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

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.