Book Review & Analysis: History of Abstract Painting by Jean-Luc Daval

History of Abstract Painting

by Jean-Luc Daval

      Everyone has heard it before. Somebody with little or no knowledge of art will look at an abstract painting and say, “How can that be art? Any child can do something like that.” Of course, some people who really are educated in the visual arts, and even some artists, will say the same thing. Considering how much writing over the past century has explained abstract, modern, and postmodern art, it seems odd that anybody who really cares wouldn’t have any obstacles to investigating and learning what abstract art is all about. Of course, people who say that aren’t really interested in understanding anything other than what they already know which usually isn’t much to begin with. What that statement often translates to is, “I’m better than those snooty intellectual types because I do important things with my life like working, driving, and watching football.” Anti-intellectualism is a tragic trait of the American character. But if you want to set yourself apart from the herd of cattle being led around by the nose hooked on advertising and mindless entertainment, one way to do so is to study art. After all, modern art is all about breaking free from established prisons of perception by altering of visual representation and breaking the rules of technique laid down by previous generations or artists. Jean-Luc Daval’s History of Abstract Painting is one source you can go to in your pursuit.

Basically, this is an art history book and an understanding of art history is necessary to grasp the meaning of modern art. Up tuntil the time of the Renaissance, art primarily served the purpose of religious symbolism and allegory. Subsequent to that, artists took on new meanings, diversifying allegory and symbolism to comment on social and ethical concerns. That style of art depended on photographic realism as a visual style. When photography was invented, photo-realism was no longer relevant and artists began experimenting with technique and materials. With early modernists like Cezanne and the Impressionists, the subject matter began fading into the background as color, brushstroke, perspective, material, and line got emphasized. Various modernist art school were established to work within their own unique techniques. Schools like Fauvism and Der Blaue Reiter maintained representation of objects in their paintings, but the emotional state of the artists in regard to such objects took precedence. Cubists oriented their works toward a more rational manipulation of line and geometric form to create depth and movement without the possibility of visual rest within the frame. The Cubists broke the wall separating representation and represented object by placing everyday objects, like scraps of newspaper, onto the canvas so that the distinction between signifier and signified collapsed.

Eventually, some artists did away with the representation of concrete objects, creating art that represented abstract ideas or feelings. Piet Mondrian made canvases with primary colors and basic geometric shapes on flat planes that corresponded to the philosophical ideas he explained in his writing. The Russian Constructivists and Suprematists used geomterical patterns to represent pure emotions similar to the way music does, particularly when it has no lyrics. When listening to Mozart, you don’t understand it by explaining it; you understand it by feeling it and this is the direct experience the Russian abstract artists wished to convey through their visual medium. These methods of expressing purity through non-representative shapes and colors reached its apogee in the most famous proponent of Abstract Expressionism ever, Jackson Pollock.

Abstract artists were then presented with the dilemma of where to turn next. Modern art had superseded the representation of recognizable objects which faded into the background until they disappeared completely, leaving nothing but representation of ideas and emotions. The only thing left to do was to abstract away from those and make paintings that represented absolutely nothing but themselves. From there, postmodernism was born and abstract painting became nothing but an interaction between the artists and their canvasses.

Daval’s presentation of how art progressed from pure representation to pure non-representation is complete but brief. This is not an in-depth study of the subject matter. At some points he simply says too little, especially in his analysis of Cubism and Futurism; he briefly introduces their theories and then blows off to another school of art. On the other hand, other developments in the timeline are given sufficient attention like in his analysis of the early modernists and Jackson Pollock. He also never mentions how these art schools were all avant-garde movements that published manifestos, detailing their political and philosophical intentions of altering life in the 20^th century. The book is entirely about form with little or no examination of substance. His account also falls short when he brings Dada and Surrealism into the discussion as both of these movements contained a wider scope in their realizations than just the techniques of abstraction he describes. His discussion of the Russian Supremtist Malevich is grating too. For some strange reason, art critics fall all over themselves with praise for his overrated White on White. That painting is the last in a series of canvases that use basic colors and shapes in varied combinations to express the emotions in musical composition. White on White is meant to be the last painting in that series and represents the silence experienced after a piece of music ends. Taken in context, it makes a lot of sense, but taken out of context it doesn’t mean anything. And yet the critics want us to see it in isolation as the greatest expression of transcendence ever created. It is nothing but a white square painted on a white background. Art critics can be so dumb sometimes.

In the final analysis, what is the worth of History of Abstract Painting? It doesn’t serve as a solid introduction to modern art simply because Daval doesn’t go into enough depth about most of the art schools he mentions to make them stand out in any memorable way. It certainly won’t enhance any art enthusiast’s understanding of the subject matter either since anyone familiar with modernism will know everything written about here already. It’s not a bad book though and Daval lays out the historical progression of abstract art in a clear and comprehensive way. It probably serves best as a review for any patron who lost interest in modern art and wants to get back into it. And the glossy, full color pages are nice looking too. The question in the end, which Daval never addresses, is where do artists go from here? It looks like modernism and postmodernism have exhausted all possibilities in their never-ending transgression of all rules. It’s probably time to reinvent representational painting. Certainly digital art will have something to do with that.

 

Book Review

Modern Art and the Object 

by Ellen H. Johnson

Modern art radicalized the way we see and create art. That is a truism by now. By extension, it also radicalized the way we interact with the objective world, or at least it did for people who pay attention to art. Ellen H. Johnson’s Modern Art and the Object is a survey and overview of the way in which modern artists treated objects in their works and as their works, sometimes even making themselves the works of art as well. While Johnson’s writing is descriptive and analytical, it doesn’t break any new ground in terms of art criticism or theory.

Her opening chapter is probably the most useful one in the whole book. As a survey, it traces the development in how objects are related to in art starting with Cezanne and his influence on Impressionism and Cubism which also opened up the doors to Dada and Surrealism. Cubists started the trend of incorporating found objects in their paintings while the latter two, Dada and Surrealism, brought the objects out of the canvases and made them into art objects standing alone as themselves. She then moves on to unexpected territories, examining the use of human actors as objects in performance art and even making the actual artist into a work of art in the case of Andy Warhol. Some of these themes get taken up in later essays while others, particularly the objectification of humans in performance art, never get any further mention. This first chapter at initially seems to be a great introduction to the subject, but unfortunately, it turns out to be the most provocative one in the whole book.

Johnson goes on to examine Cezanne and Picasso. Most specifically, she looks at the way in which both artists related to nature, the ultimate source of objective reality. She sees both artists as using similar techniques to release and draw out the inner essence of the material world. In the case of Cezanne, he shifted his perspective, moving his viewpoint several times while working on one canvas in an attempt to fully paint three-dimensional objects in a two-dimensional surface. Picasso, in his Analytc Cubist phase, operated by fracturing the surfaces of the objects he portrayed, making them incomplete and overlapping to further the sense of open space and depth in his paintings. Both techniques resulted in a visual outpouring of essences that had previously been trapped inside the surfaces of the objects. That is a great observation. The only problem is that if you have studied either artist or their theoretical writings then this nothing new. By the time Ellen Johnson wrote this book in the 1970s, this was common knowledge for anyone who had kept up with modern art. She merely states the obvious.

Those chapters on Cezanne and Picasso may not be original, but they are nicely written. Another nicely written chapter is the one on Jackson Pollock. Johnson explains how his works in Abstract Expressionism are deeply rooted in his relation to the natural world. Where Pollock differs from the two aforementioned artists is that his depiction of the “energies” of nature are shown without the objective surfaces that make them recognizable in everyday life. Cezanne and Picasso released these natural forces by fracturing surface appearances and drawing those energies out while Pollock entirely abandoned the surface appearances and painted the way in which he perceived those pure energies. . This is interesting, but again it is old information.

Another one of the better chapters is on Claes Oldenburg. In his attempt to re-integrate art into the praxis of everyday life, he created art objects representing everyday household items like typewriters, kitchen utensils, and cigarette butts. Only Oldenburg differs from those others because he neither destroys the outer surfaces of them nor does he abandon them in the Jackson Pollock way. What he does is soften those outward surfaces, making those ordinary things look cushy and pillow-like, as if the outward flow of their energy is neutralizing their outward forms, making them less rigid and more approachable. Yet again, this is not a unique observation.

The rest of the chapters are more or less just descriptive. There isn’t much explanation other than what the art objects, or the art depicting object, look like. Johnson continues on with the theme of how the artists related to nature and objectivity, but doesn’t come up with anything insightful or groundbreaking in any way that will enhance your understanding of modern art. Her writing can be awfully dull too and lacking in direction. The author spent her life as a prominent curator and gallery manager and that must have been her true calling in life because her work as an art critic doesn’t really go anywhere.

Modern Art and the Object is not essential reading. It appears to be Ellen Johnson’s attempt at leaving her mark on the world rather than offering some useful theories for the interpretation and understanding of modern art. The critic and Artforum editor Rosalind Krauss did a much better job of this in contrast. Johnson is preoccupied with the inner nature of objects, whereas Krauss wrote extensively about the surfaces of objects in modern art. Modernism was always about style more than substance and postmodern artists mostly sought to do away with substance entirely, making art about surface and nothing else. Rosalind Krauss demonstrates this successfully in her criticism. Ellen Johnson, on the other hand, leaves the reader feeling like she doesn’t have much to say. Perhaps that is because she is looking in the wrong places when she interprets modern art.

 

Book Review

Passages in Modern Sculpture

by Rosalind E. Krauss

     The fine arts in Western cultures had, for thousands of years, been conservative in form and content. Most art, especially in western Europe, was limited to themes of Christianity and judgments of quality were based largely on the mastery of technique. Things loosened up during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and occasionally some oddball like Hieronymus Bosch made something so different that no one could comprehend it. Then Modernism came along and everything went haywire. Rosalind E. Krauss, armed with a solid background in philosophy and art criticism, takes a stab at making sense out of the course that modern sculpture took in her early work called Passages in Modern Sculpture. Through the construction of her own theory, she hones the chaos of modernism into semi-coherent steps along a continuum progressing towards an unknown destination.

The foundation of Krauss’s theory is the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. On the principle of the transcendent I, meaning that an individual’s true nature is not only located subjectively inside their own consciousness but rather is a meeting ground between their own self-perception and the perceptions of others, she builds a critical theory around the idea that modern art has no inherent meaning. In other words, the meaning of art is created by the viewer as they perceive and interact with that art. Pre-modern concepts of symbolism or allegory no longer apply with the avant-garde art movement of the Modernism period.

She also approaches art through the mediums of time and space. Pre-modernist sculpture was about the perfection of physical form whether the work be a three-dimensional statue or a two-dimensional work set against a background relief while suggesting a third dimension. Also, pre-modern sculpture mostly appeared in media res, representing a point in time along a narrative structure, implying the existence of moments before and after that point, suggested to the viewer and not directly experienced. Modernist sculpture broke with these constructs of time and space to create sculpture requiring different frames of reference for interpretation.

The fun really begins when Krauss applies her theory to art objects. She begins with Rodin, then moves on to the Futurists who expose the core of their objects by penetrating their surfaces and the Constructivists who reveal the interior of their sculptures by displacing outer parts, making surfaces that only cover fragments of the interior, or even using transparent materials. The ubiquitous readymades of Marcel Duchamp are analyzed to show a disconnect between the artists’ subjectivity and the art object itself which no longer represents their subjective life. Brancusi eradicates the inner core of sculpture by mi minimalizing the constituent parts of the surface. The Surrealists transform everyday objects into nonsense to reveal hidden unconscious contents and so on.

Her analysis is engaging and logical up to this point. When she introduces her concept of theatricality into the critique, it begins to wear a little thin. She brings theater into the discussion to show how sculpture was used by modernists to break down the barrier between performers and audience, what Antonin Artaud called the destruction of the fourth wall. But this idea barely seems to fit with what she is saying considering that it is a stretch to redefine performers on stage as art objects moving among other art objects. What she is trying to do is introduce the concept of movement into the study and analysis of sculpture. While previously sculpture had been static and unmoving, modern artists introduced the element of movable parts on one hand, as in the case of the mobiles of George Segal, or art that alters in appearance as the viewer moves around it as in the work of Anthony Caro. But the connection she makes is weak and confusing. This is partly due to her attempt at describing non-representational shapes that have no signifiers to properly correspond to the form they hold in physical space. Her argument also suffers because she introduces a large number of works that she never analyzes past the initial mention in the text.

The writing picks up again after that as she moves into postmodernist movements like pop art, minimalism, abstract expressionism, and earthworks. What this all builds up to is the concept of decentralization in art, an idea that originated in Freud’s theory of the decentralization of the ego in modern psychology, and reached its full expression in postmodern concepts of the interplay of surfaces or the lack of inner meaning, a state where symbols no longer symbolize anything unless the receiver of the symbol assigns a meaning to it. Does this critique of artistic progression run parallel to the experience of humanity in the twentieth century or does art now inhabit a space of its own that is disconnected from reality and impossible to interpret? That discussion would take a whole other book to explore, but I am sure Krauss would continue to insist that any art can be interpreted if we choose to put the creative effort into making it mean something, no matter how bewildering it may become.

The verity of Passages in Modern Sculpture is open to debate. Whether the order that Rosalind Krauss explicates is there or whether it is a construction of her own devise that she imposes on the chaos is an open question. There is something quite arbitrary in how she forms her argument and chooses art objects to support it. But if we follow the theory correctly, that is the whole point. It is up to us to create meaning. It isn’t handed out or spoonfed to us the way ultimate religious truths are. It is more a matter of asking the right questions in the first place and on that note, this book is worthwhile for consideration. 

 

Book Review

Entropy and Art:

An Essay on Disorder and Order

by Rudolf Arnheim

     A mile wide and one inch deep. That’s what I thought of Rudolf Arnheim’s essay Entropy and Art

Arnheim begins this short piece of writing with a textbook definition of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics as conceived of in Newtonian physics. All objects moving through time and space progress towards their end. That progression is irreversible. A rock is thrown through a window and the glass shatters into thousands of miniscule pieces; the action can not be reversed. The rock can not go back through the window sucking all the shards of glass back into their original position, once again forming a whole, undamaged piece of transparent glass inside a frame. Time can not go backwards. The dead can not come back to life. Everything moves in a continual stream towards death, decay, and dissolution. The disassociated elements will be recombined with other things to make new objects, but the original forms, once they are gone, are gone forever.

Along the way, everything strives towards its goal of maximum structure, a peak of orderliness. But matter is caught in the tension between anabolic forces, the release of energy to progress towards a state of organization, and catabolic forces like friction, decay, and aging. This is, in other words, order and chaos, or structure and entropy. The state of maximum equilibrium is the state of maximum entropy. The peak of progression is reached, the tension is reduced, then order begins to relax before decay and destruction take over. It’s the big quantum orgasm of material physics.

So far so good, says the high school student in his science class. But Arnheim isn’t talking about Newtonian physics. He is talking about information systems with specific reference to the CIA’s Norbert Weiner and his technocratic theory of cybernetics. But actually Arnheim isn’t even talking about systems theory here. He is lifting the theory of entropy even further out of its original context and inserting into semiotics, then transferring it into art theory which he describes as an information system of visual language. Got It? Good. He illustrates his points about order and chaos in art by all-too briefly referencing works by Jean Arp and Andy Warhol. The former to explain the presence of chance in artistic production, the latter to show the principle of order. We also get some brief mentions of gestalt psychology and Freud’s theory of the conflict between the pleasure principle and the death wish, eros and thanatos, order and entropy.

Arnheim spends a long time, constructing his theory in the first section, but then in the second section he takes an unexpected turn. Arnheim himself does not agree with the theory he has just proposed. His point is that structure does not progress to its simplest form, as stated in the first section. Rather it progresses towards greater and greater complexity. Yes, he built up his theory so he could just tear it all down. Then there is a little bit more, but not much, about art. End of discussion.

The first major issue I have with this essay is that Arnheim does not display a deep understanding of entropy or even of science itself. He probably knows more than what he is telling, but he doesn’t demonstrate it in any way. He doesn’t apply the second law of thermodynamics to anything that is actually dynamic. Instead he transfers it to art theory via semiotics via cybernetics without making any argument as to why such a transference is legitimate. He does what a lot of postmodern obscurantists do which is taking a scientific term out of context without understanding what it originally meant, and using it in some way that is completely untethered from its original purpose, often to dress up a rather plain idea in a baffling outfit of unnecessarily complex clothes, all for the sake of looking more intellectual than the writer really is. Alan Sokol and Noam Chomsky, I vindicate you.

Another big problem I have with this essay is that Arnheim makes very little effort to apply his theory to actual works of art. What little application he does use is sparse and anemic, looking more like an afterthought than an actual part of the discourse. It is like he revised his original essay and inserted some references to art so that it would be something more than a generic explanation of entropy, something that can easily be found in any elementary textbook on physics.

Finally, I should ask why all this writing about entropy is even necessary. If he wants to write about the conflict between form and content in art, or structure and chaos, or any other dichotomy you can think of, can’t he just say so using direct language? Or is that not artsy enough? After all, what he is discussing is nothing new in art theory. This is the age old distinction between the Dionysian and Apollonian that is an inexhaustible well of analytic guidelines and one that will probably last as long as we humans do.

There is one thing to appreciate in this book. The way the form and content in the essay’s organization mirror each other is effectively done. It occurred to me as I read the shorter, second section, where he argues that systems progress towards greater complexity rather than greater simplicity, that the process of moving along those lines is used as a template for the structure of the essay as a whole with the content of each sub-section corresponding to the developmental stages of his theory as it goes along. There isn’t anything original in this but by self-referencing his own theory in this way, he proves his point to a certain extent. Unfortunately, Arnheim applies his theory to his own theory more than he does to art. Is this mental masturbation? Increasing tensions build up to a state of maximum entropy when the tension relaxes and then everything moves to a state of dissolution and greater complexity. Le petit mort. There is no such thing as a reverse ejaculation.

Rudolf Arnheim seems like a smart guy though I can’t come to any definite conclusions about his ideas based on Entropy and Art, which says too much about entropy and not enough about art. As such, this essay comes off as pretentious pseudo-intellectualism. His other books look promising, if a bit dry and rigorous. He was known for applying scientific concepts of psychology and visual perception to art. Those books may have some merit. He was certainly interested in, and well-educated, in scientific disciplines. This book just falls to short of its potential to be of any real value in regards to art theory.