Arguments Against Abstraction

In last September’s issue of Quadrant, Sydney lawyer Baron Alder turned his evidently energetic mind to the contentious issue of Australia’s idea of itself, comparing the kind of image advanced in Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend of 1958 with more contemporary—and recognisable—realities.

National characteristics are clearly a complex and controversial matter in which caricature often plays as large a part as sober analysis.

Alder singled out the sheer self-consciousness of Australians’ image of themselves for particular criticism, whereas I suggest that a “sheep-in-wolf’s-clothing” aspect of the current national character is more damaging and disappointing—that is, timid conformism dressed in larrikin disguise.

Some four years before I parted company with the Australian I was summoned before its then editor-in-chief David Armstrong for the supposed journalistic impropriety of describing intellectual life in Australia as “rather less than effervescent”. The phrase that caused offence appeared, in fact, in a review I wrote for the Spectator (July 26, 1997) of Christopher Allen’s Art in Australia: From Colonization to Postmodernism.

To my mind Allen’s youthful book provided evidence of a kind of fashionable conformism to a politically correct, anti-aesthetic, left-wing interpretation of art. This deadly and stifling orthodoxy is now, if possible, even more in the ascendant in all of the arts in Australia than it was in 1997. Contrary views such as mine have been largely eliminated—outside the pages of this journal, at least.

Regular readers of Quadrant may recall an article I wrote in the April 2006 issue—“Blue Poles, Modernism and the Novelty Trap”—which challenged received wisdom not only about Blue Poles but about the core ideas of modernism itself.

Unknown to me, Baron Alder wrote a fascinating response to my claims which is now published, belatedly, in this issue. Alder presents a complex and interesting argument based largely on the spirited advocacy of modernist ideals by the Englishman T.E. Hulme. However, unfortunately for Hulme and the argument, he was killed in 1917 a mere ten years after what many understand as modernism proper first began to get into its stride.

Alder quotes Jonathan Jones as dating the birth of modernism from 1907, employing Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon as a first significant marker. Yet an equally convincing case could be made for beginning a few years earlier with the first manifestations of Fauve painting in 1904. While Fauve painting did glance back admittedly to some of the more radical concerns of late nineteenth-century European art, Picasso was, in essence, looking back even further to the traditions of ethnographic African art, of which he had only recently become aware.

But there is hardly a need to split hairs here.

Perhaps a first point that needs establishing clearly is that experienced commentators tend to divide modernism into two distinct phases: an early, often idealistic period—known generally as “heroic”—and the so-called “late” modernist phase. Significantly it was to the latter, in fact, that most of the criticisms I made in “Blue Poles, Modernism and the Novelty Trap” applied.

Indeed, Alder acknowledges this point openly himself in the course of two consecutive sentences: (a) “It is not surprising that Blue Poles is the focus for Auty’s more general dissatisfaction with modernism” and (b) “However, Pollock painted Blue Poles in 1952 and abstract art after the Second World War was the result of very different forces from those that motivated the pioneers of the movement in the early decades of the twentieth century”.

Alder nevertheless sees fit to try to beat me with the stick provided not just by T.E. Hulme’s views about the origins and necessity for abstraction but by the support such views found in the writing of Wilhelm Worringer and other notable minds. Since one of these notable minds was that of T.S. Eliot, a clear inference exists that the size of the stick was pretty considerable and that any blows administered by it verge on the unanswerable.

In short, Alder’s contention is cleverly couched but I am happy to respond to it.

My main reason for doing so is that, while I acknowledge Hulme’s talent and sincerity—as a poet especially—his wanderings in the world of visual art often led him to unwise conclusions. In stating this, I am not basing my conclusions simply on hindsight, although it would have been intriguing to see how Hulme would have reacted to later manifestations of modernism such as Pop Art or to such mainsprings of postmodernist practice as Conceptualism.

Hulme was born more than fifty years or two generations before me. Evidently I cannot know how it would have been to be born in 1883 or to have served in the First World War. Yet I enjoy some assistance in imagining these experiences through having had older-than-average parents and having first-hand experience of military service myself. Three of my mother’s elder brothers as well as my father served, like Hulme, in the First World War.

In many ways also, Hulme and I are products of a broadly similar English system and background, and a certain amount of his philosophical, political and religious thought is not too distant from my own. However, Hulme’s understanding of both Catholicism and classicism parts company from mine in significant ways. Thus his agreement with “the classical position that man is essentially limited, incapable of anything extraordinary and, by nature, an exile on earth” may have been intended as a justified rebuke to Rousseau and the excesses of romanticism but is hardly borne out by the facts. Indeed, this pessimistic statement seems to exclude the possibility of “external” as distinct from “internal” inspiration: in short, works of art created for the glory of God rather than simply for that of their maker.

Here, as in many other instances, it is worth turning to the Russian-born writer Alexander Boot. In How the West was Lost (2006) Boot explains this idea with customary wit:

“Sherlock Holmes pointed out to the hapless Dr Watson that when he had exhausted all possibilities but one then the remaining possibility, no matter how absurd, had to be the answer. Using this logic, Chartres cathedral, Zurbaran’s St Francis and Bach’s fugues could only have come from the metaphysical soul, as the inspiration behind them cannot be traced back to any other source.”

The essence of Hulme’s position, it seems to me, lay in the number of irreconcilable beliefs he tried to support simultaneously.

There is little doubt that the early days of modernism must have been stimulating and exciting to an unusual degree; revolution always tends to create a greater buzz in the air than reasoned reflection. However, the early days of modernism in all of the arts also often gave rise to febrile posturing of an embarrassing kind. For example, the various Futurist manifestos of 1909 and 1910 often tend, in retrospect, to sound anachronistic and silly. Take Point Four of the manifesto of April 11, 1910: “That a clean sweep should be made of all stale and threadbare subject matter in order to express the vortex of modern life—a life of steel, fever, pride and headlong speed.” Ponder, for a moment, the “headlong speeds” of which early vehicles and aeroplanes were then capable. Major thinkers should avoid being creatures of their time.

Hulme tried to create links and continuities across chasms that were often difficult to bridge. Quoting Alder again: “For Worringer and Hulme the tendency to abstraction sprang from a desire for painting where nothing is accidental and an urge for monumental stability and permanence.”

As anyone with any knowledge of the subject can confirm, much of the abstract art produced during the latter days of modernism placed great reliance on accident and sometimes on something akin to the Surrealist notion of “automatic writing” as a form of subconscious release.

Interestingly, the art of Piet Mondrian and De Stijl probably came as close as any to embodying the ideals expounded by Worringer and Hulme. Mondrian, however, was a Theosophist and follower of the Dutch philosopher M.H.J. Schoenmaekers, who invented a Neo-Platonic system which he called “positive mysticism” or “plastic mathematics”. Wassily Kandinsky, modernism’s other prominent early abstractionist, was a disciple of the theosophical doctrines of Madame Blavatsky.

As a professed Catholic, Hulme’s modernistic artistic projections often seem strangely close to those of the Theosophists. Yet it would be interesting here to look at what the official attitude of the Catholic Church was to the early manifestations of modernism. In 1946 a series of talks given in Dublin by a Jesuit, Arthur Little, was published in book form, The Nature of Art. Little had this to say:

“For the present vice is the cult of idiosyncrasy for its own sake. The revelation of an individual mind as such cannot be of any importance to the world save in so far as it includes the revelation of the eternal truth of human nature. But modern individualism, which makes the individual the centre of his own world, also makes him in art what is most worth expressing. It escapes him that, in insisting on individuality and repudiating the common, he makes himself his own law and repudiates all universal laws.”

But what was the position of the Catholic Church prior to the advent of modernism?

Quoting once more from Boot’s How the West was Lost we find the following apposite explanation:

“Yet, until the 19th century it had been universally accepted that looking for truth was the real purpose of art. Because of that, traditional forms had a liberating rather than constricting effect. The artist could take the canonical foundation of his work as a given and concentrate instead on the higher goal. As long as truth did emerge, it did not matter to the artist whether he was the first to uncover it or the thousandth.”

Such a principle certainly seems the antithesis of avant-gardism.

I should perhaps admit here that while appreciating where and when works of art were made, this is not a predominant influence on my attitude towards them. In terms of appreciation of art, I see its history as essentially seamless—although I did not always find it so. Indeed, I think I still saw myself as a modernist at the time of my first visit to the Prado in Madrid during the very cold European winter of 1963.

The following is a description of something which happened to me there, taken from a book I wrote which was published in 1977:

“For those who don’t know the Prado—and I have not been lucky enough to go back there myself for some years—the main, mighty corridors and galleries of the famed Spanish and Dutch masters used to lie some way off from the Modern Section—which, in 1963, even by the standards of Modern sections generally, verged on the indifferent.

“For some reason I sandwiched my first visit to this section between two lengthier tours of the main galleries which, being almost empty at the time, exuded a strangely mellow and sepulchral air as the winter daylight faded rapidly in the streets outside. Standing there, I momentarily felt an extreme stillness as though I had entered some very holy place of painting, where the spirits of dead painters might almost speak to me if I listened attentively enough.

“Why, all of a sudden, did every argument for the art of the twentieth century seem so completely inadequate in the face of Velazquez? Intellectually, art-historically, all the cases had been splendidly argued: in theory, at least, the art of the Modern Section was simply our present-day equivalent of this. Yet the problem was that it refused to seem equivalent and insisted on appearing immeasurably worse in every important sense that counted. The theories behind it might be clever enough to make even the most skilful of sophists green with envy, yet the art resolutely refused to live up to any of the claims made for it. The whole trick depended entirely on our feeble and facile notions of time.

“One minute I was still in darkness and the next I had popped out belatedly into broader daylight; suddenly the strength of all my past intuitions became clearly understood.

“What I saw in that moment would be hard to define exactly. Perhaps, more than anything, that it was essential for the painter to possess a broader and more Godlike view of time—for the three hundred-odd years since Velazquez painted his triumphant Las Meninas was, in reality, but an eye’s blink distant; that for a painter a binding sense of the present was simply a prison; that time as commonly portrayed by art historians had neither artistic validity nor sense.”

Alder makes a challenging claim for abstract art: “Abstract art is a modernist flagship. Its luminaries are also notables of high modernism.”

However, against this I would claim that the artists who have emerged as the most interesting of the early years of the twentieth century tend to be difficult-to-classify individualists rather than out-and-out formal innovators. In other words Picasso, Matisse and Bonnard, say, rather than Duchamp, Mondrian or Kandinsky.

By the same token, it is interesting to note how limited the influence of international modernism—and of abstraction especially—really was on painters whom many might regard as the pick of Australian and British practitioners during the years of modernist dominance from 1904 to 1974: Arthur Streeton, George Lambert, Lloyd Rees, Ian Fairweather, Grace Cossington-Smith, Russell Drysdale, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Fred Williams and John Olsen and, for Britain, Walter Sickert, Stanley Spencer, Matthew Smith, Paul Nash, David Bomberg, Ivon Hitchens, Graham Sutherland, Ben Nicholson, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.

Which wholly abstract Australian or British painters of the time would you set against these?

Of the twenty names listed, Ben Nicholson and Ivon Hitchens probably went through the most purely abstract phases in their work—but these were never permanent in either case.

In fact, after the early phases of abstraction exemplified by such as Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian, the “purest” abstraction of significance emerged for the most part in the United States, for example in the works of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, Clifford Still, Ad Reinhardt, Sam Francis and Jules Olitski. It is worth noting that the work of these American painters was supported critically very largely by American advocates and apologists. Indeed, many saw the attempt to assert international primacy for postwar American abstraction as a form of attempted cultural imperialism: a beating of a big, heavily-financed drum when postwar Europe was on its economic and spiritual knees.

Rothko and Pollock remain the most famous names from American abstraction, yet by the end even of their own lives both had largely lost faith in the central tenets of the movement. Thus Rothko placed an intolerable strain on colour—and on himself—in attempting to use it as a sole vehicle for sentiment, while Pollock was well on the way to reintroducing figurative motifs into his work when he—like Rothko—effectively killed himself. There is evidence that Mondrian, too, eventually found his rigid brand of abstraction a self-imposed cage.

What ought to have been obvious all along is that purely abstract painting cannot possibly make coherent comment on a range of matters that affect humanity most deeply: war, atrocities, human love, spiritual ecstasy, the deep pleasures of the countryside, to name just a few. To my mind, Goya’s series of etchings The Disasters of War remains the most eloquent rebuke to human brutality that has ever been made. The world would be immeasurably poorer without it—or without the whole body of Goya’s work, which probes every corner of physical and metaphysical existence. Clearly abstraction could never offer us anything comparable.

In short, Hulme’s early, idealistic hopes for the long-term primacy of abstraction were not just seriously misplaced but were based, to begin with, on a kind of puritanical misunderstanding of the purposes of naturalism in art. Indeed, his rejection of the human image comes close, at times, to an Islamic rather than Christian standpoint.

Curiously, Hulme’s own modest output of poetry made clever use of naturalistic imagery and was rightly admired by no less an authority than T.S. Eliot, who was the younger of the two by five years.

Postscript

Regrettably, the world in which most of us spend a large proportion of our days takes little account of the enormous contribution to human thought made by intellectuals such as T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). Indeed, the great man was still alive when the incident I’m about to recount took place during my military service with the RAF Regiment in Germany. I regret, to this day, not writing to him about it.

The RAF Regiment—known more generally as the “rock-apes”—had a deserved reputation for unruly behaviour and physical violence. I seemed to be one of the few members of 116 Squadron who did not hail from Glasgow’s notorious Gorbals.

Unsurprisingly, our squadron attracted its fair share of punishments such as “jankers” or “confined to barracks” plus early morning kit inspections. As ex-service-men will know, the latter involve military kit being laid out perfectly each day on one’s bed. At 116 Squadron, however, one’s personal possessions such as contents of locker and bookshelf were also inspected.

A number of my fellow servicemen could not read, and those who could read comics for the most part. Unfortunately for me, as well as being English rather than Scottish—and possessor of an unusual name—my bookshelf not merely contained a number of “real” books but also bound volumes of Eliot’s poetry. The officer conducting the inspection handled these with mounting fury.

“What on earth are you doing with these sort of books, airman?”

“I read them, sir.”

The inspecting officer then turned to his accompanying band of NCOs.

“Sergeant, isn’t this man Eliot a communist?”

“Yes, sah!” the sergeant bellowed.

“Then take this man’s name for reading subversive literature,” the inspecting officer commanded.

This incident took place in April 1954 at RAF Fassberg, northern Germany, about one kilometre from the border of the Russian zone. Clearly the times were very sensitive.