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It is by no means easy, at this stage, to give a generally acceptable definition of abstract art. From one standpoint it is evident that its authority and range have so widened in recent years that there are few or no young artists, however great or slight their ability, who have no share whatever in its development, at least through some particular aspect of their work. On the other hand we must not overlook the fact that certain artists, and by no means the least important, are suspicious of the term 'abstract' art, if not of the thing itself, and that they try to adopt a noncommittal position in order to safeguard their own individualism, seeing present-day 'Abstract' painters as mere offshoots or hangers-on of the earlier abstractionists. Thus critical jargon falls back on terms like content and legibility or readability as if a human work could possibly be devoid of content, and as if a painted work could conform to the same requirements as a written text. But even in literature the readable is not necessarily good, any more than what is unreadable.
But no amount of painting with 'content' or more readable content can save artists from inevitably belonging to their own time. However much they recoil from the term, the painted object which is carried out of their studio shows them to be just as 'abstract' as those whom they denounce as a clique. Their arguments are of no avail, because, in the mid-twentieth century, in matters of art the spirit of the age has firmly lodged itself in abstraction. This is so much the case that we now automatically approach and interpret all works of art, whether ancient or modern, according to abstract data and principles. Faced with some Old Master, the mind of 1955 man tends to interpret in terms of composition, points of technique, psychological details, and we try to penetrate into the character of the man himself by revealing, through a minute analysis of the work of art, the reservations and discoveries, the hesitations and audacities of the painter. Our admiration swings between a synthesis effected on broad schematic lines and an analysis of craftsmanship, while we tend to forget at the same time that the spectator of a few centuries ago was concerned with nothing but the 'subject' in the proper sense of the term, the what and not the how.
For some of us the Sistine Madonna is one of Raphael's finest works because of its outstandingly powerful composition. For the painter's contemporaries this sense of power no doubt lay in the expressive faces of the Virgin and Child. But nowadays we are less attracted by things in themselves than by the way in which they are presented: we find a man's manner of walking more revealing than his objective. The hundreds of little strokes criss-crossed and juxtaposed in bewildering variety on the back of Rembrandt Recumbent Negress afford us more visual pleasure than the woman's back itself, for there are better specimens to be found in albums of photographers' nudes, while we are delighted to find an amplification of Rembrandt's strokes in an abstract by De Staël. This seems to bring an understanding of Rembrandt within the layman's reach and at the same time to demonstrate De Staël's greatness as a draughtsman. In the simplest possible terms, we are looking at art through glasses appropriate to the century we are living in, and not through those we inherit from previous generations. Whether people like it or not these modern 'glasses' exist and are nothing more nor less than abstraction. However bitterly the schools and dealers might wrangle over the word's possible meanings, we see all art in terms of its abstract qualities, regardless of its degree of figurativeness or non-figurativeness, representation or nonrepresentation, objectivity or subjectivity.
In any case it is thanks to these squabbles and barrages of apparently futile arguments that abstract art has extended its influence wherever young artists are trained all over the world, as well as penetrating the circles of dealers and amateurs. We need not worry unduly over the historical errors brought about through hasty journalism, nor over half-baked definitions, quibbles over terminology, nor even the bullying and anger that accompanied this change: all this creates a stir and serves to draw the attention of a 'general' public impervious to everything but shouts and posters. After the sandwich-boards comes the show itself, and something positive remains which is gradually sifted and shaped in the mind. It is then time for the historian and the detached interpreter to begin their work.
Let us first try to offer some definition of the material to be dealt with in this book. We shall take as our antinomies figurative painting (or figuration) and abstract painting (or abstraction).
A painting is to be called abstract when it is impossible to recognize in it the slightest trace of that objective reality which makes up the normal background of our everyday existence: in other words, a painting is abstract when the absence of any other form of sensible reality compels us to regard it purely as painting and as nothing else, and to judge it according to values that have nothing to do with representation or with the imitation or reproduction of some other thing. It follows that a transposition of nature, even when it is very far-fetched, remains figurative and is figuration; but it also follows that a transposition taken to the point where nothing in the work suggests or evokes some basic naturalistic subject -- a transposition, therefore, which to the naked eye does not even imply the act of transposition itself -- will rightly be called abstract, abstraction.
Thus, even in cases when some representation or transposition of shapes has served as a point of departure, whether in the painter's mind or just on the canvas, the work is to be deemed abstract, providing that no aspect of that point of departure remains recognizable, and so long as the work, ipso facto, has nothing to convey to us except the pure elements of composition and colour.
Conversely, we shall say that any work of art which, though setting out from abstract principles or processes, either by accident or playfully embodies representational elements, however fantastic or extraordinary they appear, cannot be called abstract.
But even if a canvas is strictly abstract -- that is to say neither representing, interpreting or transposing any reality from the external world, this cannot prevent our imagination from discerning subjects in it -- such as those shapes that people fancy they see in the clouds -- that had nothing to do with the painter's own intentions. The abstract painter must do all he can to avoid such representational accidents, though of course he cannot be held responsible for the spectator's whims.
Long before it existed in actual fact, abstraction was "in the air" and painters intuitively tried to grasp it, like the 'frozen syllables' of Mandeville and Rabelais. They were not so lucky as Pantagruel; the words eluded them and the most notorious passwords and incantations failed to make them sing before they were fully matured. Those passwords, however, came as so many unmistakable forewarnings of a new age. We could trot out dozens of quotations from Baudelaire to Cézanne, from Van Gogh to Seurat and Maurice Denis, all centred on the same realisation, that painting is not a matter of subject but of colour, form, sensibility, composition (4). But they felt themselves under no obligation on this account to leave out the theme altogether, and perhaps they were not far wrong, since we all admire the masterpieces they left us. But now that we can look back on it all we cannot help noticing a certain contradiction between their often extreme pronouncements and their actual behaviour as painters. This was because the theory of the abstract in art could only gradually be translated into actual works, and it had to be by a process of evolution rather than revolution. Great discoveries are made slowly, and there is no eureka without a long and tedious preparation behind it.
It is true that in 1841 or thereabouts Turner came so close to abstract painting that his works have no parallel in his century. They can be explained only in terms of the 'long preparation' I have mentioned. By the time he was sixty Turner had reached the end of a long evolution in the course of which he had stated the problems of representation and expression on the canvas, with an ever-increasing frankness that enables us to trace the gradual development of his bold yet calm resolve to find a solution to the paradox.
The Impressionists took a long time to catch up with the great English painter. But there are many moments of abstract beauty in some of their works, all arising from the same premonition in the artist. Whether in works that were delicate and mild, or startlingly violent, Impressionism like Fauvism and Cubism later on was a pioneer in abstract painting, and many unpretentious canvases of the period still teem with marvellous lessons for our young abstract painters. I am not thinking only of Cézanne, but of works by Van Gogh(The wheat-field, the Landscape with rooks), Renoir (Women in a field), Claude Monet(The poppy-field). In the last of these paintings, in particular, the subtle proportions of red and blue show a craftsmanship fully aware of abstract composition. There is an exquisite delicacy in the parasol-étoile, its ultramarine bringing out the redness of the flowers and uttering a kind of gentle exclamation in response to the diffused, soft blue of the sky. But even that is not the finest discovery made in this canvas. To my mind it is to be seen in the discreet stretch of light green just above the line of the horizon, without which the darker green of the belt of trees would be flat or would need stressing, -- a solution which would have ruined the general effect which was meant to be calm and soothing. Thus everything in this work is quite simple, as is the case in every really beautiful work, yet there is nothing banal about it.
At this point I can imagine some readers asking "What more can abstract art possibly offer us, than this? Here we can enjoy non-representation. and representation at the same time. What is there wrong in superimposing a real landscape on to pure art? The truth is that this offers not less, but more than does abstract art." To this I would reply that Monet's first intention was certainly to paint a landscape, and that in order to dispense with subject and paint nothing but a painting a certain evolution, or call it if you like a slow revolution, had to be gone through. I would add that art is worth exactly as much as the spectator is able to put into it, and that the spectator at the moment is the man of 1955 and not of 1873.
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