The spiritual urge to abstract art
|
After defining the immediate origins of abstract art as lying in Fauvism and Cubism, and having found one of its incidental causes to be in the change of the social milieu thanks to the growth of mechanisation and science, closer attention must be given to the problem itself in order to see what went on in the minds of its main pioneers at the time when they were passing from figuration to abstraction. One of the ways in which this can be done is through re-reading what they wrote at that time. A surprising fact then comes to light, which is that in most of them the need for abstraction was based on an acute hunger for spiritual values. It looks as though, after a century of materialist philosophy, the artists' own intuition stressed an urgent need to re-charge the spiritual centres. A new humanism then emerged, one which was very different from that of the Renaissance, amounting in this case to a kind of inner humanism, the only form of it that could possibly understand real equality because it brings man face to face with that share of the infinite which he carries within himself, and which seeks its reflection in his fellow-men. Thus a kind of brotherhood of summits is created, for every man is a summit at certain moments and in certain conditions, every man being, when considered in the absolute, the centre and summit of the world.
Spirituality in art, the title Kandinsky gave to his first book, was highly significant. In his conclusion he proclaimed a new era of the spirit, a period of intense spirituality which was to find its direct expression through art.
In Mondrian's unpublished notebooks I found the words "It is the internal life, its strength and joy, which determines form in art." On another page I read "Art has no meaning except in so far as it expresses what is non-material, for it is this that enables man to transcend his own being."
I find the same tendency, though less consciously expressed, in Robert Delaunay's paintings of 1912 and 1913. They contain a semi-mystical exaltation of light. Delaunay remarked to me one day that "Most painters are only peeping-Toms, whereas what they really should aspire to is to be Seers."
It might be asked whether, intellectually, it is just an easy way out to see this unexpected emphasis of spirituality in art, or at least in early abstract art, as an intuitive agreement with Bergson's attempts at revalorizing mind, in the broadest yet deepest sense of the term, after a hundred years of positivism and historical materialism. Creative Evolution, the first landmark in this change of values, appeared in 1906. In his remarkable lecture Consciousness and Life, published in 1914, I find the following remarks which could perfectly well be applied to the first generation of abstract painters: "Great men of integrity, and more particularly those whose sheer inventive heroism clears new paths for human virtues, serve to reveal metaphysical truth. Though they stand at the highest point of evolution, yet they are closest to the origins of things and make us conscious of that impulse which arises from the very depths." Yes, the impulse rising from the depths and which is nearest to the fundamental truths and to the naked origin of things, surely that is what we expect of art in general and what abstract art appears most fitted to reveal to us, without being hindered by material objects whose presence is no more than an agreable distraction from our main objective, which must be the mind or spirit.
Nobody understood this better than Mondrian, no man ever penetrated it more deeply than he did in the course of a whole lifetime. Yet there seems to be some dichotomy in his thought as regards spiritual values as such, and this needs some brief analysis.
Mondrian was long interested in theosophical speculations. As late as 1916 the portrait of Mme Blavatsky hung on the wall of his studio. Yet in his writings he made no mention of his theosophical sympathies. Even in private conversation he avoided religious topics and closed up at the slightest hint of them. Only in an atmosphere of friendship and trust would he risk the slightest allusion to them, and even then he was more than cautious in his use of words. He usually took up an extreme agnostic position, while praising mechanisation and praising the Futurists for saying that they would prefer a motor-car to the Victory of Samothrace. He also asserted that the day would come when we could leave the job of making works of art to machines, on condition that the machines were controlled by artists.
Vantongerloo came to the same conclusion: "Everything progresses and evolves, and the time is not far off when art and science will unite into a homogeneous whole." This notion was supported by Van Doesburg, who wrote to a friend in Holland, "My final conviction, a conviction arising from the sum-total of all my activities, is that in the future art will develop entirely on a scientific basis. Until now the artist has always been at the mercy of his feelings and has had no means of controlling them. There was nothing to distinguish his methods of work from those of the milliner or pastry-cook, who merely arrange things according to their taste or inclination."
But this scientific outlook was not set up as the enemy of spirituality. On the contrary, in Classical, Baroque and Modern the same Van Doesburg wrote "However deep it went, mediaeval art was not a direct expression of the religious outlook, because it failed to find in the means of expression itself the correlative that was needed for expressing that outlook. It found that correlative in symbolic representation, with the aid of forms borrowed from nature. The expression of the religious outlook was, therefore, not direct but indirect."
At the end of the same treatise, after speaking of a collective style of which he saw a possible fulfilment in Neo-plasticism, the author summed up his views as follows: "A style comes into being when, after achieving a collective consciousness of life, we are able to set up a harmonious relationship between the inner character and the outward appearance of life. A discontinuous development of art is the natural result of the human consciousness's discontinuous development towards truth. Over the centuries, the development of art aimed at giving reality to the aesthetic idea which consists of expressing completely, through the medium of art, this harmonious relationship between the inner life and external appearance of things, between the spirit and nature . . . Modern art's evolution towards the abstract and universal, eliminating all that is external and individual, thanks to a common effort and common idea, has made it possible to bring into existence a collective style which, transcending persons and nations, most definitely and genuinely expresses the highest, deepest and most universal requirements of beauty." We can see or read between the lines that for Van Doesburg the terms art, spirituality, abstraction, universality and religion were identical. Neo-plasticism was an effort to bring together again the data and principles which civilisation had divorced from each other in the course of time, but which originally formed a single reality in the mind of man: that is to say, the urge to express his highest aspirations.
That, and nothing less, was the aim of the horizontal-vertical style and the "simple distribution of colours". But Van Doesburg gave up the effort in 1924 and it was left to Mondrian to work out and demonstrate the idea. The works he produced in Paris, and perhaps above all those he painted between 1925 and 1932, expressed something absolute in their strict relevance of composition, while never losing their human significance thanks to their colour and some indefinable inner resonance. Every one of his canvases embodies a pure ontology. They are the works of a man capable of expressing in paint the terse aphorisms of, say, some modern Parmenides writing a treatise on Being as Being. The rhomboid-shaped canvas of 1931, consisting only of two straight lines of different breadth on a uniform white ground, is in a sense the Vedanta of contemporary painting. After that he had to come down from that rarefied atmosphere and renew his contact with life.
Is it possible to penetrate very far into a painter's work without having known him personally? A man is the living proof of the sum-total of his work, even when it is greater than himself. I am aware that some distinction has to be made between morality and art, but I believe there is some interchange between art and the highest forms of thought. I have observed that every artist contains a hidden mystic, sometimes only too thoroughly hidden. But a shrewd eye can reach the real man on slight evidence. A gesture, a silence, something in the eyes, a tone of voice, set us dreaming of the unique necessity which according to Plotinus is the most important thing in a man. For instance Mondrian's reserve never managed to mask what lay behind it, but rather made it plainer. Knowing the man, what was hidden was seen to be all the more clearly stated in the work.
In spite of his timidness as regards words, everything in Mondrian pointed to the thing or essence itself, I mean the mystic that was latent in him. In spite of the cogent things he wrote, Van Doesburg was the very opposite. He radiated violence, destruction, anger, the love of battle for its own sake. He was capable of spreading a seedy atmosphere even over such a noble conception as Neo-plasticism. This detracts nothing from his value as a manager, as an intelligent and energetic purveyor of ideas. However the difference between the the two, as men, goes far to explain the mysterious dissimilarities between their works.
At this point I should like to add a note on the spectator's role. It seems to me that the spectator is required to play a creative part, comparable with that of the artist, in abstract art more than in any other form of art. He is expected to have a well-informed mind and to be generous with it, never shrinking from the efforts that are demanded of him. Eugène Chevreul touched on this in well-chosen terms in a little book published in 1864. After showing (already!) that all the arts are made up of abstract elements, the physicist concluded his argument in these words: "But when I reduce the language of the fine-arts to abstractions, I have to point out that their effects, as abstractions, will be fewer in proportion as the minds to which they are addressed are less civilised or less cultured; for the more civilised or the more cultured people's minds are, the more inclined they will be to associate other ideas with the impressions evoked by these abstractions, -- though I would not go so far as to say that they will necessarily be more open to impressions themselves. It is this capacity for grouping thoughts round the impression produced by a masterpiece, which explains the quality and variety of intellectual pleasure that is in reach of a mind that has been broadened by culture without any weakening of sensibility." Thus a work of art is worth exactly what the spectator is worth; that is to say as much as the spectator or lover of art are capable of putting into it.
|
||
