Home Go West, Young Art, Go West American Painting 1865-1934 American Painters - The Older Generation The Meaning of Modernism Isms and Wasms American Art in 1900 American Modernism The Whitney Museum of American Art Modern Art's First Museum The twentieth-century principle of form in art The Beginning of American Modernism American Modern Movements Cubism in England and America Activity in Art with American Subjects Backgrounds in European Art The importance of Gauguin and Van Gogh The importance of Picasso and Braque Munch, The Bridge, Kandinsky, Moreau American Backgrounds The establishment of a professional art Contemporary appreciation tends Early Twentieth Century New Directions since 1913 Max Weber, Maurice Sterne, Abraham Walkowitz, Ben Benn Arthur Dove, Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth Dada and Despair Early 1900s American Artists The Spirit of Research and Significant Form Joseph De Martini, Louis Schanker, De Hirsh Margules Pinoeers of Abstract Art American Abstract Pinoeers American Abstract Artists Art in a Skyscraper Significant Vision The term "significant vision" The Influence of the Oriental Scroll Painters Traditionalists and Modernists American Modern Art - Fantasy American Artists More Artists The Painters Discover America The Painters of America American Modern Artists Regionalism in a Broadening View Regional American Artists Pop Art - Modern American Art Stage Design Sculpture Sculptors More Sculptors Definitions Art and Beauty Modern Painting History of Art   Abstract Art Architecture History Painting Process Picasso	Pinoeers of Abstract Art In 1888 Gauguin asserted that "painting is an abstraction"; in 1908 Matisse announced that his goal was "above all, expression"; in 1910, in Munich, Kandinsky painted the first purely abstract expressionist picture. The two paintings reproduced opposite are somewhat later, but still in the artist's most significant period of abstract form and color projected with the maximum of spontaneous freedom. They are, to use Kandinsky's words, "a graphic representation of a mood and not a representation of objects." Kandinsky's young countryman and future rival, Malevich, had been a cubist, analyzing, "geometrizing" nature but not yet losing sight of her. Then in 1913, perhaps inspired by a remark of Kandinsky, he showed "nothing more or less than a black square on a white background . . . It was not just a square I had exhibited . . ." he explained, "but rather the expression of non-objectivity. " Five years later he showed White on White, the culminating demonstration of Suprematism "by which," he stated, "I mean the supremacy of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts." Thus Malevich countered Kandinsky's mysticism of color with his own mysticism of geometric purity. Meanwhile in Holland, Mondrian (another ex-cubist) was also arriving at "geometric" abstraction, but gradually, after much trial and error, rather than by sudden intuition. His researches contributed greatly to the design vocabulary of de Stijl,page 217, the influential Dutch movement from which, however, he resigned in 1920. Among Mondrian's mature compositions Painting 1 of 1926 is one of the most absolute. Four black lines, their lengths and widths varied with exquisite calculation, cut across the four corners of the diagonal canvas creating a subtly asymmetric equilibrium. In New York fifteen years later, Mondrian, long a devotee of American jazz, found in boogie woogie a "dynamic rhythm" and a "destruction of melody which is the equivalent of the destruction of natural appearances." In its staccato, broken rhythms, Broadway Boogie Woogie looks back thirty years to Mondrian's emergence from cubism. His last completed painting, it offers a synthesis of his entire mature work. "For beauty three things are required. First, then, integrity of perfection: those things which are broken are bad for this very reason. And also a due proportion or harmony. And again, clarity: whence those things which have a shining color are called beautiful." -- St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae, circa 1270 "Simplicity is not an end in art, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, in approaching the real sense of things . . ." "In sculpture the forms of naked human beings are no more beautiful than those of toads." "High polish is a necessity which certain approximately absolute forms demand of some materials. It is not always appropriate, it is even very harmful for certain other forms." "Direct cutting is the true road to sculpture, but also the most dangerous for those who don't know how to walk. And in the end, direct or indirect cutting means nothing, it is the complete thing that counts." "When we are no longer children, we are already dead." "Beauty is absolute equity." -- Brancusi to Irène Codreane, in This Quarter, 1926 Brancusi is unique. And independent, though for a brief time he was associated with the Dutch Stijl movement. His art's ancestry: primarily the sculpture of West and Central Africa, and, by strong reaction, Rodin and, still earlier, his years of arduous study of human anatomy and morphology in the Bucharest Academy of Fine Arts. Those academic studies, though they may have led him to the above-quoted equation of toad with Venus, doubtless contributed to that implicit sense of organic life which informs even his most abstract sculpture. The Museum's group of Brancusi's sculpture does not yet adequately represent the full range of his forms, nor does it fully demonstrate the sculptor's marvelous mastery of materials since pieces in wood are lamentably lacking. However, the great grey marble Fish is one of Brancusi's capital works. It is the archetype of all fishes -- subtly curved, delicately poised; the motionless swimmer, swift, powerful, tense and still. Bought directly from Miss Pogany herself, her portrait is the original bronze of the earliest version of Brancusi's most celebrated head. The white marble Maïastra (the name of a mythical Rumanian bird) is the first in the long series of bird forms of which the shining Bird in Space is a later but not yet ultimate version. The egg -- that most perfect of organic forms -- seems to be the unstated goal toward which Brancusi's sculpture tends, or an ideal from which it reluctantly departs. The New-born, appropriately, is egg-shaped, yet wrinkled brow and bawling mouth are not forgotten within the perfection of polished bronze. Pevsner, formerly a painter who had known the work of the cubists in Paris, and his younger brother Gabo published their theory of constructivism in their Realistic Manifesto, Moscow, 1920, two years or so before the hostility of Soviet officials toward abstract art led to their leaving Russia. They stated, in part: "I must affirm in the first place that the art represented -- to keep to a specific example -- by Gabo's 'Spiral Theme,' is the highest point ever reached by the aesthetic intuition of man. This form, hovering like a still but librating falcon between the visible and the invisible, the material and the immaterial, is the crystallization of the purest sensibility for harmonious relationships: and whereas, in constructivist art generally, this crystallization is a mere planning of static relationships, here an axial system crystallizes energy itself. Creation is a much abused word, applied loosely to imitations and logical constructions: it is justified only for that absolute lyricism we call 'pure poetry,' for music, for certain branches of mathematics, and for constructivism in the plastic arts (which includes architecture). But even within this absolute world there is an hierarchy, and at the summit I would place this spatial construction of Gabo's." -- Herbert Read, in Horizon, 1942