Abstract Art

Anna Moszynska

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780500775875
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'art contemporain

Since the early years of the 20th century, Western abstract art has fascinated, outraged and bewildered audiences. Its path to acceptance within the artistic mainstream was slow. Anna Moszynska traces the origins and evolution of abstract art, placing it in broad cultural context. She examines the pioneering work of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian alongside the Russian Constructivists, the De Stijl group and the Bauhaus artists, contrasting European geometric abstraction in the 1930s and 40s with the emphasis on personal expression after the Second World War. Op, Kinetic and Minimal art of the postwar period is discussed and illustrated in detail, and new chapters bring the account up to date, exploring the crisis in abstraction of the 1980s and its revival in paint, fabric, sculpture and installation in recent decades. The first edition of this book, published in 1990, was acclaimed by reviewers; now in full colour and comprehensively revised, it will serve as the best introduction to abstract art for a new generation.

Chapter 1

Observing the World: Paths to Abstraction 1910–14

What occurred at that time in the plastic arts will be understood only if one bears in mind that a new epoch was being born, in which man (all mankind in fact) was undergoing a transformation more radical than any other known within historical times.

D.-H. Kahnweiler

Around 1910, several artists began to experiment with abstraction. They drew inspiration from various sources, but they had in common the desire to question representation as the be all and end all of art. Some artists challenged traditional treatment of form; others decided to pursue the options offered by colour and light. To some, speed and energy became a preoccupation, while for others, the example of music provided a new direction. In some cases, their work cut across several of these categories. Whatever their chosen way of observing the world, artists, like novelists, philosophers, scientists and poets, were seeing it with fresh eyes.

The Fragmentation of Form

A major stimulus for future developments in abstract art was the Cubist painting of Picasso (1881–1973) and Braque (1882–1963). As early as 1910 Picasso was pushing the forms in his compositions so far away from any naturalistic starting point that without the title, the subject of his Nude Woman, for example, is almost impossible to read.[3] This extreme fragmentation of form marked a fundamental break with existing modes of pictorial expression. Cézanne had earlier investigated the structural properties of nature in his work, and had confronted the problem of reconciling these with the two-dimensional surface of the picture plane. He had realized that it was in fact impossible for the artist to maintain a fixed position, as required by the Western perspectival system. The very slightest shift to left or right was capable of altering the entire view, and thus the composition. Artists had obviously been aware of this anomaly in the past, but had overcome the difficulty by adhering to the convention of monocular vision. By trusting his eyes and attempting to express natural, binocular vision, Cézanne allowed for the ‘truth’ of the shifted viewpoint and incorporated it into his late paintings.

3 Pablo Picasso, Nude Woman, 1910

Going beyond Cézanne, Picasso approached his subject from many more imagined angles, combining various viewpoints until the final image was scarcely recognizable. The anti-naturalistic treatment of the form in Female Nude shifts the emphasis from the perceptual act of looking to the more conceptual process of invention. Already, ties to the natural world are becoming tenuous. The artist does not need to counterfeit nature in order to create his pictorial structures; evocation of the subject and inventive treatment of form have taken the place of direct imitation.

Picasso’s experimentation with nude figure compositions was complemented by Braque’s investigation of the landscape, portrait and still life. Braque’s later comment, that ‘The whole Renaissance tradition is antipathetic to me. The hard-and-fast rules of perspective which it succeeded in imposing on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress’, holds equally true for the work he was completing between 1909 and 1911. Like Picasso’s, his Cubist work at this time became progressively hermetic. In Le Portugais (1911), for example, the form is fractured into tiny facets, the figure is flattened against the background, and with the uniform colouring of subject and ground, and the use of passage (open-ended facets) to unite them, the two areas can hardly be differentiated. This approach points towards a self-sufficient art that makes little reference to the outside world of appearances.

Although a radical step forward, the extraordinary treatment of form and space in the work of Picasso and Braque of 1909–11 was only part of a transformation taking place in the world at large. In the field of science, for instance, atomic theories of matter and new concepts of space, time and energy were challenging theories accepted since Newton’s day. In his Special Theory of Relativity (1905) Einstein destroyed the long-held belief that basic quantities of measurement were absolute and unvarying, by demonstrating that they depended on the relative position of the viewer. He also suggested that inert objects have energy and that ‘the mass of a body is a measure of its energy content’. Although these revolutionary proposals did not gain wider currency until after the First World War, they indicate the pervasive challenge to tradition that existed in the early years of the century; and they had obvious counterparts in the field of painting.

Significantly, Picasso and Braque both remained committed to the subject in their paintings. They enjoyed exploring the tension between apparent abstraction and suggested representation, and by confronting these two opposites together, they maintained a fine balancing act without recourse to pure abstraction. Their work quickly became known to other artists through publications such as Du Cubisme (1912), by the artists Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, and Les Peintres cubistes (1913), by the poet-critic Guillaume Apollinaire. These texts were quickly translated, and Apollinaire’s in particular helped to suggest how Cubist ideas might be taken further. In his discussion of the work of a set of artists he called Orphic Cubists (who included Marcel Duchamp, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia and František Kupka) he mentioned the possibility of creating a ‘pure’ (abstract) art. However, his description was rather broad. In his book, Apollinaire defined Orphism as ‘the art of painting new structures out of elements that have not been borrowed from the visual sphere but have been created entirely by the artist himself. … It is pure art.’ Yet in referring to painting that has an internal structure independent of nature, Apollinaire did not intend ‘Orphism’ to refer to non-representational painting alone, but to a wide variety of modes of visual expression. All the artists he described in these terms did experiment with abstraction during the period 1912–14, but in very different ways.

Léger (1881–1955), following on from Picasso, was particularly interested in the study of form. His Study of a Nude (1912–13) presents a similar difficulty of interpretation as Picasso’s Female Nude. Léger uses curves rather than the rectangular faceting of Picasso’s forms, and by tracing the outlines of these, it is just possible to distinguish the nude, seen from multiple viewpoints.[4] By 1914, though, Léger’s Contrasting Forms goes further in denying any figurative intention, contrasting simple geometric shapes and colours within a shallow picture space – as Apollinaire put it, ‘the subject no longer counts’. Significantly, despite the non-representational and non-figurative appearance of the work, the artist maintained that such paintings retained a subject: the dynamism of modern life. He believed that the dissonant contrast of man-made machines against the natural landscape could be captured in a pictorial ‘equivalent’. Even his most abstract works recall the metallic surfaces and cylindrical forms of machinery, and it was partly this interest that later led him back to more figurative, mechanized forms.

4 Fernand Léger, Contrasting Forms, 1914

While other artists pursued the fragmentation of form towards an abstract conclusion, from 1912 Picasso and Braque began to introduce collage and papier collé (pasted paper) as a new way of presenting their subject, and of reintroducing colour into their work while still releasing it from the conventions of naturalism. Torn pieces of paper and fabric were now assembled onto the surface of their work. By the addition of a few drawn lines, an image could appear over what would otherwise remain an abstract pictorial substructure. In Picasso’s Head (1913), the inscribed charcoal line transforms the paper elements into a face; an apparently random collection of coloured stripes becomes – if only just – a representational image. In this case, the use of colour is arbitrary and non-naturalistic, while in other images the coloured paper is closer in hue to the actual object. Ironically, this further refinement in their art was equally influential on the later development of abstract art, since, firstly, it opened up the possibility of using real materials in place of painted artifice, and, secondly, it suggested that the completed work of art could enjoy an autonomous existence, no longer imitating the world of things, but participating in it like any other object.

Colour Freed

If collage offered one route into colour experimentation, another was provided by scientific theory. Nineteenth-century texts on colour proved a source of inspiration for various French, Italian and American artists, impelling them towards abstraction. From the point of view of the new century with its climate of discovery, the theories provided a framework by which artists could investigate colour freed from the demands of the object. The resultant work was usually prismatically fragmented and light-infused, and was more often influenced by the Divisionist techniques of the Neo-Impressionists than by the flat forms of Cubist collage. However, whereas the French Neo-Impressionists of the fin de siècle, such as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, had applied colour theories to naturalistic ends, several twentieth-century artists used the same theories to approach abstraction.

The Czech painter František Kupka (1871–1957) was one of the first artists to venture into pure colour abstraction. His experiments began as early as 1911 whilst working in Paris, where he had settled in 1896. In manuscript notes dating to 1910–11, he wrote about the pictorial possibilities of curved and straight lines, and of vertical planes, and he was prepared to ignore subject matter derived from nature in favour of technical exercises or ‘subjective motifs’ seen in the mind’s eye. Something of this intention can be seen in his Disks of Newton (1911–12).[5] Using a colour chart published by the colour theorists Hershel and Young in Ogden Rood’s text Modern Chromatics (1879), Kupka investigated the power of colour alone to suggest dynamic movement when freed from representational function. The short length, low density and ‘velocity’ of the wavelengths of red, for example, help to anchor the upper disc firmly in the composition, while the other, undifferentiated colour discs appear to shift in their relationships, creating an effect of spinning motion. Kupka was associated with the Orphic Cubists, but his motivation for pursuing such a path was more metaphysical than that of his French colleagues, and, consequently, more lasting.

5 František Kupka, Disks of Newton, 1911–12

At this time, it was the French Orphist Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) whose work was more influential, however. Between 1905 and 1907 Delaunay studied Michel-Eugène Chevreul’s treatise, On the Law of the Simultaneous Contrast of Colours (1839), which had been of great significance for the Impressionists. Chevreul’s optical analysis of prismatic and complementary colours showed that certain colour juxtapositions intensify the adjoining hue, creating quite different effects according to their placement. A dark blue will make an adjoining yellow appear more green, while a light blue will create a more orange effect on the same yellow, for instance. In Modern Chromatics, Ogden Rood took these theories further by identifying the separate ingredients of outdoor colour as affected by light.

With knowledge of both these texts and of Cubism, Delaunay evolved the idea of creating a type of painting that would be technically dependent on colour and on colour contrasts, but would both develop in time and offer itself up to ‘simultaneous’ perception. Taking Chevreul’s term (‘simultaneous contra...