WHAT ARE THE ISSUES [A PREPARATION] PART IV.

First of all, there is no reason why working either abstractly or figuratively is preferable. Second of all there is no reason why an artist should go at his work from the conventional constructional principles of painting seen as continuing the traditions of Bonnard, Cubism, Matisse, Marquet, or Mondrian.

The defining painting for Balthus, in his first show was his first "Street Scene" in his first show, dated 1935. It was odd, the major influences on the  composition were Seurat's Grande Jatte, and the best Scuola Metafisica paintings of Di Chirico. For example, he intensifies the picture plane and at the same time uses it as a springboard for spatial development by inventing a double image. The black hat with red piping on the woman who is the closest figure to the picture plane, and a shop sign of the same colors behind it -- between them the two forms become a horse's head on about the same level of abstraction as the work of Duchamp Villon. Also the boy walking towards us, immediately behind her picks up the shop sign behind and above his head not only as she does, but following the imitative principle of the chef's hat to his left. There are many more spatial anomalies which help to construct the deep pictorial space, but all of them have arguments between apparent images and pictorial association. That same boy wearing a chef's had, had a hat which has picked up two signs, one nearly rectangular and one partially oval [it is cut off by the top edge of the painting]. This constructional device is reminiscent of the lady whose hat has picked up a variety of images including a distant, full size sail boat, in Seurat's Grande Jatte. So, what would be surrealist devices [or proto-surrealist to keep time straight] are being used to make pictorial space, and construct an abstract structure for the painting. There are many more examples in this painting, these are only a few. So there is no divide between well constructed cubist or Nabis painting and surreal or irrational work. Since this is in Balthus it cannot be outlawed from good art. One might come to worthwhile work through surreal image distortion as well as through "echt" cubist manipulation. We must keep the book of means and the exploration and adventuring of a new artist open to various worthwhile strands in artistic development of our time.  Not any one tradition holds precedence over any other in the creation of new ideas, new means of forming and new means of poetic reference. Balthus first version of the Street Scene was painted in an unexceptionable Nabis manner, for example. http://www.artchive.com/artchive/b/balthus/balthus_street.jpg

Many of us know well the road to development of abstraction, for example of such an artist as Mondrian. Before he discovered Cubism, he was first an unexceptionable painter in the Dutch version of a symbolist inspired Art Nouveau. When he first discovered cubism and made sense of it he was happy to find half destroyed houses in a Paris bombarded by German guns. The subject had new, decreased objectivity. The subject did not add up into a house or several houses, but to ruins of houses. Individual planes and surfaces which could be dealt with less so as to reproduce an image of a house, and more as disjunctive parts of houses, parts of walls. ceilings and floors. So he had no imperative to render them. Instead he used these bits and pieces to organize a pictorial whole in his canvas. He could not repair the actual buildings, but he turned his canvases into actual wholes. Thus repairing the results of brutality and death.  It is not surprising that eventually, he was able to paint completely abstract paintings which emphasized this unity and order with no objective reference. His paintings became, as he says he meant them to, balances between life and death, between the horizontal and the vertical, as an excerpt from his writings on "Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art", still shows. Along the way he learned how to develop the forms he used into complete and profound abstract pictorial wholes whose forming derived from  Cubist construction. His was a development which actually led from symbolist imagination through figurative development towards cubism and then beyond cubism towards perfection in non-objective construction.

But the progress of Joan Miro from Fauvist and cubist influenced figure, still life and landscape painting which had many different irrational qualities to full fledged abstract surrealism, was a contradictory path. In his works before 1923 he might seem a more "orthodox" modern artist. The influence of the fauves was in his color and patterns, the departure from perspective or even perspectival and ground planes with no diagonals was there, but until 1923 the the irrational repetitionemphasis on the irrational in, say, rows of grain, tiles, awning stripes, had not become an element on their own. They have in Hemingway's the Farm smaller than the Hemingway painting painted in 1924, which is now in the Guggenheim, has many more abstractions, irrational in 1923. But a second farm, muchrepetitions  and distortions out of plane for irrational intensification of some detail. It also had inventions or reinvented forms which stand for oxen, ducks and other farmyard creatures. The painting is a whole vocabulary of irrational, invented forms. And while Miro went through this period with rapidity and became an irrational abstract painter by 1924, Picasso looked back at this period for some twenty years mining its irrational forms. The Picasso series abstracting the forms of a bull would be unthinkable without those of Miro [a small detail in this painting] His shmoo shaped figures show up in many places, for example Picasso's crucifixion. His bone period figures find their source here. Miro does not get less abstractly formed by searching for irrational abstract invention, he constructs with a more intense constructional force than ever. He becomes an abstract artist by inventing breaks in logic -- in the logic of rational paintings, which are more rational in pictorial structure than his own less erratic, more normative forming. His work gets more poetic, more inventive, more original in associations than it was, and yet, is also more intense pictorially. Mondrian's better paintings, but rather better painting of a different kind than the embrace of irrationality.  Let me make a fine distinction; while artists look at what Mondrian did as the work of a fine, intense craftsman who was not irrational, their is no rationality in pictorial decisions. They are made because of pictorial needs, not just the eye is involved but the whole mind and the body of the artist. Why a shape should go a 1/4 of an inch one way or another is based on an intense response to the forms which is wholly irrational and based on the sensibility. Mondrian is not a path is not the only one into abstraction. Rejection of the irrational  does not  createrationalist, but in the best possible way, a frozen expressionist. His ideas about the meaning of painting have an honorable source back through Fernand Hodler to Kant and Burke, but in the operation of them, he, as a truly sensitive and caring artist is not rational. To the contrary, he has honed his sensibility to the most extreme position so that he can produce blends of life and death and not disasters. So where is the difference between his process and Miro's. Miro also thought and constructed so that his paintings would be more intense and more effective as images. He also honed his sensibility. It is the subject matter and its source which marks his independent path. He is making up poetic statements, associating images in his paintings with other forms. The individual associations dislodge them from their neat and unproblematic place in a normative world. They allow him to make a new world in which his exaggerations, associations, and intimate reconstructions can order a different kind of space more intensely. Little by little, Miro reaches out for a new kind of abstraction in which the processes inevitably produce irrational forms with less and less recognizably, but their own new logic. Now, he reaches for a world of like minded objects whose connection with representation becomes more and more distant until the work is entirely abstract. A part of this process is a fuller more intense abstraction. Both artists become more abstract, one follows his earlier ideation into intensity and the other develops a new ideation which leads him into intensity.

So there is more than one way of arriving at abstraction. This was true in the past, why should it not be true, now? But this is not the issue, merely an explanation why the future does not necessarily belong in the hands of figurative artist. I will discuss the figurative artist next, and then finally
having got this out of the way, I will discuss the possible valid future for both figuration and abstraction. Of course, I think both are possible. It will depend on the artists to make the work fully alive and fully wonderful for our future viewers.