in New York. This was touched on
briefly in the first chapter. I used serval artists to elucidate the universal visual nature of their
work like Jasper Johns, Robert Motherwell etc. I looked also on the association of language
and abstract art, the meaning of universal and universalism, then looked at and explored the
history, meaning and use of the sublime. Finally, I turned around on my heels to look at the
writings mainly of Barnett Newman and his contemporary art critic Harold Rosenburg. These
two explain to us through texts the notion of the sublime with in abstract works that if one
believes in their arguments as with the earlier writers we are to assume that abstract art
speaks a universal visual language to us all, nevertheless we have to read about it first to
understand the sublime content in the works of Clyffd Still, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock
and naturally Barnett Newman. Why is this sublime feeling of power of nature and man
before god not universally available to us on the encounter with one of the above mentioned
artists work? We have to consult a Rosenblum text first.
In conclusion it is hard to really to admit after this investigation with this paper and
my colloquium to be so prosaic as to have a definitive right answer. I hope to have planted a
133
134
Brice Marden, 1987,quoted in F Colpitt(ed), Abstract Art in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge 2002, p. 153
Robert Ryan, 1986, ibid., p. 153
43
seed and give added food for thought that abstract art pertains to speak a universal language.
One begins to trace back to the echoes of abstract art as still being new and in its infancy,
furthermore most importantly all possibilities are open to it. This then can be a plausible
answer to the avenue of explanation that there are the possibilities of interpretation open to
abstract art, albeit that it speaks a universal visually communicative language or not. We are
all individuals and our receptive visual awareness’s are pitched at many different levels, it is a
loaded gun to presume at all after the research I have done to be arrogant enough to demand
closure and state that abstract art in its infancy is or is not a universally appealing language.
Whether abstract art wishes to communicate to us is neither here or there to all in sundry from
the wall or a sculpture mounted on a plinth to the land art by the likes of Richard Long or the
Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson. To answer the question is abstract art a universal language,
one has to ask that question oneself next time you are humbled by the presence and visual
magnitude of a abstract painting by Mr Mark Rothko or Mr Yves Klein next time we are in a
museum or gallery! Whether it is in MOMA or the Tate. There is no apologising for
Rosenblum’s beliefs in the Jackson Pollock that he is the master for us all to learn from and I
quote: We have to read about it first, nevertheless “In Number 1, 1948, we are immediately
plunged into divine fury as we are drenched in Turner’s sea; in neither case can our minds
provide systems of navigation. Again, sheer magnitude can help produce the sublime. Here,
the very size of the Pollock-68 by 104 inches- permits no pause before the engulfing; we are
physically lost in this boundless web of inexhaustible energy.” 135
Word count 15,464
135
Robert Rosenblum, The Abstract Sublime, Art News, Feb 1961, in Clifford Ross, Abstract Expressionism:
Creators and Critics, New York, 1990, p. 278
44
Bibliography
Abstraction :Towards a New Art- Essays on the background to Abstract Art 1910 -1920,
(cat. Tate Gallery) London, 1980
Ashfield, A., Bolle, de. P., The Sublime: a Reader in British 18th Century Aesthetic Theory,
Cambridge, 1996
Boersma. L., ‘Neo-abstract: abstracte schilderkunst in de Verenigde Staten na het
Modernisme’ in Brand. J., de Vries, A., Neo, (cat. Centraal Museum), Utrecht , 2003
Burke, E., A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1757), edition by Adam Phillips, Oxford, 1990
Brecht, B., ‘On Non-Objective Painting’ 1935-1939 in Harrison, C., Francina, F., Modern Art
and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, London, 1982
Carrier, D., ‘Baudrillard as Philosopher or, the End of Abstract Painting’ in Arts Magazine,
1988
Chipp, H., ( ed.), Theories of Modern Art, London 1968
Colpitt. F., (ed.), Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, 2002
Crowther, P,.The Language of Twentieth-Century Art, Yale, 1997.
Gooding, M., Abstract Art, London 2001
Guilbaut, S., How New York Stole the Idea of modern Art, Chicago and London, 1983
Fer, B., On Abstract Art, London,1997
Fry, R., ‘last History as an Academic Discipline’, in Harrison, C., Francina, F., Modern Art
and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, London, 1982.
Gibson, A., Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics, Yale, 1997
Greenberg, C., ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’,1940 in Shapiro, David and Cecile Abstract
Expressionism: A Critical Record, Cambridge, 1990.
___________ ‘Abstract Representational, and so fort’, 1954 in Harrison and Wood, (eds.), Art
in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford, 2000
___________ ‘Modernist Painting’, 1961 in: Harrison, C., Francina, F., Modern Art and
Modernism: A Critical Anthology, London, 1982.
___________ ‘After Abstract Expressionism’, Art international 6 (Oct. 62)
Harrison, C., Francina, F., Perry., Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction, New haven and London
1993.
45
Harrison, C., Francina, F., Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, London, 1982.
Harrison and Wood, (eds.), Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas,
Oxford, 2000
Kant, I., The Critique of Judgement (1790), translation is by Werner S. Pluhar,
Indianapolis/Cambridge, 1987.
Longinus, On the Sublime, transl. W.H. Fyfe, London, 1995
Mitchell, w., Picture Theory, Chicago/London, 1994
Moszynska, A., Abstract Art, London 1990
Newman, B., ‘The Sublime is Now’, first published in Tiger's Eye, Vol. 1, No.6, December
1948, in Harrison and Wood, eds. Art in Theory 1900-1990. An Anthology of Changing Ideas,
Oxford, 1992.
Polcari, S., Abstract Expressionism and the modern Experience, Cambridge, 1999.
Rebay, H.,‘The Beauty of Non-Objectivity’, 1937 in: Harrison, C., Francina, F., Modern Art
and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, London, 1982
Rosenblum, R., ‘The Abstract Sublime: How some of the Most Heretical Concepts of Modern
America Art Relate to the Visionary Nature Painting a Century ago’, 1961, in Clifford Ross,
Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, New York, 1990,
Rosenthal, M., Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline, (cat.
Guggenheim Museum New York.), New York, 1996
Ross, C., Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, New York, 1990.
Ryan. D., Talking Painting: Dialogues with Twelve Contemporary Abstract Painters
London, 2002
Shapiro, David and Cecile Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record, Cambridge, 1990.
Schapiro, M., Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries. Selected Papers, Tallahassee, 1978
The Spiritual in Art. Abstract Painting 1890-1985, (cat. Los Angles County museum), Los
Angeles 1986
Stils. K., Selz. P., (ed.), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, A Sourcebook of
Artists’ Writings, London 1996
Worringer, W.,‘Abstraction and Empathy’, 1908 in Harrison, C., Francina, F., Modern Art
and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, London, 1982
46
Abstract
Art :
A
Universal
Language ?
Stephen Pegg
47