The Oriental Tradition and Abstract Art

Home

The main line of western tradition in art is based on the solid structure of the Graeco-Roman heritage. But from the Athens of Pericles to the Paris of 1900, a secondary tradition emerged in various places and, almost invariably at times of crisis, broke through the main line of development or ran parallel to it. This is the Oriental tradition.

Today we seem to be approaching a period when the transformation of artistic values, begun in this century, is accelerating its pace. From Giotto to cubism, western art has had a strong unity and relatively little outside cultural influence. But in the fifty years of its existence, modern art has broken sharply with this past. The seemingly contradictory insurgent movements of the twentieth century have all pressed toward the same goal: the destruction of the natural image. In turn, the natural vision, the vision of agrarian man, has been transformed by the world's inventions and technological changes. This basic alteration has opened modern eyes to an artistic appreciation of great cultures of the past which are aesthetically different from western art. Modern communication, science and, above all, the discoveries of archaeology, have completely altered our concept of the classic, the medieval, and the modern.

The shift from traditional to modern art was accomplished through transfusions from primitive and exotic sources. At the turn of the century, the Japanese print influenced the impressionists; the art of the South Seas, Gauguin; the Islamic arts of North Africa, Matisse; and African sculpture, the cubists. Last came the great discoveries of Sir Aurel Stein in Central Asia, revealing the mixed styles of the Gobi oases cities; the Tibetan tankas and banners; the Buddhist caves of Tun Huang. And in India, the paintings of Ajanta and Bagh, which in the nineteenth century were treated as ethnology, were rediscovered as art. Today it is the arts of the Far East that are pervading the artistic atmosphere and whose influence we may expect to see growing. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the minor arts and effete periods of Far Eastern art became known and appreciated. Now it is the great art of China's Han, Tang, and Sung dynasties, and Japan's Nara, Fujiwara, and Kamakura epochs, which are becoming familiar to the West.

There have been centuries when East and West existed quite apart, and western history was written almost as if Asia did not exist. So too China and Japan used to close their doors to the West. But in the past there have also been eras of intense communication between East and West. Ideas, artistic objects, and artists travelled across Asia's deserts by caravan, slowly but as surely as they do today by truck and plane. In the Late Roman Empire, Europe was swept by successive waves of Oriental influence culminating in the triumph of Christianity, in origin an eastern faith. It was the Crusaders who brought the whole Arabic world of abstract forms back to Europe, fructifying the style of the Gothic. In reverse, the Greek ideal of art was carried from Europe to Afghanistan and into India and thence, transmuted by the vision of Buddhism, crossed into China, Korea, and Japan, creating some of the world's greatest sculpture and painting. Like the diastole and systole of the blood circulating in the body, mankind's organism pulsates in periods of expansion and contraction. Since the Second World War, we have had unprecedented expansion. Asia's westernization moves forward with vertiguous speed, and the easternization of western thought is tapping deep levels in our art and culture. Today's centrifugal movement of East and West has been made possible by the movement toward the abstract in the West. No one can foretell what ignites the human spirit and lifts it from the simple organic to another dimension. But we have been passing through an axial change in human thought since the beginning of this century. Whether it is the web of modern communication drawing the world closer together in time and space; the financial operations determining the world market; the physical sciences exploring the universe; the mental sciences -- psychology and psychoanalysis -- delving into man's soul; or simply the gadgets of daily existence -- all this has been brought about by abstract calculations and determined by abstract relationships. Is it any wonder that the direction of art has followed this path?

During and after the First World War, the pioneers of abstract art formulated a new plastic language in which local, particular and national differences were gradually absorbed into a universal expression. From the child to the mature individual, and from faraway cultures to the centers of modern civilization, this new ABC of a world art in the making is open for all to read. Today it is widely accepted via advertising, typography, design, and architecture and is in use throughout the world. On higher esthetic levels, the tempo of change is slower and it may take time to merge the contributions of all past cultures and to create a world tradition in art. But today everything vitally creative in art takes place, for the most part, in the abstract domain; all the esthetic arguments are conducted on this level.

Cubism, which dealt the greatest blow to the old structure of art, marks the transition to this new vision. But all the movements of protest and destruction -- fauvism, expressionism, futurism, cubism, dadaism, and surrealism -- not only produced many beautiful works of art, but in distorting, dissecting, tearing apart, exploding, and eroding the natural image, they helped to prepare the way for a totally opposite expression. Out of them was born pure plastic art, abstract and non-objective. The spark first kindled in Paris spread to the periphery of Europe and simultaneously there arose, in Russia, constructivism and Suprematism (Tatlin, Malevitch, and Lissitzky); in Germany, abstract expressionism ( Kandinsky, Klee, and Marc); in France, orphism (Kupka and Delaunay); and in Holland, de stijl ( Mondrian, Van Doesburg, and Vantongerloo).

It was at this point that Western art was liberated to receive another vision, and that a deeper rapprochement between East and West became possible.

The birth of abstract art represented a basic shift from a sensorial culture toward a new ideational one. Once the image of individual man dominating nature -- the central theme of the Renaissance -was done away with, the boundaries of art were extended to include the whole universe and man's mind. Man now took his place in the cosmos along with all other living organisms. This 'death of humanism' was actually the extension of its ethos on a higher level. Thus Western art was brought close to the metaphysical speculations of Oriental thought: Vedantism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism.

Of all the pioneers of abstract art, two men have been most conscious of the meaning of this fundamental change in art. Painting today oscillates between two poles of expression: Mondrian and Kandinsky. In 1925, Kandinsky wrote that painting must inevitably quit the materialist world-concept based on the Graeco-Roman tradition and move toward a spiritualized art facing the East. Antipodal in their work, the paths of Mondrian and Kandinsky converge in their theoretical and philosophical views. Both were

concerned with scientific inquiry and the new mathematics, to which they felt their work ran parallel. Both joined the Theosophical Society in Europe, which sought a synthesis between Occidental and Oriental thought. Both found no incongruity between science and metaphysics, for both were sustained by idealism, anti-materialism, and universalism.

To Kandinsky and Kupka goes the credit of having created the first painting without object ( 1911). But the series of Pier and Ocean, which Mondrian made in Holland during the First World War, marked the logical break with the old tradition. In them a new order of vision is set forth: the abolition of illusionistic perspective, the supremacy of the plane, the dissolution of the object and the repetition and alternation of identical units. In the great composition Ocean, the sea, earth, and stars are indicated by short verticals and horizontals in opposition. Within the primordial ovoid, as within the circle of a mandala, the universe is born as a sign, its active and passive principles disclosed operating in dynamic unity.

For the next thirty years, Mondrian was occupied with the creation of an orthogonal composition of straight lines and pure color planes, in which the classical heritage and Northern European tradition were reconciled in a new equilibrium of crystalline purity. This Western counterpoint of' form transmuted the old universal symbols into another plastic expression: the vertical as the active principle, the horizontal as the passive principle, the superimposition of one on the other, the cross -- the sign of generation and life. Mondrian's theory of oppositions is akin to the Chinese theory of duality: Yang and Yin. Chinese rhythm was organic and accomplished through the circle; Mondrian's was angular and oppositional. But his final summation that all art and life is rhythm brought him close to the first canon of Chinese art, formulated by Hsieh Ho in the fifth century A.D., that painting must be the expression of the rhythmic vitality of life, the revelation of spirit in space.

Mondrian lifted Western painting from all concern with appearance into a realm of pure being. In this, he approaches the doctrine of the void in Mahayana Buddhism, not the nothingness which the West assumes it to be, but the void as the life-source, beyond name and form, in which all duality comes to rest.

If Mondrian's Eastern mystique is concealed within an immaculate impersonal structure, Kandinsky's relationship to the East is omnipresent in his color and space.

Kandinsky was born in a Moscow family whose ancestors had lived on the Siberian-Chinese border and his connection with the Oriental tradition was inherited and actual. Educated as a political economist, he began to paint seriously at the age of forty-five. In the history of Russian painting, which first adopted the Western tradition under Peter the Great, Kandinsky was the first painter of stature and the only one whose influence has reached beyond Russia's borders into Western Europe and the Americas.

While Mondrian's ideas have changed the face of our modern cities, Kandinsky's work has transformed our world of inner feeling. From his first chromatic, polyphonic improvisations, through his painting of geometric structures during his career as Bauhaus teacher, to his last powerful synthesis in Paris, Kandinsky's work is like a majestic stream flowing to its source. 'What suddenly broke forth from Kandinsky', writes Willy Grohman, his friend and biographer, 'was the soul of the Orient, of Asia, which conceives the world in a more complex way, more sub specie aeternitatis, more cosmo-magically than does the Western mind.'

Every great historic movement in art has a period of exteriorization when its principles are demonstrated in the world, and a period of interiorization, when it turns inward to contemplate its own life. The decade 1935-45 marks the first stage in the expansion of abstract art. In the years after the First World War, when the isolated pioneers were making their discoveries, the main current of art was flowing backward, seeking reconciliation with the natural image (late cubism, neo-classicism, Neu-Sachlichkeit, the right wing of the surrealists). But by 1930, the pioneers had emerged from obscurity to become leaders of a movement that swept Europe. In this era, the structural artists dominated the scene. But the rise of dictatorships and the events leading to the Second World War, stopped all this development and many artists left Europe. The abstract artists who came to the United States during the war ( Mondrian, Léger, Moholy-Nagy, etc.) exerted a profound influence on American painting and helped to implement its direction toward the abstract. The decade 1935-45 was the age of Mondrian.

Mondrian died in New York in 1944; Kandinsky died that same year in Paris. The period immediately after the war saw the triumph of abstract art on a world scale. Its ideas were carried to distant and disparate countries from the Americas to Asia. But at the same time, a change occurred at the core of the movement; the pendulum swung from constructivist thought to the world of feeling. The decade which has just closed ( 1945-55) was the age of abstract expressionism and it stands under the sign of Kandinsky. It is possible that in the decade we are now entering, the two opposing currents in abstract art will merge and that this will be brought about by influences from the East.

Today's artists are, for the most part, in retreat from the structural and formal; they are moving from an objective expression to a subjective one, from conscious to unconscious creation, from an urge toward the universal to concentration on the individual personality.

In the United States and Europe, the extreme wing of the abstract expressionists is breaking up form in novel ways. For certain painters nothing exists but the canvas, the artist and the operation of painting -- the establishment of direct, immediate, bodily, or psychic sensation with the minimum of conscious determination. These are the Western activists; their art is more physically oriented than that of the naturalists, more automatic than that of the surrealists. Their emphasis on behaviorism and on novel means of expression to the exclusion of meaning, has opened the door to backward-looking tendencies, resulting in tachism, neo-impressionism, and a return to the natural image. This longing for the past, for an art of sensuous abundance, is seemingly a natural reaction after the vast expenditure of energy in a destructive conflict. But no robust realistic tradition was created on the ruins of the First World War and it remains to be seen if it can be accomplished after the Second World War.

All abstract expressionist groups owe their origin, consciously or unconsciously, to the early, explosive Kandinsky. Whereas he moved from Monet to an art of liberated color and space, they are moving from his achievement back to Monet and back beyond that to the natural image.