Letter to Kurt and Abstract painting now and then.

Dear Kurt,

You do sound very changed, and very serious. I was thinking of the Reinhardt under glass at MOMA and the others. The Klee book I have been mentioning is by him and called the Thinking Eye. There are 2 volumes of it. I think the first volume is enough for a few years.  It is now out of print and expensive.  I am sure that any art library in a place like Uppsale, for example, would have it. So would any library connected with a museum which collects 20th century painting.

You know, all of those letters are there. I didn't know how to validate them, or even read them. I think the letter I am answering should now appear, but I am not sure of that.  Even if it doesn't, I am closer to getting it

It is true that abstraction has had only a short life, thus far, so it is hard to say, avoid the influence. I do believe that if you spread it around there is a lot to be learned. But I think of most of the people on that list of yours as people who are spending the interest on someone else's principle rather than investing their own minds hearts and souls in their work. I tend to believe that AE was not the dog, but only the tail of the dog, waving. That gallery which handles the Reinhardt estate had a show of Reinhardt/Mondrian a year or two ago.  And it was no show of equals. Mondrian's very best follower was, in my eyes, Burgoyne Diller.  And that is because, while keeping all of Mondrian's pictorial laws [no secondary colors, no diagonals, no brush strokes] in his late work, Diller was able to arrive a wholly different concept of power and a sensibility not so much foreign to Mondrian as very, very different. I had studied with Diller in 1950 or so when that was not yet true, but his work then, was very much like the best Mondrian, just before his last 3 or 4 paintings.

I certainly do not believe that any one like you has to know and go through all the work which has made it to the top of the hit parade and is abstract! In fact, that strikes me as the best way to douse your own feelings in ice water. Not all of the biggest reputations represent wonderful artists. Sometimes it is the ideas of an artist which are most exciting, not even the work. You should read Hodler. He was a big enough deal back then so that there may even be writings of his translated into Swedish, if your German is not too hot.  The one essay in English, his essay on parallelism of 1888 is a gem. He was such a big deal back in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century that I can remember a book whose title was "Cezanne und Hodler." 

Actually, how abstraction came out of figuration and a variety of other sources is really very mysteriou s. Rather than worrying about Ryman, I would worry about Malevitch or Boccioni, or Wyndham Lewis, or Sophie Tauber[Arp]. There is nothing happening in the 19th century which reliably can predict that there will be such a thing.  Learning about how and why and looking at those works seems to me a more productive way of getting there than following all the followers who followed the followers who....Etc.

I don;t know whether I told this story here.  My younger son is a flutist. Albert Roussel wrote a work before WWI called Jouers des Flutes.  It is a suite for flute and piano in which each movement gets a double name. One name for a living flutist, and the other for a character in a book of fiction, poetry, or in one case a great religious epic, who played the flute.  Michael had been playing movements out of the suite, and in fact the whole suite for some 15 years before he realized that he hadn't been going about it the right way. He need ed not only to look up all the flutists and find out  what they were like, as well as learning as much how they played as possible, he needed to read all of the stories, poetry and the religious epic to find out what was in Roussel's mind. So, he did. One of the references was a French novel of the period,not very common today, but he found it and read it. Krishna, of course was easy to find, but a long read.  Well when he was all done reading and had worked out the personalities of all of the flutists and fictional flutists, he worked it up for performance again. Nothing was the same.  He played everything differentl;y, not because he was an eccentric, but because he had done his homework and understood it all differently.  One day he found a recording of a performance he had given some 15teen years earlier, and it sounded like all the other performances flutists had been giving. He had realized that living in the 1990's he was in a different wor ld from Roussel and he had to treat him historically in order to give a really definitive performance.

Well we are living that far away in time and space [it was all in Europe]  so that we don't really understand what abstract art was about for those radicals who were living and producing it from the 19teens through 20s when it all began.  So studying them and their ideas would seem to make real sense for anyone really interested in abstract art.  None of the people around now who didn't  do that really understand what they are up to.  They are on the tail end of the bandwagon. If you start over again trying to understand, you won't be.  And,by the way, there were some mystics involved with some of it. People like Madame Blavatsky, and an American architect from Buffalo who wrote about four dimensional space being described in three dimensions. He made drawings of such things as tessaracts, for example. I will try to remem ber his name. It would also be interesting to read what Wyndham Lewis wrote, or what the futurists wrote. If you know Russian, maybe they wrote, too.  

A little bit of scholarship, and study as to what these people thought they were doing and why might open something  good for you.

When Ad [Reinhardt] was rich enough, he made a trip around the world in the summer time.  When he got back, he showed us at Brooklyn his slides. He repeated it at the Club as well.  There were two kinds of slides: 1. slides of details of Islamic mosque construction showing the shapes of the architecture and chunks of the words of the Koran cut into the stone and shown as part of the forms of the building. 2. The interiors of very dark Buddhist and Hindu temples full of marvelous figures of which we could only get a trace as we looked.  I don't know that he had painted the black paintings yet, but they were all there.

Love,
G abriel