Paths to Abstraction

The paths to abstraction are straighter and shorter than one might realise—and they can double back. Let’s begin with the rock art—engravings and paintings—found in every corner of the globe; from Africa to Australia, from Norway to South America. They share specific characteristics even as they have a regional flavour, and these same characteristics—notches, circles, lozenges, clutches of dots alongside schematised stick figures—all point to symbolic abstraction as a precursor of naturalism. Such abbreviated motifs are a record of man’s apprehension of his world. Clearly abstraction had particularly early beginnings.

This mark-making by our prehistoric cousins—the impulse to incise or paint lines, concentric rings, chevrons, and other abstract motifs on clay, on rock and in sand—might suggest some ritualised activity, some inner propulsion. Consider the red ochre spray which delivered a silhouette of early man’s hand against a cave wall, preserving forever this first impulse to externalise himself. So we can forget about abstraction being a modern concern—something that grew out of the incremental constructions of Cézanne, or the galactical beauties of Kandinsky, the whimsies of Miró or the disciplined warp and weft of Mondrian’s geometries.

What do we mean when we talk about abstract art? The most comfortable notion might be that nothing on the canvas—or paper or wall—is immediately identifiable. The lines and shapes are entirely unfamiliar to us, and try as we might we cannot trace them or place them in the context of images and scenes already known to us. Attempts to isolate a shape that “looks like something else” are beside the point.

Robert Hughes once had something to say about the pointlessness of trying to “read” an abstract work or a work composed of unknown symbols:

Content did not necessarily mean story-telling, and abstract art could embody it too. I can think of few painters more moving, on this very level of content, than the Spaniard Tàpies, who reminds us—more, perhaps, than any other living painter—of the fearful ritual of man leaving a mark on empty space.

He also spoke of what abstraction could offer that literal narrative painting could not:

Communication, in the linguistic sense, is a splendid concept, but it fails to account for the comprehensions of reality we call the aesthetic experience. Rational communication, which was made possible by the invention of linguistic signs, is a recent thing compared to perceptual communication, which dates back beyond the Altamira cave-paintings to 40,000 BC.

The contemporary notion that a painting can entirely reject all illusionism (the imperative to recreate any realistic element of a world outside the canvas) and that the painter can by-pass looking altogether and go straight to the expression of a state of mind, seems commonplace now. And indeed much American post-painterly abstraction, such as Mark Rothko’s hovering fields of light, was predicated on the notion that the abstract canvas could generate an emotional response from the viewer in the same way music might. But the postwar American phenomenon of Abstract Expressionism and post-painterly abstraction did not spring fully formed like Athena, from mid-town Manhattan. The seed had been introduced by such Europeans as Arshile Gorky and Max Ernst—even Marcel Duchamp—who were all seeking more congenial surroundings. However, it soon found its own bearings, most conspicuously in the work of Jackson Pollock.

Pollock’s later work was the very embodiment of physical action, hence the term “action painting” which art critic Clement Greenberg deplored, because he thought it was misleading—and worse—because it had been coined by his sparring-partner, Harold Rosenberg. The term gained currency. “And it wasn’t any good … it’s pretty much settled into ‘Abstract Expressionism’ and that’s not good either!” huffed Greenberg. This enigmatic commentator believed that a painting should have no reference points beyond itself; that the experience of it had to be contained within the frame—assuming there was one; this idea too, is now routine.

But where did the modern impulse towards abstraction gain momentum, and how? This is the subject of a scholarly, lucid and engaging exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales from June 26 to September 19, Paths to Abstraction 1867 to 1917, assembled from most corners of the globe by the curator of special exhibitions, Terence Maloon. More on this exhibition shortly.

The Western world had a parallel experience many centuries ago. Realism had reached great heights during the classical Greek period, and the Romans—the inheritors of this profoundly naturalistic Hellenistic tradition—pursued it to logical extremes. Then, as the Roman jurisdiction across the Mediterranean unravelled internally and from external pressures, and Christianity with its highly abstracted signs and symbols gained momentum, naturalism faltered. In its place, from the time Charlemagne was crowned in 800 AD to well into the fifteenth century, two-dimensional, highly stylised human and animal forms occupied all illuminated manuscripts, murals, frescoes and church carvings. Only in the mid to late fifteenth century did painters begin experimenting with naturalistic or three-dimensional settings for figures and giving them a tentative flesh-and-blood roundness.

Why had they not done this earlier? Western Catholicism and especially the Eastern Orthodox Church wrote the entire agenda for artistic expression from the collapse of the Roman empire until the 1400s. What was the point of giving realistic expression to earthly concerns—celebrating that which was literally on this earth and of this earth—when the main game lay ahead, in the life “hereafter”? Those images that proliferated were overwhelmingly of Christ, his disciples or apostles, saints, angels, demons, martyrs and Mary with the infant—all highly schematised. Restless scholars and humanists chafed to see humanity on its own terms, to explore a world which was not an expression of God’s will, which was grounded in the here and now, and one which sought and celebrated the knowledge and the aesthetics of the pagan world of antiquity. This bore fruit.

During the Renaissance in Italy and the northern regions, new sophisticated economies saw new categories of people appear alongside the landowners, their entourages and the church. These were professionals, merchants and traders who expanded the markets for artisans and craftsmen. New technologies such as tempera and oil painting encouraged experimentation, and the idea that newly wealthy individuals might achieve a record in some detail of their families, their possessions, their homes and their groaning tables was very appealing—particularly to the Dutch. Narrative clarity meant a great deal to these burghers who were quite specific about what would be included on the canvas: a kind of inventory of wealth. Quite a modern idea really, as is the contemporary fashion for responding to and spending large sums for the furthest extremes of abstraction because it seems to indicate some sensibility which is inaccessible to the hoi polloi.

We see how a New York art dealer endorsed this kind of snobbery in a memorable moment in a BBC documentary, Relative Values. Arnold Glimcher, owner of the Pace Gallery, takes a client to a “viewing room”. They step out of a private elevator and walk past a glass wall with two absolutely emblematic works of the twentieth century—a Jean Dubuffet and a Louise Nevelson no less. They enter a white-walled room with carefully calibrated light and the ubiquitous bowl of tulips. There is a hush. A Rothko is carried solemnly into the space by two factotums. There is some fiddling with the light. “You know, Mark always liked his paintings in natural light so that over a period of time, the painting begins to reveal itself more strongly … and ah, these paintings … you know, deal with the finer levels of perception.”

Even as Glimcher was paying his wealthy client the ultimate compliment of assuming his grasp of the furthest edge of the modernist aesthetic, he himself was enacting an enduring truth. Art is pure artifice. It is the invisible tightrope between the subliminal impulse and the disciplined gesture. As Picasso once said: “Art is the lie that tells the truth.”

But perhaps we have a more candid revelation for what abstraction means when we hear from Ian Fairweather, who lived a hermit’s life on Bribie Island outside Brisbane. He wrote to his sister Queenie:

You ask about abstract art. It is something I think like the Buddhist idea of suspended judgement. The mind is cleared of thought but not awareness. Always the purpose of art is to find its way through the forest of things to a larger unity containing all things. I often had the idea in Jersey that running over rocks (of which I was inordinately fond) had some psychological or psychical significance—to balance, one must run quickly from point to point. You cannot rest on one point.

 Now let’s return to the Renaissance and see what happened next. Increasingly naturalism or realism prevailed, even when it was overloaded with copious and obscure allegories and metaphors. Once the over-sophisticated mannerist wave had passed, the Catholic Church, wounded—but not mortally—by the Reformation, prepared, for want of a better phrase, an intense propaganda campaign aimed at marshalling miscreants back into the fold with every visual trick in the book. There would be graphic images of crucifixions, sacrifices, flagellations, ecstatic visions, and beheadings. The church visitor was expected to detect ecstasy and God’s grandeur in these fruits of the Counter-Reformation, but fear played an important role. Frothy Rococo followed, and then a purer, disciplined harmony appeared in the form of the Neo-classical in painting and architecture, which was followed by Romanticism: a pursuit of the wild and the natural, in painting as well as literature. Here, the first undisciplined brushwork makes its appearance—for example in Delacroix’s paintings of skirmishing Arab horsemen—as if a brushstroke itself could embody the feelings of the hand holding the brush. Other painters too, turned their attention to contemporary atrocities and themes of barely suppressed horror. So what was left to explore in Western art?

At some point in the mid-nineteenth century—earlier, if one takes into account the work of Charles-François Daubigny—brushwork became looser. This was not merely an arbitrary decision of the painters, but in part a response to being able to paint out of doors and capture fugitive atmospheric conditions with faster-drying paint. Colours were liberated from their traditional roles and shadows were suddenly blue or indigo. However, for the Impressionists a railway station was always a railway station and a field of poppies was always a field of poppies.

Distortion (though not yet the complete flattening of the picture plane) happened too, in the interests of getting “an impression” down of a scene, rather than labouring over a detailed account of what the eye was experiencing. Once a name had been applied to this new way of “seeing” and “painting” that is to say, “Impressionism”, which was coined in a spirit of derision by a critic called Louis Leroy, it was only a question of time before even more radical experiments with the brush encouraged a rash of “isms”.

It was the preserve of the Fauvists, the Expressionists, and particularly the Cubists to fracture the picture plane completely; to tilt and mix perspectives, flatten and distort subject matter, and present it from several viewpoints simultaneously. By the 1920s, all these visual discoveries and experiments were so well entrenched in Paris that they occasionally subsided into repeated echoes of the first bold impulses. The School of Paris with its myriad of first-rate and lesser artists is a reminder of what happens when the earliest impulses are diluted.

More was called for. And surprisingly a movement called Dadaism with its possibilities of satire, mayhem and anarchy for the stage and in random everyday life events and disruptions spilled over into the visual arts. The Russians arrived on the scene at more or less the same time with their Constructivist works, and perhaps these in some way still represent the furthest impulses of abstraction. We have only to think of László Moholy-Nagy’s distilled geometric constructions to see how painters at the time were striving for a new purity of line and shape on the canvas.

And so to Terence Maloon’s adventures. When curators embark on a journey which resists casting a net far and wide to haul everything that lands in it up onto the mental deck, the task is harder. Maloon had set about locating specific works from state and private collections worldwide to best illustrate the earliest steps along the pathway to abstraction in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its contemporary efflorescence.

Such a journey would have been time-consuming, replete with disappointments and hopes dashed, and the result—until it materialises on the wall—is all flux. The planning and co-ordination of the exhibition took around three years full-time work:

Everything requires a huge effort. It’s not as if you just shake the tree … sometimes you have a very nice meeting with a museum and it all looks promising … in principle there’s an agreement to lend say, three or four things. You write your letters … and perhaps you get one out of four—or you get none.

What sort of works had Maloon set his heart on?

We would have liked the Whistler from the Detroit Institute of Art, which was the occasion for the trial with John Ruskin. We would have liked Whistler’s symphony in White No. 3, which is the first work he gave a musical title to, from Preston University. We would have liked the Talisman by Paul Sérusier but that was part of the Musée d’Orsay exhibition in Canberra. There were two works painted by Matisse in Collioure, both reproduced in the catalogue from the Museum of Modern Art—they would have been really essential works. Personally, I would have liked another 1910 painting by Picasso from Cadaquès and another 1910 painting by Braque from L’Estaque because that was an amazing moment where they had both crossed over into abstraction but came back from it. The Braque is one of the greatest treasures we have.

Thus those works which, for one reason or another, could not make the journey to Sydney are nevertheless reproduced in the catalogue to flesh out the physical exhibition.

Some of the finest works in this show are the smallest and in many cases quite unfamiliar ones. In a cultural environment where works are growing more and more insistent in scale, it feels like a private tryst to spent time with a canvas just centimetres in scale. Maloon suggests that “Australia has all these masterpiece shows which are all smoke and mirrors, and [it’s important] for people to respect the fineness and the quality of thought that are invested in these small works …”

There are two tiny seascapes (1896) from Picasso which, surprisingly, echo the paintings in Melbourne’s infamous 9 x 5 exhibition of 1889. Placed in close proximity to these two works are four almost monochromatic Whistlers and three Walter Greaves (an associate painter who languished in Whistler’s shadow) which make clear the enduring attraction of the horizon line in canvases which in other respects are moving towards minimal representation.

Room two opens in a brighter lighter key with Monet’s Sailboats on the Seine (1874) and the celebrated new acquisition of the AGNSW, Cézanne’s Banks of the Marne (1888) and Monet’s Stacks of Wheat (End of Day, Autumn) (1890–91) but the real surprises are ahead in room three, which has a handful of tiny colour explosions. The horizon lines, the distinct foregrounds, mid-grounds and backgrounds have all been dissolved in favour of celebrating a single dimension. Maurice Denis’s Mass (1890) and Offering at Calvary (1890), two tiny oils on cardboard from private collections, are surfaces of pure interlocking areas of colour. In both works, each nudges the next, no patch of defined colour has primacy over another. Thus the eye is obliged—even coerced—into recognising the flat nature of the painting. This in fact reflects a maxim of Denis’s: “Remember that a painting—before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote—is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.”

Across the room from these wonderful works are two tonally restrained offerings in ochre tones: Woman in Black (c 1891) and The Doors (1894) by Edouard Vuillard, which remind the viewer of Vuillard’s mastery of the almost monochrome composition, and which also confound our traditional expectations of space. The latter work was an exceptionally prescient acquisition by the National Gallery of Victoria’s Felton Bequest in 1952.

Another small surprise which packs a punch is André Derain’s Banks of the Seine at Bougival (c 1904) from the Musée Malraux at Le Havre. It uses salmon-coloured paint which seems to fluoresce, and thus reminds us that new technologies in pigment preparation were advancing at some pace.

The Musée Malraux is not on everyone’s travel path and how it came about is a story in itself. In December 1958, Charles de Gaulle became the first President of the Fifth Republic. He created a ministry for André Malraux—the Ministry of Culture, to which he anticipated Malraux would bring “style and grandeur”. Any arena with the remotest cultural resonance or application (architecture, archives, museums, monuments) was swept into Malraux’s orbit. His explicit intention was to make “accessible the major works of mankind, and mainly those of France, to the greatest possible number of French people, to ensure the largest audience for our cultural heritage and to favour the creation of art and the spirit that enriches it”. This apparently passed muster with de Gaulle. Many museums in far-flung regions of France owe their very existence to the indefatigable Malraux.

Maloon, in his journey along the paths to abstraction, has also seen some relevance in those works which can best be described as expressions of Nordic and Germanic angst. One such is Edvard Munch’s Vampire (c 1895) and To the Forest (1915). Happily both belong to the collection of the NGV.

By the time the viewer arrives at room five, colour has taken its new freedoms completely for granted. André Derain’s works in particular dazzle with the bright yellows, limes and fluorescent salmons and Alexei von Jawlensky’s canvases also busily assert the primacy of colour. Perhaps Robert and Sonia Delaunay felt that all this barely disciplined riot of coloured forms demanded some order, because their works introduce a gentle but insistent geometry. Colour has been harnessed to partial pattern-making and perhaps in the service of rhythm and movement.

In room six the viewer is returned to canvases with semi-solid structures. There are some small canvases by Picasso, The Writing Table (1910), and Braque, Glass of Absinthe (1911), who were both embarking on similar experiments at the time. Here colour has taken a back seat while the painters assemble new three-dimensional structures on a flat surface.

And perhaps the logical conclusion of some thirty years of painterly invention laid out before the viewers in this thoughtful exhibition would be Kazimir Malevich’s House under Construction (1915–16) a happy metaphor for the whole ongoing modernist experience.

Patricia Anderson is Editor of the quarterly magazine Australian Art Review.