Introduction
A few years ago I was fortunate to attend an exhibition at the Picasso Museum in Paris of the paintings of Pablo Picasso hung alongside those of Francis Bacon (see, Baldassari 2005). Previously, I had found great pleasure and interest in looking at the works of these two artists, but I had never before encountered a selection of these artistsā works hung together. The curator had taken great care to position the paintings in such a manner as to create an intimate dialogue between the paintings, and the exhibition as a whole enthused me; an experience that has remained active in my thoughts ever since. Two rather obvious impressions that I formed at this show were as follows. First, I found it apparent that both artists could in some way be thought of as creating abstract artworks, as their paintings of people and places were not directly representational or veridical cases of subject matter-to-image correspondence: nobody would expect to see a cubist woman or a disfigured Pope in the manner that Picasso and Bacon had respectively painted. Second, whilst both artistsā works were abstract to varying degrees, it seemed apparent that their understanding of what constituted abstraction and the role and reason for painting in the abstract probably differed greatly.
However, both artists can also be thought to be representationalist in that they clearly depict or represent people and places in their paintings. Indeed, if the works of these two artists are considered against other abstract artists, such as Ellsworth Kelly or Paul Rothko, Francis Baconās and Pablo Picassoās works may seem highly representational and barely abstract or semi-abstract. A consequence of the breadth of the church of art abstraction is that a simple definition of what constitutes an abstract artwork is problematic. Later in this chapter and towards the end of this book I will illustrate, in some detail, the importance of thinking expansively about what, vis-Ć -vis the characteristics of an artwork, makes a given piece of art abstract. To these ends I present the scholarship of Paul Crowther (2007) and expand upon the eight categories he uses to delineate abstract art.
However, as well as embodying an apparent visual content, artists along with their work are understood to exist within a context, and increasingly this context has become an important component in understanding an art exhibit. Furthermore, context has come to the fore of curatorial practice and critical exposition (Bryant 2009). Examples of the veracity of artistic context in appreciating and even in presenting an artistās work are many. I could have chosen from a multitude of examples from amongst the vast collection of exhibitions that have incorporated the contextual phenomenology associated with the artistic creation. 1 However, the Francis Baconās studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin (McGrath 2000) and the Atelier Brancusiās studio at the Centrum Pompidou in Paris (Barthel 2006) serve as examples of such practice. These two exhibitions are housed permanently in buildings within which the respective artistsā studios (Bacon and Brancusi) have been recreated in order to ground and locate the artist and the artwork in a place that is recognizable to viewers and to which a narrative of the artistās life is attached.
As well as these permanent sites, there are of course also innumerable travelling or temporary examples of locating an artistās work by presenting the context of where the artist worked: In these exhibitions, the artistsā process and location of production are intimately associated with the artworks. The works by artist Dieter Roth provide an example of this. Roth spent much time in Iceland, and shortly after his death the Listasafn Iceland held a major retrospective of his work (Roth 2005; Dobke, et al 2004). In this particular exhibition, a phenomenological account of Rothās work was presented (see, Crowther 2009; Parry 2011) in which more than 400 of his pieces were exhibited in a show curated by Rothās son, Bjƶrn Roth. This exhibition was described thus, āOn view at the Train exhibition are some of the artistās best-known installations, books, graphic works and paintings. In selecting the works, the curator was particularly concerned with their links to Icelandā (Dobke, et al 2004). In all exhibitions that reference artwork and the artist to a physical situation, 2 an artistās work is considered phenomenologically through placing paintings, drawings, sculptures, and so on, within the context of their production and in which the pieces of art tell a broad story about the artist along with his or her work. Here, I am suggesting that by juxtaposing any form of art, including abstract art, within the context of its inception, inspiration and/or creation that is recognizable to the viewer, the context is able to bring representational qualities (contextually representational qualities) to the most abstract of artwork.
The preceding sentences demonstrate how attempting to understand art and more specifically abstract art is a multifarious occupation and that many factors, including context, may be influential. However, context is but one very specific quality of art in general and particularly art abstraction, and in the following section I forward a notion of how we may initially think about the qualities of art abstraction.
Definitions of Art and Abstract Fine Art
This book is about how we perceive and understand abstract fine art rather than being a review of abstract art itself. However, it is necessary to provide some initial definitions of both art (fine art) and abstract art in order to place boundaries around the scope of this book. Therefore, in this writing art will be defined broadly as both a process and a product of āā¦ human skill, imagination and inventionā (Art 2015). Usually art invokes the idea of visual art, but often art is taken to include theoretical and perhaps critical art disciplines and may embrace literature, music and drama as well as drawing, sculpture, painting and printmaking, and so on. Over the last half-century or so, art has come to take in installations, events, digital works and many other conceptual and physical forms. The breadth of what now constitutes art can perhaps be understood by considering the breadth of the contents and themes that exist within art and which have been cited as giving an artwork significance and meaning. What is meant by the content of a piece of art is the artworkās subject matter, whilst its theme is its object. On this understanding themes may be universal (e.g., love, death, nature) or repeated and common (e.g., genre, landscape, the human form, figurative art, abstraction) (Art 2015).
The late British aesthetic philosopher Ronald Hepburn has reviewed how the understanding of fine art comes about. Aesthetic theories, he says, may be subdivided into those that attempt analytic neutrality and those that aim to establish judgements that are of practical worth. Hepburn claims that one group of philosophers who are concerned with aesthetics take a linguistic focus and relate aesthetics to attempts to understand how language is used when we talk about artworks. Other aestheticians, claims Hepburn, closely relate their writing to art criticism to enable them to reach aesthetic value judgements. These two examples constitute the extreme poles on a continuum of philosophical practice. This linearity forms what Hepburn calls āa conceptual scaffoldingā within which art may be positioned and which also distinguishes linguistic philosophy from art criticism. Furthermore, this dimension, running from linguistic philosophy to art criticism, has a broad reach and differentiates concepts about central and peripheral elements of aesthetic experience as well as accounts of artistic creativity, which can be seen to influence our real-world reactions to aesthetic objects.
In order to further establish the boundaries to the subject of my writing, I present a brief review of abstract forms of art. Many definitions of abstract art exist, for example, āArt which is either completely non-representational, or which converts forms observed in reality into patterns which are read by the spectator primarily as independent relationships, rather than with reference to the original sourceā (Abstract Art 2003). This definition stresses the lack of direct representation in abstract art or as involving the process of inspired interpretation. Representation has been identified as a form of art known at least since the time of Aristotle who termed this mimesis or imitation. In this form of art the artist is attempting to represent or even replicate the appearance of reality and where skill and accuracy are usually associated with a piece being a successful artwork that produces pleasure in the viewer. On the other hand, another Greek philosopher also from the classical era, Plato, understood the artist to convey his inspired vision rather than simply depict reality. On this understanding, such inspiration originated from the artistās muses, the gods, inner impulses or the collective unconscious (Abstract Art 2003) and the artist expresses emotions, essences and veracities that are not visible.
Read and Stangos (1994) offer a similar definition of abstraction when they claim that this is a form of art, āā¦ which does not imitate or directly represent external reality: some writers restrict the term to non-figurative art, while others use it of art which is not representational though ultimately derived from reality.ā It is evident that abstract art is not a simple art genre to define. In the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms (Clarke 2010), abstract art is identified as being non-representational and containing the implicit notion that the abstract artwork is not a mirror of reality but exists in its own right. Van Vliet (2013) described abstract painting tersely as being: non-figurative, non-representative, non-objective art, free-painting, free-abstract, intuitive-style. Fer (2000) offers a more elaborate and more thorough account of abstraction when she defines abstraction as being, āā¦ art that does not picture things in the world, but nevertheless claims its objecthood as a painting or a sculptureā (p. 4).
In the chapter, āThe Rise and (Partial) Fall of Abstract Painting in the Twentieth Century,ā David Galenson (2009) views abstract painting. He identifies this form of painting to have been independently created by the artists Malevic, Kandinski and Mondrian, and to be one of the twentieth centuryās most radical of art movements. Abstraction, as it developed into Abstract Expressionism, moved to a point of dominance within the art world, through the works of Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko and others at the end of the Second World War. These artists (and others) saw abstraction as a means to artistic discovery. They further ...