The Brooklyn Rail

Around 1960, when I was a student, abstract painting was still controversial, in a couple of very different ways. On the one hand, more traditionally minded artists and critics considered it unserious: too easy to do, meaningless. (“Do these people even know how to paint?” “A child could do it,” etc.) I vividly remember seeing a Mark Rothko show back then at the Sidney Janis Gallery with an artist friend who told me that he doubted what we were looking at could even be called paintings. (Ironically, I learned years later, Rothko himself said something similar about his own work around the same time.) On the other hand, purist advocates of abstraction insisted on the virtuousness of strictly eliminating any element of real-world reference in an abstract painting. The foremost advocate of this position was Clement Greenberg, who insisted that painting should reject any form of reference to the outside world or any space that recognizable objects could inhabit. (I remember a conversation I had with Greenberg during the late 1970s, in which I said that I found it nearly impossible to look at Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (1950) in the Met without having it to some degree evoke a tangle of trees. To which he replied if that was what I thought I clearly did not know how to look at paintings.)

Distinctions between pure-abstractions and near-abstractions were important during the first half of the twentieth century. In the catalogue for the Museum of Modern Art’s groundbreaking 1936 Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition, for example, Alfred Barr noted that with near-abstractions, the artist starts “with natural forms, [and] transforms them into abstract or nearly abstract forms. He approaches an abstract goal but does not quite reach it.” In the face of still-rampant prejudice against art that looked as if anyone could do it, Barr noted that abstract painting is “based upon the assumption that a work of art … is worth looking at primarily because it present[s] a composition or organization of color, line, light, and shade.” For Barr, although resemblance to natural objects did not “destroy these [a]esthetic values,” he felt that it might “easily adulterate their purity.… and might as well be eliminated.”¹

Nowadays things are very different. On the one hand, very few serious people question the validity of abstract painting, which has become completely mainstream. And on the other, very few serious people object to the idea that abstract paintings are in some way related to real-world reality. As Pepe Karmel stated at the beginning of his comprehensive global history of the subject, published in 2020: “Abstract art is always rooted in experience of the real world.”²

Within the Western tradition, a strong impulse behind the move to abstraction seems to lie in a paradigm shift that occurred in the early nineteenth century, when Eugène Delacroix modified Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone, ut pictura poesis, which held that painting aspired to be a form of visual poetry, to ut pictura musica, in which painting aspired to be a form of visual music. This musical paradigm promoted abstract equivalences between form and expression (as in music, the most abstract of the major arts) and undermined the notion of clear narrative and direct word-equivalences in paintings. (Although Delacroix’s paintings often retained literary subjects, they are often difficult to “read,” as in the extraordinarily abstract rendering of his 1846 The Abduction of Rebecca in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.) This shift in the underlying paragon for painting led to a conception of painting that increasingly prioritized the importance of the underlying pictorial field over the presentation of a view of the world. This field conception of the picture space—which has parallels in modern physics—was developed in a remarkable way in Paul Cézanne’s painting, in which various objects within the picture were conceived primarily in terms of relationships to and within the pictorial field. Within that field, forms could be set down in ways that evoked entities that had physical presence but remained unnameable. For advanced painters, it became increasingly clear that certain painterly gestures could be conceived of as constituting their own kind of abstract pictorial rhetoric, in effect replacing the figures and gestures that inhabited representational paintings. Whereas traditional painting described familiar things that we remembered seeing in the real world, abstract painting came increasingly to emphasize processes over things, and became increasingly free of direct memory. Abstract paintings aspired to show us what we had never before seen but which we intuitively felt.

And because this process is difficult to define, abstract painting also gave rise to a considerable body of writings by its practitioners—beginning with early practitioners such as Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian—which often emphasized scientific and mystical thought. Literature in which you are shown what you have not before seen. Kandinsky and Mondrian were both deeply involved with Theosophy, which aspired to transcendental knowledge and to seeing the natural world with “the inner eye.” And Malevich, who was obsessed with the mystical properties of geometry, was devoted to the works of P.D. Ouspensky, a follower of the Theosophical Society, founded by Madame Blavatsky. These early abstractionists initiated the practice of explaining with words their non-descriptive and somewhat recondite art, a means of educating the public about aspects of their art that may not be immediately apparent as the result of only looking at works of art, which has become pretty much a standard practice that continues to this day.

And that is in itself a whole other subject.