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Avant-Garde v.s. Avant-Garde The origins of abstract art.

Intro

In historical overview, art historians like to point out where a style, as abstraction can be described as a style, be found for the first time. Is it Kandinsky in 1910 who discovered the abstract painting? And is Malevich ‘Black Square’ the only true abstract work of art, because it is most rigours proposition? What I think is more interesting how powerful the abstraction is that after a hundred years of abstract art it is still very much alive. So there’s seems to be more to it than a simple proposition, a simple statement that painting or better a picture is flat. Abstract art didn’t emerge out of nowhere; it slowly grew out of modern styles like Cubism, Futurism and so on. And it literally means to simplify: to abstract parts that distract from pure form. It is this pure form or essence that abstract art seems to be looking for is what kept it alive for all those years. Because that leads to questions what art is? What painting is? And so on.

European Avant-garde

New times call for new artistic representation. The European Avant-gardes were the real avant-gardes in its warfare connotation; these people like Malevich were engaged in the political struggles of their time and chose deliberately sides. Therefore when I speak of avant-garde I mean the European and not the American, which I will cal Abstract Expressionist. The radicalness of someone like Malevich is best quoted: ‘imitative art must be destroyed like the imperialist army.’ (p.296, art in theory 1900-1990). Malevich revolution was the one of the people; he say a world in which everybody would be equal to each other, and this absent of order asked for a new way of representation. Art should have a social meaning and not only be aesthetic pictures for the bourgeois. This naturalistic, academic way of painting naturally became the ‘imperialist army’ that needed to be destroyed because it represented the bourgeois society. Art had to become pure: so ignore the natural world and try to paint the canvas itself, to redirect the viewers attention form the pictorial picture to the object that a painting is; a flat plain. They argued that only through a (color) system art can be made that penetrates the objective, or naturalistic, and art can become more philosophical. Therefore the artist must read philosophy to base him within the discourse of the new world to be able to express these ideas. An artist must become a critic, a critic of art and of the world.

De stijl and Piet Mondriaan

In the Netherlands a group of revolutionary artist like; Piet Mondriaan, Theo van Doesburg and Gerrit Rietveld united under the name De Stijl (the Style). The artist connected to De Stijl were collectively looking for new visual languish that could represent the modern times in which they living, and they came to something that they called neoplasticism. This new plastic art focuses upon the essence of art and the materials or media in which the works are made. Theo van Doesburg argues that in paintings, painters use natural subjects, like people, to create an artistic composition that is self-reflective but it hides it behind a natural scene. The painter uses the natural world as pretext to demonstrate his skilful painting, which makes the painting empty shell. ‘Arms, legs, trees, and landscapes are not unequivocally painterly means. Painterly means are: colours, forms, lines, and planes.’ (p.280, art in theory 1900-1990, Theo van Doesburg) Van Doesburg calls the technique that they use to construct the painting cancellation; ‘One element cancels out another.’ (p.281, art in theory 1900-1990, Theo van Doesburg), for example a flat plane is cancelled out by a line to make perfect harmony.

It was interesting for me to read text about these Dutch artist in English because as Charles Harrison and Paul Wood notes that: ‘It should be noted that the Dutch term beelding carries connotations of forming and making absent from the more basically material sense of ‘plastic’.’ (p.282, art in theory 1900-1990, Charles Harrison and Paul Wood) In the Netherlands fine art is called: Autonoom Beeldende Kunst, which carries the word Beelding.

Mondriaan

To me, and to the art world in the Netherlands, Mondiraan is the most important figure in De Stijl movement and the Dutch avant-garde. The way Mondiraans work evolved throughout is whole live is extraordinary, by looking at his oeuvre you can clearly see where and how he made his decisions what way to go. He started by painting from the natural world and mastered it very young, he went to Paris and became influenced by the avant-gardistic movement and gradually his work evolved from naturalistic into the abstract works that we are so familiar with. With his abstractions Mondriaan focuses on the relationships between lines and colors on the canvas to come to a universal expression that is more pure than art that represents nature. He tries to brake the bondage between subject matter and plasticy to make the plastic into a subject matter. ‘In painting you must first try to see composition, color, and line and not the representation as representation. Then you will finally come to feel the subject matter a hindrance.’ (p.283 Piet Mondriaan)

Through his New Plastic art Mondriaan combines two opposites, the particular and the universal, to come into equilibrium. For Mondriaan this equilibrium is the essence to keep on working, in every painting that he makes he tries to come as close to this as possible. The oppositions in his paintings are of course that of horizontal and vertical lines, and lines versus color plains. He makes these into an aesthetic equilibrium. ‘Although art is the plastic expression of our aesthetic emotion, we cannot therefore conclude that art is only ‘the aesthetic expression of our subjective sensations.’’ (p.287 Piet Mondriaan) Through this quote you see immediately the relation with someone like Malevich; searching for a new representation of the times in which they lived. They searched for universal qualities within the medium of painting to be able to communicate to everyone the ideas that they hat about painting and life.

American Avant-garde

In the 1940s a lot of the European avant-garde artist flee to the United States because of the Second World War in Europe. This is one of the factors that created in New York a blooming of abstract painting. At the same time an instrument becomes more and more available to be used by artist, maybe not directly but art criticism begins to shape the art world. Where before art criticism hat to do with good taste now it became an avant-gardistic project on its own by explaining what the artist involved in the abstract expressionist movement meant with their work.

Clement Greenberg

Clement Greenberg is one of these critics that gave him self the task of explaining the newly formed art movements and to interpret what they meant. In his essay ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ from 1940 he begins by making a historical basis from which the American avant-garde or abstract expressionist emerged. Greenberg claims that there can be one form of art that is dominant for a period in time, for example literature in Europe by the 17th century. This dominant art becomes the prototype for all other art. All other arts will imitate the dominant art form, but at the same time the dominant art tries to absorb and incorporate all the other arts which leads to confusion and eventually to a shift of the dominant art. So in the 17th century painting tried to imitate literature: ‘All emphasis is taken away from the medium and transferred to subject matter. It is no longer a question even of realistic imitation, since that is taken for granted, but of the artist’s ability to interpret subject matter for poetic effects and so forth.’ (Greenberg, p.556) As we have seen earlier that against this romanticism the avant-gardes arose, who felt that art had become decadent and they focused upon social struggle of their time and the formal side of painting.

Greenberg makes an interesting comparison, logical to his theory of a dominant art form, that the abstract avant-garde art is imitating music: ‘Its was when it was discovered that the advantage of music lay chiefly in the fact that it was an ‘abstract’ art, an art of ‘pure form.’ It was such because it was incapable, objectively, of communication anything else than a sensation, and because this sensation could not be conceived in any other terms than those of the sense through which it entered the consciousness.’ (Greenberg, p.557)

In the end what Greenberg concludes is; what the avant-gardes achieved is that they accepted the boundaries of the medium that they used. ‘The history of avant-garde painting is that of a progressive surrender to the resistance of its medium; which resistance consists chiefly in the flat picture plane’s denial of efforts to ‘hole through’ it for realistic perspectival space.’ (Greenberg, p.558) He also gives us the explanation to why the avant-gardes used the square: ‘Under the influence of the square shape of the canvas, forms tend to become geometrical – and simplified, because simplification is also a part of the instinctive accommodation to the medium.’ (Greenberg p.558)

Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978) from ‘The American Action Painters’ 1952

An opposing critic named Harold Rosenberg argued that the abstract expressionist like Pollock didn’t so much emphasize the flatness of their picture plain, but that their movement, their action in making the painting is what gave a meaning to their works. So where Greenberg focused on the support structure of painting Rosenberg focused upon the performance of making; so formal approach against a preformative one. Rosenberg argued that a painter had not an image in mind but the confrontation of the artist with the painting became the picture, the picture is the result of this confrontation. The act is the most important thing, therefore abstract expressionist painting is not a purist one; it doesn’t have anything to do with aesthetics. The painting produced by an abstract expressionist is directly related to the artist’s biography. ‘The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.’ (Rosenberg, p.582) Rosenberg clamed. Pollock’s radical statement is not so much the fact that he laid the canvas on the ground during his painting but that his performance above the canvas with the paint were frozen in a painting that functioned as an equivalent for his own state of mind. For Pollock his paintings originated out of his subconscious, which meant for him that, there was a deeper truth in them than a picture that was created with a conscious mind.

To get a clearer picture of the ideas surrounding the abstract expressionist paintings it is interesting to see what the artist had to say about their work. For, the critical notes by art critics helped the artist to sell their work, literally and figuratively, but they published also their own statements. For example Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko together with Barnett Newman:

1 To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.
2 This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.
3 It is our function as artist to make the spectator see the world our way – not his way.
4 We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.
5 It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject-matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.

What is interesting in this statement that there is a combination of the thoughts of the two opposing critiques; ‘flat forms’ and ‘expression’. On the one hand they speak of destroying the illusion of the pictorial and at the same time they speak about subject-matter. From a photographers point of view this seems a paradox, but within the painters discourse they move the subject-matter from pictorial real to the mind and intellect of the artist. The artist himself becomes subject, not in the same way as the European avant-garde who tried to make an universal language, the abstract expressionist made their own language and within this they thought a something universal will reveal itself. For: ‘we do not intend to defend our pictures. They make their own defence. We consider them clear statements. Your failure to dismiss or disparage them is prima facie evidence that they carry some communicative power.’ (Gottlieb and Rothko p.562)

The shift in subject-matter of the abstract expressionist gave a new élan to the concept of abstraction. Because: ‘It was a common assumption among the Amercian avant-garde painters of the 1940s and 1950s that painting could be a kind of equivalent for an individual person, at least in the sense that in invited the spectator into a form of one-to-one relationship.’ (p.565 Charles Harrison and Paul Wood) This idea of work being an equivalent demolishes one of the problems of abstract art; its relation to the pictorial. Because if an abstract painting is only a proposition, a painting is flat, than after Malevich Black Square nothing really changed, but now there is a different relationship; the one with the artist.

10 Barnett Newman (1905-1970) ‘The Sublime Is Now’ 1948 Barnett Newman describes how art has always been looking for beauty and it relation to a sublime message within these arts. He calms that the American abstract expressionists are able to solve this problem of beauty and the sublime message. Although I don’t think he succeeds.

‘The question that now arises is how, if we are living in a time without a legend or mythos that can be called sublime, if we refuse to admit any exaltation in pure relations, if we refuse to live in the abstract, how can we be creating a sublime art?’ (Newman p.574)

‘Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘life’, we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings.’ (Newman p.574)

So it seems that the individual experience becomes the sublime messages, and this is something that is very true to that time, which is the birthplace of our individuality.

Newman describes how and why the aesthetic always comes fore everything else: ‘that the aesthetic act always precedes the social one.’ (Newman p.568)

Resistance: Objecthood, reductivism and concept

In the late 50ties and early 60ties the claim of expression in abstract art had become a hegemonic one. Whenever an artist made something abstract it became immediately an expression of deep feelings and subconscious urges. The abstract art seemed to have lost something; it became a window not on the pictorial real but a window to the inner being of his creator, the artist. The abstract art lost the promise of being empty, being something in its self and reflecting its own being.

Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967) ‘Art as Art’ 1962

Ad Reinhardt is one of these artists who consider abstraction not to be merely an expression of a subject but as an entity in itself. In ‘Art as Art’ Reinhardt defines art as something independent from everything else, something that refers only to itself and nothing outside. Therefore art can only be described by what it is not. ‘The one thing to say about art is that it is one thing. Art is art-as-art and everything else is everything else.’ (Reinhardt p.806) Within Reinhardt’s world art is an institution had functions purely on its own and needs to have no connection to anything else. That’s also why an abstract work of art only reflects its own being. To be able to express these theories about art in works they needed to be accomplished by statements and conceptions about the history of art. Reinhardt describes this history like this: ‘The one history of painting progresses from the painting of a variety of ideas with a variety of subjects and objects, to one idea with a variety of subjects and objects, to one subject with a variety of objects, to one object with a variety of subjects, then to one object with one subject, to one object with no subject, and to one subject with no object, then to the idea of no object and no subject and no variety at all. There is nothing less significant in art, nothing more exhausting and immediately exhausted, than ‘endless variety.’’ (Reinhardt p.808) Reinhardt emphasizes the formalness of art and radicalizes the idea that art is autonomous and reflects only its own being. ‘The one meaning in art-as-art, past or present, is art meaning. When an art object is separated from its original time and place and use and moved into the art museum, it gets emptied and purified of all its meanings except one. A religious object that becomes a work of art in an art museum loses all its religious meanings.’ (Reinhardt p.807) ‘The one thing to say about art is its breathlessness, lifelessness, deathlessness, contentlessness, fomlessness, spacelessness, and timelessness. This is always the end of art.’ (Reinhardt p.809) This is the final statement of Reinhardt, long before post-modernist declared the end of art, is more interesting because Reinhart claims that every new work of art will be the end of art. This line of thinking was later taken over by Joseph Kosuth, one of the conceptualist.

‘At the time they were written, his strings of negations offered a strategic resistance to the types of claim for meaning in abstract art which had become prevalent in the literature of Abstract Expressionism. They also served to clear some theoretical space for the ‘pure’, contentless abstract painting on which Reinhardt had been working since the early 1950s.’ (p.806 Charles Harrison and Paul Wood)

Conclusion All three stages of abstract art described above seem to have a strong relationship with the political climate in which they emerged; the European avant-garde where highly involved in the class struggle in the beginning of the last century, the abstract expressionist celebrated the American freedom and individualism and the conceptualist tried to get away from the ruling politics and art marked to purify it so it would be autonomous.

Art in theory 1900-1990 By Charles Harrison and Paul Wood