Aspects of American Abstract Painting
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The major movement of abstract art in America began in the 'thirties with a strong direction towards a more structural quality, the elimination of impressionism and atmosphere and a general clearing away of realistic painting surfaces and textures. Most of the work was also non-figurative and it was a strong answer to the social art of the 'thirties. Behind this great and homogeneous movement was the tradition of rationalism and the striving towards intellectual perfection. Nothing sums up this ideal better than Juan Gris' statement: 'Artists have thought to produce a poetic effect with a beautiful model or beautiful subjects. We on the other hand believe that we can produce it with beautiful elements, for those of the intellect are certainly the most beautiful'.
This striving towards a purer and more architectonic quality was clearly reflected in the exhibitions by American painters during the late 'thirties and early 'forties. Outstanding in these exhibits was the work of such artists as George L. K. Morris, Joseph Albers, Jean Xceron, Karl Knaths, Albert Swinden, Byron Browne, and John von Wicht. 1936 saw the formation of an important art organization which was called the American Abstract Artists. This organization played a leading role in the development of American abstract art. Most of its members were prominent exponents of akstract art in America at that time.
Parallel with the Second World War many abstract painters began moving from the somewhat closed cubistic interior feeling toward the more open spatial landscape feeling of Kandinsky and Mir. Strong individual viewpoints were being developed. Some artists began working in a highly subjective, erotic, and surrealistic way; others reacted to the challenge of external nature and the modern era in more positive, more objective terms. It would be impossible to name all the various artists whose individual development took place, and in turn contributed to the general development of abstract art, in this period. Some of their work is reproduced in this book. George McNeil, who was an early member of the A.A.A., experimented in free form. His was sheer painting, using a very free brush movement, relating shape to shape. Reflections of freedom come through in the painting of Botkin, Pace, and later members of the group. Xceron combines a sense of spatial freedom with a poetic feeling for the solid geometry of form. The more subjective development was well represented in the work of Arshile Gorky, whose debt to cubism during the 1930's was great. Always an eclectic, Gorky now turned away from Picasso and became more concerned with expressing his inner conflicts and frustrations. These flowed like unconscious symbols into space -- dream paintings, as it were. In contrast to the subconscious and subjective painting of Gorky stands the positive and seemingly objective work of Stuart Davis, distinctly American, and George L. K. Morris, both of them geometric and calligraphic in flavor. Davis is a painter who reflects the dynamics of the American scene and who never has deviated, but rather has grown with his subject and with his knowledge for form and color. Both he and Morris are classic examples of painters who understand their problems in terms belonging to painting. Davis has always held: 'Art is not the recording of the impact of natural forms on the retina. It is a synthesis of all the perceptive faculties in emotional equilibrium, objectified in a language of form. Emotional response to nature does not create art except when it is integrated with an imaginative construction for its own sake. The act of painting is not a duplication of experience but the extension of experience on the plane of formal invention'. Morris has also been one of the most articulate spokesmen in America for abstract art. He as well as Davis have understood the context of classical pictorial order.
In examining the American painting scene we find the sensuous part of painting more highly appreciated than the structural. The structural significance of an abstract painting is often unappreciated because of a general prejudice and an undeveloped esthetic and plastic sense. Many people cannot differentiate between the surface decorative appeal of an abstract composition and its structural significance. Their hostility towards formalism, together with a certain lack of understanding, has confused their judgment and they attribute emotion only to a painting which has a kind of painting verve and surface manipulation. Painting that has clear form and clear color appears to them intellectual and cold.
Can one say that Vermeer with his clear, clean surfaces felt life less intensely than Rembrandt or that he lacked poetic vision? Or that Ingres had less feeling than Delacroixl? Or that in our day Léger is cold because he believed the idea, the form, geometry, and color to be the important and decisive factors in determining the true value of the work, and believed that the style should be anonymous?
Virtuosity has always been greatly admired. Sargent, Zorn, Boldini, Bougereau, all won fame through neuro-muscular performance and atmospheric effects. In our own day the serious part of painting rarely evokes appreciation. Modern art has come a long way toward eliminating counterfeit naturalism, yet there is always a demand for romantic and atmospheric pictures. The purer painter sometimes becomes a tragic figure. Juan Gris, for instance, and many fine American artists, never compromising with sensuous surfaces, suffered for it.
The word 'freedom' is a very misused word in painting today. One might ask: What is freedom? And one might ask: Freedom from what? Does it mean a destruction of traditions and a violation of laws that govern the visual meaning of painting? Does freedom free the painter from the responsibility for clarity but burden the spectator with guessing and inferring his own interpretation? Does it, therefore, require of the painter that his work be tentative?
There are two approaches to painting today. One is that the painter paints suggestively, allowing the observer to read into the painting. The other is that the painter develops the painting through to an exactitude and allows the observer to see his vision clearly. And doesn't that give the observer a better chance to dream a bigger dream?
Although all painting today is somehow subjective, the extreme of the first non-communicative approach came out in the movement of abstract expressionism. Here the inner tension of the artist was relieved by a projection of himself onto huge canvases and by the sensuous impact of his paint -- the energy and excitement with which it fell, pushed or moved across the canvas. Despite its completely abstract form, this approach did not exclude certain atmospheric, illusionary and other qualities pertaining to naturalism. The enthusiasm generated by it often outstripped regard for the flat plane, the borders of the canvas, the scale, scope, and proportion.
Certain works of Pollock and de Kooning come close to the real meaning of expressionism. Obviously the description 'abstract expressionist' does not fully describe Hans Hofmann's combinations of geometry and expression, nor the works of Motherwell, Baziotes, or Kline. Despite the stir to American painting by the avant-garde movement of abstract expressionism, it would be difficult to say that it has truly broken fresh ground or given us a new sense of form such as emerged from the post-impressionist, cubist, or even constructivist movements. Rather has its contribution been of a personal nature in which the very act of painting has been its solution.
The climate that relies so heavily on surface seduction and tentative form actually limits the artist. True freedom lies in the understanding of one's limitations. This was realized in primitive art and in the work of Gauguin, Kandinsky, Miró, and Klee, though they are often cited as examples of inspiration for expressionism. The use of formal symbols in primitive culture aimed, not at expressionism, but at giving order and meaning to life. Gauguin without his great understanding, order, feeling, rightness, subject matter, and his fulfillment of their particular demands for form and color, would be nothing but a high-class story-teller or decorator.
It was for Mondrian to make an absolute of form, to make the pictorial structure of the picture both subject and content. He abolished completely any semblance of subject-matter. This search for purity in painting and what is called a 'new realism' inspired a number of American painters, among them Glarner, Fleischmann, Bolotowsky, and Diller. In their personal idioms they responded with fresh vitality and lyricism. Mondrian believed himself to have carried cubism to a logical conclusion. But cubism, though it played so vital a part in giving modern art a new form concept, never attempted to destroy the image or imply its dissolution. Cubism freed painting from the fixed position, the stage set and the tyranny of the subject which had dominated painting since the Renaissance, and it opened the road to greater pictorial imagination as well as to greater plastic meaning. It liberated the modern painter from the world of the outer eye and allowed a larger recording of the whole of life. Bradley Tomlin, freely wedding Mondrian's horizontals and verticals with cubism's overlapping planes, romanticized in paint. With more severity in structure and a wider variety of suggestive geometric symbols, Motherwell injects a fresh note to the vertical strip. Other painters of the purist point of view have accepted the Mondrian concept of structure as the last word in contemporary painting. It has led a number of painters to feel that painting was exhausted and so opened a path for them to deal with physical construction outside of painting. Men like Biederman believed in a kind of relief concept of form; others pursued beyond relief into physical space.
Despite the reticence to discuss subject-matter and its importance in abstract painting today, it nevertheless plays a tremendous role for a number of American painters. Up to the twentieth century, objects, people, principalities, and things were always identifiable. One of the fascinating phenomena of our time is the anonymous role of imagery. The inspired independent painter searches today for the meaning that lies hidden beneath things seen and felt. His vision is to find concrete shapes that express and communicate his feelings and to state them in fresh vital painting terms. This explains the conspicuous elimination of the subject and its replacement by symbolic imagery. It is thus in the object symbol that the subject has persisted: the symbol has come to contain the character of the subject. This is apparent, for instance, in the field of abstract landscape painting where strong feelings and emotions pertaining to nature take shape. These landscape forms have now become shorthand symbols often able to convey with poetic feeling the love for and joyousness of nature in its changing moods. In a way, therefore, these landscape forms are short-hand symbols carrying the character of the painting.
The current work of John von Wicht, done in very personal shorthand symbols but with a sense of freedom guided by intuitive discipline, might be described in these terms. Other painters with a long devotion to landscape painting have been inspired by a similar direction, which might almost be said to have stemmed from the early landscape paintings of Kandinsky. In John Ferren's abstract landscape paintings, for example, color becomes the chief shorthand symbol. Many of the younger painters of today, as well, have found their inspiration in this abstract landscape painting.
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