Representation, Level of Abstraction and Meaning

A friend just asked me to look at the work of someone whose work I did not know, which was on the web, and also someone other friends of mine liked. In reproduction it was very hard for me to work out a clear response.

The use of a brushstroke which affects the character of the image we observed, rather than the look of some thing observed in nature, has been around since at least impressionism. Before that date there were occasional periods in the West, such as Venetian mannerism, and the Genoese baroque where that was true, but to a much smaller extent than in moder times. This artist used such a brushstroke.

One thing which has happened to our eyes and our hands, since impressionism and post impressionism, and the very active brushstrokes of expressionist and fauve painters, as well as the other  descendants of Cezanne, is that we have become desensitized to the affect on the image which we present to brushstrokes which describe our abstract studies and discoveries while at work. Contemporary artists cannot have, as a general rule, the kind of sensitivity to distortions of the image which seem necessary to them to achieve a firmly held abstract logic, that artists working in the 1860s had. This is because, we have all seen and appreciated much such work, ourselves, in the hands by many great artists of the past hundred and 30 years, or so. 

The eyes of an artist like Chardin, over his lifetime  became capable of seeing both warm and cool colors at any point in a form which he was trying to realize spatially, in light, and with a great understanding of the needs of the picture plane.  But, even at the very end of his life, he hid these color changes in plain view by masking them easily to refer to the forms which he was intent on realizing. It is well known that late in life his hand was too shaky to hold a brush productively, so he shifted all of his work over into pastel. So the late pastel portraits and self portraits represent his final thoughts on expressive and constructional color. None of his exaggerations come across as anything other than as wonderful means to describe his subjects. I can remember going into a room in a museum in the Loire valley which was filled with pastel portraits, largely by 18th century contemporaries of Chardin, and one self portrait of his.  His pastel was down on the other end of the room from which I entered. The room was kept with the light off, until a visitor turned it on, so I did not notice his portrait at first.  I looked at a whole series of portraits by others, all of which seemed lovely, until I got to his, after which the portraits in the remaining quarter of the room seemed to be lifeless.  His deviations from his period's normal practice, to me, with my twentieth century eyes, seemed more modern and more fulfilled. Full of life and light.

Another artist, the Genoese Baroque painter, Alessandro Magnasco worked with a very big brush which he used to portray eccentric subjects. Gypsies, Monks carousing in a dining room, Jews praying in a synagogue, a bizarrely exaggerated painting of the inquisition torturing a heretic, a bizarre painting of skeltons rising out of their graves to attack living people.  He also painted more conventional subjects. In those the brushstroke is not quite so large. But, so much of his work, which has a very large brush in it is also of bizarre subjects which could stand a bizarre pictorial hand.

It reminds me of something which happened in the 20th century in music. The members of the second Viennese school, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Von Webern, all began their lives as late romantic composers. All were profoundly influenced by Wagner and revered Gustav Mahler. Their early music, such as Schoenberg's Verklarte Nacht, Berg's Piano Sonata Opus 1, and the early orchestral pieces of Webern fit into this mold. But, like the German expressionist painters, they all developed into artists whose work evoked the darkest part of the human psyche. Berg's two operas are about the development of insane rage by a low ranking soldier at his wife, the mother of his child, for her adultery, whom he finally murders, and in the other opera a woman who is evil incarnate who deals out sexual depravity to both women and men, with all of her male lovers ending up dead.

Now, as he developed, Schoenberg's music got more and more dissonant, his subjects were often bizarre , but his musical construction got more and more formally controlled and distant from traditional music. He finally invented the tone row as a new ordering of musical form. It made every moment, necessarily atonal and was also the perfect vehicle for violent emotion.

The tone row, based on any music which had preceded him, was intrinsically ugly to listen to.  Berg's Lulu and Wozzeck were both written using tone rows, so were all of Webern's works [he was perhaps the most extreme of the group]. But they presented their new musical system as the solution for all the problems in late romantic musical organization, and many composers all over the world accepted this and wrote music in this form.  However, as members of different generations elsewhere in the world than between the wars, and people not from Germany and Austria they did not have the emotional needs in their work which was found in Schoenberg, Berg and Webern.  That made for music whose forms were fully contradicted by the emotional content which many of these later composers tried to impart.  I can remember an American twelve tone composer of many years ago named Ben Weber, whose music was fully twelve tone and whose feeling was not particularly expressionist, and who therefore wrote music which was problematic, always.  I have had this problem with the work of many later American composers whose understanding of the twelve tone system was much more profound, but whose emotions were not fulfilled by its dissonance and aural violence. This musical example can be called a flaw in the level of abstraction. When certain forms are understood emotionally as well as formally, and an artist chooses to use them because of their meaning, and deviations are also thought through, then we get metaphoric art. Art which purposefully aims through association, to produce specific emotional qualities the artist wishes to express. The new forms being examples of forms which express these emotions better than the existing ones.

When I was a kid, and  all of my teachers were abstract artists , there was a  general epithet which was applied primarily to conservative and academic painters who tried to stick their toe in the water of abstraction by painting works in which they applied some cubist devices to fundamentally conservative paintings. We called those artists "semi-abstract painters." There were some very good people who meant well for whom this was a problem. 

Quite a few American artists were affected by the plight of the poor, the dispossessed and minority members, especially, African Americans.  They became Social Realists, and often joined the Communist party. But, most of them were members of the intelligentsia to begin with, and so, like other members of the intelligentsia they had been exposed to modernist French painting. Often the exposure occurred during a stay of several years in Paris, then the acknowledged capital of the art world. One such artist was Robert Gwathmey. As a kid I knew about him because some of my friends went to Cooper Union, where they had him as a teacher. My friends [most of them] liked him as a teacher and learned things from him which were useful to them as artists, but his own work was another matter.  He was apainter, primarily, of African Americans, going through their daily lives. They would be seen working in cotton fields, at home, in the street, in characteristic locales.  The works I was most familiar with had exaggerations in the use of lines, shapes and pattern which broke up the forms of the people or most often trapped them in a net of lines, which functioned visually like a cage. One way of seeing the paintings was as a series of thoughtful, soulful images overlaid by a more abstract school of Paris painting. The painting had potential meaning as a comment on the subjects, but the meaning was out of control. Instead of concurring with Gwathmey's fellow feelings for his subjects, they subjected them to a kind of prison cell of lines which worked against his ostensible, and purposeful subjects. It would be useful to compare the paintings of Jacob Lawrence painted in those same years. Especially his Migrations Series. These are metaphoric paintings using modernist means to express metaphoric responses.

Now, Braque, Picasso and Leger, for example, all made paintings drawing on their cubist constructional principles which showed abstracted and reconstructed figures.  But in each case, the artist understood the meaning of the distortion in the painting and the distortions supported the images presented. Leger, by the way, was a serious, life time Communist, of working class background, and as early as his first large painting, as a cubist, in the teens, painted a city in cubist style which stood, in that painting, for the oppressive economic system, which oppressed the people within it. Paul Klee, in a witty comment on cubism, which influenced him a great deal, made a print which he called "Death of an Ideal", which showed an entirely analytic cubist city, with an analytical cubist man, lying dead, just outside of its gates.  Although he is far from serious, it is clear that he understands cubism and is using it for a metaphoric end.

After World War II, a number of surrealist artists who had gotten progressively more abstract over the previous ten years or so, began to paint works which were entirely abstract.  This was not an abstraction like that of Mondrian, Van Doesbrug, Torres Garcia, Malevitch, El Lissitzky, or Helion, all of whom were, in part, at least, intensifying formal tensions and compositional construction as they became more and more abstract.  It was an abstraction, at least in part of images of abstract shapes in an invented world. Some of the major figures in France were Vieira Da Silva, Wols, De Stael and Hartung. For them abstract constructions were the world of their paintings. These paintings might have specific formal events happening in them, but they had little to do with the kinds of forming found in earlier modernist painting. From 1950 through 1953, influenced by my teacher Alfred Russell, who tried to spend 8 months out of almost every year in Paris, and who was a part of this group, I also worked in this tradition.  The tradition could not have existed if it hadn't been for the abstract paintings of artists whose forms were rich and full of tension and movement. But although they used these forms, which in general went back to cubism, they used them against cubism. Intense colors were forced to stay behind dull ones[De Stael], a large cubist looking structure, was more available as a huge open  steel structure of a building before any facade has gone on it [Vieira da Silva], the painting is seen as an overlay of a multitude of arbitrary horizonals and verticals, which we look through [Wols], huge brushstrokes provide an image of intense movement which often does not re-engage the eye or move over the surface in more than one direction[Hartung]. In some ways, many of the American Abstract Expressionists, who had been abstract surrealists before their most successful work could also be discussed in these terms [Gottleib, Rothko, Still, Motherwell et al]. Some of the Americqn painters were, in fact abstract surrealists in much of their developed work, Baziotes is probably the best known.

The painters I have just been discussing used the forms found in some earlier works as images which had their own logic.  There is nothing semi abstract about them, because the abstraction is being used because of the image it generates.

So, learning how to find forms in nature which express your formal response to the motif, as well as the full range of your sensibility to color, movement and space, in the hands of a talented artist should produce good work. But, when any part of such a painting, the product of fine observation and inspired description of the motif also has some large forms which are more available as those shapes in Vieira Da Silva's paintings of complex structures in her own world, than they are as forms which tensely activate pictorial drama, movement, tension, space, light and air, there is a problem with the level of abstraction in the work. This kind of problem is a new one. Only a post abstract painter of our several generations can have such a problem.  Many years of looking at abstraction and of trying to work through abstraction to figuration, has to be behind any one with such a problem. It is a good problem, once it is recognized.  There is enough work to look at which can help solve it, and it is all work with which we are familiar, the work of the great French masters, for example, who worked between 1870 and 1950. The Post impressionists, Fauves, Cubists and the related abstract painters in Europe through the same period.  At the same time, having this problem means that one is sophisticated about some of the very best work produced in the 20th century.

There is of course another solution. Become aware of the breaks with constructional painting, and if they express some emotion or idea which you actually care about, try to make the painting, as are Paul Klee's paintings, metaphoric.

It is shameful when a young artist has been trained without any awareness of what happened  in radical art in the first half of the 20th century, and is instead apprenticed to the last of the Pompier painters of the nineteenth century, by his/her teachers.

Love,
Gabriel